12 Gets You Printed. 25 Gets You Paid.

If we had it our way, every shirt on Cotton Bureau would make it to print. The reality is, selling 25 shirts in two weeks is a pretty steep climb for most designers, and only about 40% of shirts make it. Though that number is greater than we expected when we launched the site, it's still not good enough. Over the first 10 months of Cotton Bureau, we've seen hundreds of awesome shirts come and go, never making it to reality. We want to change that.

Effective immediately, we're dropping the threshold for success from 25 to 12. That's right, from now on designers only need to sell 12 shirts to get their shirts to print. Pretty sweet, eh? We thought so too. This move means more happy designers, more happy customers, and more green progress meters on our homepage. Win-win-win. In theory, every single shirt on the site should make it to print now...because who can't get a dozen people to buy a shirt?! OK, OK, realistically, we know it'll be more like 70%, but we can dream, can't we?

There is a catch, however (you knew there'd be a catch). If you hit 12 but fall short of 25, you will not receive any profit from your sales. The reason is, compared to 25, the unit cost of producing 12 shirts is crazy expensive, and we need every penny to make it happen in a way that's even remotely profitable for us (after all, we're not some fancy startup with a Scrooge McDuck vault full of investor loot). Ya dig? So if you wanna get paid—and who doesn't?—you still have an incentive to keep pushing past a dozen.

Like everything we do, this is an experiment. It could take us to new heights, or it could totally blow up and send us back to 25. That's the fun/terrifying part. One thing we know for sure is that we've removed virtually every possible barrier for buyers and designers. If you see a shirt you like, you can order it knowing it'll most likely go to print. If you're a designer, you can submit a shirt with confidence.

(Thanks to @pstypelab for the blog post title.)