$10 T-Shirts, Not Quite As Often
Posted by Vanir at 10:35 PM
We've got good news and bad news about our weekly T-shirts. The bad news is that we're not going to have them every single week anymore. The good news is that we're now offering shirts for $10 (plus shipping) apiece. Just in time for you to buy one for your favorite nerd this holiday season!
There's several reasons for these changes. One is that in the whole time we've been up, we've sold a grand total of three (3) shirts. Two of them were to Yax from DungeonMastering. With that single order, Yax became responsible for the vast majority of this site's income (which, if I'm not mistaken, is about to crest $3). Thanks, Yax!!!!
What I'm trying to say here is, we're not moving any shirts. Cafepress's base prices on shirts are really insanely high, so to order any shirts we were offering you'd have to shell out almost $30. And we'd see maybe $2 of it. So we've gone with a cheaper shirt (their "value" t-shirt, which isn't quite as thick as the ones we've been selling but still nice), and only marked it up a buck so maybe we can have a little money to blow at Gen Con next year.
Since we're not moving any shirts, we're also starting to wonder how much interest there is in them. A look at our site stats shows very little activity in the shop (and no sales). We've all got a lot on our plates right now, so we've decided our time might be better spent on doing the things on the site we know people come for: that is, good quality articles and comics.
Not to say that there will be no more new t-shirts. They're still fun to make, and I think I might do a little dance and make a girlish squeal if I ever saw a random person wearing one at a convention. We will be making new t-shirts. However, we'll be doing them a lot more sporadically.
If it seems like the winds of change are starting to blow a little around here, you're probably right. When we first launched and were trying to get the word out about the site, we had several bloggers tell us "great site, hope you keep it up because a lot of them peter out". I think we're starting to see why that is, it's so easy to go at this full bore for a month or two and then get exhausted (especially when Real Life starts getting in the way). But everyone here thinks we'll be OK -- and the main reasons why are that we're starting to get a feel for what people are looking for, setting realistic expectations of what we can do, and adjusting accordingly.
It might be a little bumpy sometimes, but we'll still be here giving you something to waste your time on at work and improve your gaming experience. Thanks for reading!
P.S. every time you buy a t-shirt you save a baby owlbear from a grisly doom
Labels: rpgbloggers, shirt of the week
