Zazzle, the site that lets you custom-design and sell everything from T-shirts and sneakers to postage stamps and skateboards, is launching localized sites and offerings in Australia and Canada. The company has also expanded its existing UK site, which was launched in late 2008, to the greater European market by accepting payments in Euros. And for pet-friendly users, Zazzle has unveiled a line of custom dog apparel, letting sellers put the same designs on items for both dogs and humans.
Zazzle allows anyone the opportunity to become product designers and to earn money by selling designs on a variety of items displayed in custom store fronts, free of charge to the seller. Designs and images can be screen printed or embroidered on items. Sellers earn royalties from the sale of products they design and can also allow consumers to further customize their creations.
German custom apparel company Spreadshirt has secured €10 million in funding from Kennet Partners and returning investor Accel Partners, which led an undisclosed round of Series A funding for the company back in 2006. Spreadshirt, which competes internationally with companies like CafePress and Zazzle, was founded in 2002 by graduate student Lukasz Gadowski (currently still acting as Chairman of the company) and has become one of the most significant players in the field of personalization and online ordering of custom goods and clothing over the years.
According to PEHub a regulatory filing revealed that CafePress has recently raised $8.3 million in Series C venture funding from Sequoia Capital, who also invested $14 million in a previous round. This brings the total funding of the online retailer of user-generated personalized products to $23.8 million.
Launched in 1999, CafePress enabes its users to design, buy and sell expressive merchandise such as t-shirts, hats, bags, mugs, bumper stickers and the likes. CafePress handles the merchandising process and returns a cut of the revenue from sold inventory to its users. The company boasts serving a network of over 6.5 million members trading 150 million+ products, and also claims to receive 11 million unique visitors per month on average.
Update: CafePress has responded, saying that this story is incorrect:
We did not raise venture funding, nor have we raised funding from Sequoia since our series B in 2005.
PEHub mistook a Form D notice which was filed with the SEC because CafePress issued $8.29 million shares of stock back in July.
Imagekind, the art site that describes itself as “a hybrid art gallery, photo-sharing service and a print-on-demand service” has been acquired by CafePress for $15-$20 million in cash and stock, according to VentureBeat.
The site, which was launched two years ago, allows artists to upload and sell framed prints of their pieces, and also allows users to purchase one-off prints of their own images. The company’s blog post on the deal says that the site is home to over 50,000 artists, who will now gain increased exposure from CafePress’s 6.5 million members. ImageKind will continue to operate from its existing website and brand.
In January 2007 we heard rumors that Amazon was looking to acquire the company, but a deal never materialized. Instead, the company wound up raising $2.6 Million in funding in February of that year.
Cook also reports that Zazzle, one of CafePress’s largest competitors, was looking to acquire Imagekind as it moves to launch its own custom framing service. Another major player in this space is Art.com.
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.
Maybe it’s because it’s the holiday season, but it seems impossible to me not to like San Francisco-based GoodStorm. It’s a competitor to Kleiner-backed Zazzle, and CafePress – basically they let you set up shop and sell items with your logo on it.
As with all of these services, they do all the hard work – producing and shipping the item, and collecting the money. All the seller has to do is market the shop, set prices and collect their share of the money.
GoodStorm was founded by Yobie Benjamin and August Capital’s Andy Rappaport in October and launched on December 14, 2005 (there are good pictures of the team at that link as well). Their business model is designed to cater specifically to nonprofits. They keep only 30% of the profits on a sale (giving the rest to the seller), and also donate a portion of profits to charity. Like I said, it’s hard not to like this company.
Currently they are working with sellers one-one-one, but will eventually launch a self service store creator.
The company is built on the Drupal open source content management system. GoodStorm says they will be donating chunks of code back to the project as well.
Stefanie Olsen at CNET wrote about Goodstorm earlier this week and has additional information.
