MySpace has announced a music merchandise deal with Zazzle that will allow the “more than 6 million musicians and bands on MySpace” to sell unlimited music merchandise to the MySpace community.

Under the deal, musicians and bands on MySpace will have the immediate ability to create products and sell merchandise by putting the Zazzle Merch Booth widget on their MySpace profile. Zazzle’s “Model Realview” technology allows artists to display their very own branded merchandise three dimensionally, on real models in their profile. The Zazzle Merch Booth widget will also enable placement of the artist’s merchandise in a Zazzle gallery, their own websites, fan sites and blogs.

MySpace said the deal was part of their “commitment to offer tools and services to the music industry that benefit artists and consumers alike.”

The Kleiner Perkins backed Zazzle appointed Jim Heckman, formerly of Fox Interactive (the News Corp arm that owns MySpace) as Chief Strategy Officer Saturday and was rumored to have closed a second round of $30 million in July.

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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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Here’s an unconfirmed but well sourced rumor: silicon valley based Zazzle will be closing a second round of financing in the $30 million range, at a $300+ million pre-money valuation. The round is expected to be led by an as-yet-unnamed hedge fund. Kleiner Perkins (which led the company’s $16 million Series A round in 2005, is supposedly also particpating in the round. Look for confirmation from the company in the next couple of weeks.

The company competes with CafePress and others.

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There are many sites that sell customized casino chips (just do a search), but we haven’t found any that have an online design tool to allow you to create the chip itself. TheChipLab has take the extra step and has created a very nice Flash tool for designing your own casino-grade chip. The creation tool is very flexible and layer based. It’s not as powerful as new online image editor Fauxto, which is also Flash based, but it does the job.

So my question is, why don’t CafePress and Zazzle implement Flash tools to help people create customized products as well? Zazzle’s Ajax tool is pretty nice and allows some basic resizing and movement of images, plus the addition of text. Imagecafe is stuck in the nineties - their product creation tool has next to no flexibility at all. Neither are anywhere near offering what TheChipLab does.

Adobe has created awesome tools that tiny ecommerce companies like TheChipLab can use to provide a cool service to customers. It’s time for the VPs of Product at CafePress and Zazzle to wake up and reinvent their products, too. Adobe has done all of the heavy lifting, all they have to do is implement it.

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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.

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Company: Zazzle

Launched: 1999 (zazzle.com launched 2003)

Status: Announced $16m Series A on July 18, 2005

What is it?

Zazzle let’s customers create customized products, ranging from tshirts to stamps, and sell them on the zazzle website.

In their own words, “Zazzle is the leading customized products marketplace for consumer enthusiasts to share and celebrate their interests by creating apparel, posters, cards, stamps and more. We combine on-demand manufacturing, a robust community, the largest online collection of customizable digital images and unmatched personalization tools to empower you to create your own products. In addition, you can choose to become a contributor by sharing your unique creations in Zazzle’s public galleries. Within these galleries, you can browse, comment and connect with others who share your interests. Contributors also earn royalties every time their creations are purchased by others. For anyone who wishes to create, wear, display, sell or celebrate their interests, Zazzle provides a compelling interactive marketplace to a worldwide audience.” Link

Creating Products:

Creating products is a relatively straightforward process of choosing prodcuts (apparel, posters, stamps, etc.), uploading images, and pricing the items. Zazzle claims that they have “over 500,000 totally unique, user-created products, available in billions of variations”. Link

Zazzle Stamps:

Zazzle Stamps is really interesting. Within certain parameters, users can upload their own images, or use stock zazzle images (like disney images), and create actual postage stamps. A sheet of 20 first-class stamps will sell for $16.99, 130% more than “normal” stamps. Zazzle Stamps is possible via a partnership with Pitney Bowes.

FYI, Stamps.com has a similar program and will be partnering with cafepress, a zazzle competitor.

Relevant Links:

About, News, Blog, B2Day, New Persuasion Blog, Alarm:Clock, New Media Musings, Somewhat Frank, RSSWay, Traders Trade, CNET, Ben Barren, Alarm:Clock

Tags: zazzle, , zazzle.com, pitneybowes, cafepress, stamps.com, stamps, ecommerce, techcrunch, web2.0

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