t-shirt candidate

[Martin P. Hellwig]

justin at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
<cut>
Cafepress is low-effort, but they charge a significant base cost.  Even if
you aren't looking for any significant profit, it's still going to be
pricey for the buyer, especially for sales across the ocean.  (Do they do
international shipping?  I don't recall.)
They do handle international shipping (otherwise I could not get my own
shirts, that would suck ;-) )
The way that lets you charge the smallest price and/or make profit is to
get the shirts printed in a large quantity (>100) at a local print shop.
Thats a problem of living in the Netherlands, stuff is *expensive* here
and I have not found a printshop handling my demands at a reasonable
price.
You get to see the quality of the print before it goes out, and you have
stock you can sell at conventions.  You can probably get it printed on
more types of material than you can at cafepress, believe it or not.
That is indeed a big pro

The downside is that you have to outlay some money for the inital print
run, and you have to handle mailing yourself.  Cafepress will work if you
have the volume to offset the margins, and I don't think the user base for
BSD is really big enough yet.
Well, the thing is I like to do about 4 variations , 2 for shirts and 2
for polo, Cafepress let you do that when you take a premium account.
The price difference between selling it at a break-even price at
cafepress.com and printing it yourself with a small profit is probably
going to be more than US$10.  It all depends on how much time you have.
A quick search in the Netherlands suggest that cafepress is cheaper to
print, but mucho more in shipping, don't know about the quality though,
prices here in NL are quite comparible with cafeepress only we pay in
euros what US pays in dollars.
Perhaps somebody on this list knows some good printshops in cheaper
countries? Western Europe is to expensive for this stuff, as even
cafeepress is cheaper then local printshops.
Thanks for taking your time.

--
mph