Still no confirmation on that rumored $30 million hedge fund investment (it happened, though), but Kleiner Perkins backed Zazzle is now beefing up it senior management team. Tomorrow they’ll announce that Jim Heckman has joined the company as Chief Strategy Officer.
Heckman was most recently at Fox Interactive Media; he joined Fox when his company, Scout.com, was acquired by them in 2005 for $60 million. Heckman was also the chief negotiator at Fox in their $1 billion search deal with Google.
In other words, they made a heavyweight addition to the management team. Kleiner Perkins’ John
Doerr supposedly recruited him personally.
Heckman isn’t the only Fox Interactive exec to leave the company recently. Former SVP Corporate Development Heather Harde is now our CEO, and former Fox Interactive President Ross Levinsohn is now running a buyout fund called Velocity Investment Group with Jonathan Miller, the former Chairman and CEO of America Online.
Zazzle competes with Ponoko, Cafepress and Goodstorm, among others.
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Zazzle needs all the help they can get. I made a purchase from them and the quality was crap. So then I returned it (their policy is to support returns) and guess what, the new one was crap also!
Not so great when you are trying to make a wedding gift for your new wife.
Hopefully they figure out how to make shirts that don’t look like total sh&t.
This is why Kleiner has a terrible Internet portfolio.
lame company. Zawhat?
zazzle looks stupid.
Zazzle - sometimes I think these are just names in search of a website.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Since when does a venture-backed startup need a chief strategy officer? This reeks of bad management.
46 million dollars financing!
Instead of hiring such expensive management maybe Zazzle should hire some better engineers, their app looks weak.
Andy is right. I tried Zazzle last year it did seem run poor. When I got my shirt it didn’t fit and they wanted me to ship it back before they would replace it.
I just looked at it again today and it had youngs people on the front page like they were trying to be cool. Peoples like me will never think this site is cool no madder what strategy they use.
Anyway it seems harder to beat competitor like cafepress & spreadshirt both are well known for quality.
my friends and i use zazzle and it’s been great. it’ll be interesting to see what new offerings they bring to market with all these large investments.
lol, this board is crawling with cafepress & spreadshirt shills
Oops - looks TC traffic brought down another site.
anybody that knows Heckman knows this is no big deal.
They compete with Ponoko? Goodstorm? Since when? These sites are in a totally different ball game. Why do you never mention Spreadshirt when you talk about Cafepress or Zazzle?
Zazzle started the day off with major updates to their site including allowing contributors to set the commission amount, choose models to wear your clothes among others. Also, on Mashable they mentioned Zazzle was undergoing a $60 million round of funding.
They should spend some money on Zazzle design/usability improvements. The site looks ugly