A Kindred Spirit at Kindred Market

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     kindred market, kindredmarket.com, sell your own tees, set up t-shirt brand, t-shirt business, t-shirt start-up

Now, I get a lot of submissions here at Buy Tees from Cafepress and Spreadshirt designers and time and again I explain to them that one of the major reasons I won’t review them is that I don’t see the point of passing on kudos and PR if it simply goes down the drain of a corporate behemoth with a marketing budget that could feed a small country. Besides any company as big as say Zazzle doesn’t really give a damn if you make money as a t-shirt designer, all they want are premium store fees and more and more online traffic. The usual advice is to use a third-party merchant like Big Cartel and then print your own or use someone local. But, and here’s the biggest but I’ve seen in a while, I did come across another alternative recently, KindredMarket.com, at first I guessed their site was simply feeding the general public the usual hype, but I’ve been studying Kindred Market in a little more detail recently and I have to admit I am impressed – and here’s why.

They offer a top-notch service for beginners at the t-shirt business, they don’t drop any of the usual bombshells on you that their competitors like to do so often, right now they have just 17 brands on their books. Yes ‘brands’ – they treat each designer as a brand, just the way it should be, and I’m not sure how the application process is carried out because as far as I can tell they have a handful of superb designers on the site. (and then some not so good ;) My problem with most services of this kind is that they seem to go more for quantity over quality, some like Spreadshirt have almost abandoned the idea of supporting their creative users and simply offer a D.I.Y application for any idiot strolling by. KM seem, at least on the surface, to be pulling out all the stops in order to build up their reputation in the t-shirt industry as a truly high quality print to order t-shirt company. In fact even if you have your own stock they’ll still help you sell your wares.

Here’s a breakdown of their profit-sharing scheme:-

* If they sell one of your t-shirts at their online store you receive 32% of the income. The rest goes to cover their costs such as stock, printing, site administration and advertising.
* If they sell your brand to a boutique (shop with less than 10 stores) you receive 16% of the sale before shipping costs.
* If they sell your brand to a Medium sized Retailer (has more than 20 stores) you receive 8% of the gross sale before shipping costs.
* If they sell your brand to a Mass Retailer (has more than 200 stores) you receive 4% of the gross sale before shipping costs.
* If you’ve printed your own stuff they take a 30% commission excluding shipping and taxes (Which will be your responsibility).
*What’s more they also offer to sell your artwork at a 10% commission, plus 3% Paypal costs.

Unlike many similar companies out there they let you keep full rights to your designs which will come as a big relief to many of you I am sure. If you decide to deactivate your account they will have 60 days to fulfil any outstanding orders and then you’re free to hit out on your own. I must admit I am a little disappointed with the URL structure, if these are truly brands I’d have expected sub-domains at the very least, but that asides I doubt you’ll find a company that will go this far to placate their designers. Oh actually one more problem, a small technical error I am sure, when you select how many brands you want to see per page you get a line of PHP output, one for the programmer to take a look at there.

KM’s site is well designed, comical, humorous, quirky but clean. They even feature a brand every week at the top of their homepage, you can vote on their brands too if you need a ‘Threadless fix’. To make it real easy to get started you can read their short tutorial here. Now here’s the most important point, I get quite a few emails asking about alternatives to the usual range of high-priced graphics software packages out there, well KM have taken care of that for you too. They offer all their brands free usage of their online Phoenix image editor from Aviary.com which more than passes most people’s requirements. Imagine Photoshop 7 but a little more user friendly. So if you’re desperate to start your own t-shirt brand, are not impressed by the major print to order labels out there, then I’d recommend you follow the lead of these featured brands and set up your own at Kindred Market today! read more