Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes
Here’s something interesting… and sad for the people affected by it.
When you choose to build a “business” around somebody else’s rules you put yourself in a vulnerable position.
If the company which controls the infrastructure you depend on to make your money changes the rules (usually to favor itself, not you) you could see your income drop by 50% or more.
This is apparently what has happened to “shopkeepers” at CafePress.com.
I’ve never paid much attention to Cafepress – so I had to go look at the website to jog my memory it’s about to have some context.
Cafepress has established a middleman-business, similar in some ways to what eBay does. It’s not an auction site though. What CafePress does is make prints, coffee mugs and T-shirts. Artists design these things according to their talents, set the designs up in CafePress, and split the proceeds with CafePress.
CafePress Helps Artists. Or Does It?
The benefits to the artist are many: lots of traffic because CafePress has a real marketing budget, little or no money tied-up in stock or storage space. Pretty cool deal for the talented artist/designer who doesn’t want the responsibilities of running a screen-printing operation or marketing his or her own products too much.
CafePress designs number in the 1000s. They are extremely “niched” and most I looked at were clever, funny, snarky, sarcastic, or provocative. There’s one with the Republican elephant humping the Democrat donkey, for example. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be pro-Republican or anti-right-wing. The humor is ambiguous.
In any case, there’s a clever T-shirt or coffee mug for just about everybody. Presumably racist hate speech and really offensive stuff is screened-out, but I saw a few T-shirt designs with the F-word on them, so it’s not really targeted at kids.
What’s cool about CafePress is the wide selection of cool gifts for all sorts of personalities. When you buy from it you get to support independent artists and humorists. That’s kind of cool.
Apparently for the last several years CafePress has been paying-out generous bonuses to “shopkeepers” who manage to do some good monthly volume. Nothing motivates people like more money, so shopkeepers who wanted bigger and bigger bonuses worked hard at coming up with catchy designs that sold well (great for both designer and CafePress) and also at promoting and driving traffic to their individual “shops” – sort of a CafePress boutique where each artist shows off his or her quirky vision.
As a result of rewarding the artists so nicely CafePress has built a stable of steady designers who make their full-time incomes designing for CafePress distribution and promoting their shops.
But…
A storm cloud was on the horizon.
CafePress now has a lot of clever designs that sell well and make a lot of money.
Now CafePress has decided, from what I’ve read, to pretty much whisk away a lucrative bonus structure some of their best designers were depending on for their incomes.
Cruel? or just business?
One CafePress watcher wrote on June 6th, 2009:
“Losing the volume bonus was just one example of Cafepress putting the squeeze on shopkeepers. As of June 1st 2009, the corporation just ripped 60-90% of the profits away from the very designers and artists who made them so big. There’s a mass exodus going on over there of people who have been with them for years all up and leaving. Either the corporate heads are amazingly stupid, or they are up to something devious with this short term cash grab. I speculate that they are looking to buy another company, or are about to be bought themselves. Can’t see why they’d be raiding the cash drawer in such plain view otherwise.”
http://cafepressshopkeepers.blogspot.com
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.
