Tried commenting on this earlier but was spam blocked.
1. Revenue
2. Estimated ~25% That number gets larger with quantity. I'm more focused on getting more people exposed to the concept and signed up for our shirt picking surveys.
3. Not really but it is a real worry. The submitted designs -> voting -> new shirts concept is repeatable. I also have my thoughts towards building a platform around that. Imgur for shirts.
4. Sustaining and growing, yes since my livelihood depends on it but really I love this concept and am having a lot of fun. I don't see why we wouldn't grow, that would be a failure to execute. I am also going to look for a minor seed investment to enable me to do more things.
We use nice shirts and printers. The shirts cost ~$5 - 5.50 (and more for larger sizes). The coverage of the shirt dictates the price of that, full coverage being ~$10 for loq quantity. Cost decrease quite a bit if the order of that shirt is high. (down to $7.50). We're using a market penetration model but really I just want to reach out and talk to people I want involved in creating shirts, voting, and selling. I am very responsive and available.
Both cost and demand. One shirt is crushing it compared to the rest and then we have three groups. Ones that sell really well, ones that sell, and ones that don't. Some of the non-sellers provide good comical value though. I would say it's pretty spreadout as you can see with this graph: http://i.imgur.com/W5pCFSl.png.
We only offer shirts we have agreements with the artists with, are created/recreated by us, or have no searchable creation. There has been a couple times someone said "I made that!" and we add them into the royalty group when it looks like they are. I don't know if we have to do that even, but we do.
Most shirts people submit have licensing issues and the shirts we have with licensing besides Astrosloth don't sell as well.
EDIT: Spam blocker has limited my capability to respond, so I hope you see this:
"You're right, when we first launched based on community reddit posts. We had whatever was most popular since it was being made just for them but we grew past that quickly and realized it was going to keep going. This was just going to be a fun one-off ordeal. Now I have an adviser for licensing and I take it very seriously. Thanks for the compliments too!"
Sure, we seem to be popular on forums with people sharing "wtf is up with these shirts" or "would you wear these"? The first comment always seems to be "no." then the rest are positive. Also, a few of those shutupandtakemymoney type places have done posts on us and those have really high conversion rates. Lastly, I use places like FunnyJunk and 9GAG as a place to repost twitter pics. It's my first time on those, so I'm still trying to learn their communities.
Our Kim Jong Il shirt is crushing it, which I didn't expect, and people are sharing it / finding up on Instagram and twitter. I am going to expand and utilize those social media platforms more such as a "4chan designs shirts" board on pinterest. We have virality on our side with this, but I think most B2C companies need something others want to talk about.
We have high conversion off facebook but I don't do anything on it. So, it most be others sharing links and pictures that I can't see. We also have a large "direct" group of sales that I have no information on how they found us.
EDIT: I can't reply as fast as I'd like to due to spam restrictions in place. I didn't use my main account for this post.
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