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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Honest question. If your business is doing good, why would you want to raise money?
The obvious solution would be to set up another factory. Suppose for simplicity that this costs $25 million and allows a doubling of capacity. suppose further that TeeSpring is making a profit of $100,000 a week (a completely imaginary figure - I know nothing about their finances). Because it's near full capacity that weekly net isn't going to increase much. But saving up the money to purchase the factory outright would take 4-5 years - an organic growth strategy - is plenty of time for competitors to move against you and pull away customers.
So you have a couple of options. You could go into debt, either by getting a loan or issuing a bond that pays interest (effectively the same thing). Now some of your income goes on interest payments, but they're tax-deductible and after you've paid off the debt you'll still have the second factory. As long as the increased income resulting from the investment is greater than the cost of borrowing the capital then going into debt can be perfectly sensible - the same reason it makes good sense for governments to splurge on necessary infrastructure during periods of low interest rates, just like we're not doing now due to politics :-/
Another option is to issue equity, ie sell shares in the company to raise the money. For large firms this may not be any more attractive than debt, because shareholders will expect a dividend of some sort. For growing firms it makes a ton of sense because early investors are not so much interested in dividends as in the possibility for the shares to appreciate in value - who wouldn't have liked to invest $1 million in Google or any other large company back in the early days? This is ideal for a firm like Teespring that has a very simple and straightforward business model - manufacturing a basic consumer product like this is great from an investor's POV because it's so easy to analyze.
Honest question. If your business is doing good, why would you want to raise money?
Economics. Suppose you have a factory and a growing order book but you're running at or near full capacity; if you get any substantial increase in the number of orders, it's going to take longer and longer to fulfill them, and customers might start to go your competitors if they feel the quality of your service has dropped. This is a diseconomy of scale - you've run out of room to grow and the more business you get t…
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 e…
Honest question. If your business is doing good, why would you want to raise money?
You could start by feeding the machine $1, waiting an hour, then feeding the $1.20 back in, and so on. But you'll get richer far quicker if you persuade somebody to lend you $1M and directly dump that in to the machine.
Honest question. If your business is doing good, why would you want to raise money?
Economics. Suppose you have a factory and a growing order book but you're running at or near full capacity; if you get any substantial increase in the number of orders, it's going to take longer and longer to fulfill them, and customers might start to go your competitors if they feel the quality of your service has dropped. This is a diseconomy of scale - you've run out of room to grow and the more business you get t…
"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.