Earlier on, I mentioned I was looking into the whole idea of merchandise fulfillment via CafePress. The whole idea intrigued me, and as a huge fan of art and design, I thought it would be interesting to see how it worked. CafePress is a retail site that allows anyone to be able to apply one’s own designs to various merchandise such as apparel, bags, mugs, buttons, paper products, and more. You can then set up a storefront with your chosen items for sale. When you sell an item, CafePress handles the fulfillment and shipping details and takes the base price of the item that is purchased, while you receive your mark up price as earnings. It’s a win-win situation and definitely worth a look if you are the creative type and would like an outlet for your art creations, whilst leaving the operational matters for someone else to handle.
I partnered with a graphics illustrator and designer, and we have come up with our first new CafePress store, called Anime Culture. The whole idea behind it was to provide designs that were fun and whimsical in the style of anime and manga. This new store’s vision is a testament to our affection for American pop culture as well as for Japanese products such as Pokemon, Totoro or even Gorillaz, as you will see in this design:
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We’ll be coming up with additional designs down the road, and we’ll be testing them out in similar sites as well, such as Zazzle and Spreadshirt. If you look around the web, there are a lot of examples discussing retailers that handle “on-demand manufacturing and fulfillment”.
Our CafePress Store Experiments
To show you what we’ve done so far, check out these stores we’ve been working on. These are a work in progress, so I would caution anyone about having high expectations about these yet!
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Anime Culture is a design line that showcases whimsical anime, caricatures and designs that are inspired by pop culture, entertainment and real-life as well as fictional characters. | |
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The Curly Tree Shop showcases designs representing our blog identity. What you will find here are some Curly Willow tree inspired designs and insignas on merchandise. |
So what do you think? Care to try out your own Cafepress experiments?
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m looking forward to some nice anime designs. Maybe some cowboy bebop tshirts ?
Cowboy Bebop,
Well if that ain’t pretty! Love the designs… 🙂 We’ll consider it… 😉
woohoo to Clay Aiken! 🙂
I like anime shirts. Anime is one of my favorite things. 🙂
Please please please make some Avatar Tees! <3
I love anime shirts and figures, there really should be more anime stores in the U.S.!
I use to run a CafePress site a long time ago. Very easy to use and best of all they do all the work! (for a % of what you make .. of course) best of luck.
At this point, I’ve concluded my experiments with CafePress. I thought it was a wonderful experience to try it out for a while, but because of time constraints, I am unable to devote enough attention to this particular project. I’ve opted instead to put my full and undivided attention upon my web publishing business, which I enjoy quite a bit. I may get back to CafePress sometime in the future, but I’ve got nothing definite right now.
Yeah, anime shirts are a great idea. I would like a shirt such as those that show Naruto or Code Guess designs.