Matt Marshall of the Merc blogs about Zazzle - Kleiner Perkins' latest investment (along with Ram Shriram). Zazzle seems to be doing the same thing that Cafepress has been doing for a number of years. They were founded in '99 and launched in '03 -- did it really take that long for them to build the system? I wonder how they plan on competing with Cafepress and others. Also, as the person in the comments section notes, Zazzle are offering a flat 10% of revenues to their sellers vs. cafepress where sellers can set their own prices subject to some minimums. OTOH, they have an interesting angle in getting museums and other institutions to use the IP from their collections to sell branded products.
While I haven't yet used Zazzle, I'm a big fan of what Maheesh Jain, his co-founder and the rest of the Cafepress team have accomplished. I love their model and their service has been good. When we were considering a merch solution at Live365, our broadcasters recommended we look into Cafepress (this was in '00 or so); and they were right. I remember one of my first experiences with Maheesh was his offering to pick up some boxes of Live365 T-shirts we had on hand on his way to work so that we wouldn't have to pay to ship them to their warehouse (which was across the bay in Emeryville). Now that's service.
Anyway, I'll watch Zazzle with interest, and congrats to them for getting such blue chip investors. They must be doing something right.
Is this a publically traded company yet and if not when is this anticipated?
Posted by: Ed | July 19, 2005 at 04:48 AM