CafePress is all about Community. The nature of our business brings together a really diverse group of people who all share one common interest: their own self-expression.
Our lively boards are a great place to meet some unique and fascinating folks – and not a bad
place to get some tips on how to be successful in our system, either. One thing we’re always pleased to see is how helpful our Community is in supporting each other with feedback, tips and props.
Occasionally, a CP customer goes that extra mile to personally deliver some feedback. While
we generally distribute these internally to give everyone that warm fuzzy feeling, we don’t usually share our love letters publicly. However, one letter speaks so clearly about the spirit of community and empowered self-expression that I decided to share it with y’all today. Because who doesn’t want a warm fuzzy feeling on Monday?
Dear Leslie,
I hope you are well. I wanted to take a moment to express my sincere appreciation for what CafePress has done for me and my family.
Before opening my first shop, I was blessed with a new baby. The delivery left me with a beautiful new daughter, some health complications, and a pile of bills. Of course the first addition was a delight,
the later two were the problem. I wasn’t able to go back to work even part-time because of the health problem, and so our debt continued to soar. All the while, my intention was to find something I could do at home so I could heal and stay-at-home with my baby. Then my brother introduced me to CafePress.
When I started my first store, I had no idea the value it would bring me. I opened it during the holiday season and was astonished to see my sales volume. My husband and I loved to see the emails roll in “You Made A Sale At CafePress.com!”. It was like hearing holiday music in our ears! After our first few months with CafePress, the stress of finances began to lighten from our shoulders and a sense of relief came to us knowing I could spend more time at home with my daughter.
Being inspired by my baby and the success of my first shop, I opened another shop. I had no idea what was in store for me next. Within a month of opening it, I was handed the infamous $16 million lawsuit for
having clothing items designed with my own daughter’s nickname, Sweet Pea, on them. At that moment, my holiday profits didn’t look so bright and my short-lived stress vacation came to an end. But then, through the warm and professional help of Candice and CafePress staff, the defendants rallied
together. It was a very empowering battle that pursued over the course of the next few months. I gained knowledge, community support, and the power and resources to fight for a worthy cause beyond my own personal stake in the case. We knew we were setting an example for other kinds of seemingly frivolous acts against other shopkeepers. Needless to say, we were delighted the outcome was mostly in our favor and the case was dismissed.
This experience didn’t taint my relationship with CafePress. In fact, it strengthened it. It showed me the integrity of the people and the company. Even though CafePress couldn’t back us up directly in
the case, as you were not officially named, we felt your strong and supporting presence through the process.
Through these experiences, I’ve seen what CafePress is really about. I see you are about much more than just printing designs on merchandise. I see you are about empowering people. You’ve empowered
me to be a better mom, by allowing me to stay home with my daughter. You’ve empowered me to lighten the financial load on my family. You’ve empowered me to stand up and fight for what is right and just. You’ve empowered me to be a successful, home-based business owner. You have provided the right tools, the right products, the right staff, the perfect balance of support and independence, and outstanding integrity.
I look forward to growing my shops to the surpass our debt and generate an income greater than even my husband’s full time job. When a stay-at-home mom can do that, she is truly powerful.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for making your dreams part of my dreams and creating a mutual success.
If you’re not feeling warm and fuzzy yet, this pic should send you into that warm, fuzzy place…
Pamela Anderson made some waves last week when she showed up in Washington, D.C. at the Department of Health and Human Services to deliver a report on behalf of PETA.
Her chest caught our attention for good reason: it would seem that she’s wearing a shirt from the CafePress PETA shop.
Activism is purposeful and empowered self-expression, so it’s no wonder that we have so many motivated activists out there wearing it loud. In this case we give baby blue trucker hats off to Pam Anderson for making a statement with, arguably, her loudest apparatus.
The CafePressVoice election is happening right now and the candidates are busy campaigning why they are the right “Shopkeeper” for the job. Check out the campaigning happening in the CafePressVoice forum.
For those of you who may not be familiar with the CafePressVoice program, it is a panel of Shopkeepers elected by their peers to help us evaluate new features, services, merchandise and programs. At CafePress, we feel it’s important that the Shopkeeper voice gets heard. Together, CafePress and the CafePressVoice team will work together to build an even stronger Community.
If you’re a Shopkeeper, make sure your voice is heard and voteby April 25, 2008 at 11:59 pm PST. When you vote, you’ll be picking a representative who will bring your perspective as a Shopkeeper to discussions about important issues that affect your business.
In the spirit of Earth Day, we decided to come up with things you can do with CafePress merchandise to make the earth a better place.
Canvas totes are more eco-friendly than plastic bags, and a lot sturdier as well. Buy a few and re-use them for all your shopping needs. With almost 3 million to choose from, you should be able to find a groovy tote that speaks to your gutmonkey and makes your Mother proud, all at the same time.
Mugs are washable and better than disposing of a coffee cup every morning, particularly if that cup is made of Styrofoam. Take your favorite to the office and impress your coworkers with your mad style and enviro-friendly self.
Buttons are a re-usable way to express your views. And if you really want to conserve, buy a blank button and use dry-erase or grease pencil to change your daily statement to the world. (Note: we make no claims as to the rub-offable-ness of your writing instrument of choice…)
Organic T-shirts are organic. And that makes Mother happy. It also makes your skin happy, because these shirts are remarkably soft. And hey, it even makes Greenpeace happy.
Thongs use less fabric than your average pair of panties. So don’t be afraid to bare the back in the name of the environment – in this case, your Mother will be proud.
So there you have it – The CafePress Top 5 ways to celebrate Earth Day Without Eating Alfalfa Sprouts.
As the rivalry between the Democratic frontrunners increases it seems that the news focuses more and more on the conflict itself. Hey, if it bleeds it leads.
The article goes on to discuss the candidates complaining about who’s the bigger complainer.
Because our content is a reflection of the public discourse, the CafePress system up to this point has been a good indicator of political trends. The Meter has, as we suspected, been remarkably accurate.
That being the case, I decided to search for “complain” today in our system to see what comes up. Would I find some Hillary or Obama gear at the top of the system?
Nope.
But what I did find was interesting – the top result is a “Vote” design, and there are 2 other “Vote” designs on the first page of results. And that’s really the point of all this, isn’t it? No matter how much complaining or campaigning our candidates do, at the end of the day the American people speak a lot more loudly and convincingly. And that’s by speaking with our votes.
So remember: if you want to feel good about complaining about our elected officials, be sure to register to vote.
And after that, don’t forget to make a T-shirt. Because voting is private, but your shirt lets everyone know what you think. And that’s the American way.
I don’t know if y’all know this, but thanks to our industrious group of Shopkeepers CafePress has – as far as we know – the largest online retail catalogue in existence.
As of today we had around 165,000,000 products for sale in the Marketplace catalogue (meaning there’s actually a lot more than that, what with private shops and all). 40,000 new products get added every day, which means that by the time you read this post in its entirety around 150 products will be added to the system.
Thing is, 165,000,000 (and upwards) is a gargantuan, colossal and otherwise ginormously huge number. It’s of the “gozillion” caliber and is pretty hard to conceptualize. So today with the help of a mathlete-type engineer who enjoys these kinds of puzzles, I did some fun math to try to put that huge number into perspective. Here’s what we came up with:
If you laid all the products in our catalogue end-to-end, you’d go around the world 2.5 times.
If you laid all the t-shirts in our catalogue end-to-end, you’d go around the world twice.
If you stacked all the products in our catalogue into a nice towering pile (that’s T-shirts laid flat and mugs standing up – we’re assuming the mugs don’t break; come on, humor us), you’d be able to bridge the Grand Canyon. Depending on where you bridged it would determine the width of your Merch Bridge.
If the desert’s not your thing, you could create a Merch Bridge that runs parallel to the Golden Gate Bridge that, from the water, sits at the height of the cars and is 5 lanes wide. (We might suggest building a dock first so the bridge doesn’t sink.)
New York City has 8 million people. We have almost 7 million mugs. This means that you could give every person in New York a one-of-a-kind cup of coffee – because kids shouldn’t drink coffee. Even New York kids.
You could drain Raging Waters with the mugs in our catalogue.
If you filled all those mugs with gas and then filled up a Prius, that Prius would run for 62 years straight. You could also drive that Prius to Venus (or maybe farther – we didn’t take into account that zero gravity would save enormously on gas), or you could drive the Prius around the earth 1000 times. Alternatively you could have 1000 people race a lap around the earth, if Toyota saw fit to make the Prius an aquatic vehicle (and if the gas mileage stayed around 50MPG as such).
Interesting political numbers:
The number of anti-Bush stickers in the catalogue would cover the entire Washington Monument, with enough left over to wallpaper the Oval Office and the rest of the West Wing.
Worried about redecorating in November? No problem:
The Obama stickers in the catalogue can cover the Washington Monument, the Oval Office and still get a room or two in the West Wing. (And we still have some time to go until the election, so we may be able to add the rest of the West Wing eventually.)
The Hillary stickersalmost cover the entire Monument – we’re a little short, but who can read anything at the top of that thing anyway?
Now, even those numbers are pretty huge and hard to wrap one’s head around, so we came up with a couple easy daily figures:
The products added in a day would stack as high as the Eiffel Tower.
The products added in a day, laid out end-to-end, stretch 15 miles. So you could go from the Eiffel Tower to Versailles, and still have enough stuff left over to lay a path through the gardens.
So we learned a few interesting things in this exercise, and the most obvious is this:
You can’t compete with Mother Nature.
Sure, we can bridge the Grand Canyon with a pile of merchandise (er – I suppose that makes it a dam, on second thought) – but we’re nowhere near to filling it in. And just when we felt impressive about draining Raging Waters, we realized that pouring out all the water in those 7 million mugs account for a single second of water going over the crest of Niagra Falls.
But hey, keep checking back. As motivated as our Shopkeepers are, we won’t be at all surprised if – laying out our product collection – they lead us to beat China to the moon.
P.S. – If you want to come up with your own fancy math and interesting measurements, please do! Comment here or send to blog@cafepress.com. We’re especially interested as to whether anyone can figure out how large the catalogue in pile form – think dumping-out-the-duffel-bag pile – would be.
Early last week some protestors climbed the Golden Gate Bridge to unfurl a couple banners to draw attention to Chinese action in Tibet. Talk about gutmonkey – these climbers risked life, limb and arrest to get their point across. SFGate.com got some great photos and video, letting the world know that this was a precursor of a much larger protest to be had when the Olympic Torch was to be run through San Francisco on Wednesday.
Of course, it didn’t escape our notice that the climbers were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with big block “TEAM TIBET” lettering. Right on.
This kind of free expression is at the heart of CafePress, and knowing that Wednesday was to be a day where thousands would wear, voice and show their opinions, a fearless coworker and myself decided to go into the city and talk to some protestors about their fashion statements and why they choose to express themselves via the almighty T-shirt.
We hit the Embarcadero, which was the heart of the protest scene and supposedly the site of the torch relay. You will notice that the video we took contains folks all wearing pro-Tibet T-shirts or Save Darfur shirts – also a remarkably common sight that day. This is not to say that we didn’t see any pro-China T-shirts; we did, though they were in the vast minority. However, we weren’t able to get on-camera commentary from anyone wearing a pro-China T-shirt, so if anyone reading this has thoughts on the matter we certainly welcome them via the comment field.
Anyway, here’s the video we did:
What we didn’t see: the Olympic Torch. Apparently Mayor Newsom decided to avoid the fray and they secretly ran the torch across town. Oh well. What we did see: thousands of people, news cameras, a lot of chanting and shouting and marching and singing, a band, police in riot gear, police on bicycles, police in general, and thousands of signs, flags (both Chinese and Tibetan), T-shirts, stickers and buttons speaking out for the bearers. We even saw a dog wearing a “Free Tibet” T-shirt – and, as you saw, he was kind enough to grant us an interview.
For more good pix of the protest, check out Google images.
Interesting things heard throughout the day:
“What’s Tibet?” (pronounced “Tibbet”)
-a teenage girl wearing a “Save Darfur” T-shirt
“Does anyone else find it ironic that people are out here holding Chinese flags in America to support a government that doesn’t allow the Tibetan people to fly their own flag in their own country?”
-random observer
“If San Francisco is about free expression, man, why is the Mayor hiding the protest from the world?”
-annoyed observer once the crowd found out the torch had been secretly run in another part of the city
“This is crazier than Pride!”
-passerby marching with the crowd
“I just gave my kids the day off school and they didn’t even get to see the torch.”
-local teacher
Hmm. Perhaps we should make some “I took the day off work to see the Olympic Torch and all I saw was some lousy T-Shirts” T-shirts…
Since the CafePress business model and this blog are founded upon an invitation for open conversation, we’re thankful to a local blogger for bringing something to our attention that started a conversation within the green walls ’round these parts.
It seems that CafePress carries an “unsatisfactory” rating with the Better Business Bureau (BBB) due to not having resolved a handful of complaints with said agency/the consumer. Yikes.
We are a Customer-first company that prides ourselves on being an industry leader in Customer Service. That we had this rating was bad enough; that we weren’t aware of it was pretty embarrassing, and we don’t look good blushing what with the chartreuse walls and all. On the plus side, the situation let us know that our process for handling these kinds of complaints was broken, and we’ve now taken the steps to fix it.
As of the time of this writing, we’ve responded to the BBB with documentation to close out all
the outstanding issues. We’ll follow up and make sure that our online profile is adjusted accordingly, as that is now part of our new process.
The first thing we did when we saw the rating was investigate the complaints. Most of them are from
2005-2006, and a couple are from 2007.
It’s worth noting that during 2005 and 2006, both our “main” office and our manufacturing facility moved. Since we had 4 different addresses on file and since, at the time, complaints were sent via snail mail, we’re pretty sure that a few were lost in the mail. Yes, it’s a lame excuse – and that’s why it’s not an excuse. We should have kept our mailing address up-to-date, and we didn’t. Shame on us, and apologies to our postal carrier as well as those folks who, it would seem, couldn’t find us. (How many holiday cards did we miss? We’ll never know.)
We hired a seasoned Customer Service Manager in 2006. Once he started, he changed our process for BBB complaints to allow for self-management and e-mail notification. This is a great system unless you forget to check into the system and clear out resolved issues, which is apparently what happened with a couple issues. Whoops. On the plus side, the consumers had their issues resolved and are none the wiser.
We measure our Customer Satisfaction scores regularly and work hard at putting programs in place to improve customer satisfaction. Although we will always strive to improve customer satisfaction, we have made great progress. We’ve improved from a 7.7/10 rating in 2005 to a 8.3/10 rating in 2007, which makes us happy that we hired aforementioned Customer Service Manager.
Truthfully, the blog post and the BBB report made us happy overall. We were happy to find a simple way to fix a broken process, happy to be able to close the loop and revisit a handful of folks who deserved better service, happy to have a conversation started that’s of import to our business, and happy to see that we had such a small number of complaints given that we are the industry leader and, as such, do ship significantly more orders than others in the space.
Which is to say that our Customers’ happy:peeved ratio is one that we’re smiling about.
[buzzcowboy note: these unresolved issues have all been closed as of 5/9/2008, and we're back to a satisfactory rating.]
We all know that CafePress is about more a lot more than T-shirts. The power of self-expression is what drives this business, and it’s the reason we have such a passionate, outspoken group of users.
In the past, we’ve used words like “passion” to describe our users’ feelings about a certain thing, but that word doesn’t really capture the gut-level obsession that so many people have that move them to express themselves. Some folks have a message coming from the heart, some from the mind… but all of them have that gut-level instinct and desire that moves them to create or buy something that tells the world what their “Thing” is.
Thing is, “Thing” isn’t a great word to describe that “Thing.” And so, in our spare time (that commute’s good for something), a couple of us figured we’d try to think of a better word to help us explain and describe CafePress and what it means to our users.
The Japanese word “otaku” is a person who has an obsession with something, or an uber-fan. Marketing guru Seth Godin uses this word in his how-to-be-remarkable Marketing tome “Purple Cow,” and while it’s a great word and very descriptive it’s already been popularized. Plus we may be missing some subtlety in the translation. And so, while “otaku” is actually a great word for our users (and really fun to shout out loud – try it, you’ll feel empowered – yes, you. Really, try it.), we are forced to move on to find a new way to describe the nature of our business and what it means.
So, as you may have guessed from the title of this blog, the word we’ve come up with thus far is (drumroll…): gutmonkey.
Yes, it’s sort of a silly word. And we’re not married to it – y’all are welcome to come up with something else. But it’s better than “hobsession” (hobby + obsession), and at the time of this writing it holds the distinction as being a word that returns ZERO results in the CafePress marketplace – something nearly impossible to do if a word already exists (and we’re sure one of you will fill in that zero result for us – go for it). So this tells us that we’ve made up a word. And that’s good. It’s fun to say, too. And that’s also good.
So what’s a gutmonkey?
There are lots of idioms that involve monkeys. Most of them are quite fun, all of them very colorful. Gutmonkey stems from a slang word and a colloquialism. It’s the monkey on your back, but in your gut. And not in a destructive way, but in a good way. You know?
More simply: gutmonkey is that deep-seated desire/obsession/passion/addiction that, gut-level, inspires your action. Your gutmonkey might be as fun as a barrel of monkeys, or it might be a more serious cause that stirs up the activist inside you. (Monkeys aren’t generally known for being docile and quiet, after all.) Your gutmonkey invokes the commitment and fiery passion/addiction, and the gut-level inspiration that moves you to action.
If you’ll drive 30 miles to find The Best BBQ Joint Ever, BBQ (or finding the best local food, etc) is your gutmonkey. (Mmm… BBQ)
You might not like this word, and that’s OK. Just so you know: we’re not married to it, but until y’all come up with something better we’re going with it.
And if you love the word, do feel free to toss some designs into the Marketplace. Who knows? You may start a gutmonkey frenzy, and we’ll definitely feature our favorites on the blog. (Monkeys are fun anyway.)
So, 2 questions for you:
1) What’s your gutmonkey?
2) …and do you have a better word for it?
I had a chance to catch up with Todd P. last week, after he gave me a ring to address the various comments surrounding his dating preferences with CafePress LoveMatch. I’d like to remind everyone that the To-A-T™ CafePress LoveMatch™ algorithm is still in BETA, and given its unique nature does indeed come up with some matches you might not make on your own.
And let’s all remember that, like CafePress itself, CafePress LoveMatch™ is meant to be an opportunity for absolutely everyone to make a personal connection.
This is long-tail dating, people. Should we be any more hasty to judge Todd P. than we are to judge the person who made the “My squirrel is my best friend” T-shirt?
In any case, Todd P. wanted me to relate this to his detractors:
I am Todd P and I’m done with my 15 minutes of
fame.
Little did I know when I signed up for a beta dating
program that I would be featured so prominently on the premiere marketing
materials. I suppose I should have read the fine print – who knew?
I should have also been suspicious when they asked for
quotes relating to my relationship with both Lib (I call her Lib) and Fernando.
Now neither has returned my calls for the past few days.
When I was a small boy I dreamed of being famous, but then the
other day I was in the bookstore minding my own business, and a random lady started
yelling at me for dating two people at once, then threw a copy of “You Know He’s a Two-Timing Egomaniacal, Womanizing Slimeball When . . .” at me. When I tried to explain that, technically, I was only dating one woman and couldn’t really be called a womanizer, things went from bad to worse and she tried to shepherd me to the “Self-Help” section while quoting Doctor Phil and I had to call security over to save me. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind.
Anyhow – just thought I’d drop a line and ask people to be a little more understanding. I think it’s time for me to get back to try meeting girls the old-fashioned way (i.e. in a bar with alcohol as my wingman) and see if I can once again fade into the background.
Sincerely,
Todd P.
In honor of Todd P’s disgrace, we shall take a moment for some Monday haiku:
People are people
So judge not, lest ye be judged
Happy April, all
