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Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

forbes.com

11–20 of 66 posts

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#11

Honest question. If your business is doing good, why would you want to raise money?

As others said - grow faster than your current cash allows. You don't want to have scale just to support your current customers but be able to scale to support your future customers.

One example that was mentioned in the article was building a factory. Obviously that requires a huge chunk of capitol but will allow the business to grow to fill the market that they have confirmed to exist.

edit: typo

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#12
post #9

It's surprising to me the degree to which Teespring has become part of the affiliate marketing community. The same group of people that normally spend all their time pushing "get rich quick" schemes, MLM programs, dating site ads on social networks and fake news articles about diet pills have really embraced t-shirts for some reason. There's a whole ecosystem of products around Teespring marketing businesses -- landi…

You become popular enough, you will attract all kinds of people to your platform/service. Including ones you may not want to be associated with. But this is great news for Teespring. Congrats to the team.

[deleted]

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#13
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You become popular enough, you will attract all kinds of people to your platform/service. Including ones you may not want to be associated with. But this is great news for Teespring. Congrats to the team.

[deleted]

It's simplicity - CafePress's website is complete chaos whereas TeeSpring is dead simple.

Rudimentary comparison: there are 422 tags on CafePress's home page and only 47 on TeeSpring's

Further, once you're on a TeeSpring product's page, it's the only product there (focused call to action to buy that one product being marketed) compared to CafePress where the product page has a bunch of other "similar" and "recommended" products diluting focus.

May be counter-intuitive but adding more options seems to be to CafePress' detriment.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#14
If you want to build a huge business, building a platform where other people can make money using it is a great way to do that. eBay, AirBnB, Uber/Lyft/etc, Teespring. Even Google, with their adwords product (and reddit with it's self serve ads).

There's lots of great businesses where people pay you for a service, but if you can create one where people make money when you do, they are heavily invested in your success.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#15

"At least ten, the company says, have become millionaires from the work." Does this mean they sold a million dollars plus worth of shirts OR that, after all expenses, they netted a million? The phrase millionaire implies the latter but that is a far higher bar to cross.

The latter. We have paid out, after expenses, millions to at least ten sellers on Teespring.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#16
How's this different than something like Big Cartel (http://bigcartel.com/)?

Not asking about business stuff specifically, but the usability or whatever-it-is that this newer stuff does that the older online t-shirt printing businesses don't? I don't really understand their story about starting because they couldn't find someone to make their t-shirts...

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#17

"At least ten, the company says, have become millionaires from the work." Does this mean they sold a million dollars plus worth of shirts OR that, after all expenses, they netted a million? The phrase millionaire implies the latter but that is a far higher bar to cross.

The latter. We have paid out, after expenses, millions to at least ten sellers on Teespring.

That still excludes any of their external marketing costs.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#18
post #16

How's this different than something like Big Cartel ( http://bigcartel.com/ )? Not asking about business stuff specifically, but the usability or whatever-it-is that this newer stuff does that the older online t-shirt printing businesses don't? I don't really understand their story about starting because they couldn't find someone to make their t-shirts...

It's about who is taking the risk, with BigCartel you shell out money upfront to buy shirts + print (guessing how many to get in each size, how big an order you need, etc.) then try to sell them.

TeeSpring is kind of like a Kickstarter, you setup a picture of what the T-shirt would look like when printed and then no money changes hands until you hit your "funding level" of a certain number of shirts, and there's no excess inventory because they only print exactly the right number for the sizes that people ordered.

It's a really interesting model.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#20
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter. We have paid out, after expenses, millions to at least ten sellers on Teespring.

That still excludes any of their external marketing costs.

It also may not include any taxes owed. That's just as orthogonal to how much Teespring has paid out, which is the entirety of their claim.
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