jlobb Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 Hey, did the admin ever take a serious look at having a photo.net merch. section? It would be awesome, they could make a bloody fortune. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 What do you mean by photo.net merch section? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlobb Posted May 28, 2005 Author Share Posted May 28, 2005 a merchandise section. With like t-shirts, ball caps, jackets, etc with the photo.net logo on them, or with photography related graphics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 We offered merchandise for a while: t-shirts, caps, coffee cups, etc. Not much of it was bought, and we ended up having to buy back the unsold inventory of CoShops. So, rather than making a "bloody fortune", we lost money on it. Maybe people who might have been interested in photo.net stuff and looked at what was on offer last year can comment on why it wasn't a success. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlobb Posted May 28, 2005 Author Share Posted May 28, 2005 wow. I wouldn't have expected that at all. Bummer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ajweiss Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 Is there and of the stuff you bought back left? I would be interested in something... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 We did it some time ago, in fact I helped to organize it. I presume it didn't do well, or we'd still be seeing it. I really don't know what the final outcome was. Most of these programs require charging rather high prices for merchandise (e.g. $25 for a $5 T-shirt, $15 for a coffee mug) in order to cover production and distribution costs and still make it worthwile. I really don't think there's a fortune to be made by selling these things (except maybe for the companies who actually make and distribute them). It would be easy for photo.net to make $1/shirt I guess just by signing up with an outfit like Cafe Press. But they'd charge Photo.net $15 a shirt and they'd charge you $4 to ship it. So you'd pay $20 for the shirt and photo.net would get $1. Given it probably costs $5000/month to run photo net just for hosting expenses, I doubt if selling "shwag" would have a significant effect on financing the site. I could, of course, be wrong. Perhaps the smart thing to do would be to licence the photo.net logo to someone who thought they could make money selling approved merchandise. Brian or Rajeev might be interested in such a proposition I guess. It would be like licencing an image. You pay an upfront fee and you get certain rights for a certain amount of time for certain applications. Say for $1000 upfront, you get to make 1000 T-shirts with the Photo.net logo on them and you can sell them for whatever you want. BTW I'm not in a position to do this. It's just a suggestion! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlobb Posted May 28, 2005 Author Share Posted May 28, 2005 bob, that's a pretty good idea. Or just run it off of here. My buddy runs an internet forum and he sells t-shirts for $10 + $2 for shipping. He just goes to a local t-shirt printer or whatever, and has a bunch made, then you order on his website and he sends it to you. Now, his is a small outfit, so he has the time to do this. I imagine that with an enormous outfit like P.n you'd have to contract it out, or have somebody who's only job was to distribute the t-shirts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlobb Posted May 28, 2005 Author Share Posted May 28, 2005 oh, and if they were like $20 or less I'd buy a couple t-shirts from this site. Personally I wanna find a place that sells a grey t-shirt, like the ones that say Army, Navy, Air force, etc., that says "Photographer" on the front. Yeah, i'm a power nerd. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 I don't think physically handling manufacture, collection and shipping would be photo.net's strong point! It's easier just to let Cafe Press do it. We went with CoShops earlier because thay had a better deal and allowed the shirts to be sold at a reasonable price and yet still let photo.net get something like a $5 cut on each shirt. It seems like the downside was you had to commit to a small number of shirts (maybe something like 30?). Even at that, according to Brian's data, we didn't sell them all. Of course the upside is that if we had to buy them and they're now sitting in Brian's basement (or his whole family is wearing them...), they're now collectors items and could be sold at inflated prices. Anyone want a $50 photo.net T-shirt (rare)? Maybe making money's not as easy as it seems... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ajweiss Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 If you can do it through an external company with minimal hassle and not lose money, why not sell stuff? Even if you are only making a dollar, you are getting shirts and hats that say photo.net out there, which could increase the number of users, and therefore increase membership revenue. If it really is possible to have someone else handle all of it, I would say do it at $1 a shirt profit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
r_e Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 Achieve greatest success with <a href="http://www.photo.net/photo/3368932">these</a> motives :-)) RE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 We ended up buying out the inventory for $270. Rajeev has some t-shirts and coffee mugs at his place. I doubt we made that much, so it was a loss, but small. I think maybe we sold the first batch of t-shirts and got caught with the second batch. The way we did it, to keep the price low, we had to agree to buy-back any unsold inventory if it didn't sell after some length of time. As long as they keep selling, you don't lose money. You have to judge correctly when to stop making additional batches, otherwise the loss on the last batch is going to wipe out most/all of your profit on the previous batches, considering that the profit is very low to begin with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ajweiss Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 If you've got some shirts in a box, I would buy one. What color were they? (I think I liked them, but I don't remember.) As an aside, I can sell color photo t-shirts and mugs through my smugmug.com site for $17 and $11, and they take care of everything. If I want to profit from it, I can do so with no more work than raising the price. I would assume that there are other places that do the same with normal two-color t-shirts. If not, and if there is interest, Brian could send me a hi-res photo.net logo which I would happily put it up on my site for sale on shirts, mugs, bags, magnets, etc. I would only set my profit at between $0.01 and $0.04 per item (and only because profit is required to see if anyone is buying). I would even donate those pennies back to this site, if it was practical to do so! I would much rather be a walking advertisement for photo.net than for Nike or Abercrombie! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 I'm pretty sure Rajeev could sell remaining inventory here (unless he's now addicted to wearing "photo.net" T-shirts). If he doesn't have time, since I was an "instigator" in this, ask him to put them all in a box and mail them to me and I'll sell them off and return the proceeds to photo.net. As for selling stuff at zero profit, I'm not sure I see the point. I'd have though that part of the reason to buy a photo.net item would be to support photo.net, not to support CafePress or other such companies. People would probably assume that some of the purchase price went to help photo.net and might be annoyed if it didn't. After all, if you really just want a shirt with "Photo.net" written on it, all you have to do is go down to your local T-shirt store and I'm sure they'll make one up for you. I'm not even sure that "photo.net" is a registered trademark, so just using those works probably may not even be illegal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ajweiss Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 My earlier offer still stands, but after looking at cafepress.com, I would say go ahead and set up a little store there! Set your profit at between $0-5 per item and forget about it. If huge checks come in, great. If not, you've at least made a few of us happy and earned a few dollars. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 One of the potential problems for merchandising is that even if photo.net had ZERO to do with fullfillment and manufacture, guess who would get complaints from unhappy customers. If the handle falls off the coffee cup or the T-shirt shrinks, or the order is late or gets lost in the post, it's nothing to do with photo.net. Howeverthere will always be a subset of customers who think it is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ajweiss Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 I can see complaints as a problem, but wouldn't setting up an email address like shwag@photo.net (to use Jonathan's word) that simply redirects to cafépress mitigate that quite a bit? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobatkins Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 Maybe a bit, but users may already have complained to them and may hold photo.net itself as the ultimate place of appeal in case of problems/disputes. If you put your name on something, you have to expect to be dragged into problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mottershead Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 Bob is correct, some of the people thought the hats and t-shirts weren't up to their standards, and complained to us. Not being much of a t-shirt or hat collector, I have no idea what people expect for 15 bucks, or whatever it was. The thing was, we actually could have avoided any risk at all by going with the solution where they screen-print them one at a time for buyers. This works for coffee cups, etc. But it looks pretty cheesy with shirts and hats. So we paid to have shirts and hats made in batches with photo.net embroidered on them. This is why we lost money in the end because we had to agree to buy out the unsold units. As for the coffee cups, I'm not quite sure why Rajeev ended up with any, actually, since in theory they were made on demand. The guy must have made them for someone, and then for some reason didn't ship them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joshroot Posted May 28, 2005 Share Posted May 28, 2005 Brian, please check your e-mail for a note from me on this subject. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ajweiss Posted July 13, 2005 Share Posted July 13, 2005 Did anyone ever dig up that box of T-shirts? I'm still interested... Adam Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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