It’s been a while since we’ve written about DIY online shop, Zazzle. But the company has grown to be one of the largest customization companies out there, with 20 million unique visitors a month. And today the company is pressing forward with developing its own innovative new ways to help users more accurately customize and visualize their products.
To do so, Zazzle is today announcing the launch of some patent-pending augmented reality technology that will show online shoppers exactly what art, prints, canvass wraps, photos, etc. will look like on their office or home walls. → Read More
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
Zazzle, the online shop that lets you order custom-decorated clothing, mugs, and a variety of other items, has laid off nearly 40% 25% of its corporate staff and 15% of the overall company, which includes workers in its manufacturing factory. The corporate office was hit hard, with over 30 28 of 110 employees cut, primarily in business development, marketing, and engineering. Cuts were also made in the company’s factories, which houses 140 workers (some of which are working under contract).
In an official blog post, the company’s founders write that the site has seen strong growth over the past year, but that the sluggish economy forced them to make cuts in order to ensure the company’s continued profitability. The company says it will continue to sell products currently available on the site, but has cut some projects that have yet to appear and will continue to drop products that aren’t performing well.
Update: Chief Product Officer Jeff Beaver says that the Zazzle representative I spoke to earlier was misinformed, and that 28 out of 110 corporate employees were laid off, representing around 25% of the corporate office. He confirmed that 15% of the staff overall had been laid off. → Read More
Taking a page from Threadless, Mozilla is opening up its own online store featuring crowdsourced Firefox T-shirt designs. You can upload your own design, or pick from the gallery.
The store is built on Zazzle‘s platform, which handles the printing, shipping, and billing. Zazzle is rolling out partner stores focused on other online communities as well, but this could turn out to be the best example. → 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
Zazzle, the site that lets you custom-design and sell everything from T-shirts and hoodies to sneakers and skateboards, has launched a new feature that may well put it leagues ahead of its competitors: embroidery. And while the prospect of having an embroidered shirt may not sound appealing at first (I’ve always associated embroidery with tacky nametags emblazoned on polo shirts), Zazzle’s new feature is very impressive and will likely draw a large number of new customers.
In the past, most custom shirt designs from Zazzle and its competitors have used flat prints that are essentially glued on top of the fabric (these are higher quality than the iron-on products you’ll find in stores, but look similar). These look fine enough on T-shirts, but tend to look much cheaper (and tackier, depending on the item of clothing) than designs that are actually sewn into the fabric, and don’t hold up as well to multiple washings. Now, Zazzle’s new embroidery option is giving users the chance to have their designs sewn into their clothes, resulting in items that are much better looking and durable. → Read More
I come here today to present to you the fruition of years of labor. Between research, design, eating snacks, and playing video games, countless man hours were spent on what I am about to unveil. It is with much pride that I present to you: The P. Has. → Read More
MySpace has announced a music merchandise deal with Zazzle that will allow the “more than 6 million musicians and bands on MySpace” to sell unlimited music merchandise to the MySpace community. Under the deal, musicians and bands on MySpace will have the immediate ability to create products and sell merchandise by putting the Zazzle Merch Booth widget on their MySpace profile. Zazzle’s “Model Realview” technology allows artists to display their very own branded merchandise three dimensionally, on real models in their profile. The Zazzle Merch Booth widget will also enable placement of the artist’s merchandise in a Zazzle gallery, their own websites, fan sites and blogs. MySpace said the deal was part of their “commitment to offer tools and services to the music industry that benefit artists and consumers alike.” The Kleiner Perkins backed Zazzle appointed Jim Heckman, formerly of Fox Interactive (the News Corp arm that owns MySpace) as Chief Strategy Officer Saturday and was rumored to have closed a second round of $30 million in July. CrunchBase Information Zazzle Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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
Here’s an unconfirmed but well sourced rumor: silicon valley based Zazzle will be closing a second round of financing in the $30 million range, at a $300+ million pre-money valuation. The round is expected to be led by an as-yet-unnamed hedge fund. Kleiner Perkins (which led the company’s $16 million Series A round in 2005, is supposedly also particpating in the round. Look for confirmation from the company in the next couple of weeks. The company competes with CafePress and others. → Read More
There are many sites that sell customized casino chips (just do a search), but we haven’t found any that have an online design tool to allow you to create the chip itself. TheChipLab has take the extra step and has created a very nice Flash tool for designing your own casino-grade chip. The creation tool is very flexible and layer based. It’s not as powerful as new online image editor Fauxto, which is also Flash based, but it does the job. So my question is, why don’t CafePress and Zazzle implement Flash tools to help people create customized products as well? Zazzle’s Ajax tool is pretty nice and allows some basic resizing and movement of images, plus the addition of text. Imagecafe is stuck in the nineties – their product creation tool has next to no flexibility at all. Neither are anywhere near offering what TheChipLab does. Adobe has created awesome tools that tiny ecommerce companies like TheChipLab can use to provide a cool service to customers. It’s time for the VPs of Product at CafePress and Zazzle to wake up and reinvent their products, too. Adobe has done all of the heavy lifting, all they have to do is implement it. → 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
Company: Zazzle Launched: 1999 (zazzle.com launched 2003) Status: Announced $16m Series A on July 18, 2005 What is it? Zazzle let’s customers create customized products, ranging from tshirts to stamps, and sell them on the zazzle website. In their own words, “Zazzle is the leading customized products marketplace for consumer enthusiasts to share and celebrate their interests by creating apparel, posters, cards, stamps and more. We combine on-demand manufacturing, a robust community, the largest online collection of customizable digital images and unmatched personalization tools to empower you to create your own products. In addition, you can choose to become a contributor by sharing your unique creations in Zazzle’s public galleries. Within these galleries, you can browse, comment and connect with others who share your interests. Contributors also earn royalties every time their creations are purchased by others. For anyone who wishes to create, wear, display, sell or celebrate their interests, Zazzle provides a compelling interactive marketplace to a worldwide audience.” Link Creating Products: Creating products is a relatively straightforward process of choosing prodcuts (apparel, posters, stamps, etc.), uploading images, and pricing the items. Zazzle claims that they have “over 500,000 totally unique, user-created products, available in billions of variations”. Link Zazzle Stamps: Zazzle Stamps is really interesting. Within certain parameters, users can upload their own images, or use stock zazzle images (like disney images), and create actual postage stamps. A sheet of 20 first-class stamps will sell for $16.99, 130% more than “normal” stamps. Zazzle Stamps is possible via a partnership with Pitney Bowes. FYI, Stamps.com has a similar program and will be partnering with cafepress, a zazzle competitor. Relevant Links: About, News, Blog, B2Day, New Persuasion Blog, Alarm:Clock, New Media Musings, Somewhat Frank, RSSWay, Traders Trade, CNET, Ben Barren, Alarm:Clock Tags: zazzle, , zazzle.com, pitneybowes, cafepress, stamps.com, stamps, ecommerce, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More
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