

Ask YC: Selling merchandise? - nuffink

We've been getting a lot of requests from our users for t-shirts.  There seems to be a lot of options: CafePress, Zazzle, and doing it on our own a la Reddit (American Apparel).  Does anyone have any suggestions here?<p>I don't know if I can balance being a startup dev monkey AND merchandiser extrodinaire.  Thanks for taking the time to help!
======
e1ven
I've heard some positive things about having them embroidered professionally
or otherwise printed by a national outfitter. Fog Creek has had good responses
[1] doing this, and it's something that we're considering at Darkened Sky. The
downside is that we would need to maintain our own inventory, which would get
costly, as well as potentially wasted if we move to a new design, but have a
lot of of the old shirts already printed.

SpreadShirt actually looks decent, but I'd love to see a blog order a shirt
from each of these services, and then write up their experiences.

[1] <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html>

------
rrival
CafePress uses thermal printing (bad) and they'll give you 20%. Zazzle is
better quality, also 20% of the sale. GoodStorm (recently acquired by Zazzle)
will give you 70% iirc. SpreadShirt is another option.

I'm working on the sweet spot between Zazzle & the Reddit approach - American
Apparel with better %s than CafePress/Zazzle, focused entirely on startups,
outsourced - drop me an email - roddy at StartupSchwag dot com

