# how to attract artists?



## freestylezz (Oct 21, 2007)

i want to start a program for artists who can submit their art at our website (website is still building ) to earn royalty based commission. i have the software support of tracking each user's royalty in place though. 

what % of sale price do you guys think is a fair royalty for the artists who get approved by our staff for their submissions? or should i attract them in terms of flat $ rate? 

i am looking for urban style graphics which will be segmented in different themes to attract specific set of groups... im looking for art which is in same class as "threadless" but different and in more directed themes. so what is their fair value.

where should i look for artists, how should i market my website to them. all the info will be available on the website but i cant find artists until i approach them. how many artists visit this forum? will it be a good idea to get t-shirtforums to post the ads here?...


----------



## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> where should i look for artists, how should i market my website to them


Build your website, then find the various places online where there are artists and engage them. (Twitter, emptees.com, gomedia, various t-shirt blogs, etc)



> what % of sale price do you guys think is a fair royalty for the artists who get approved by our staff for their submissions?


Some artists don't like working on a "maybe" percentage. If you don't get any sales, then they don't get paid for their hard work in creating the design (is one way of looking at it)

That's one reason why the sites like threadless, designbyhumans, teefury, shirt.woot.com, etc all pay a flat rate for each design that is used *on top of* any commissions that are offered for the future sales of the design.

Maybe you could check out those sites and see what type of percentages they pay and offer something similar.



> how many artists visit this forum? will it be a good idea to get t-shirtforums to post the ads here?


There are definitely artists that visit this forum, but I'm not sure an ad here for a site selling t-shirts at retail would be a great fit. Many of the people on this site are doing something similar (building or running a clothing line selling retail). 

The other sites/resources I mentioned above would be a good start.


----------



## freestylezz (Oct 21, 2007)

thanks for the advice Rodney, i was checking threadless program for their artists



$2,000 in cash
$500 Threadless Gift Certificate (can be redeemed for $200 cash)
$500 in cash each time your design is reprinted
how is this possible? they give $500 each time their design is reprinted, it would only make sense if their t-shirts would costs $1000


----------



## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> how is this possible?


They sell LOTS of t-shirts 

How Threadless Got People To Buy Over A Million Tshirts A Year. – With Jeffrey Kalmikoff — Mixergy.com

The Customer is the Company -- Threadless -- User Innovation


----------



## Kristinopolis (Jul 12, 2009)

Well by reprinted I think it means that they make more than one initial print run of the shirt. Like if a design is popular and sold out quickly, if there is still a large demand for it, they will probably reprint it. There must be artists here, I for one already have a print shop, but I be people that are interested in designing shirts probably come here too.


----------



## freestylezz (Oct 21, 2007)

oh yeh now it make sense, i was looking for the catch... their strategy is to boost the talk $500 per print!!!
i like i like lol

my business model is dtg prints on demand, until i have the top selling t-shirts which i can mass produce with screen printing. my first and for most focus is to generate traffic. i am so surprized to hear they sold 1 million t-shirts in a year when their traffic level is not even that high (competable), their conversion rate must be sky high.

my plan was to set fixed royalties for the artists but rodney is right, they cant know for sure if i will be able to sell them. and buying the art outright is out of my budget... confusion, confusion...

how about if i boost the talk with one of those "million satisfied n counting..." im kidding


----------



## jkruse (Oct 10, 2008)

If you want good artists just pay them money for a design to start out. Show everyone that you can get quality artists and quality shirts. Make everyone else want to work for you + give them a big cash prize.


----------



## fender967 (Sep 28, 2007)

freestylezz said:


> oh yeh now it make sense, i was looking for the catch... their strategy is to boost the talk $500 per print!!!
> i like i like lol
> 
> my business model is dtg prints on demand, until i have the top selling t-shirts which i can mass produce with screen printing. my first and for most focus is to generate traffic. i am so surprized to hear they sold 1 million t-shirts in a year when their traffic level is not even that high (competable), their conversion rate must be sky high.
> ...


What on Earth makes you think that Threadless' traffic "isn't that high"?


----------



## freestylezz (Oct 21, 2007)

fender967 said:


> What on Earth makes you think that Threadless' traffic "isn't that high"?


i was talking about in relative terms. because they are focusing more on offline marketing or word of mouth promotions. ive seen a better job of online marketing which zazzle and cafepress are expert with but than again, threadless dont have as many products but i still think threadless can do better job promoting themselves online.


----------



## mariuszb79 (Mar 3, 2009)

You could go to local Colleges and post flyers. Many design artists there.


----------



## fender967 (Sep 28, 2007)

freestylezz said:


> i was talking about in relative terms. because they are focusing more on offline marketing or word of mouth promotions. ive seen a better job of online marketing which zazzle and cafepress are expert with but than again, threadless dont have as many products but i still think threadless can do better job promoting themselves online.


Then I suppose you meant that their online advertising wasn't very intense. Regardless of how they do it, their online website traffic is _huge._ 

They aren't getting cuts of products like Zazzle and Cafepress, the profit is all theirs.

They probably get ~100,000 visitors / day. 100k X 2% = 2,000 sales per day on average. That's ~730k sales / year using a pretty standard conversion percentage.


----------



## freestylezz (Oct 21, 2007)

fender967 said:


> Then I suppose you meant that their online advertising wasn't very intense. Regardless of how they do it, their online website traffic is _huge._
> 
> They aren't getting cuts of products like Zazzle and Cafepress, the profit is all theirs.
> 
> They probably get ~100,000 visitors / day. 100k X 2% = 2,000 sales per day on average. That's ~730k sales / year using a pretty standard conversion percentage.


100,000/day is way too many. last month they generated 
679,380 people and their last year average was around 500,000 visitors mark on monthly basis. so to average it up they have 16,666 people per day. BUT according to Rodney they sold over i million t-shirts last year... and this is what surprising me the most because that would make their conversion rate 16.6% which is like OMFG HIGHHHH!!!

cafepress and zazzle are different business model but let me throw in their numbers too... cafepress is generating 5 million visitors in a month on average and zazzle is about 2.5 million


----------



## fender967 (Sep 28, 2007)

freestylezz said:


> 100,000/day is way too many. last month they generated
> 679,380 people and their last year average was around 500,000 visitors mark on monthly basis. so to average it up they have 16,666 people per day. BUT according to Rodney they sold over i million t-shirts last year... and this is what surprising me the most because that would make their conversion rate 16.6% which is like OMFG HIGHHHH!!!
> 
> cafepress and zazzle are different business model but let me throw in their numbers too... cafepress is generating 5 million visitors in a month on average and zazzle is about 2.5 million


Those numbers don't add up at all. Where did you get them? Look at their Alexa ranking and Compete.com ranking. They are 5000 and 2800. I know what traffic these ranges of Alexa/Compete ranking get based on numerous other websites that have public traffic counters and similar rankings and this range ~5k is at or most likely _above_ 100k daily unique. 

They are hugely popular and their ranking is much higher than other sites that _heavily_ advertise online such as bustedtees and snorgtees. There is really no way that they are only pulling in 16k visits / day.

If they were only getting 16k/day their ranking would be more like 25-35k.


----------



## Solmu (Aug 15, 2005)

You're comparing apples and oranges; one of you is comparing (an entirely speculative) uniques per day, the other uniques per month. Because they have a lot of loyal repeat traffic, their uniques per month is not as high as you would expect for a company with such high uniques per day. Likewise, their uniques per day is not as low as you would expect based on their uniques per month.

You can't divide 500,000 uniques per month and arrive at 17k per day; just as you can't extrapolate it up to 6 million per year. It makes absolutely no sense.

Threadless don't advertise - at all. They've hardly even tried it before, because they just don't need to. If they were to spend money pulling in more traffic, it would harm their margins. Ultimately their margins are what makes the company so successful, so it would be a significant risk to do so.

There is also such a thing as growing too fast. They've almost killed the company with expansion at several points in its history. I can rarely or never say traffic would be a bad thing, but we can't really guarantee it would be a good thing either.

The company could be improved in all sorts of ways, and advertising is _possibly_ one of them, but personally I'm not automatically or readily convinced.

Although I think they should have spent more time worrying about how people shaped their brand while they sat back and let them, and that could be considered part of their advertising.


----------



## freestylezz (Oct 21, 2007)

fender967 said:


> Those numbers don't add up at all. Where did you get them? Look at their Alexa ranking and Compete.com ranking. They are 5000 and 2800. I know what traffic these ranges of Alexa/Compete ranking get based on numerous other websites that have public traffic counters and similar rankings and this range ~5k is at or most likely _above_ 100k daily unique.
> 
> They are hugely popular and their ranking is much higher than other sites that _heavily_ advertise online such as bustedtees and snorgtees. There is really no way that they are only pulling in 16k visits / day.
> 
> If they were only getting 16k/day their ranking would be more like 25-35k.


i got their results from compete.com as well according to which they had 679,380 unique visitors in last month.
i dont know how close these results are with actual numbers but i was stating it based on compete results.

and Solmu i get your point here, ive been studying them closely for 3-4 days and i agree with all your points. they are based on pure word of mouth promotions. and not spending any money of affiliate marketing, their margins are high...


----------



## fender967 (Sep 28, 2007)

Compete.com's statistics are _drastically_ wrong. Just a heads up. I have a few sites and every one of them gets 3-5x more traffic than the statistics on compete.com say.

It's true though that Threadless doesn't advertise, but that certainly doesn't mean that that is a good strategy. They were lucky enough to be doing the right thing at the right time and it caught on and that was that. What do you think the chances are of creating another Google or Yahoo without huge corporate funding (bing.com)?

Check this out about Threadless:

How Threadless Got People To Buy Over A Million Tshirts A Year. – With Jeffrey Kalmikoff — Mixergy.com


----------



## freestylezz (Oct 21, 2007)

do u pay membership for alexa? they dont give the traffic numbers... only the ranking
are there any other sites for gathering the traffic data

yeh i saw this video last night


----------



## fender967 (Sep 28, 2007)

No I don't pay membership for Alexa, but I know that if, for example, my site has an Alexa ranking of 100k and I get 4000 unique visits per day, and several other sites with public counters who are also ranked ~100K display that they too receive around 4000 unique visits per day, that is roughly how much traffic a website at 100k gets. 

You see and check enough sites and you can make a pretty good rough estimate of a site just based on its Alexa ranking.

There is no website that has realistic traffic numbers for all sites because they don't have access to track them unless a website lets them. Quantcast.com offers something like this where website owners sign up and put their tracker up to allow them to collect real traffic stats, but unfortunately even that isn't too accurate.


----------

