Perhaps we could arrange a Wikimedia "Loves Threadless" competition to generate some more T-shirt designs worth buying. There seems to be an extremely active community of artists who participate in these design competitions, especially for organizations that have large fan-bases. For example, the recent "Gmail Loves Threadless" competition generated over 400 designs, many of them quite good:
http://www.threadless.com/submissions/designs,gmail/showme,intherunning,comp...
I'm not sure how the sponsors for these competitions are selected and whether/how much the sponsors are paying for the privilege, but it might be worth looking into.
-Sage (User:Ragesoss)
On 8/27/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/26/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 26/08/07, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
I've been wearing my Wikipedia golf shirt, purchased I believe at Cafe Press, for three years. It is as white as ever and has not suffered in quality.
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.
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.
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.
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@gmail.com
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