starting the discussion: merchandising at Conservancy

[Sean DALY]

Hi Amy, Tony

With t-shirts, the key question (beyond basic t-shirt quality, which can be
problematic) is the printing process. Here are a couple of links I have
found useful when researching the topic:

http://www.alt-team.com/choosing-a-printing-technique-for-custom-t-shirt-printing-business.html
http://www.staplespromotionalproducts.com/Landing.aspx?name=ArtworkRequirements

One advantage of working with Spreadshirt / CafePress / Printfection /
VistaPrint / Zazzle / PrintMojo / etc. is, they offer different kinds of
merchandise beyond t-shirts and handle order fulfillment and individual
shipping, in some cases worldwide. This can be through a branded online
shop or not. I can't vouch for quality though, these services market ease
of use and speed of delivery - research/benchmarking needs to be done.

But before that, it might be interesting to enumerate the promo needs for
each SFC project (handouts? in-person/online sales to recover costs?) and
art objectives (simple logos? lots of variants? one side printing for tees
or double-sided for ex?).

In the case of Sugar Labs, we would like to recover costs and ideally offer
say 8 colors of tees with 6 choices of logo colors, maybe hoodies too;
mugs, and logo-embroidered caps and laptop bags.

thanks

Sean
Sugar Labs Marketing Coordinator



On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 7:09 PM, Tony Sebro <tony at sfconservancy.org> wrote:

> On 02/06/2013 04:09 PM, Amy Terlaga wrote:
>
>> Hi Tony--
>>
>> I'm interested in starting up some merchandise sales for the Evergreen
>> project.  We'd love to have some things to sell in time for our April
>> conference (April 10-13).  I was thinking T-shirts, pens, post-it notes to
>> start, but I'm open to other ideas.  I have no idea as to how much money
>> we'd need to get a good base of merch for sale for this initial wave and
>> I'd
>> need some help with that.  I'm also looking for some good companies to
>> produce these - I want quality at a reasonable price.  (Doesn't
>> everybody?)
>>
>> Thanks for getting this list going.  It's coming at a really good time for
>> us!
>>
>> Amy
>>
>>  Thanks for kicking things off, Amy.  :)  You've started off with a
> fairly broad question, which is good; hopefully, others can chime in with
> their experiences.  Perhaps we should break it down into separate threads,
> so that people can follow some discussions and not others.  I'll reply with
> my comments with the subject line updated as appropriate.
>
>
> Best,
> -Tony
>
> --
> Tony Sebro, General Counsel, Software Freedom Conservancy
> +1-212-461-3245 x11
> tony at sfconservancy.org
> www.sfconservancy.org
>
>
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