CafePress.com

Full review
I've always been a sucker for the "hand made gift". Back in elementary school that meant little coupons for my mother. In high school it meant handmade photo collages. And after the World-Wide Web sprung to life it meant personalized calendars, mugs, t-shirts and mousepads, and all thanks to Cafe Press. My first order from Cafe Press was in October of 2001 and I've been turning to them for a variety of items, with a variety of success, ever since.

About Cafe Press
Cafe Press has been in business since 1999. In the early days they were an outlet for unique, creative people to sell unique, creative things. Through the next six years they expanded, and quickly, not just surviving the dot-com bust but thriving, particularly during Presidential elections when partisan merchandise of all sorts could be found at Cafe Press.

What They Sell
Originally Cafe Press sold a handful of standard merchandise: t-shirts, mugs, mousepads, etc. Basically everything had to have a white background because of the way Cafe Press' print process works. White is not rendered onto an item in their printing process, the color white is provided by the background. They've expanded their repertoire to include a wide variety of products. Here's a list:

(deep breath)...
t-shirts (long sleeved, short sleeved), sweatshirts, tank tops, boxers, thongs, hats, caps, kids' t-shirts, infant tcreepers, bibs, shorts, round buttons, round magnets, throw pillows, large mugs, small mugs, ceramic beer steins, tile comasters, tile boxes, mousepads, wall clocks, insulated coffee mugs, barbecue aprons, wall calendars, bound journals, postcards, posters, framed prints, tote bags, license plate frames, messenger bags, oval and round ornaments, stickers (oval, rectangular, bumper), greeting cards, teddy bears with mini t-shirts,wall clocks and dog t-shirts.
...

Whew, that's a lot of stuff. And I think I might still be missing a couple of items.

How It Works
You can have a variety of "relationships" with Cafe Press. You can merely be a purchaser of items already listed on the site, if you find a t-shirt someone's selling there that you simply must have. You can make and purchase your own items, for friends and family. Or, you can make and purchase your own items, and sell them to other people who might browse the site and find themselves interested in one of your creations.

The way that it works is that Cafe Press charges a 'base price" for each item. A t-shirt, for instance, has a base price of $14.99. If you design your own t-shirt for your own personal use you can buy it from the site for the base price. If you design a t-shirt and choose to sell it, you can select a markup of a dollar or two for Cafe Press to charge for the site. Everything over the base price goes to you as profit. When you log in to buy your own t-shirt, Cafe Press always charges you the base price.

Navigating the Site
Cafe Press is a very, very busy site. They link to about 8 million items of merchandise on their site. On the home page you're presented with the very basic options: Start Selling Now, Shop the Marketplace, In the News, Make Your Own Stuff. Click on any of these links, or search for what you're looking for. Entering "golden retriever" will bring up thousands of Golden Retriever items, some better than others. You can search for Golden bumper stickers or license plate frames. There are a slew of choices.

The ease with which you can navigate a seller's selection of items often varies by seller. Cafe Press allows sellers to heavily customize their pages so they can integrate their Cafe Press items in with their own websites. I've found that this sometimes makes navigating through a slew of bumper stickers to find the one that came up in my search a royal pain.

Design Quality
Because these are designs for Average Joes by Average Joes you will find that some Average Joes have better designs than others. Some people who use Cafe Press to sell items are professional, or near-professional, artists. Others took a 2 megapixel washed out, half-blurry picture of their Golden Retriever and thought it would look neat on a coaster and think that they can earn their retirement money by selling hundreds of them at a $5 markup. It's kind of amusing to see some really bad designs with huge markups for sale at Cafe Press. Hey, everyone has an opportunity to put their stuff out there.

Item Creation
To create your own item you must first have a JPG image of something that you want to render onto one of the many items Cafe Press sells. A few tips: When you pull up the blank item to create something, Cafe Press will tell you how big the image needs to be to fit, and look good on the item you are designing. Pay attention to this. They know what they're talking about.

If your logo has white in it, stick to white products so that the white background will come through. If you are putting up a photo, definitely stick to white products, as there will almost always be white objects or areas in your photo that will render poorly on say, the bright yellow messenger bag, or the silver coffee mug.

Once you have uploaded your image or images, Cafe Press will present you with a preview of your item. If you are satisfied with it, then you're through. You can tweak the image and re-upload if you wish. From there you can opt to just purchase one, or multiple, items for yourself. Or you can opt to do that and also list it at Cafe Press to sell. Or you can even just list the items at Cafe Press to sell.

Purchase and Delivery
Making your purchase through Cafe Press is very easy. Just add the items to your cart. Unlike places like eBay, if you want to purchase items made by different sellers, you're only going to get dinged with one shipping charge because all of the items ship from the same place. My items always arrive via USPS priority mail with no trouble, and once you create a login you can log into the Cafe Press site to see the status of your order. It does usually take a couple of days from the day your order is placed to see that your order has been shipped out.

My Experiences with Cafe Press
I have purchased a lot of items from Cafe Press, specifically ones that I have made myself. Here are my experiences in a nutshell:

Halloween 2001: This was before I had met the man of my dreams and I, and four of my best female friends, were single and didn't want to bring dates to our large group of friends' raunchy annual Halloween party. So after a night of drinking Cosmos, lamenting our singleton status and watching Sex and the City together we decided we would all go to the party as a "pack of lesbians". Seemed like the perfect plan. We could all be each other's dates, dance with each other and we could rebuff the men all night long. So I made up a t-shirt logo with a pink Powerpuff style girl bursting through a pink triangle and one of my favorite t-shirt lines "I'm not a lesbian but my girlfriend is" written underneath. I uploaded it to Cafe Press and ordered six shirts for our "costumes". At the time I didn't realize how long it took Cafe Press to put the items into production and four days before Halloween with our order still pending I was getting nervous. I called Cafe Press and they immediately rushed my order through, getting it delivered to me right before Halloween. They also joked that they wanted a group photo of us for their site. :-) The "costumes" were a total hit and we actually had one guy beg us to let him have our one extra shirt to wear for the rest of the party, so we gave in. Our "group" costume is still talked about at parties, and there have even been requests to revive it, which haven't panned out.

Summer of 2002: By this time I had met the man of my dreams and his birthday was fast approaching. He loved his Golden Retriever so I took several photos of her while he was away and made up a design with her name included on it. I gave him two ceramic coffee mugs, one travel mug and one mousepad for his birthday with the logos on it. I've never seen him happier about a gift. The ceramic mugs and mousepad came out great. The silver travel mug didn't come out very well at all because as mentioned earlier, the printing process replaces white with the background color, in this case silver. So the pup's mug didn't show up well on the mug at all. Lesson learned, no more travel mugs unless I'm doing logos without white in them.

Summer of 2002: Did the same routine for my mother-in-law for her birthday with a logo and photographs of her Golden Retriever. Couldn't have made for a happier woman. She was thrilled.

Spring of 2003: To celebrate the one year anniversary of my brother's new ice cream business I had his wife send me a high res copy of their logo. I knew that my brother didn't have any "logo wear" for his new company so I made up an entire store of items with his logo, complete with markups and everything. I sent him a huge box of logo wear including a clock for his store, a calendar, a sweatshirt and cap, coasters, mousepads and bumper stickers. He loved it. He also loved the instructions I gave him on how to manage and run the online store that I had set up for him, should he want to sell items online to his customers.

Summer of 2005: It's been awhile since I've made anything creatively with Cafe Press, though I have bought a few other people's items. This year I bought a canvas tote to carry beach towels in and I wanted to personalize it so I put pictures of our Tonkinese on one side with the phrase "Happiness is being loved by a Tonkinese" and pictures of our Golden Retriever on the other side with the phrase "Happiness is being loved by a Golden Retriever". The off-white color of the canvas made the images a little dark, so it's not my favorite item, but it's functional and personalized and I still love it.

Customer Service
Right under the "help" link on all pages you will find a knowledge base to search, a list of frequently asked questions, an online e-mail form and a toll-free customer service helpline manned 7 days a week. In my experience, the folks at Cafe Press have always been helpful and responsive and easily accessible to customers.

Summary
I've used Cafe Press on and off for many years to make gifts for other people and to make products for myself. Their customer service is great and many of their products are wonderful, although I would steer most people, especially Cafe Press newbies, away from anything that doesn't have a white background as the quality of an image or logo is lessened on the silver, yellow, gray and off-white items. If you're looking for a way to give a personal gift to someone, or to sell your artistic wares to many people, I highly recommend Cafe Press as the place to go!

Cafe Press
http://www.cafepress.com
E-mail form link: http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/help/cpcontact.aspx
Phone: 1-877-809-1659
CafePress.com
Customer Service Department
1515 Aurora Drive
San Leandro, CA 94577