The Zig » T-shirts

Creative Commons does work

fletchy — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:52:00 +0000

The first time anyones told me they are using one of my flickr pics. Awesome, I’m doing my little bit to support Miss Universe.

Its been a while since an update. Everything’s ticking over just fine at home and work. Today I’m at Barcamp Auckland checking out NZ tech scene. Didn’t manage to think of a talk in time though

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New Job, New City, Old HipHipUK

fletchy — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:32:33 +0000

Good news (if you’re my landlord), I now have a new job here in Auckland, my new city (I think HipHipUK is now about two years old which completes the heading). Ironically, I already wrote about what I thought the most important new area of the internet would be – access, in particular mobile (see Web 3.0 post here). Now I have a job working for an Internet company specializing in mobile applications. Is that what they call ‘the law of positive attraction‘? If so then – ‘I think the next big thing is the end of receeding hairlines that you get when you’re only 24′. Lets see how that stab in the dark plays out.

So, desperate pleas aside, the company is called Sprite Mobile. I’ll be their Internet Marketing Specialist. What does that involve? Well similar things to those that I did at Spreadshirt, but working purely with one product. This time the company is just 13 people, not 250. So I’ll get plenty of responsibility as one member of a two person (the other guy has also just been hired and surprisingly is German, because why would I want to work with a different nationality for a change marketing team. We’ll be devising a go to market strategy for a new and as yet un-named web portal. I’ve only seen an early demo, and I’ve no idea exactly how many cats I can let leave the safety of the bag, so I’ll say no more. But I think its got plenty of potential, especially in the corporate space which is where I see its key audience being. But I could be wrong, its all up in the air at the moment.

I’m excited because I’ll still get to work with communities and evangelize. I’ll still get to write. I’ll get tons of responsibility. Its not a web 2.0 platform per se. The aim isn’t to flip it to google. We’ll be measured on revenue and not eyeballs. Its a niche area, so will have to be advertised to a niche crowd, which, bottom line means – new skills. Oh and I’ll be able to pay my rent.

As I said before, HipHipUK is now my business blog so they’ll be more posts here about this project, and whatever else is keeping me up at night.

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The Future of the Design Contest

fletchy — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 08:54:32 +0000

Whats the future of the design contest format? Its a crowded market place these days, one company that I think could make it interesting again is Spreadshirt.

The DrawÂ from spreadshirt looks intruiging and hints at a wider push towards design contests in the future. This is also the first venture I’ve seen under both the spreadshirt and la fraise banners. I thought that spreadshirt might rebrand La Fraise but I think it’s a smart move that they haven’t, after all the have different target markets and La Fraise has a great rep in its market space. I think this design contest (and I dont know how its going to run so I could be way off the mark with this) could be an evolution in the format because of spreadshirts one-off production capabilities. The design contest is an attractive format because:

1. It attracts community by offering involvement and discussion (you know my thoughts on community, if not read the community is king series here)

2. It reduces the risk for the host company, the voting allows you to see the popularity of a product before you’ve gone to the trouble of printed a thousand examples of it that you now have to try and offload. Threadless from years of experience and sales data can probably forecast better than anyone the likely interest in a design and configure production to match. Its a much safer investment to spend thousands of $’s on a run of t-shirts if hundreds of people have said its great.

Spreadshirts model is different, they own now own not only the format in La Fraise but the production as well (in spreadshirt) providing them with profit from producing one-off t-shirts.

Wheres the part where this gets interesting? Now…

Spreadshirts design contests can follow a different format. Take Threadless’ for example – like a design that was submitted? It didnt win? Oh dear, better wait for it to come to Yabbos or something.Â Â

Spreadshirt on the other hand could build a store around every competition and although there are winning designs and the winner gets the Â£ and kudos why not offer every design for purchase? Write into the TOCs that every design submitted will be offered for sale (probably after the competition is closed) and that the creator will recieve x Â£’s per sale. The competition is still an interesting format, everyone that submits a design stand a chance to win but also make some Â£ in the process even if they dont win.

The only potential problem would be in deciding ownership of the rights to that design with it creator. The Threadless approach might work, by submitting a design you grant us the rights to sell it on La Fraise/Spreadshirt for 90days (with the creator receiving % of sale) after that period you have the right to request the removal of the design, at which time full copyright is returned to the creator.

Oh well I guess we’ll see soon enough…

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Look out for the little guy

fletchy — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 17:54:26 +0000

I’ve been contacted this week by both Yabbos and Shirtstain who are some of the first (I think GoApe had a couple as well) of stores to feature Threadless designs that didn’t win. The online t-shirt business has gone crazy in the past year and it was only a matter of time before Threadless’ submission rules changed to represent the newly competitive industry they operate in.

The new rules state that

“The participant may display or archive the design in a portfolio or personal collection, but may not sell or reproduce the design for commercial purposes for 90 days after the design has completed scoring.

In addition, during this period, the participant cannot submit the design to another company to be potentially produced.

Once this time frame has passed, the participant is free to use the design for commercial purposes, however the participant must email Threadless to notify where and when it will be produced so that it can be removed from the Threadless.com website.

Also, if the design is printed elsewhere, the participant cannot use the Threadless blogs to promote the product or another company.”

There has been a mini backlash at this, you can read some of it here

Personally I think this is an extremely reasonable submission policy and designed to help Threadless remain competitive, being fair to both the artist and Threadless. The 90 day window seems a little longer than necessary but will most likely only deter people who submit in multiple places.

Yabbos and Shirtstain have also taken some flack for selling ex-threadless submission. I’m not really sure why, Threadless have some great designs gathering dust so why not put them to use. Just because it might have made economic sense for Threadless to produce 5,000 tee’s (or however many they do make) doesnt mean that it won’t for make economic sense for somone like Go Ape! (who have also used ex-threadless designs) to do a run of 500 or whatever.
We benefit from greater choice and the artist from greater exposure and Â£. The obvious criticism of these businesses is that they piggy back off of Threadless and reduce some of originality or risk involved in selling these designs. I can see the point in that but really successful businesses will always attract micro businesses “exploiting” their model, its more a compliment than serious threat to Threadless. Yeah it removes some of the risk of production, but that has always been what Threadless was about. While they probably didnt plan on that benefitting their competitors I guess it was almost inevitable. If they really wanted to stop it happening (and it would definetely detract from their business model) they could never reveal the average score even after scoring is complete, but I don’t think theres too much here to worry about.

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The Blogging Business

fletchy — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 17:34:37 +0000

I’ve been thinking about what classes as a blog these days. That term has almost come to mean any site that displays content chronologically and isn’t run for a profit. Unfortunately its also become a pseudonym for other things like sloppy journalism and information aggregation. The first of those two this site is definitely guilty of, its the second that this post is about.

Before the net really exploded the talk was around how it would cut out or disintermediate the middle man. Technology would streamline processes and remove some of the value in traditional middle man practices of assembling and distributing goods and services eg wholesalers, distributors and retailers. Most of the big, early, but doomed .coms were based around this model such as Boo.com

“Disintermediation is the most important structural change brought about by the Internet”

Palmer & McCole (2000)

The benefit to us is reduced cost through increased market competition and the removal of the margins added by these intermediaries. One of the best examples of where this has worked is in the music industry where distribution costs have dropped to almost zero through the digitization of music. This has allowed record labels and bands to sell direct to the consumer.

Where is this going? Good question, I’m still thinking that through, the point I’m trying to make is that the term “blog” is too insular and only represents a small sub-section of those that are now labeled under it. I don’t consider this site a blog because

- 99% of the time its all original content
- The “posts” are intentionally long and not really written to attract casual readership,
there are no digg friendly how to’s or top 10’s.
- sometimes I use references… yep references… in a “blog”

It seems today that blogs are becoming labeled as the nets ugly, dunce of a sister. Actually sites aimed at specific niches perform an existing business function, but without charging for it. This function is the sourcing and filtering of available information and products. This reduces the time the consumer has to spend searching for whatever it is they are looking for.

If you wanted to book a holiday a travel agent would perform this search for you and add their margin, few blogs ask for anything in return. We are distributors, only distributors of information.

“Value has shifted from the product itself to information about the product.”

Wise and Morrison (2000)

How does this work with HipHipUK? Well I’ve adapted a model from Anderson & Anderson

1. Solve Customers Problem

– Where can I find the best t-shirts?

2. Gain Customer Knowledge

What do customers like?

- monitor via clickthroughs, feedback and post popularity

3. Solve Producer’s problem

- How do I market to my target customer segment

4. Gain Producer Knowledge

Cycle repeats back to 1. Solve Customers Problem

- What are the best producers to feature? Gain inside knowledge of market activities through contacts at producer

People speculate on what the future of blogs will be, With every individual and business now online, the consumer will have more information at their disposal. This is shown in the popularity of social networking/bookmarking sites like delicious and digg.

Do I have a point to this? Only really that blogs often don’t get the respect they deserve for the time and effort they take to produce at little gain to the creator.

References

Anderson, P. & Anderson, E. (2002) The New e-Commerce Intermediaries, Sloan Management Review, Summer, pp. 53-62

Palmer, A & McCole, P 2000 â€œThe role of electronic commerce in creating virtual
tourism destination marketing organisationsâ€, International Journal of
Contemporary Hospitality Management, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 198-204.

Wise, R & Morrison, D (2000). â€œBeyond the exchange: The future of B2Bâ€, Harvard Business Review, November-December, pp. 85-96.