Creators Freedom Project has a nicely focused case study of a crowdfunding project they did with musician friend Keith Medley. Together they created and funded a t-shirt with no up-front cost using Teespring, a t-shirt crowdfunding platform. The modest experiment was a solid success and revealed why Teespring is particularly well-designed for its niche.
Teespring has gotten a lot of tech media coverage due to their strong start including hitting $750k in revenue per month while they were still at Y Combinator.
By working with a network of screenprinters Teespring offers a higher quality product than digital printing services such as CafePress at a lower price.
Teespring allows you to create a design, test demand via a crowdfunding campaign and then Teespring handles fulfillment. You won't have to pay Teespring anything to make this happen.
Using one of the designs etched into Medley's guitar, they launched a campaign for a limited edition that quickly hit goal. Sales then continued until the end of the campaign at which point t-shirts were created on-demand and delivered to participants.
An important point to remember is that this is the first time Medley had offered merch so it was also a no-risk experiment for him in that regard.
The case study goes into the details of a no-budget campaign. It's an excellent example of how even relatively simple projects combine a lot of different elements.
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Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.