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.
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.
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.
The survey results are in. Before we talk about them, however, we need to warn you that this post is going to be long and scattered. It’s fascinating to read the feedback you all were kind enough to provide. We want to answer as many of your questions as we can. Let’s get to it.
The clear favorite was United Pixelworkers. While we’re very proud of the community we’ve built as United Pixelworkers, we expect (and need) that number to ultimately be a drop in the bucket.
Slight footnote: this survey was seen primarily by people who follow Cotton Bureau on Twitter or subscribe to the email, so we know it’s not exactly unbiased. With 278 responses out of more than 10,000 customers, we got a reasonable sample size, but we probably shouldn’t consider the results of this particular question representative of the population at large.
Uh oh. We accidentally made answering this question compulsory without providing a “not applicable” option which means it looks like we got a bunch of junk data for May 2014. We’re going to throw that number out and concentrate on the earlier months. The good news is that almost 20% of respondents said they made their first purchase the month we launched. To that we say: thanks for sticking with us! We’re equally happy to see a steady 5–9% each month in between.
Woo-hoo! Eighty-seven percent of people filling out the survey have either made multiple purchases or intend to make another purchase in the future. How’s that for loyalty? (For comparison, around 20% of customers have actually made multiple purchases which is a pretty clear indicator that the self-selection bias in this survey is strongly toward happy, satisfied customers.)
Customer acquisition (or, in this case, retention) is a tricky subject and one about which we certainly still have much to learn. Our strategy to this point has been straightforward: execute on shirt quality, website experience, and customer service while trusting that friendly and honest communication in a select number of channels (weekly newsletter, direct email, Twitter, and Instagram) will be compelling. Our sincere goal is to avoid anything remotely shady or spammy. (“Whose isn’t?”, you might be asking yourself. You’d be… surprised.) We had also been posting to Facebook and Pinterest, but with limited success and limited time we’ve decided to pause our efforts in those places. (Not that you should stop!) Going forward, we expect to continue doing the same while hopefully mixing in even more content on the blog and in—dramatic pause—other places.
On the advertising side, we tried a brief run of Facebook ads. Our efforts in that direction have been disappointing at best. We’re going to continue looking for appropriate opportunities to advertise and the best ways to, clears throat, communicate the unique Cotton Bureau experience. We’ll keep you posted.
Lots of stuff to unpack in this question, not all of which we’ll be able to do in this particular post. But we do want to address some of the high-level stuff.
“The designs don’t interest me” — That’s fair. We’re constantly reaching out to amazing designers and we accept designs on nearly anything as long as they’re awesome. We’re open to tees for everything from aliens to zeppelins. Ultimately, however, we have little control over which designs come in the door. The good news is that more designs are coming in every day, and if there’s something we’re missing nothing is stopping you from filling that gap.
“Pricing is too high” — Whew. This is a tough one. Nothing would make us happier than being able to lower prices. In order to lower prices, we’d have to do at least a few of the following things:
Switch from American Apparel to a less expensive shirt
Reduce the amount a designer could add on to the shirt cost
Reduce the amount we add as a surcharge for our own labor and expenses
Absorb some of the shipping costs ourselves
These are our realistic alternatives. We’d lose money in the short-run (most likely) with the hope that we make it up on volume and/or in the long-run. As we’ve mentioned in the past, this is a bootstrapped business not a VC-backed business. It should go without saying but we’re gonna say it anyway: we need money to stay in business. The exact price intersection of supply and demand for premium tees is anybody’s guess, but prices are what they are right now because that’s what we’ve found to be sustainable. We’re going to keep tweaking the model in the hope that we can find numbers that work well for everyone.
Here’s the reality of starting a business like Cotton Bureau with rent and health insurance and a family depending on your success: it’s scary, it’s frustrating, and sometimes it’s discouraging. We are completely dependent on dozens of designers and thousands of customers to pay our bills every month. Guess what? It’s exhilarating when it works, and we would’t have it any other way. We relish the ownership, control, and freedom that comes with being the ones at which the buck stops. Yes, it means we’ll grow more slowly than we could otherwise, but it also means our empathy for customer needs is genuine, our decisions are calibrated to be beneficial to everyone, and the insane pressure to grow at the expense of everything else doesn’t warp our perspective. Shirts won’t be as cheap as they would be if we didn’t need to make money and not every feature we’d like to have will be built immediately. So what. Slow and steady, we say. The bottom-line, for us, is helping designers make quality shirts available to a discerning audience. For now, that costs what it costs.
“Sizing issue” — This is something we’re actively working on improving. Better size charts, more fit options, exchanges. Because everything (currently) runs on a pre-order model, it’s imperative we help people get sizes right the first time since there may not be a second time. Also, handling exchanges is a time-consuming and expensive proposition for a company our size. Measure twice, cut once, as they say.
“Shipping costs were too high” — Same deal as above. We can’t change the price of shipping, not at our scale. We already use the cheapest option from USPS. There’s some margin built-in for handling, but the same logic applies. We cut that, we’re hitting bone. We could incentivize multiple purchases by discounting shipping on more than one shirt. That’s a solution a lot of people would be happy with, but it’s not a silver bullet.
Everybody else who said they wouldn’t change anything, we love you!
Not gonna lie, this was our favorite question in the survey. Cotton Bureau has always been about—and will always be about—helping independent designers make awesome, one-of-a-kind shirts. We’re glad you agree!
We’ve already addressed pricing to some degree—and we’re going to have a good bit more to say about that in the future—so let’s talk about some of the other areas we’re working hard to improve.
“Sometimes I miss out on shirts during the pre-sale period” — We’re hoping to come at this one from both sides. On the one hand, we’re exploring ways to make sure you don’t need to come to the site to see every shirt that’s released, maybe a Twitter firehose or, gasp, RSS. On the other hand, if you do miss a shirt, be sure to use the handy notification feature to make sure you get an email if it comes back. For the foreseeable future, however, Cotton Bureau is always going to run on a pre-order basis. We can try to smooth some of the rougher edges, but Cotton Bureau isn’t a store, it’s a platform to help designers get shirts printed and shipped. That’s an intentional choice and one that has some unavoidable consequences to go along with its many, many advantages.
“How long it takes to get my shirt” — That’s a tough one as well. (Maybe you’re sensing a theme here?) We’d love to get everyone their stuff faster. Here are a few ways that could work:
Less time live on the site
Quicker turnaround at the printer
Expedited shipping
To take them in order, less time live on the site means fewer people have an opportunity to purchase. We might enable that option on a per design basis in the future, but, having done everything from a day to a month in the past, two weeks feels right to us. It’s enough time to scrape the money together for a shirt you just have to have but not so long that the season changes while you wait. And, most importantly, it’s enough time to make sure as many shirts as possible get printed.
Can we turn things around more quickly once it’s clear that a shirt is going to make it? Yes, to a point. We already have a terrific relationship with our printer. They bend over backwards to accommodate 12 shirt runs for us and make sure we’re always at the top of the queue of orders being run. There’s still a little fat to trim in the overall order process, so we do look forward to ship times being cut down by a few days in the long-run. A few people suggested that we start running smaller quantities as soon as possible. While we’d love to do that, the margins are just too tight at this point to prioritize ship time over cost. And judging by the survey results, if we can pass any of the cost savings on to customers, that’s a more pressing need than faster shipping.
For simplicity and cost reasons, expedited shipping is not something we currently offer. We’ve offered it in the past (not on Cotton Bureau), but it’s almost never worth the cost to the customer. We may offer it eventually, but given the 2–4 weeks already spent waiting for a shirt, the one day saved by faster shipping is negligible.
“The quality of the shirts (comfort/fit)” — Quality is something we are absolutely unwilling to sacrifice, so we’re glad to see it wasn’t high on the list of complaints. We use American Apparel right now because it’s the best blend of price and quality. We’re always looking at alternatives. To this point, we haven’t been persuaded something better is out there. Some people prefer a thicker tee, and, while that’s not our preference, we aren’t ruling it out for the future completely if we can find a way to make it work. As far as fit goes, we would love, love to have better size options for women. We’ve scoured the internet for years to find a solution and have come up empty. If you have any suggestions, you know where to find us.
Thanks, guys. That means a lot to us and, frankly, is the only way we get to keep doing this at all.
Whoa. Okay. So, hoodies. We are definitely not planning to introduce non-shirt apparel or even different types of shirts soon (read: in 2014), but everything on this list is under consideration for the future. To be honest, it really feels like a matter of when and how, not if. But we’ll leave it at that for now.
We’re big fans of Real Talk™ around here, so let’s have some: it’s not your problem shirts cost so much and take so long to print and ship, it’s ours. We understand if you don’t want to pay and don’t want to wait—neither do we. But we have some news for you. WE ARE NOT RUNNING THIS HERE BUSINESS ON ROCKET FUEL. We are using plain, old American dollars with which we pay our one, part-time employee (hi, Sara!), our fantastic designers, our printer (this guy, remember?), and, when we have enough left over, ourselves. (These three guys here.)
Our business model is simple: we have a product, we sell it for more money than it takes us to produce it. We happen to think it’s a pretty good product. So far more than 12,000 people have spent their precious time and hard-earned money to indicate that they agree with us. That validates the decisions we’ve made to this point and gives us hope that many, many more people out there also agree and just don’t know it yet. As usual, that’s where you come in. Please help us spread the word about this upstart t-shirt platform. We’d be awfully grateful.
First, a sincere thank-you to everyone who spent a few seconds this morning answering our quick poll on Three Cents. While that was fun, it whet our appetite for more. If you have a few minutes, we would be ever so grateful if you would fill out our new, slightly longer customer survey. (Survey results are private.)
The entire survey is on one page and should’t take more than a few minutes to fill out (10 questions total). If you give us your email address at the end, we’ll enter you into a drawing for a free shirt. (We promise not to use the email addresses gathered from this survey for any reason other than to contact you about your free shirt… if you want to sign up for the newsletter so we can spam you with impunity, you can do that right here.) We’ll be collecting responses until around this time next Friday (about a week) and contacting winners shortly thereafter.
This is the first survey we’re running, but it won’t be the last. If you have a favorite survey website, let us know via email or Twitter so we can try it out.
Two years ago, long before Cotton Bureau existed, we reached out to someone about a possible job for our now defunct client services company. It would have been a very high profile job, and we had good reason to believe we had a shot. The owner (someone with whom we had previously had positive contact and with whom we believed we had much in common) had publicly expressed interest in having the site re-designed making our offer not, we hoped, completely unsolicited. We composed a short, pleasant, to-the-point email that did not receive a reply. Chalking it up to anything but malevolence, we moved on as we always do. It wasn’t the first time we’d didn’t hear back from someone, and we knew it wouldn’t be the last.
Nearly a year had passed when a new idea occurred to us for the same person. We again reached out by email, this time to suggest that making t-shirts with us might be of interest. At the time United Pixelworkers had a well-established partnership program, having run shirts for industry heavyweights like A Book Apart, Dribbble, and Rdio. No luck. Maybe our email was eaten by a spam filter? Maybe our advances were unappreciated? There was no way to know. At that point, exasperated by the silence, we could have been persuaded to move on. The last thing we wanted was to be an irritation. In the land of the Internet, however, there’s no body language to read, no clues to investigate. As business owners, writers, and website makers, we’ve always considered ourselves peers of the people we contact, regardless of their celebrity status. We’re not too proud to admit that the silent treatment stung. Writing a decent email is table stakes for running an online business. After 3-4 years of practice, we had a pretty strong batting average at this sort of thing. Nearly everyone else we had emailed previously had been responsive and, usually, interested.
Four months later we reached out again for what we hoped would be the last time. Mixing it up, we added a few additional people to the email who might be better positioned to at least return our email and, ideally, to give us an unequivocal yes or no. We got a reply, thankfully, with something resembling interest (though not from the original recipient). By this time, we had spun our partnership program off into the site you see today, Cotton Bureau. Maybe the delay had been for the best. The new site would have been the perfect vehicle for a limited run of shirts for a popular and beloved project.
Time passed (slowly) as we waited to hear whether the shirt we knew would be a monster would land on Cotton Bureau. Five months later it became clear (publicly) that t-shirts were a priority once a satisfactory design could be found, place of sale TBD. With nothing to lose at this point, we sent a last plaintive email: we’ll help with artwork, we’ve got the experience, the credentials, the contacts to make this a fantastic shirt. Just give us a chance. No answer.
This story does not have a happy ending.
Four months later, it was announced that the shirt would run on a competing service. It sold over 1,000 tees—twice as many as our most popular shirt ever. We had spent nearly a year pursuing this shirt, and there it went, without an explanation. What could we have done differently? Was our service considered and rejected? Were we too aggressive in reaching out? Who knows?
There’s a powerful idea about the Internet, embedded in the deepest recesses of our psyche, that excellence is all that matters, that the world we’re building is purely meritocratic. We know this isn’t true, of course. Anyone can see that justbylookingaround. It should be obvious that simply being good isn’t good enough; in fact, it isn’t even close to being good enough. Why?
You should be familiar with David Sherwin’s Tipsy Triangle of Software Startupdom. If you aren’t, become so quickly. David argues that every startup needs to divide its focus among three core areas: user experience, tech choices, and business model. Let’s use Cotton Bureau* as an example.
User Experience: Our website is responsive, reasonably performant, easy to navigate (we hope), and has a delightful checkout experience that we haven’t seen anywhere else.
Tech Choices: We use a basic LAMP stack running on a super-cheap Linode. We take advantage of third-party, open source libraries (like Sass, jQuery, and Laravel) whenever possible to minimize development time. Nothing fancy is happening here. Our goal is to build a reliable e-commerce site, not push the technology envelope.
Business Model: The entire reason Cotton Bureau exists is because the business model is relatively new. By creating a pre-order t-shirt platform, we enable transactions that previously couldn’t happen.
*Technically Cotton Bureau isn’t a startup. We’re a five year old small business bootstrapping a new product. We’ll talk about why we made that decision in future post.
It’s easy—terrifyingly easy—to get fixated on any one of those variables. The user experience on Cotton Bureau is good, but it’s so far from what we would like it to be that we cringe each time we look at it. Our friends and colleagues work on the sites and apps we use every day. It’s essential we remind ourselves that we don’t have the resources of an Instagram, Twitter, Google, etc. That we have to balance our urge to perfect the design with the reality of staying in business.
Our technology choices are practical, but are they exciting? Hardly, and that’s intentional. Nobody jumps out of bed eager to fire up their PHP virtual environment, and we have hundreds of improvements and refactorizations we’re itching to make.
The temptation to tweak the business model is constant and one to which we’re particularly susceptible. What if we added stock? Is direct-to-garment good enough yet? Will it ever be? How much should designers make? Can we lower our cut to spur sales, i.e. make it up on volume? Is it fair (and profitable) to curate designs rather than letting anything and everything on the site? Certainly there’s value in examining and re-examining the assumptions of your business model—but not every day, not to the exclusion of work that needs to be done on the site.
And yet, there’s a hidden, fourth dimension (if you will) to David’s triangle that we would do well to observe. Here it is: Sales. Marketing. Public Relations. For sake of mnemonic ease (and geometric validity), let’s call our new shape the Cotton Bureau Not-So-Tipsy Pyramid of Staying in Business.
I suspect we’re all thinking the same thing right about now: ugh. For anyone who isn’t naturally extroverted or whose skin isn’t leathered to an impermeable hide by years of failure, the fear of putting oneself out there for rejection is very real and the rejection itself (even when unintentional, as it so often can be) is agonizing.
But I have news for you. All the effort that’s been put into making your thing special is useless and, worse than useless, irrelevant if nobody is coming to see your thing. We’ve had many conversations about this topic on Skype and Twitter and even in person with people who are very good at what they do, and there is real frustration and confusion about the lack of attention being paid to products and businesses that lie outside the traditional venture capital narrative. These people might appear to be successful and profitable, but behind the scenes, staying afloat is a continual, painful struggle, which makes getting to the next level feel like it might as well involve flying to the moon.
I don’t know about you, but we don’t have a wheelbarrow of VC cash in the corner. We can’t buy attention. We’re a small, bootstrapped business trying to make it work from humble Pittsburgh, PA. If we’re going to do this, it’s going to be the people in the room. TechCrunch, Fast Co., etc. won’t come calling (at least not if we don’t call first), and as far as meeting payroll goes, Ben Horowitz isn’t walking through that door.
So what’s the answer? Relentless sales. For real. Like I said on Twitter, if you look around the office and don’t see “the sales guy”, you’re the sales guy. Roll up your sleeves. You’ve got some work to do.
Sure, we all get the occasional shot in the arm—an out-of-nowhere link from swissmiss (thanks, Tina!) or a kindly tweet from another well-intentioned friend with a bucket of followers—but those waves crash on the shores of your website and wash maddeningly right back out to sea. Some people stick around to be customers. Most are gone forever.
That’s why May is Cotton Bureau Awareness Month around the office. We’re reaching out to anyone and everyone, brainstorming ways to bring people to the site. Our product is successful. We make money on every transaction and enough of it to meet payroll for 3.5 people. The last 10 months have proven that there’s a real desire for our services on the designer side and for t-shirt sales on the customer side (yeah, no kidding). We’re pretty sure we’ve got the ol’ product-market fit locked down. Now’s the time to take the vision to the people, not spend time twiddling knobs behind the scenes. Here’s to us (and you) making this month the month people hear about your thing.
Can we help? Let us know what your thing is. We’d like to shine a little spotlight in your direction. Let us know what’s worked well for you in the past, or what you’re hoping to try in the future. We’d love to follow up on this blog with some encouragement for people out there trying to make this all work on a shoestring. Email us@cottonbureau.com.
