CafePress
So, I've decided to start a CafePress.com shop. I've also decided to learn Flash and redo my website, based on an awesome design project I turned in at the end of the year.
CafePress:
I didn't really know how it worked till a couple days ago when I looked it up out of curiosity.
So, on Threadless.com you submit designs and people vote on them and if they pick a design you get some money and they put them on t-shirts and sell them.
If you're selling your own retail, you can get t-shirts made with your own design on them, and if you have a few different ones, it can get reeeal expensive reeeeal quick to keep stock. Plus, then you have to keep inventory around and deal with shipping and stuff.
On CafePress, you submit whatever designs you want for free, put them on as many different things as you want (shirts, clocks, mugs, magnets, greeting cards, and even art prints and posters) for free, set your price as marked up from CafePress's base price for each item, and when people buy your items, you get the markup. The base prices can be expensive so you can only really mark everything up a couple dollars if you actually expect people to buy them, but it sure beats dropping a thousand bucks on starting a not-so-broad inventory of your own. You can have as many individual-item stores on CafePress as you want for free, but if you get a paid account you can have a combined storefront with all your items on it at once, organized into categories and stuff. And always, they deal with printing and shipping your stock. Pretty cool, I say!
Also, this will give me an avenue to sell my art that I can make on my own time, rather than my only art income coming from commissions (portraits and commissioned designs). Another bonus is that people who don't live in my immediate vicinity can also enjoy my work, even if not personalized. CafePress will sell stuff to someone in Maine, but I can't exactly do a photo shoot up there. I have a bunch of stuff I can put on there already (just have to make multiple files at different sizes and dimensions for the different products and upload them). Once I have enough individual items up there I will probably get the paid account so my stuff isn't just scattered around the huuuuge amount of individual designs already up there (you look up "cello" and you get 1,630 results). My last design project, I think, would make an excellent set of magnets, and a great t-shirt.
Okay, the stuff about Flash will be in the next post so you have two shorter posts to read instead of one monster.
EDIT: Whaaaaaaaaaaat? Emily just told me about a place called Zazzle and it looks WAY cooler. No fee for having a storefront, I think, can edit stuff there instead of making different files for each product (or having the product not fit correctly), and - here's the kicker (haha pun intended), you can design SHOES. Hokay I may be sold on that.