Unless you spent 2022 hiding under a rock (we wouldn’t blame you), you might have heard we started offering premium phone cases. The cases are tough (confirmed through more than a few drops in our personal testing), the printing is sharp, and the price is right. It’s our first new on demand product after apparel, but it won’t be our last. 😉

In user account land, we also consolidated payments, added a balance view, plus whole new sections dedicated to managing discounts and notifications. Speaking of discounts, we restored the friends and family discount and started handing out free shirt and phone case codes like candy (candy that you earn by selling, uh, lots of other candy). We revamped our discount engine as well to share the load and offer more of everyone’s favorite promotion, free shipping.

The public site received some love as well with searching, filtering, and sorting for stores and featured products for premium stores. The home page got a slight tweak to increase emphasis on our favorite products. (New stuff is great! But we have 10 years of amazing designs that deserve to be seen.)

In one of our favorite developments, we kicked off this very email which enjoyed a strong six month run last year and is now entering a second healthy season of sharing updates with all of you lovely people.

What’s new in 2023? 🥳

The Beta List

When we rolled out phone cases last year, we issued a call for some courageous early adopters to help us test things before they were ready for prime time. That worked so well, we want to expand and improve that program. If you are interested in being the first to know about (and trial) new products, reply to this email. Before we make something available to everyone, we want your feedback on the product quality, the website interface, etc. As a bit of a preview, we are planning one major new product category this year plus 2–3 smaller product introductions from our existing partners. Space is limited, we are not going to be able to accommodate everyone.

Stock Products for All

If you’ve ever seen a sticker on Cotton Bureau, or an enamel pin, or a poster, a mug, or fancy socks, you might have wondered how you could get in on that. Until now, we haven’t been ready to open up stock products to everyone. That changes this year. If you are interested in selling something that isn’t available through our on demand program, email us. We’ll walk you through everything, it’s super simple.

There are some costs with stock products, so let’s get that out of the way.

• Product setup (including assistance with procurement) is $49 and includes one free product photo.
  
• You gotta actually buy all that product. Prices vary, of course.
  
• Accounts with at least one stock product are just $5 / month, deducted automatically from your existing sales.
  
• All stock product accounts include $5 of free product storage per month which is enough to cover hundreds of enamel pins, thousands of stickers, or an entire department of designers with notebooks, pens, and prints.

The Inevitable Price Changes

Effective immediately, on demand apparel prices have been bumped up a few bucks. You don’t need to do anything. Retail prices on the site have been updated by the same amount, so your margin hasn’t changed. If for some reason you prefer to reduce your cut, feel free to reach out to us. You can do that directly in your account, or we can handle it for you. At this point it is our hope (and expectation) that inflation has eased enough that when we sit own to review the global economy in January 2024 no further changes will be necessary.

No increase has been made to phone case prices as that product was introduced late enough in the world-wide inflation cycle that our costs were fully known.

For those of you with stock products, a slight adjustment to our fulfillment fees is coming there as well (effective February 1). We’ll be emailing you all separately about those changes.

Finally, after 6+ years of free storage for stock products, our warehouse costs have increased to the point that we are no longer able to avoid charging for inventory management. Again, for anyone with stock products, those prices and more information will be communicated directly. Our intention is only to cover our costs on those items, so prices should be minimal.

What Else?

It’s not our habit to pre-announce features as the exact timing can be difficult to nail down and the scope can shift significantly during development. However, there’s something to be said for a little look ahead every so often.

Philosophically, we divide our time roughly equally between maintenance, quality of life / site features, and new product development (e.g. phone cases). We’ve already mentioned the plan to onboard one major new partner this year with an entirely new product category. While we don’t want to get into too much detail, it’s going to be a pave-the-cowpath sort of product. We’ve offered items like this as stock products before. Now we’re taking the next step to make it available on demand.

On the maintenance side, there are a number of behind-the-scenes tasks that aren’t of interest to anyone except perhaps other developers. We’ve got servers and libraries to upgrade plus a few crusty bits of code to whip into shape. Boring stuff like how product images are generated and stored over time becomes a drag on more exciting things we would like to do.

Other than that, some much requested smaller features are on the docket (ahem, multiple print locations) along with a few fun customer-focused ideas, and, if the stars align, maybe one idea that has been on the to do list for 10 years will finally happen.

Not long ago (okay, it was 2018), we had the brilliant idea to randomly give away matching prizes to customers and creators. Well, we’re doing it again. We’re hereby announcing the First Annual Holiday High Five, 2022 Edition.

Starting now, ending Friday, Dec. 16 at 8 PM ET every on demand shirt or phone case purchased using the code HOLIDAYHIGHFIVE is worth one entry into our iPhone 14 giveaway. One customer order will be drawn at random, both the customer and the product designer will win a brand new iPhone 14. All you need to do is tell people. We’ll provide the prize(s), you send the people.

Oh, and by the way, if we get 500 retweets on the announcement, we’re going to upgrade the iPhones 14 to iPhones 14 Pro. If we leave 500 retweets in the dust, we’re willing to throw more prizes on the fire, if you know what we mean. Teamwork makes the dream work. Let’s go, let’s go.

Account Balance

All accounts on Cotton Bureau now having a running balance (“to be paid”) which is settled monthly (typically the 15th). You can see yours right now in your payment history tab. (Not the most obvious place, we know. Maybe it will get rearranged in the future.)

In the olden days (October), pre-order campaigns would be paid out 15 days after campaigns ended while stock and on demand products would be paid the 15th. We’ve consolidated all those into a single balance and payout that you can view any time in your account. That should make it a good deal easier to see what is coming and to know when it is arriving.

Depending on your account type, you might also notice a “site credit” box, or it’s possible your “to be paid” number is negative. If you happen to have one of those special accounts that we work with to coordinate merch giveaways, you can now see a live accounting of how much of your deposit has been used.

More certainly to come in this area, all in good time.

Notifications

Speaking of new stuff, we’ve got a whole new area in your account dedicated to managing notifications, a sure crowd pleaser. Step one for us was integrating Mailchimp’s API, so you are now able to directly control which emails (including this one) you get from us via your account. We’ll be adding additional notification management options as we are able to incorporate each service type into that area. Purely hypothetically though, if you wanted more (or less) frequent sales notifications, that might be something we are working on, hypothetically.

Our extended phone case kickoff is coming to an end this Monday (Dec. 5). If you’ve already added a few phone case designs to the site, thank you! Every new phone case product counts as an entry for the giveaway up to the maximum of 10 entries. The winner will be chosen and notified next week.

If you haven’t submitted anything yet, you still have time. You can convert an old design or send a new one.

There are rumors that retail stores have begun playing Christmas music and selling all manner of year-end paraphernalia. We give no credence to these rumors, but they must be acknowledged. Naturally, Cotton Bureau is deep into planning and executing our own brilliant plan to take over the world promote your many wonderful designs. We can reveal, however, that focusing on discounts was not an accident. We want you to have all the tools you need to spread the word. We’ll be doing the same on our end with the usual assortment of promotions, giveaways, and relentless social media pressure. There will be free shipping. There will be surgically-timed campaigns targeting those among us who wait until the very last minute to take care of shopping for loved ones.

In order to be as aggressive as possible this year (which is to say, still quite conservative by the door-busting standards of the greater internet), we’re taking advantage of our new discounts infrastructure to carve up the discount responsibility among multiple parties. Historically, site-wide discounts have been an all-or-nothing nothing affair, with Cotton Bureau taking the “all” and sellers the “nothing”. Honestly, that has severely limited our ability to grab shoppers’ attention with attractive promotions. We’d like to change that.

After accounting for costs, inflation, the rotational axis of earth, gravity, windage, and myriad other factors, we’ve come to the decision that a 50/50 split on general sales and promotions is the most equitable distribution, with the proviso that your share of the discount will never exceed 50% of your cut. As a concrete example, if Cotton Bureau ran a 12 hour and 21 minute winter solstice flash sale on December 21 for 21% off, a seller with the standard $5 cut on a t-shirt would be responsible for: $30 × 21% × 50% or $3.15. With the 50% cut cap, that would be reduced to $2.50 with Cotton Bureau covering the other $3.80 of the customer discount. Similarly, the math for a hoodie would be $45 × 21% × 50% or $4.73, reduced to $2.50.

We see enhanced site discounts as a classic Michael Scott win-win-win. Creators win with additional sales, customers win with better prices, and Cotton Bureau wins too, for having successfully mediated a conflict at work. In our opinion, promotions should be strategic, relatively infrequent, variable, and highly motivating. We hope that by nudging the site slightly more in the direction of customer-friendly discounts, we’ll be able to deliver a better experience across the board. As usual, hit us up with your feedback. We’re in this together.