On 26/08/07, Sean Whitton <sean(a)silentflame.com> wrote: I think in practice no-one is going to sue. Put it this way: I need to make up a couple such shirts for short-notice media appearances ... - d.

Yes, exactly re fun and teambuilding. And to that point, one of the benefits of CafePress is actually its findability and ease of use - people expect to find WMF material there, and they do. (I say this as a person who went and found and bought our stuff there, long before I ever saw the CP link on our site - I'm probably not alone in that.) And although I too have heard the complaints about quality, my shirts are holding up fine :-) Regardless, yes, Vishal has been looking at this, and yes, it has not been a particularly high priority. Really it's the branding company who will handle it, if we sign with one. They will have the industry knowledge and the relationships to make a recommendation for what's best. Thanks, Sue -----Original Message----- From: Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2007 17:40:16 To:foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Alternatives to Cafepress Erik Moeller wrote: There is also the proposition from the branding company. If we sign a deal with them, it would be within their role to find a more suitable (if more suitable there is) company for tee-shirt printing I guess. I agree it is not a priority from a "revenue" point of view; This said, from a consumer point of view, the quality is a little bit more important than "revenue" :-) If tee-shirts do not bring significant revenue, then the quality is a priority over revenue... Exploring options to change tee-shirt providers and taking primarily into account revenue as a variable is, imho, a mistake. Tee-shirts are not done to bring money, but mostly because it is fun and team building. LINK ! http://www.aboutus.org/WikiWear.org ant _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On 8/26/07, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote: Printing the Wikipedia logo on t-shirts is one thing, but developing a full product line of Wikimedia-branded merchandise is something that deserves some careful thought and professional attention. I don't know who told you this, but either they were misinformed or you misunderstood. While a Swedish chapter with which we have a trademark agreement would be able to arrange such a thing, just as the German or Polish chapters could, there's certainly no plan I'm aware of to delay merchandising of language-specific products until we have chapters whose members speak those languages. I expect that any future merchandising plans will include designs that reflect the linguistic diversity of the various Wikimedia projects. In the meantime, I'll note that the Foundation has never sued anyone for printing logo Ts for themselves and a few friends, so long as you don't make them generally available to others. Selling stuff printed with Wikimedia's trademarks is a can of worms that everybody's particularly cautious about, and quite reasonably so. Austin

On 26/08/07, Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote: The main problem with the CafePress process (and that used by most one-off printers) is that it's basically laser-printing to a shirt, i.e. toner particles melted into the fibres. This can work very well indeed, but is not going to be as good as silk-screen printing, which becomes cost-effective at a few tens of shirts or so. Of course, the other thing you're buying from CafePress is having someone do all the ordering, packing and posting backend - not just making sure you don't have a stock of maybe-saleable shirts. - d.

On 8/26/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: For most of the fabrics, it's actually inkjet to a transfer "paper", which is then ironed on to the clothing item. Attempting to direct-print to fabric is problematic at this time. My wife has had stuff on CafePress for many years and has been active talking with them about technology on and off. She also does her own stuff, for items where CafePress doesn't produce that type of item, using a decent home inkjet printer and commercial iron-on transfer material. Right. This is the big reason to use Cafe Press or its ilk; they don't just produce the items, they have the "Store", and you don't have to be in the "Store" business. Just send them the design, and collect whatever royalties the sales earn. There are plenty of screen print T-shirt companies, some of which can do all sorts of other stuff, and plenty of other companies that can do logos/artwork to mugs and so forth. But very few of them will do the online store thing. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

This sounds like a pretty cool idea. :-) On 8/28/07, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 --- Note: This e-mail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to this address will probably get lost.

James Redmond wrote: I'm a bit wary of the "Wikimedia Loves Threadless" phrasing, which sounds a bit too much like we're endorsing a tshirt company, rather than just having them print shirts for us. Is there a way to do this without that wording? If we *were* willing to do something that vaguely implied endorsement, surely there are companies willing to pay more for the privilege? At $5/shirt, and even a very generous estimate of 10,000 shirts sold, that'd be $50,000, which isn't all that much when compared to other avenues for Wikimedia's income (the January fundraiser netted about $1,000,000). -Mark

On 31/08/2007, Peter Halasz &lt;email(a)pengo.org&gt; wrote: "Wikipedia maintains its Neutral Point Of View towards Threadless Despite Thinking They're Very Nice People And Working Well Together Competition <ref>" Dunno if they'd be open to variations on the catchphrase :-) Even a plain puzzle globe T-shirt marks you as some sort of nerd who thinks reading and writing encyclopedias is *fun*. - d.

Hoi, When you consider how marketing works, we can have a clothing line that shows off the intellectual qualities of the wearer.. it is something that would nicely offset the more foolish brands of clothing where it is the so manieth pop star film star of whatever person who went in to this line of business. Really, we could make serious money if we take this serious. We could even have a reserved range of clothing for people with more then a certain amount of edits ... hmmm I may want a 10k WMF edits premium leather jacket ... :) Thanks, GerardM On 8/31/07, Ben Yates &lt;ben.louis.yates(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: