[Marketing] Merchandise / Swag: Cafepress? Spreadshirt? Zazzle? Printfection? VistaPrint?

[Sean DALY]

http://www.cafepress.com
http://www.spreadshirt.com
http://www.zazzle.com
http://www.printfection.com
http://www.vistaprint.com

Let's offer Sugar Labs branded T-shirts, stickers, badges (buttons),
coffee mugs, messenger bags, mousepads, &c !

Perfect booth stuff. Great for spreading the word - walk through a
crowd, 500 impressions :-)

Here are five well-known "print-on-demand" services (feel free to
point us to any others!). The concept is, there is no stock or upfront
bulk orders like with traditional printers. We provide the graphics,
the supplier does printing and fulfillment (including returns &
exchanges, a perennial headache). Listings can vary from simple (users
have to find our stuff on the supplier's site with keywords) to
branded shop (users may not notice except for the URL they are off our
site) to embedded (users are on our site but the backend is at the
supplier's).

Each one has strong points/weak points: for example Spreadshirt has
good presence in Europe; Printfection offers T-shirts in many colors
and provides APIs for a store on the designer's site (probably
overkill for us).

My impression is that signing up is not exclusive; we could go with
any combination and make recommendations to site visitors based on
delivery destination.

Royalty rates, margin structures differ but my main concern would be
quality + breaking even, if such a service doesn't cost us money we
are already ahead by benefiting from the "free advertising" of t-shirt
or bag wearers.

Is quality comparable? I have no idea, but Spreadshirt has a good
reputation. A friend of mine has used Cafepress for some time and
never had a complaint.

What I really like about these solutions is:
* We can offer all 24 variants of our logo (the 12 combos on either
white or black background); it will be interesting to note the
hit-parade of sales
* The Home View!
* The Neighborhood View!
* Big Icons of our favorite Activities... in different colors?
("EToys, a Sugar Activity")
* Screenshots with impact (Speak saying something, Moon)
* a Sugar Labs USB stick with text "Sugar on a Stick"
* more ideas?

We could shamelessly steal a great idea from our friends at OLPC
France: a little rectangular Sugar Labs sticker which fits right on
the hinge of an XO-1. Would be great for G1G1 "get 1" XOs...

Help please, let's look at these together and make a recommendation
for one or more suppliers... they seem very similar to me based on our
needs, but they may have licensing issues or something.

If we get this going soon we could be wearing (or even selling) Sugar
Labs tees at LinuxTag Berlin ;-)

thanks

Sean