Zazzle: (Almost) a Great Opportunity

Zazzle.com is an outfit that, like CafePress, allows graphic designers to sell shirts with their designs on them. We use CafePress to sell American Apparel t-shirts, which are made ethically in the USA with attention to standards for workers. CafePress should be applauded for offering some American Apparel shirts. Zazzle should be applauded for offering American Apparel t-shirts, too, and as a matter of fact they offer more American Apparel styles than CafePress, with multiple organic shirts, muscle tees and shirts for the kiddies, too.

BUT, unfortunately, they don’t let a seller pick which sorts of apparel will be made available for sale and which won’t. That means that if Irregular Times put up a peace sign t-shirt design, someone could put my design on a t-shirt made with questionable sourcing. In effect, we’d be selling a probable sweatshop shirt, and we just don’t want to get into that territory.

So I’ve written a note to the tech people at Zazzle:

Over at Irregular Times, we have worked with CafePress for years, and just now we’ve decided to start transitioning over to Zazzle because of some of the offerings you have — including organic and American Apparel shirts for men, women AND kids. That is a huge attraction. We have a lot of designs we’re looking to migrate over…

But unfortunately, I’ve just been informed by Zazzle help folks that it is not currently possible to limit sales to particular apparel items. For the liberal/progressive community we work with, it’s really important to know about ethical sourcing of shirts, and for that reason we’d like to be able to limit sales of our designs to American Apparel shirts.

On the tech end, would it be at all possible to allow Zazzle Contributors to choose which shirt types they’d like to make available for sale (ex. organic men’s shirt, organic women’s shirt, but not baby onesie)? Such a tech innovation wouldn’t cut any sellers’ options — they would only increase the ability of sellers to market to particular niches if they chose to. The innovation would help me feel comfortable bringing our shirt designs over to Zazzle. Without that possibility, right now we just can’t do that.

What do you think?

I really do hope they can work something out. But until then, we’ll only be offering non-apparel items through Zazzle. Some interesting things are in the works… can you say “square button?” Today is our first day over there, so everything’s a bit underdone, but do check back.