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Create Your Own Designer T-Shirts and Fashion on Cafepress and Zazzle

Updated on June 14, 2014

Create a Design

One of my design creations, quick and simple with the cafepress.com Design Creator.
One of my design creations, quick and simple with the cafepress.com Design Creator. | Source

Blind Clothing Designer on Cafepress.com


If you have read some of my other hubs on disabled living and coping with life as a recently blind man. You will have perhaps noticed that I do not do things the easy way. I go out and look for mental challenges to my blindness. Getting a BA degree in History and Political Science was one example of facing the challenge. Now I am taking on cafepress, the online merchandising store where you can design your own products, post them in your own store and when the customers come and buy,

Cafe Press.com take over


Cafepress.com do much of the work, they produce your designed item, collect the fees and deal with all customer service matters and any returns.

The reason for the approximate sixty day delay is that Cafepress.com offer the customer a thirty day money back guarantee. The cash is therefore held for those thirty days before finally being credited to your account.

Cafepress then offer you varying levels of payment of commissions, you can opt for payments in as little as $10 then $25, $50 and $100. Any shortfall will be carried over till the next payment cycle. So if you have $24.99 and you opted for a $25 payout you will need to wait thirty more days, if you set the payout at $10 you would receive the full $24.99.

You can opt to receive payments either by check through the mail or by payment to a PayPal account.


Cafepress, promise to pay you for your sold products after sixty days. So any items sold this month, I could expect to receive payment for in August or September.

Setting Your Mark-up


There are several methods of deciding how much mark-up you receive. Mark-up is the $ amount that is paid by the customer to you after all costs have been taken out.

Simply If An item is priced for sale at $12, Cafepress take $10 for production etc. Your mark-up is $2.00 or 20%.

You can set an overall store mark-up covering everything in the store with a set percentage or cash amount, you can choose market place pricing and go below market price in the middle of the market or high or a premium price for goods. Again a whole store price can be set or you can price individual items. The final choice is to set a set $ amount for your mark-up. This again can cover all or individual items.

Designing


The design area is very easy to use. You select an item to carry your design, then you can add your own images, these can be photographs or images made on design programs such as Corel Draw. The image can be saved and manipulated on the cafepress website.


You can also add text to your design or you can use a reasonable number of clip-art items and shapes for your designs.

Being blind this is a fun area for me, the shapes are bold and it is easy to change their colors. The image at the top of this article was created with two clip-art images, an open heart and a crucifix, the image was created by overlaying the crucifix on the heart.

This may or may not create a totally original design, there are millions of designs and a limited number of clip-art images. When you are satisfied with your image you can save it to your portfolio for later use.


You then select the goods you want to sell and can choose individual items or everything on the site to place an image on. The group settings allow you to produce a lot of products in a few clicks, so again very easy. You can always opt to choose one or two items at a time too. It is all up to you and how much time you want to take.

Finishing and Filling the Store

When you have completed your design, you just save the items to your store. Then you can change the descriptions and the names of your items. This adds a personal touch and is recommended by Cafepress.com.

You can open several basic stores if you wish. Basic stores allow the sale of only one of any item, so one white man's tee-shirt or one woman's dark hoodee.


For $4.99 per month you can open a premium level store where there are less restrictions and more options for design of a layout. The basic store is ok though for the fun aspect. If you find that you need the extra products or you are bringing in more than $5.00 over the longterm then cafepress.com promise a quick and easy upgrade which may be worth considering.

Conclusion

This past few days I have had a great deal of fun playing with this website. I went to it unsure of what to do and with a couple of hours practice I created something. Whether someone will pay for that remains to be seen.

Watch out for further updates over the coming months as I hope to share my experience. If writing gets too much, and you feel a need to change. Maybe take a look at cafepress.com or zazzle.com, Zazzle is very similar to cafepress but doesn't have the same fraphic capabilities. For Zazzle I feel you do need to purchase a graphics program to help you create your designs.

working

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