Lest we bury the lede: discounts are here! Get 20% off on everything in your cart today and tomorrow only using the code “DISCOUNTSAREHERE” at checkout. Go now!

We’ve been hard at work building a discount engine and all we have to show for it is this tiny little box.

If anyone is still here, we want to talk a little bit about why we built discounts at all.

Starting a retail site from scratch means we don’t get a lot of features for free out of the box. We have to choose carefully. Discounts might seem like a slam dunk—and, indeed, they are an essential tool for running sales, providing top-notch customer service, tracking external advertising, etc.—but with great power comes great responsibility.

First, we want to be clear, buying a discounted shirt does not change the amount of money designers receive. Any discounts we offer come directly from our cut. We think that’s only fair. Don’t you?

Second, as we’ve said on more than one occasion in the past, we’re committed to making sure Cotton Bureau is profitable and sustainable. That means we have to balance the needs of designers, customers, and ourselves. Running sales is sort of like taking out a loan. Sure, there’s an immediate cash influx, but there are undesirable long-term consequences. For Cotton Bureau to work, prices need to be more or less what they are. Sales bring new customers, help price-sensitive customers get over the hump, and reward everyone for being part of this little community. Unfortunately they also tend to undercut our business model of making money by selling people t-shirts. We’re happy to “make it up on volume”—so long as our margins are still positive. What all this boils down to is that sales are by necessity going to be few and far between. Enjoy them while they last, use them as an opportunity to introduce a friend to Cotton Bureau, but don’t get too attached.

Used in moderation, discounts are good for everyone. We’re thrilled to finally be able to offer them. Today won’t be the last time you can save a few bucks on Cotton Bureau, but it might be the last for awhile, so head on over and use the code “DISCOUNTSAREHERE” at checkout to get 20% off on everything in your cart. Offer expires midnight Eastern tomorrow. Thanks, yo.

We don’t know much about retail. It’s true we ran United Pixelworkers for years (still do), but it was always a side-business. We celebrated the good times and tried not to sweat the bad times. When Cotton Bureau launched last summer, an immediate wave of attention washed over us; the swells that followed in its wake obscured a critical reality of commerce: the summer slump.

Fast-forward to July 2014. The mighty Cotton Bureau schooner is becalmed, floating listlessly as we tug the sails this way and that, trying to catch the flimsiest breeze. Maybe you noticed the slipping numbers on the home page. Maybe you’re a designer wondering why shirts that sold so well in the past are barely going to print. More likely, you’re reclined on a chaise lounge by a pool somewhere, sipping lemonade, reading a good book, blissfully unaware that Cotton Bureau’s sales are sagging. (And good for you, by the way. That’s the right approach.)

At first, we blamed ourselves. Was it the switch to 12? Was it because we stopped tweeting every new shirt? Did we exhaust our customers with new shirt after new shirt after new shirt? We started digging into our numbers. Twitter’s new dashboard tells us that Cotton Bureau’s impressions are down 35.4% as compared to the previous 28 days. Ouch. Overall traffic peaked in March, held steady through early June, then began to decline heavily. The ratio of shirts hitting 25 was dropping as well. What did it all mean?

The first thing we had to remind ourselves was that Cotton Bureau is not a store, it’s a pre-sale engine. We can’t rely on standard numbers. We need to think differently about a successful pre-order and an unsuccessful pre-order. We need to acknowledge that events outside of our control (and sometimes even awareness) can radically alter our statistics. We have the privilege of providing a platform to a variety of designers—designers whose ability to bring traffic to the site can fluctuate by orders of magnitude. Separating the signal from the noise was going to be difficult.

Fewer people seeing our tweets was telling us something. Fewer people visiting the site was telling us something. Which numbers are significant? We chose to focus on conversion percentage, average order quantity, and shirts funded. Conversion percentage so far in July has been a rock-steady 2.07%—just a hair over our lifetime average of 2.05%. Clearly people coming to the site had not stopped buying tees, whether as a result of changes to the site or the type and quality of the t-shirt designs. Average order quantity has been similarly consistent. For every four orders we sell about five tees. That number jumped a few ticks back in March when we introduced the shopping cart and hasn’t moved since. That’s a good thing, we think. The first bit of bad news in our bellwether metrics was a decline in total shirts funded. More shirts go to print now than ever before thanks to the reduction of the goal from 25 to 12, but fewer of those shirts are getting to 25. That’s disappointing both to us (we make more money the more shirts we sell, naturally) and our designers (designers get paid only if a shirt reaches at least 25 sales).

Why are fewer shirts getting to 25? Is it because customers aren’t telling their friends as much as they used to (because the threshold for getting to print has been lowered)? Is it because we have more shirts than ever on the site, causing the same number of sales to be spread out? Or is it because, as we increasingly believe, it’s tough to move merchandise in the summer when people have better things to do than shop for t-shirts?

We asked some of our friends with more retail experience and the answer was unequivocal: summer is brutal, people will come back, relax. Easier said than done, of course, but we found one other number that helped make the medicine go down a bit more easily: search. Referral traffic comes and goes as a function of the shirts on the site and the outreach efforts we are able to make, organic search traffic, however, is a relatively reliable measurement of the core audience—and ours has been going up steadily for the last nine months (nearly 250%). July will be down, just slightly, but we’re no longer worried that the dip is anything more than the natural consequence of everyone getting a little well-deserved relaxation.

So what are we going to do about it? Well… not much. As much as we love numbers, we know that if you torture numbers enough, they’ll confess to anything. At our scale, a tweet here, a link there can alter an entire fortnight-worth of sales. We’ll continue running the numbers, trusting our gut, working hard behind the scenes to get more awesome shirts on the site, building new features, and talking with you all.

On that note, we started a Tumblr recently that Sara is having a blast using to share stupid Vines, examples of great design, and interviews with fantastic Cotton Bureau designers.

We also recently built a little discount engine for ourselves that we plan on putting to good use. (Keep an eye out for discount-laden tweets, yeah?) Of course, we’ve got plenty of other big ideas for the site, but timing-wise, we don’t really expect those to hit before the fall anyway.

Regardless of the features we add or don’t add, the coverage and traffic that does or doesn’t come, we have a reminder for ourselves and for you: we’ve all been conditioned to believe that the essence of business is growth. Everything needs to go up, up, up. If the business isn’t growing, Houston, we have a problem. That’s simply not true. The growth mantra dangerously warps our incentives as independent businesses and hobbyists, leading us, more often than not, to make decisions not on what is best for the customer—or even our own happiness and long-term well-being—but what most impresses our peers and satisfies the requirements of the investor playbook.

Look, business is simple if we don’t muck it up. Find something people want, produce it for a price less than they’re willing to pay, sell it with integrity. That’s the model we tested last June with Cotton Bureau, it’s the model we continue to believe in today, and it’s the model we expect to continue with as long as we’re in business.

Next year, we’ll know what to expect and won’t needlessly wring our hands. In the meantime, we’ll weather the current doldrums as best we can without resorting to an undue number of gimmicks or frantic pleas for attention.  Enjoy your summer, and, if you don’t mind, tell a friend about Cotton Bureau. We’ve got the best t-shirts around.

I heard a story one time (a quite old story) about a man and a woman playing a little game of something like truth-or-dare at a dinner party. The man, allegedly and, in all likelihood, inappropriately identified as Winston Churchill, poses the following hypothetical to the woman, “Madam, would you sleep with me for 5 million pounds?” The woman considers the offer and replies that she would. Following up his initial offer with slightly more favorable terms, the man suggests that perhaps only five pounds would be necessary? Outraged, the woman responds, “Five pounds! What kind of a woman do you think I am?” “Madam,” he answers, “we’ve already established that. Now we are merely haggling about the price.” The unfortunate lady in this story has compromised her principles. In other words, she sold out.

Earlier this week eBay announced that Svpply is shutting down. Ben Pieratt is bummed out.

Last year Yahoo killed Upcoming, causing Andy Baio to lament that having sold Upcoming was “a horrible mistake”.

Ben, Andy, and countless others have walked the same road—they brought an idea into the world, nurtured it, and watched it grow into something above and beyond their expectations. And it wasn’t just theirs. Thousands of other people came to know and love their creation. Thousands of people who were hurt and disappointed when one day, somewhere a handful of people gathered in a room and decided to disrupt their lives based not on what was best for them, the users and customers, but on what was best for those few people in that small room.

Except it wasn’t. Ben and Andy and many, many others have found, to their dismay, that the new owners didn’t quite care about their baby the same way they did. That, despite assurances to the contrary, the product wasn’t being improved, it was deteriorating; that the community wasn’t growing, it was dying; that, worst of all, they had inadvertently done something they never, ever wanted to do: they sold out.

Speaking at XOXO, Cabel Sasser thinks he knows why smart, creative, thoughtful people sometimes sell out: that’s how you win at business, right?

Is it? It’s worth asking ourselves that question, both as creators of something other people care about and as users of things other people have created. How do you win at business? What made you (or them) leave the (perceived) security of being an employee under someone else? Understanding what it means to win at business means taking a deep dive into people’s complex, nuanced, and, usually, hidden motivations.

For some, owning a business isn’t a voluntary, high-risk, high-reward proposition. Imagine your local, father-son plumbing operation. Sometimes winning at business just means putting food on the table. For others, the stakes are higher. Winning may require being not simply profitable but highly profitable. It might mean having access to the privileges and favors and prestige that come from being known as a successful businessman or woman. Others have grander ambitions yet, hoping to put a dent in the universe, like Steve Jobs, or put a man on Mars, like Elon Musk. Starting and selling a two-bit t-shirt company like little, ol’ Cotton Bureau would be child’s play.

Would you like to know what winning at business means to us? It means making t-shirts that we can be proud of; it means having integrity in our actions and conversations, publicly and privately; it means having the freedom—and the responsibility—to make the hard decisions; it means building a company that we can work at making a little bit better every day, overcoming the challenges that come with success (or failure), and, yeah, making a couple bucks along the way.

Is Cotton Bureau different than other companies? That’s up to you to decide. Talk is cheap. Maybe the only way we’re different is that we treat our customers like adults. We won’t hide the harsh facts of life from you. This entire system is built on the idea that in the titanic collisions of business, customers are mere collateral damage. To be surprised or, worse, disappointed when you, the customer, are ignored is childish. Even our favorite companies are not immune to the capitalist dilemma. Pixar makes the best movies in the world—and they sell mountains of merchandise that we’d all be better off without. Apple is the most profitable company on earth—and they must continually chase fiscal growth at the expense of what is best for their customers lest they be penalized by Wall Street and grumpy shareholders for not providing an adequate return.

Will Cotton Bureau ever sell out? We hope not. Cabel said Panic has been approached by Apple, Facebook, and Google… and immediately turned each of them down because it didn’t feel right. Like Panic, we love what we’re doing here and want to “fill the middle with as many weird plot twists as we can”. We’re ecstatic for Andy and Ben as they attempt to resurrect their ideas and communities. (Full disclosure: we’re taking care of t-shirts for Andy’s Kickstarter campaign.)

Here’s the truth: Cotton Bureau has never sought or accepted outside investment. We didn’t set out to grow fast and flip the company for a quick profit. We’ve earnestly and frankly laid out our motivations before you. We can’t promise they’ll never change. Ultimately, we—like you—have to do what is best for ourselves. We trust that the business model we created is sustainable, fulfilling, and fair to everyone involved. After all, we agree with Cabel: maybe this is the best time of our lives.

On June 12, 2013—one year ago today—we launched Cotton Bureau. After six months of active development (and about a year prior of hypothesizing, strategizing, daydreaming, and “what if?”-ing), we started life with what the startup world likes to call a “minimally viable product.” In real-people-speak, that means “the least finished, least sophisticated system that we could realistically get away with.”

Much to our delight and slight surprise, it didn’t immediately fall on its face (quite the contrary, it took off like a rocket, at least for a week or two before leveling off to more modest altitudes). In the months that followed, we kept building, kept improving, kept adding the bits and pieces that were missing on Day 1. We brought international designers into the fold. We launched a designer login and submission system. We built a pretty slick shopping cart. In November, we felt confident enough about our progress and potential that we shuttered our web design studio to work on Cotton Bureau full-time.

But along the way, we missed one key update; in our haste, we never bothered to tell you why we built Cotton Bureau in the first place. Let’s rectify that oversight now (what better opportunity, right?) Call this our manifesto, call it our mission statement, call it a shot-across-the-bow, call it whatever you like. Here goes…

There are a lot of places on the internet where designers can sell custom t-shirts, even places where they can have those t-shirts printed and shipped. But all of those places have flaws…big enough flaws to dissuade people like us from participating. So we started Cotton Bureau to be the t-shirt shop we’d always wished existed: driven by the design community, focused on quality, highly curated.

We started it to be a community where designers didn’t have to win a popularity contest to get in the door, where the only price of admission was a quality design. We started it to be a gallery where designers would be proud to post their work, not a flea market free-for-all. We started it to produce top-quality t-shirts using actual screen-printing techniques, not glorified inkjet printers where the ink fades after half a dozen washes (and was never that vibrant to begin with).

We started it to be the antidote to t-shirts shops featuring nothing but anthropomorphic food, Star Wars/Dr. Who/Zelda/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fan art, Experimental Jetset ripoffs, and a seemingly endless stream of “Keep Calm And…” mutations. We started it with the refusal to participate in the “ZOMG $14 tees!!!” race-to-the-bottom, with the hope that customers would pay real prices for real t-shirts so that everybody could get paid.

But most importantly, we started Cotton Bureau to be a showcase for t-shirts featuring the absolute best in modern and unique graphic design and illustration, where quality, care, and attention-to-detail are paramount from the instant we receive a designer’s work to the moment their printed t-shirt reaches a happy customer. We may not always succeed, and we've certainly made our fair share of mistakes, but 365 days in, we think we’re on to something.

To celebrate our birthday, all t-shirts are $4 off for one day only (and don't worry, that $4 comes out of our cut, not the designers’). Also, we're giving away t-shirts all day on Twitter, so follow @cottonbureau for a chance at some awesome free tees.

If you’re reading this, there’s a better-than-average chance that you submitted a design to us in the past year, bought a tee from us, or (hopefully) both. Thanks for an awesome first year, everyone. There’s literally nothing we could do without you. Let’s take a look back at our first year together.