Still no confirmation on that rumored $30 million hedge fund investment (it happened, though), but Kleiner Perkins backed Zazzle is now beefing up it senior management team. Tomorrow they’ll announce that Jim Heckman has joined the company as Chief Strategy Officer. Heckman was most recently at Fox Interactive Media; he joined Fox when his company, Scout.com, was acquired by them in 2005 for $60 million. Heckman was also the chief negotiator at Fox in their $1 billion search deal with Google. In other words, they made a heavyweight addition to the management team. Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr supposedly recruited him personally. Heckman isn’t the only Fox Interactive exec to leave the company recently. Former SVP Corporate Development Heather Harde is now our CEO, and former Fox Interactive President Ross Levinsohn is now running a buyout fund called Velocity Investment Group with Jonathan Miller, the former Chairman and CEO of America Online. Zazzle competes with Ponoko, Cafepress and Goodstorm, among others. CrunchBase Information Zazzle Ponoko Cafepress Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
In December I noted that using a Flash interface allowed a little known custom casino chip maker called thechiplab to offer far more powerful schwag design tools than the heavily funded Zazzle and CafePress. My post didn’t serve as much of a wakeup call – those guys still have design tools stuck in the 90′s (although to their credit Cafepress has been busy rolling out it’s new developers network). But Goodstorm, another schwag company we’ve written about in the past, has grabbed the bull by the horns and has jumped onto the Flash bandwagon with enthusiasm. The company launched catering primarily to nonprofits, giving charities a way to inexpensively sell custom designed tshirts at a very low wholesale price. The company also launched a widget product last summer. The new product allows visitors to quickly design their own Tshirt using uploaded or stock images, text and special characters. If you like you can buy just one – a men’s standard Tshirt, designed to your specifications, costs $15. Store owners can also create their own version of the design tool, with pre-uploaded images and custom pricing. We’ve created one – see the TechCrunch Tshirt store here. Upload your own images and have at it – any proceeds we receive from sales of Tshirts will go to charity. → Read More
San Francisco based GoodStorm will soon launch a new program called MeCommerce that will allow bloggers to insert product listings in a javascript and iframe box on their sites and keep 50% of the retail mark-up for themselves. Blog readers will be able to purchase books and CDs inside the box without leaving the blog page they are on. Blog publishers can populate their boxes by tag or with specific items of their selection. I think this is going to be big. An image of the purchase stage of a MeCommerce block is available on right. I tried to post a demonstration, but could only get WordPress to display it in the sidebar and not in the post. To see a demo check out the MeCommerce site. The point is that each of those blue bars drops down when clicked to display all the fields you need to purchase. The initial display is made up of the front covers of selected books and CDs along with some explanation text. This purchase stage appears when an item is clicked. MeCommerce is accepting requests for beta invitations, accounts will open on June 30th. I think this kind of revenue split and attractive functionality make a powerful combination. GoodStorm currently offers a service that gives individuals and organizations an online store to sell custom designed, on-demand manufactured t-shirts. Users receive 70% of the markup from manufacturing costs. The company was founded by August Capital’s Andy Rappaport. We first covered GoodStorm when it launched in December. → Read More
Maybe it’s because it’s the holiday season, but it seems impossible to me not to like San Francisco-based GoodStorm. It’s a competitor to Kleiner-backed Zazzle, and CafePress – basically they let you set up shop and sell items with your logo on it. As with all of these services, they do all the hard work – producing and shipping the item, and collecting the money. All the seller has to do is market the shop, set prices and collect their share of the money. GoodStorm was founded by Yobie Benjamin and August Capital’s Andy Rappaport in October and launched on December 14, 2005 (there are good pictures of the team at that link as well). Their business model is designed to cater specifically to nonprofits. They keep only 30% of the profits on a sale (giving the rest to the seller), and also donate a portion of profits to charity. Like I said, it’s hard not to like this company. Currently they are working with sellers one-one-one, but will eventually launch a self service store creator. The company is built on the Drupal open source content management system. GoodStorm says they will be donating chunks of code back to the project as well. Stefanie Olsen at CNET wrote about Goodstorm earlier this week and has additional information. → Read More
