That was my thought exactly. But I can imagine there is room for a "ThinkGeek for designers." Their second site is already a move beyond T-shirts into patches, hats, and other things. I guess they will find out!
Our goal for the rest of the year is to cover our costs by working exclusively on United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau. If we haven't quite bridged the gap, we might take on brief, time-blocked consulting work after the holidays. This would be a big, big change from how we've operated for the past four years. All the previous work we did was flat-fee, project. We'd work with a client from strategy to launch. The consulting we were referring to in this would be a 20 or 30 hour, one week engagement and it might not result in us writing a single line of code or opening Photoshop/Illustrator.
We have a couple options for staying in business if United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau don't grow fast enough to sustain us. We'd prefer not to need to explore those options, but I hope you can understand why we need to leave that door open. We'd be very sad if we had to stop doing what we enjoy because we ran out of money, and a lot of other people would be too.
Yeah, it's kind of a press release for United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau, but that's only for people who don't know who we are. Within the web design industry, we have lots of friends who would be interested to know why we're done working with clients. We tried to write something that works for everyone. We'll be writing a lot next week on United Pixelworkers and Cotton Bureau to speak directly to those audiences.
Speaking as a former screen printer, the material costs are very low, except for very elaborate prints: clear or glitter inks, adhesive and foil, partially embroidered shirts, water-based inks with or without burning out the underlying dye in the shirt itself, and certain gradient effects like the Zune logo that required a very steady hand and some experience to produce. The last was my favorite; the complex prints were mostly to the demands of Vegas casinos.
With the caveat that my career was interesting but fairly brief, I believe that I may offer a cost analysis of what exactly the profit potential is here. The shirts and inks themselves cost a pittance, less than five dollars each as a rule. Production equipment can be moderately expensive and requires a moderate amount of warehouse space, but the highest operating cost is almost certainly going to be the Art department. Complex prints take lots of expensive man-hours and back-and-forth with clients to produce, and even simple ones need someone with a bit of domain knowledge to produce. Most designs will be spot colors rather than CMYK, because CMYK tends to look like your grandma's Christmas sweatshirt rather than e.g. a photo.
So, if you can outsource half your art department, and avoid complex designs, and avoid the need for a lot of expensive machinery, you're pretty much where these guys are at. Your big competition is likely to be Chinese, and so the real mass market (Target, Wal Mart, etc) is more or less out of reach, so if you can focus more on smaller runs of boutique prints then you can join the handful of other companies competing in this space, and make -- as other poster suggested -- a decent profit, an enjoyable product, and a career, but not likely a staggering amount of wealth.
Depends what you mean by real money, of course. There might not be super-startup-huge-exit money, but there's definitely make-a-small-business-you-enjoy money. And, more broadly, there's always money if you're willing to cut corners or be unethical. We're more interested in building something sustainable and something that makes people happy. T-shirts make people happy, and Cotton Bureau helps people make t-shirts which makes those people happy too.
Mostly front-end and design. We started on Big Cartel, then switched to Shopify. Original site wasn't responsive because it was from 2010. Built the first responsive version, badly, in January 2012 then re-design and re-built it in September 2012 to make better use of the space on big screens and improve performance.
Unfortunately that's about all I've written regarding the technical changes to the site over the years. It might have been a bit clearer if I had said re-designed and re-engineered the front-end if slightly less pithy. Hope that makes more sense.
What do you mean? I don't grasp your intention.
Rebuilding from scratch is not always bad. While Joel (on Software) said that it's the worst idea ever, there surely are situations where it makes sense. E.g. if your codebase is so rotten (from too many quick fixes on the initial MVP) that it's quicker to just rinse and repeat.
As they were previously running client jobs, I can see an attractive side to building up the team experience on new tech using their in-house project rather than on client projects.
Put otherwise, in their previous line of business, it matters to be current with regards to state-of-the-art application development. Where's the harm in experimenting with your 'on the side' app?
It might be more an exercise in keeping current on new technologies rather than fixing a broken codebase. I have friends who keep rebuilding the same hobby site as different technologies pop up. It sounds as if they treated it as a side project previously.
How do you mean? We don't manufacture the shirts we use (yet), but I suppose we're open to it if the demand is there. Do you know anyone that's doing it well?
Hi. Sorry for the typo in my previous post. It should have started with "If...".
What I mean is, sometimes you buy a great quality shirt from a store but the next year at the same store, when they have new a new line of shirts, the quality of the textile is rubbish. This is what I mean with consistent quality which is especially important since I order of the net and I can't check the quality of the textile before buying.
Thanks! We use exclusively American Apparel right now, but there are obvious reasons why we don't want to do that forever. We're planning to add additional (high-quality only) shirt styles and manufacturers.