The t-shirt that inspired Teespring. Teespring
When police raided and shut down a bar popular among Brown University students, Walker Williams and his friend did what a lot of college students do when trying to rally people around a cause: they designed a t-shirt.
The pair didn’t have enough money to actually order a batch of the shirts for those intent on protesting the bar’s closing, so they put up a one-page website promising they’d print the shirts if they got enough pre-orders. They did, and three years later, the two don’t have to worry so much about not having enough money.
Apparently, the bar they tried to save remains closed, but Williams and his friend, Evan Stites-Clayton, were inspired enough by their protest t-shirt to create Teespring, a t-shirt design and sales service that just landed $35 million in venture capital funding—and that’s on top of the more than $21 million in financing the company has already received.
For Williams, the company really isn’t about t-shirts. The point, he says, is to get the logistics out of the way of entrepreneurial inspiration. “It should be as easy to bring a product to market as it is to have a great idea,” he says. “The best ideas should win, not just the ones with access to capital.”
In many ways, this is the story of online commerce: eliminating overhead. Think about Amazon cutting out the brick-and-mortar store, or Airbnb serving up any room as a de facto hotel. Williams believes Teespring is doing the same by eliminating the cost of scaling up manufacturing from the entrepreneurial equation. To streamline the process even further, the company is preparing to open a 110,000-square-foot production facility in northern Kentucky run by the former head of fulfillment at Zappos, the online shoe seller now owned by Amazon.
The Spread of Microbrands
To smooth the path from idea to t-shirt, Teespring is designed to eliminate risk for the would-be seller. Someone with an idea for a t-shirt can upload a design, set the price, and start taking pre-orders. The key is that the t-shirts won’t be printed until the seller hits a minimum pre-order threshold.
But Teespring itself has apparently hit such a high volume that the minimum has become extremely low. The company has shipped 6 million t-shirts, Williams says, and a seller can set the threshold as low as five pre-orders for a t-shirt to go into production.
Keith Rabois, who led this latest investment round for Khosla Ventures, says Teespring’s model is enabling “microbrands” to proliferate: products tailored to individual identities and affinities rather than the mass market.
“Human affiliations tend to bond around t-shirts,” Rabois says. “Though it looks superficially simple, t-shirts are incredibly important in the emotional impact they have.”
Proving A Hypothesis
Out of these microbrands, Williams says, his company is creating opportunity for micro-entrepreneurs, some of whom appear to be on their way to becoming the macro variety. Hundreds of sellers earn six figures on Teespring, he says, and more than ten have become millionaires.
As it works to get on-demand t-shirt design, production, and sales down to a science, Teespring is also preparing to branch out into other products. Williams won’t reveal what comes next, but he says t-shirts are just a template.
“I think Teespring has very little to do with t-shirts,” Williams repeats. Instead, he says, the motto around the company is that t-shirts are to Teespring what books were to the first iteration of Amazon. “They’re a way of proving a hypothesis.”
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