282 : James McArthur – Teepublic offers options with hoodies, mugs, cell phone cases to Amazon Merch Sellers
So you have had your creativity throttled and you need to find another way to let it flow? There are a lot of options for Print on Demand but with James and Teepublic they are offering you dedicated account manager to help onboard you and your designs. The account manager also can help you drive sales with Social Media.
Mentioned:
Sponsors
Gaye’s Million Dollar Arbitrage List
Transcript: (note- this is a new tool I am trying out so it is not perfect- it does seem to be getting better)
Stephen: [00:00] Wanted to it, take a second and recognize my sponsors this week. You know, Gaye lisbey’s million dollar arbitrage as edge and list group. That’s a mouthful. It is. But guess what? It’s a great opportunity. You can build a big Amazon business. You don’t need a lot of capital when you start. I mean we all started, you know, um, most of it started selling books and then you move into retail arbitrage that is the place that you can turn your money the fastest and online arbitrage. And so by having that skill set, by learning those skill sets, you can get the best bang for your buck. And so gay group will help you learn online arbitrage. It’s, it’s more than just a list service. They’re going to give you a whole bunch of actionable inventory every single day. Write Monday through Friday. However, there’s also a mentorship that goes on and that mentorship is so important because sometimes it’s great to know what to buy, but it’s more important to understand why to buy it.
Stephen: [01:02] But yeah, that’s that, you know, learning the fish are just getting fit, you know, you really want to learn because ultimately you want to strike it on your own and this is a great way to do it. So how about seven days free trial, but a free trial, right? Very, very cool. So it’s amazing. Freedom Dot com. Forward slash is a mouthful. The word momentum. You’ve got to use a hyphen and you put in the word arbitrage. So it’s amazing. Freedom, [inaudible] forward slash momentum dash arbitrage. And you’re going to get a free trial in gaze group. You got to tell her I sent you, right? I also have the link in the episode, but it’s such a great opportunity. So she is amazing. Amazing. I’m in that group. So you’ll see me there. An amazing, amazing person who’s there to answer your questions, who’s there to help lead you and help guide you.
Stephen: [01:50] And that’s what gay does. She does it every single day. The testimonials are real. Go take a look. You will be blown away. And again, it’s a free trial. I have the link on this episode to reach in, you know, labs, Jeff Cohen and the team. They have blown me away with this scope project. We use this all the time for our business. We do a lot of private label. We also do a lot of wholesale and wholesale bundles or multi packs, that kind of thing, which a lot of people do, but we use a scope to help us figure out what are the keywords and so it’s really simple. You basically figure out where you’re going to sell, what you’re going to sell, what category, find that light product, find the top couple sellers and find their keywords. Boom magic. There you go. You copy the best because it’s working.
Stephen: [02:39] And guess what? That’s a proof of concept and scope allows you to do that. So it’s solar lamps.com, forward slash scope, seller labs.com, forward slash scope. Use the code word momentum, and you’re going to get a couple of days free trial and you’re going to save a little bit of money and you’re going to get some free keywords. It’s worth every penny. I’m in that group. Come and check me out. So our [inaudible] dot com, forward slash scope. Again, use the word momentum solutions for ecommerce. Karen lunker. Great, great, great group. I’ve been using them for a long time, I guess over two years and I’m in there and I pay just like everybody else. Yeah, she’s a sponsor my show, but she makes me pay and I got the same $50 discount that you can get. Oh by the way, you’re going to get that through my link and my link only.
Stephen: [03:25] Oh, and you’re also going to get the free inventory health analysis. Great way to start. Two thousand 18. Get your inventory in line and Karen will help you do that. We use them for everything. The basically, uh, you know, long term storage fees coming up. Guess what? She’ll evaluate, she’ll make some recommendations and I’ll say, Yep, check, check, check, check these out, this return, blah, blah blah, blah blah. And magically it’s done. I love it, love it, love it. I love the fact that they take and get rid of stranded inventory for me. I see it in there. And then next time I go in and it’s gone. Love it. Love it, love it, got an ip infringement. She’s going to help you work your way through that. This is the kind of service that you get from Karen Locker, that’s solutions for the number for ecommerce solutions. Four ecommerce.com forward slash momentum, right? So you’ve got to forward slash momentum and you’re going to save $50 a month, 600 bucks a year by just clicking that link. She pays me. I don’t want to hide that, I never do. I’m always upfront about that, but it doesn’t cost you anything additional and you’re going to get that inventory health report. The only way you get that is through mind link the solutions, the number for ecommerce.com, forward slash momentum.
Cool voice guy: [04:39] Welcome to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast, focused on the people, the products, and the process of ecommerce selling today. Here’s your host, Steven Peterson.
Stephen: [04:51] Yeah.
Stephen: [04:53] Welcome back to the ECOMMERCE momentum podcast. This is episode two, eighty two, James Mcarthur from the public and the public is a merchant company and those of us who sell merchant, if you don’t, this is an opportunity to start selling march. Um, this is a great opportunity. Matter of fact, that’s a great idea. If you’re not able to get approved to sell on Amazon, this might be a great place to start. And then you can merge the two. I mean, this is just a smart way to run your business, but then again, you might not want to go there because the public will give you custom service. I’m one of the coolest things that he gave in and he is affiliating me. So I’ll tell you that right up front is though, he’s letting us have that account manager service and to me that’s the best part.
Stephen: [05:36] Um, and I’m very excited about that. Um, so let’s get into the episode and let’s really get started taking the existing business you have and bring it to another marketplace. All right. Welcome back to the e commerce momentum podcast. Very, very excited about today’s guest because I think it’s opportunities, you know, opportunities what a or luck and preparation meet. Right? And I think about things as I’m at different events and I happened to meet this gentleman at a podcast event and you know, the pitch was the pitch and I’m like, I get it. I really understand it. James Mcarthur, the director of business development for t public DOTCOM. Welcome James. Thank you. Thank you for coming on. And I appreciate you reaching back, reaching back out to me because I do follow up, but it’s a little slower but it’s fair. Um, because you want to get a message out there that there are other options.
Stephen: [06:32] There are places to sell merchandise that you’ve developed on any platform. When you’re a creative today, you can put it out there in so many places and you think that the public is a great place to go. Fair. And what blew me away was, you know, you weren’t cavalier about it. You weren’t, you know, like, Hey, we’re the best whatever. But you’re like, Steve, take a look at this. And what I remember was the myriad of products that you guys offer. And I was like, oh, I get it. It wasn’t just a shirt, it wasn’t just a Hoodie, it wasn’t. It was. I saw coffee mugs, I saw. What else did I say? It was a whole bunch of crazy things and I was thinking, I wonder if they do ladies and
James: [07:15] I wonder if they do, do you do not? Okay. I wonder if they do, uh, you know, it just, all the crazy things that I’ve seen out there with things on. I’m like, I wonder
Stephen: [07:24] they do that stuff. What kind of price? How many products? How many varieties of products can you do?
James: [07:31] So on demand we have 30 different products that we consider our on demand products. Thirty plus. And these range from any of our tee shirts, mugs, phone cases to laptop cases to tapestries to, to pillowcases. And then we have a line of 20 plus custom wall art options that you can apply for any artist. If you come to our office every, you’ll see it all over our walls.
Stephen: [07:59] Oh, I’m coming to New York and I will, I will. That’s right. You’re based in New York. I should say that. Um, and uh, so I say [inaudible], I’m thinking about the wall art because that was just a very current discussion where people were talking about for the office, they need some stuff to hang on their offices. So you know, some sayings or what have you. Anybody got anything? This is a perfect example of what you can do, right? You come up with a good idea, you put it out there, you can put it on Walmart and so it on etsy. Could I not?
James: [08:28] Um, as of now, it’s where we’re built so that it’s all on to public, but down the road yet where we’re saying you can, anything you design, you can put on any product we sell, you can sell it on any platform at that or some most platforms at that point, but I could buy them and ship them to my warehouse and then send them into my warehouse. That’s what I meant by that.
Stephen: [08:51] Okay, cool. I was thinking about this is really take away the barrier. In the past I would have to go get a graphic designer to design, right. So check already got that done, but then I would have to go find a print house to do it or a specialist assigned maker depending on what it is and then get that done and then I’d have to buy, you know, so many of them. There will be a minimum order quantity. Right. What’s your minimum order? Quantity, James?
James: [09:20] Yeah,
Stephen: [09:22] come on, come on, fess up. I’m a, it’s a big charge. Do I get a big discount if I buy a million?
James: [09:29] You’re buying million? Yeah. At that point, at that point we can. So we have infrastructure built to scale whether you’re ordering one unit or a thousand, um, we can, we have the relationships to build it because our company is both off the backbone of a 14 year old tee shirt company. We are, we were founded by the same guy who founded college humor and busted tees and our company was actually born out of busted tees. So busted piece was founded in 2004. It’s still alive today as a part of the public and we in 2013, our founders realized that, you know, artists, designers like your listeners having an incredibly hard time making enough money to survive. And so we wanted to create a platform where any designer, anywhere, any content creator, anywhere, could turn their passion into profit. And that’s what the public is. That’s what we were built for.
Stephen: [10:34] It’s funny, I think about my first shirt that I use that I created on, um, on merchants selling merch by Amazon, like a lot of the people listening to this podcast would, um, was for my company. I was in the first one I put up, you know, of course my, my podcast company, right? And then you know, you getting for them, you have to get teared up. And so then I go to my gym owner and we’re talking. He’s like, Hey Steve, where’d you get that shirt? And I said, Blah Blah Blah. And he’s like, man, he struggles with his. He has them on his wall and he’s like, man, things disappear and I don’t know, sizes. I’m like, Oh, I’ve got a way to fix this for you and what you’re going to listen to James in New York City. What the city. That’s what you hear, but you know, that makes it really authentic, but it’s so cool that all of a sudden I connected with him on this issue.
Stephen: [11:20] I solved a problem for him almost instantly. And he had no other avenue in the past. He had to go by and he had minimum quantities and he had to pay a premium. What are, you know, and now he doesn’t have to carry any inventory and it’s the best thing in the world. One of the things that very attractive to me about t public was the fact that you can do those other products too. So I can, let’s just be clear, I can take all my Amazon merch designs that I developed, I created or I had created for me that I own.
Speaker 5: [11:49] Yeah.
James: [11:52] Um,
Stephen: [11:52] the, the ambulance go home. Let’s go because that was the climax right there. I can bring them over to the public, um, and moving right over and get ’em up on your system immediately. Correct, and there’s no cost to join your service, correct? Hundred percent correct. And well let me just qualify this up front. Um, so if you joined through my link, um, you do get a d and I’m very appreciative of this because it was one of those things I always ask somebody when they’re like, hey, you know, we’ll, we’ll, uh, we’ll uh, let you sign up your listeners, you can benefit Steve. I’m like, oh, that’s cool, but really what makes it unique? And you were like, hey, how about this one? Dedicated account manager, white glove onboarding. That’s a big deal because there are, I’m assuming there are nuances to your system as opposed to all the other design shirt company print onto me.
Stephen: [12:48] I guess that’s why we say print on demand companies fair. And so to get that service you gotta go through a link and the link is t public [inaudible] forward slash forward slash momentum consistently. And then that way you can get that and you’re going to get help. And one of the other things I said to James, I said, you know, there are times when some of my listeners who do sign up through my links and they benefit, they say to me, Steve, you know, that was great, but I have problems and I always like having access and that’s one of the things I asked for is to be able to say, hey, whoa, Steve’s not getting into response, you know, can you help them out? And then almost always, and then you know, whatever the problem is, at least they get through. So that’s really important. And you were agreeing to that. So I appreciate that a lot. Tell me how big t public is, is
James: [13:37] massive.
Stephen: [13:41] Wait, wait, wait for that ambulance. That combined again, and we’ll be like Messi gotta do sound.
James: [13:47] He has over 40,000 independent graphic designers on our platform. Over one and a half million designs on our platform. Ranging from everything from fan art created by people who just love things. I mean we’ve got, we have stuff ranging from people who just really love stranger things. Two people who just really loved their cat.
Stephen: [14:16] And
James: [14:18] to into original art pieces where we have amazing astronauts holding jellyfish in the middle of space and it’s a neon astronaut and it’s fantastic designs. So no matter what you need, we have it on our sites. We have over a million and a half designs, over 40,000 independent graphic designers. In fact, last year we were able to pay out over three point $2,000,000 to independent graphic designer.
Stephen: [14:48] How many, how many shirts have you guys sold existence?
James: [14:52] Has anybody ever keep track of that? I’m sure there’s some repository somewhere where somebody has a list that’s in the millions, probably six or 7,000,000 shirts total.
Stephen: [15:07] So, because one of the big challenges that you know has happened as these other companies have entered that market is they grew too fast, right? They and that’s a struggle. And then there’s a limit. And so they have to kind of hold everybody back and then try to fix the infrastructure, you know, launch and then fix it, launch and then fix it, build the infrastructure. And that’s pretty, that’s a pattern. That’s kind of that, that we’ve seen, those of us who sell in the e commerce platform, you guys have been established since, what’d you say? Since 2013. It’s been open to the public open to the, uh, to the artist. So, so you’ve got about a five years of doing it. How, how quickly, if I brought you my 500 designs or whatever, I’m up to over to you. How quickly can I get them up for sale,
James: [15:58] buck, bulk uploader. If your auto tagging, we could get all of those designs off probably within an hour. A single design. You can get up. I’ve, I’ve gotten entire store is functioning within 10 minutes.
Stephen: [16:15] One of the big questions that somebody’s going to say, you know, that sounds great, Steve. There’s a million of these companies out there. Um, how do I get found? I mean, that’s one of the biggest challenges, right? That’s out there, right? Um, you know, you already said you’re going a million plus designs. How does, how do my designs get found?
James: [16:33] So there are a couple of different ways that can happen. A lot of it is going to be based on your community and what and the people you’re talking to on a daily basis as a designer because of course the people who love your art or that’s just a fact, but we also have for your listeners and for top tier clients that we work with every day, we have a white glove setup and this is going to give you an account manager to walk you through the initial setups, walked, made sure all of your tags are correct because like every major ecommerce store out there, our entire system is based on tags so that if you search Mars, you’re going to see a red planet as the first thing that comes up. So based on that we are, your account manager is going to walk each one of your listeners who signs up with the public through that process, make sure they’re a hundred percent correct and really make sure they get off to the start selling art that they need to to be successful.
Stephen: [17:42] Well, you know what you’re saying, kind of it’s that education piece in a lot of people are missing that education piece. So you know, I selfishly, I’m thinking if you’re going to teach me, I can apply that everywhere I’m at. I mean, just common sense would be that when somebody’s searching for Mars Mars example shirt and they go to Google and they put in Mars t shirt, how does my shirt get found? That’s up on the public. Would it, do you index with Google? It’s a wide world. Oh yeah. I was going to say you have 8,000,000,000 other people. I mean that’s really part of the challenge. Right? But best practices, that’s where the social media stuff comes in, right. That’s where all the other opportunities to use an instagram and pinterest or facebook and all the rest of that jazz. Um, what about, you know, sitting there thinking about who’s doing it right. Do you have any test cases or any trainings out there for who’s really doing it right? Or is that what your account manager does on a one on one basis?
James: [18:45] Our account manager will help you do our account manager, helps you understand the proper way to length in the proper way to present your art on your page, whether you need to have a sample shirt in hand or if your community really cares about the design. It’s more than they care about the product that you’re selling. It’s different for every single person. I work a lot with podcasts and for every single podcast, promotion is different. Every single one based on their content, and you could have two people within the exact same sphere. If I’m talking to to see five podcasts, I’m talking to two PSI Phi artists. What the one who exists within the spectrum where all they’re designing is stuff about Mars is going to be wildly different than the person who’s designing things from the year 2,500.
Stephen: [19:37] Right? And so
James: [19:40] those two audiences are by nature different. So the different promotions your account manager will be able to walk you through what you do in each of those cases.
Stephen: [19:51] How much effort you know. Is it a quantity or a quality issue when it comes to putting up a shirt design? What’s been your experience? Kind of a bit of both, right? That’s usually the answer depends. Yeah. It’s realistically it’s you could have 500 shirts up and none of them will sell. That’s happened. Yeah.
James: [20:19] Or you can put. We’ve had a designer who put one shirt up and it’s sold 360 units within two days
Stephen: [20:28] like that.
James: [20:31] Those use cases exist, but then there’s also the use case where somebody had put in a hundred designs and all of them sole. It’s very dependent on the art and the quality of the art. Now, if your art is just like one written out in, um, Ariel font on the, on a black background, you know what chances are that might not sell that much, but because there’s that, there are a ton of those designs on the site, but if you have something truly unique that tells a story that people care about that’s timely and works, that shirt is going to do well.
Stephen: [21:14] No. You bring up a point that there are tons of, let’s say Mars, how do I protect my individual art from someone else using it? Do you have any kind of protection for me out there?
James: [21:26] We do. We have. We are in the open Beta stage and it’s by open Beta. I mean it’s open to everyone but it is still largely a first generation product of our art protection program. This is an image library built within the public that reverse image searches. You can think about it as us indexing our own site and then checking against all the parameters within your design. I guess every other design on our site, so if you are what we call a ripper for chance and I’m not saying anyone is, but if there is someone who pulls other designs, they have to let it be public. It’ll get autotech to auto taken down.
Stephen: [22:12] Is there a repercussion for that? Because let me tell you, the one of the big stories are there are these giant teams and just happened to be other countries and they go through and they scrape a site and that has a lot of shirts and those designs magically show up on all the other sites. Magically there might even be on yours already. Magically. They just magically appear and they just happened to be all the designs I did or somebody else did. Is there a repercussion to those people eventually, you know, if you have a so many strikes against you, are you out or. I mean, does somebody look at that?
James: [22:46] Hm. That looks at every single. We call them TMCA or refer content. They look at every single one of those designs and if someone does that more than a few times, like more than a few, I mean really means more than once. If you are known to do that, we will. We’ll just say while you’re
Stephen: [23:08] store and that’s reasonable because it’s unfair for those who put all the effort in to develop this stuff and then for somebody to come along and take advantage of it. And then just. Okay, cool. All right. Let’s talk about what you can sell 30 different products and you had a. so, so we have shirts, let’s talk to shirts. What type of shirts can I sell?
James: [23:31] We have 12 different varieties of shirt ranging from small in the men’s to five xl in men’s from extra small and women to to x out in women and eight different styles of lemon shirt, which is unprecedented in the industry and for different styles of men. Shirt,
Stephen: [23:55] hoodies.
James: [23:56] Yup. We have hoodies. Sweatshirts,
Stephen: [24:00] yeah. Okay. What other clothing do we have?
James: [24:06] We have tank tops, baseball tee shirts, one. Zs
Stephen: [24:12] just I hope, right? Yes.
James: [24:16] I mean, you know, if you’re, if you’re ordering over 50, I can get you an adult one Z. I mean it’s, you know, I, I’m not, I’m not here to judge
Stephen: [24:26] suburbia. So let me ask that. How long does it take when somebody orders a shirt? How long is the turnaround time?
Speaker 6: [24:32] Yeah,
Stephen: [24:33] depends state. Go ahead, give me the depends.
James: [24:37] Well, if you’re ordering one of our standard on demand shirts, it’s a three day, three day productions
Stephen: [24:42] in the US. In the US and if it’s a little bit more custom, there’s a longer lead time,
James: [24:51] so yeah, if you’re ordering a one of our silk screen example, so if you’re ordering over a hundred and 44, if any given shirt, that’s when we start getting into silk screening and at that point it’s a two week turnaround.
Stephen: [25:07] Hello. I’m sitting here thinking about um, now I’m going to completely draw a blank so I’m going to pull that out. Change. He’s going to make a note because I just want to completely blind because I had an idea and a, this is what happens when you get older. Um, I don’t want to lose it because it was where I was going with it was. I’m touched. I’m going to come back. All right, here we go. All right. How about any other clothing? Any hats or anything like that?
James: [25:36] In volume? We can do hats in volume. We can do shoes. Ah Ha. Wait,
Stephen: [25:41] the hats volume is what? 15. Okay. Wow. That’s a lot less than I thought. Okay. Shoes. Volume would be. And shoes are we. Can I choose the type of shoe? Were my buying the shoe? What is what? How does that work?
James: [25:58] At the point where we go to a volume sale, you’re ordering the bulk volume and then we and then we can ship it to your warehouse and you can distribute it. If you’re doing an SBA thing, then you can do. You can ship it directly to Amazon’s warehouse.
Stephen: [26:15] Ooh, I have a whole bunch of people are like, wait, wait, wait, Steve, wait, pull back. What did he just say? I can create my own line of shoes, my ecommerce momentum shoes and put them on an Fba. Is that true? Is that rumor true?
James: [26:28] A rumor is true. Okay.
Stephen: [26:30] And you will ship them in for me with the Barcode I give you. You can do all that. Now all of a sudden people are pepin up. Okay? So you could do that with how much you could do that for a whole bunch of different things. What about, um, can I put Yankees on the hat? Is that okay? Or Walt Disney or any of those good things?
James: [26:49] How that. We are very, very, very closely. And by that I mean to the letter of the law to the DMCA roles. So that means
Stephen: [27:04] tell us what GMC stands for. Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
James: [27:10] This means that any, any Ip holder out there is entitled to protect their own content. We do not police the content that goes on our site. We, we do not. We do not stop any upload from happening to our site. The moment a cut, an Ip holder comes to us and says, this is my design. Take it down, we will DMCA. And that means we will pull it down. And if you do that, if you’re somebody who just posts pictures of marvel characters off and throws them on the shirt, we don’t. It has to fall within what? The line within the Law of paradigm. So this means that we only the only things that do not get Dmca in general, our original artworks. And if somebody came to us, if one of your listeners goes to the public and finds one of their designs, all they have to do is email illegal at the public. The moment we’ve processed that through and we can get up to 50 of these requests a day, the moment we process that through, we’ll pull your pull that design down, almost no questions asked
Stephen: [28:30] and then if a bunch of that happens, there’s repercussions to that person who’s ripping off people. Correct. Exactly. Cool. I don’t think, uh, as a designer, I, that’s fair to me. You know, that’s reasonable. Now I do get a chance to say, Whoa, Hey James, that’s mine. I made it. Here’s my blah, blah, blah. Right. Does the person have to prove that they made at the other person or they could just make a statement.
James: [28:54] They can. Somebody came to us and said, this is my content. Pull it down. This isn’t, we’re actual, we have an actual person, 99 point nine percent of the time except for certain content that we have auto tag for DMCA or for people trying to rip products off of our own site. Um, we, it’s an actual person that’s looking through that and making sure. And so you’re going to be interacting with them, with a member of our team, like a real person, a real human person that sits less than five feet away from me.
Stephen: [29:31] Oh No, wait. They’re going to have a New York attitude. Oh Man. Great. Love it though. That’s really. Um, one of the things I was thinking about was, you know, I have my own shopify site. I have my own store. Am I, is there a way that I could get my inventory out in my shopify site print on demand through t public.
James: [30:00] Make sure that I understand the question. Are you saying you want people to buy it on your shopify site? Correct. Go through too. So right now we do not have that capability. You don’t have the interface. We are building it and it will be out later this year. But what we do have is we have the ability to do wholesale. So if you are fulfilling on your own, which if you’re going through shopify, chances are you are. Or you can build a bridge, build a branded store on the public, and then that’s gonna be the same as your shopify.
Stephen: [30:36] Okay. So I get that second one, which is basically I have a stores slash whatever. Okay. Got that. But then the wholesale model would be what is there. There’s obviously minimum quantities. Now we’re down into that quantity issue, but then I got to buy them from you at a lower rate, but then I sell them. You’re shipping it to me that I’m selling them out of my warehouse. But that’s a good way to get started. Again, you know, to me, I sit back and they say, wait, there’s no cost, there’s no risk, there’s no nothing. I get to send you my designs that I’ve already created, selling him on another platform and I don’t. I’m not limited to a shirt or a hoodie. I can now start the coffee mug business I want, which I don’t know why, but you know, you could do those kinds of things. So we didn’t get through the rest of the. So we got clothing. I think we went through the myriad of clothing. Okay. Let’s, what’s next, what’s the next category? If there’s a kind of a thing.
James: [31:28] So yeah, beyond clothing, we have phone cases. Um, we have a Webinar, different varieties of phone case ranging from the iphone five to Samsung galaxy x.
Stephen: [31:42] This is screen printed on. This is printed on the outside of the case.
James: [31:46] Yeah. This is skin printed onto the case until you’re ordering the case. And I have one on my phone. I think I showed it to you when we were asking for.
Stephen: [31:55] You didn’t give it to me, but you were very cool. Well I was on my phone. I couldn’t give it to anyone listening to this conversation. Pleased to be here. I just heard the sirens. Jesus. All right. Go ahead and see
James: [32:10] something’s. Something’s going on. I don’t know. We’re at a very busy part of me like I don’t know. Um, but we also have laptop cases so. And that’s, you can do 13 inch, 15 inch. So we have mugs, travel mugs and traditional coffee mugs. We have,
Speaker 6: [32:31] yeah,
James: [32:33] at volume we can do kind of almost anything. It’s just, there can be substantial lead times for many of them, so eight to 12 weeks we also have on demand pillowcases, so three different sizes of pillowcases. We can do stickers, we can do tapestries and that’s ranging from small, medium, large. Um, and we also have all of our Walmart and their stuff I’m forgetting cause we, it’s just a lot.
Stephen: [33:03] It just keeps expanding. I love it. I’m very excited because I know that there’s a whole group of people that are saying, man, I had some real success in the merchant world. Right. And all of a sudden, and just selling shirts. I mean cause it really, quite frankly, most of us and now there’s a whole bunch of them that are selling on and probably some of them are selling on your site to already. But they’re saying, you know, I’ve had a bunch of success and then all of a sudden my success was kind of stymied. All of a sudden my, my world was going great, and then all of a sudden it kind of slowed down for some reason. It’s almost like throttled in some way. Do you have you, you’re in the business of selling merge. You’re not looking to slow me down. You want my win?
Stephen: [33:43] Is Your Wind Fair? Yeah. I don’t understand why somebody else would slow somebody else down intentionally because my window is your wind. That just makes perfect sense. What happens when a design doesn’t sell? Are you gonna? Let me just keep it there. Forever. Cost again, there’s no cost. So. So really somebody can just take old designs. If they’re limited elsewhere, they can bring them over to a place like that. There’s another clue. That’s another pro tip for someone. Um, fees. Let’s talk a percentage of commissions I guess is the right to what’s the right term? Royalties, commissions, commissions. So let’s talk about that.
James: [34:22] Every time you sell a design you make between 18 and 22 percent off the regular price to science,
Stephen: [34:31] 18 to 22 percent off, regular to I get to set the price that it’s selling for. So that’s one challenge. Um, you decide that a shirt sells for what’s a shirt? Sell for $20 for 20 bucks, I’m going to get $3 and 60 to 40 [4:40] on that shirt. Correct. There are additional fees from you that you say, well Steve, that’s it. But then again, you know, uh, you didn’t do this. So here we’re going to take this away or whatever. Is there any other fees that you take it?
James: [35:08] You will never be charged knocking to say never, but you. There are no fees.
Stephen: [35:16] Okay. Today’s structure, there are no fees. I’m good.
James: [35:20] Be Fees for people that are just doing, just uploading art and selling it. We will never charge a fee. We only make money if you make money.
Stephen: [35:32] So there’s a real interest. You handle the shipping, you handle all those additional things. I don’t to get involved in that.
James: [35:38] All you do is upload your art. We take care of everything else.
Stephen: [35:42] Eighteen to 22 percent. And is it category specific? So our coffee mugs different than a hoodies versus a tee shirt. Okay. So can you talk about any other ones? So general shirts are 18 to 22. Uh, how about, how about tapestries? I got you a curve ball. All right. Yes. I’m pulling it up right now. Half a second. And so this is out on your website though to somebody because if you go to the public dot con slash commissions, they’re all listed there by. Okay, cool. Um, what’s, what’s the downside of using t public? Yeah. You know what I mean? What, what, what is, what are the things that are challenging about using t public, um, that maybe, uh, pitfalls or things that just haven’t worked that you would recommend us to be wary of working with the public.
James: [36:49] We make it super easy and we’re designed to be the easiest site to use. The easiest. We want to make your life as simple as possible as an artist.
Stephen: [36:59] Yes. That’s just totally simple. If you want to charge $60 for a shirt, I’d recommend going wholesale through us. It’s realistically, it makes sense though. You’re not saying, hey, you can’t do business. And the wholesale cost of that shirt would be, you know, eighty percent or 80 some odd percent of that. Is that what kind of. The way it works? Both. Yeah. Wholesale costs. If you’re ordering under the,
James: [37:29] I’m 44 units, if you’re ordering say 15 minutes at a time, I would, I would take off
Stephen: [37:36] 30 percent from the retail price that you’re selling. So next scenario would have been 14 bucks roughly, but you can still get away with 40 and then so that’s how I can control if I want to control price, that’s how you can do it. Um, but you guys have the costs, the reason you’re setting the prices, you have a cost of shipping, you’ve got the cost of your overhead and all the rest of the printing or built into that. And so therefore by doing that we do charge for your customer, get charged for that to ship from more than one location in the country to print at different leases. Yeah, we have locations all across the country. Okay. Okay. Cool. All right. So he didn’t give me any downsides. So you’re basically saying, hey, there is no downside, Steve. We’re 100 percent easy but, but have you seen anybody who hasn’t been able to make a go of it? What was the common thing that they didn’t do right? I’m always looking for best practices and you know the beauty is that you’re going to give me a dedicated account manager is going to be like, Steve, do it this way, this is what works, because again, there’s an incentive. You only make money when I make money, so that’s good, so we’re getting the benefit of that. But for me, what should I put up? A tea public? What kind of shirt should I do? How about that?
James: [38:49] I don’t have any meaning to you. It’s all about care. It’s all about how much you care about a given product. Like if you developed a product that’s tells you something, like you’ve developed a design that really speaks to you in some specific way that you care about, that you can promote and it comes off as real. It’s the same thing as everything else. People buy because of trust. People buy your product because they care about it because you care about it. They see you caring about it so they care about it. If you’re not going to dedicate the time to promote your stuff, it’s sure if people will find it on the public and there’s a chance if you just blind upload something, it’ll sell, but that’s the same thing as blind. Uploading a product into Amazon and then expecting expecting people to just find it without you doing any keyword promotions or anything like that. It’s on public. It’s if you. If you promote it through your social promoted to your community, wherever that community exists, that’s what’s gonna sell. It’s the same thing as you’re doing this podcast out to all of your listeners. Unless you make the podcasts, nobody. Nobody’s going to. Nobody’s going to listen to it unless you’re promoting it on social and nobody’s going to listen to it. So it’s a matter of promoting out to the, to your community. So really the people who do best are the people who care about their art and promote their art.
Stephen: [40:25] Do. Is there any help that my account manager can give me with that? When I, when I’m talking about them, Hey, what are the best practices and things like that. Is that something I can get as an expect if I came through, um, to get an account manager?
James: [40:38] That’s exactly what they’re there for.
Stephen: [40:41] Beautiful. Because I think that that is the miss. I mean, I, a lot of people that are selling on Amazon for example, merge, which a lot of these people listening are, are going to say, you know, it’s one of the challenges we go to there because it’s such a big audience, however, you know, and it was working and then all of a sudden we kind of know it’s dissipated or something in some. And not, not everybody else. There are outliers of course, but we’re, we don’t have the control of it. What I do and one of the problems is, and this is real, if the shirt doesn’t sell, it’s taken down after so many days on their 90 days, six months, whatever it is. And so therefore I promote this thing and then it goes away and I put it up on yours. I promoted. It’s still there.
Stephen: [41:20] That’s very attractive to me. That’s a very powerful thing. So I don’t mind putting the energy and effort and the money in my case because I usually use an outside company to do this in that kind of thing because there’s a, there’s a longterm I’d like to play the long term gain or game here and there’s a real value there. I love it, dude. That’s a, that’s a big deal. So again, that’s [inaudible] public.com, forward slash forward slash momentum. That’s how you get that. You could go sign up on your own and you know, that’s fine. I want to stress, uh, you can go do that. You’re not going to get this service if you do that. And that’s a very cool thing. Um, okay. So James was a seller by the way, if you guys haven’t found it, heard that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to Amazon. So there’s a, there’s a good story there, but I appreciate that. Um, when I, when I think about where the business is going, where do you see public in print, on demand going?
James: [42:16] I think about thinking about the world. We’re entering into a customizable autonomy. The promise of three d printing, which is the industry I came from, was that you’d be able to create anything on from your desktop, right? That was what everybody went wild for. About Three d printing back in 2012 through 2015. That’s the world we’re coming to. And so the value of print on demand, the future of print on demand isn’t in just merge. It isn’t in, it’s in everything. So eventually we’re going to end up in a world where everything you make can be customized. Everything people are going to want products that speak to them and that’s the future of print on demand. That’s the future of
Stephen: [43:09] well t public. So, um, somebody has follow up questions. Best Way to get in touch with you
James: [43:19] James, that the public.com.
Stephen: [43:22] Come on, make it harder than that. And he’s real and he’s in the US, the public and he’s in New York City’s you heard those. Those are real New York city sirens that we heard. I, you know, it’s funny because when we were doing the pre, you know, always try to get the sound right and it was like, Steve, these are thin windows, we are in New York City, so understand it’s going to be noisy and you did not disappoint you had them come by right at the right moments and I appreciate that. I really appreciate in your conversation, what are you doing? Yeah, I agree. And I in, you know, we’re talking about art here. We’re talking about design. We’re talking about, again, why wouldn’t somebody do this? It’s very, very exciting to me. Um, that this opportunity is available to regular people like us. That’s very cool to me and a t public.
Stephen: [44:09] Sounds like a great company to work with. I’m excited. I can’t wait to get my stuff there. Um, and I will be there. So again, it’s public.com, forward slash stores forward slash momentum. I’ll have all that on this episode, James. Man, I really appreciate you taking the time. I know you’re busy and I, he came right from another podcast, right to this one. So I really, really appreciate you taking the time. I really mean that. Thank you so much. Was absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for. Thanks for taking the time to talk about it public again. You know, and be clear. I do benefit if you buy through my link but you don’t have to. So please don’t feel obligated or whatever. Didn’t cost you anything but I just don’t want to. I always disclose that because I, you know, and it won’t be uncomfortable, but what’s very cool to me is that dedicated account manager because there are times I need help.
Stephen: [44:53] I know that I’m a miss on some of the stuff that we do in our current merchant count, man, just to get advice and be able to find out the best ways, best practices. So then I can get better at that because then I went everywhere and that’s just like, Duh, why wouldn’t I do that? So you get a dedicated account manager with wakely white glove onboarding surface. And to me that’s very, very cool. Very cool for them to do that. I’m very excited about this because all those other things that you want to sell, you now have the ability to sell cell phone cases, coffee mugs. I want a coffee Mug for my company and I would’ve had to buy it and buy it for a whole big dollar mountain. Had to buy a bunch of them. I don’t have to do that anymore. Print on demand is here and it’s here for all of us. ECOMMERCE, momentum dot e commerce, momentum dot. Take care.
Cool voice guy: [45:38] Thanks for listening to the commerce momentum podcast. All the links mentioned today can be found@ecommercemomentum.com. Under this episode number, please remember to subscribe and like us on itunes.
Stephen: [45:50] Yeah.
