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.

The design site has also unveiled a suite of new “seller-friendly” tools to spice up sellers’ offerings. Sellers can now uber-customize their online storefronts, creating a branded destination for their products. Sellers can also enable a a filtering mechanism to specify which designs can be featured in different products in various colors. Additionally, Zazzle has implemented a Flash-powered bulk image upload tool that is compatible with Macs and PCs.

It’s good to see that Zazzle is growing by expanding its reach and offerings. Earlier this year, the startup underwent a round of layoffs, letting 15% of the company’s staff go due to the sluggish economy. Competitors include CafePress and Spreadshirt, which both have an international presence.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The company also lets private individuals and commercial organizations set up their own online merchandising outlets as resellers of the Spreadshirt service.

Spreadshirt says the financing will be used to develop its online platform and its push into the North American market, where its two main competitors, venture-backed CafePress (Foster City, CA) and Zazzle (Redwood City, CA) are based.

According to a January company blog post, 1 million t-shirts were sold in 2008 via Spreadshirt. They’re also open about the missed growth estimates put forward at the end of 2007: growth was at 40% for the year instead of the aimed-for 50-80%. As a result, the company was recently forced to do a round of lay-offs and reorganize some of its departments.

(Source: Deutsche Startups)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Launched in 1999, CafePress enables 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.

CafePress even made its first acquisition last Summer, and a significant one at that, buying Imagekind for $15-$20 million in cash and stock. The company has recently announced plans to expand internationally by taking its marketplaces to other English speaking nations like the UK, Canada and Australia.

CafePress claims to be profitable, which of course raises the question why the extra funding was needed to begin with. Most likely, the investors are providing CafePress with a safety cushion for the future consequences of the current economic downturn, as well as the necessary capital for the company to expand its base operations into even more countries.

For the sake of comparison: $28.3 million is only half of the backing that head-to-head competitor Zazzle has received to date, yet both Compete and Quantcast suggest that it receives twice as much traffic. Spreadshirt is another noteworthy player.

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. The Form D notice was filed with the SEC because we issued $8.29 million shares of stock back in July.

PEHub mistook a Form D notice which was filed with the SEC because CafePress issued $8.29 million shares of stock back in July.

Update 2: Dan Primack at PEHub explains what went wrong.

Update 3: Below is the SEC Reg. D filing in question, which does clearly state that the company sold $8.3 million worth of securities in July (page 3) to investors including Douglas Leone (a VC at Sequoia Capital) and OpenTable CEO Jeff Jordan. But as indicated above, this was actually an issuing of existing shares rather than a sale of new ones. The new SEC form that CafePress used does not make this clear. So much for transparency.

SEC Cease And Desist Order To Prosper – Get more Legal Forms

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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.