Teespring (YC W13) uses social media to sell more than 7M shirts a year | Hacker News Reader

Teespring (YC W13) uses social media to sell more than 7M shirts a year

bloomberg.com

44 pointsjkw8 comments

It is interesting to me that Teespring seems to force sellers to advertise each specific design. I was looking for, but couldn't find, a way to see all designs created by a specific user. On a cursory search, I found a few designs by the million dollar seller mentioned in the article, and each of those designs involves clip art quality graphics and a number of seemingly randomly chosen fonts. I imagine if I came across a page showing all of his designs, Teespring would look a lot more like Zazzle or CafePress.

The people selling on Teespring likely prefer it this way. Launching these campaigns is like digging for psychological gold... Once you've found it, you don't want your competitors to know where you found it. A lot of the campaign pages also have do not crawl headers set on them to prevent this as well.

With TeeSpring, the only way to win as a seller is to go for scale

I know some internet marketers who will go out and create hundreds of campaigns targeting different interest groups (right from broad categories like 'truckers' to narrow interest groups like Pokemon fans who play Skyrim). Then they'll test them all out on Facebook, throwing in thousands of dollars into the process.

here is an interesting writeup from someone who is making money doing this: http://getbusylivingblog.com/how-ive-profited-100k-online-in...

So, what happens if Facebook decides it doesn't want to allow Teespring ads anymore? From what I can tell it is very heavy skewed towards FB ads. This seems very risky to depend on one channel for sales.

Their base price is pretty nice: $7.30 each for 50 shirts with text or art.

Society6 seems to be way ahead in terms of the number of product lines. http://society6.com

I think you're missing the point of the article.

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