Creating wealth often means simply coming up with a great little idea. It’s usually one of those ideas that has others saying, “I could have thought of that.”
Case in point? CafePress.com.
CafePress.com got its start in California in 1999 as an idea that people might want to create their own artwork and see it printed on T-shirts and other products. Artists could open up their own “shops,” CafePress would set a baseline price for each product, and the “shopkeepers” could set their own retail price above the base price, pocketing the difference.
The company started in August of the year with just four products — a T-shirt, two mugs and a mouse pad. By November 1999, CafePress had incorporated, launched an email campaign targeting 100 websites a day, and viral momentum began rolling. By March 2001, less than 18 months after its launch (and during a time when many other dot-coms weren’t faring so well), CafePress turned a profit.
“We could actually let people become kind of micro-entrepreneurs, selling the ideas in T-shirt designs with no money out of pocket because it is made on demand,” said co-founder and CEO Fred Durham.
CafePress.com averages 11 million unique visits per month, and roughly 45,000 new, unique products are added each day, for a total catalog of more than 150 million unique products.
Consumers can buy mousepads, keepsake boxes, mugs, T-shirts, hoodies, and more. CafePress even opened its own publishing venture, where authors and artists can upload their books and CDs and self-publish them with CafePress’s print-on-demand feature., without having to wait for a publisher’s contract or a record label to sign them – and without waiting to have the funds to self-publish a large print run or manufacture a large number of CDs. Authors and artists can almost instantly see and hear their works – and sell them.
That’s the key to what has made CafePress such a hit: Artists and entrepreneurs can open up a “shop” with no investment required. Another factor is the desire by artists to see their designs sold. Third, what propelled CafePress mightily into the marketplace were two factors for consumers: pop culture and politics.
When actor Tom Cruise jumped up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch a few years ago to proclaim his love for actress Katie Holmes, for example, a top CafePress T-shirt became “Free Katie.” Click on CafePress today, and the Twilight movie and book phenomenon has spawned hundreds of Edward and Bella shirts, keepsake boxes, even bumper stickers that read “Warning: I Drive Like a Cullen.”
Politics in 2000 and 2008 gave CafePress a huge boost, with tens of thousands of campaign and candidate designs launched on the site. Today, the CafePress.com numbers are pretty staggering. The website averages 11 million unique visits per month, and approximately 2,000 new, independent shops join the CafePress.com network each day. Roughly 45,000 new, unique products are added each day, for a total catalog of more than 150 million unique products.
That translated into more than $100 million in goods sold in 2007, with $20 million in profits doled out to the creators/shopkeepers. And while retail as a whole struggles for breath, the privately owned CafePress is still claiming an average growth of 60 percent a year.
Tags: CafePress.com, entrepreneur, online retail