Zazzle, the site that lets you custom-design and sell everything from T-shirts and sneakers to postage stamps and skateboards, is launching localized sites and offerings in Australia and Canada. The company has also expanded its existing UK site, which was launched in late 2008, to the greater European market by accepting payments in Euros. And for pet-friendly users, Zazzle has unveiled a line of custom dog apparel, letting sellers put the same designs on items for both dogs and humans.
Zazzle allows anyone the opportunity to become product designers and to earn money by selling designs on a variety of items displayed in custom store fronts, free of charge to the seller. Designs and images can be screen printed or embroidered on items. Sellers earn royalties from the sale of products they design and can also allow consumers to further customize their creations. → Read More
German custom apparel company Spreadshirt has secured €10 million in funding from Kennet Partners and returning investor Accel Partners, which led an undisclosed round of Series A funding for the company back in 2006. Spreadshirt, which competes internationally with companies like CafePress and Zazzle, was founded in 2002 by graduate student Lukasz Gadowski (currently still acting as Chairman of the company) and has become one of the most significant players in the field of personalization and online ordering of custom goods and clothing over the years. → Read More
According to PEHub a regulatory filing revealed that CafePress has recently raised $8.3 million in Series C venture funding from Sequoia Capital, who also invested $14 million in a previous round. This brings the total funding of the online retailer of user-generated personalized products to $23.8 million.
Launched in 1999, CafePress enabes its users to design, buy and sell expressive merchandise such as t-shirts, hats, bags, mugs, bumper stickers and the likes. CafePress handles the merchandising process and returns a cut of the revenue from sold inventory to its users. The company boasts serving a network of over 6.5 million members trading 150 million+ products, and also claims to receive 11 million unique visitors per month on average.
Update: CafePress has responded, saying that this story is incorrect:
We did not raise venture funding, nor have we raised funding from Sequoia since our series B in 2005.
PEHub mistook a Form D notice which was filed with the SEC because CafePress issued $8.29 million shares of stock back in July. → Read More
Last week we reported on Frazr, one of Germany’s many Twitter clones (if you’re eager for more side-by-side comparisons, see Sloggen, Wamadu, Faybl or 1you, which all launched in March or April). Frazr is symptomatic for the state of Web 2.0 in Germany and to get a better understanding for the many international developments, this post starts a series of regional profiles on Web 2.0 around the world. I’ll start the tour with a closer look at Germany, home to Europe’s largest population of internet broadband users. Hype vs. Hesitate Just as this week’s Pew Internet Study stirred a debate on the view of Web 2.0 in the US, Germany has seen similar arguments on the size of the phenomenon locally. For a long time, several indicators had hinted that Germany was falling behind in broadband penetration compared to other European countries like Sweden or Norway. But a recent OECD study painted a very different picture: looking at the total number of households (as opposed to per-capita penetration), Germany comes out on top in Europe with 14.1 million subscribers in December 2006 (followed by the UK at 12.9 and France at 12.7 million). So the crowds are here, but where can they go? “Web 2.0” is a term that brilliantly translates around the world, but many of the sites that are commonly associated with it have a language barrier for international audiences (take MySpace for example: it officially launched its German version only in March of this year). While English certainly isn’t foreign to Germans, it has still slowed their adoption – and network effects, which have been a driving force, are often tied to language and reach as well. What’s been the consequence in Deutschland? A mushrooming of German copycats that have localized and copied their US role models, sometimes down to the last pixel. Copy/Paste Innovation Whether you’re looking for social bookmarking, photo sharing, video posting or a college social network, Germany’s clever entrepreneurs have done the translation for you and some even fared quite well. The best example by far is StudiVZ, whose name stands for “student directory.” Launched in October 2005, it now claims to house 2.1 million users. Despite a myriad of security problems and controversies, new users kept coming in, which only speaks to the universally strong demand for such networks among students. In January of this year, Germany had its mini-YouTube moment when → Read More
