Taking a page from Threadless, Mozilla is opening up its own online store featuring crowdsourced Firefox T-shirt designs. You can upload your own design, or pick from the gallery.
The store is built on Zazzle’s platform, which handles the printing, shipping, and billing. Zazzle is rolling out partner stores focused on other online communities as well, but this could turn out to be the best example.
T-shirts are always a good money-maker on the Web. But how much of those Google subsidies can be replaced by T-shirt sales?
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It’s great to see Mozilla endorse and use crowdsourcing to create a new and exciting way to interact with their community. Plus everyone loves t-shirts. It’s a can’t lose proposition.
I will make a bold guess and say 1% at most.
Crowdsourcing is the way to go! Rock on Mozilla!
is it an ongoing design contest like threadless or just print on demand + designs supplied by the crowd?
zazzle is print on demand
threadless is not
@d - it’s the latter…print on demand + community-created designs.
why doesn’t anyone do design contests for big bands?
I am sooo down w/ crowdsourcing! Mozilla ROCKS!
coool, so will the shirts be available on zazzle.com too?
@Gee - actually, they already are. It’s a bit confusing, but all the shirts in the Community Store are automatically available on Zazzle.com. When you select the shirt you want on the Community Store, you’re taken to Zazzle for the fulfillment.
You can also go straight to http://www.zazzle.com/mozilla* as another option.
If you don’t want to design a t-shirt or fork over the cash to buy one, you could try to score a free t-shirt at http://gitchers.com. Who knows, maybe Mozilla will share in some t-shirt love.
A search of Glitcher users between the ages of 1 and 105, with no other criteria, turned up only 383 results nationwide. A business has to send out a minimum of 100 shirts at $10.99 each to people who fit their criteria. What business is going to pay $1100 to reach such a small group, that can only be categorized by gender or age? If there were actually enough people on the site to pull out a usable demographic, I’d pony up the money today. Such is not the case.
If I’m missing something about how it works, please enlighten me.
You’re right. Currently, the pool of people to choose from is neither large nor useful to most businesses. Gitchers just went live a few weeks ago. Some time and a few plugs could change all that, though.
$1,100 for 100 very targeted ad placements - ads that repeatedly and proudly wear your logo…
This is an awesome example of what Zazzle can do for community-powered e-commerce. Crowdsourcing like Threadless is great - but you’re still limited in what you can offer due to costs/inventory management. With Zazzle, you can take any and all great ideas from the community, make them available, let the best float to the top, and make each one uniquely customizable. I want a Firefox shirt with my personal URL on the back.
At first I thought this was mozilla teaming up with threadless for the designs. That would have been a cool matchup.
Great idea. I’m getting one.
This is another example of the Mozilla group’s creativity and a model for other open source groups to follow.
I believe all t-shirts bought these days must be custom designed or of a limited run (like these).
so correct me if i’m wrong, but you design tshirt, give this design for free and let mozilla earn money?
this is not crowdsourcing but simple rip off.
A more interesting implementation can be seen in http://www.jujups.com where anyone can personalize a t-shirt easily - more than changing text and uploading jpegs. Personalized t-shirts are more valuable than pre-designed t-shirts.