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So what does that mean to us, and “who are us”?
Well, we are the entrepreneurs who are feeding our families (and often stray animals in my case) and make our living selling our wares on the Internet.
I now own a number of e-commerce businesses, and they do very well, but I learned something along the way (from our customers) that now seems important to me, and I had to be flexible to make changes to accommodate them. Many of my own customers want to sell my products, but don't necessarily want to be an affiliate. Affiliation is either confusing to them, degrading, reminds them of MLM, or a thousand other reasons (and many of them valid) for not wanting to go that route.
They want to sell my products on Ebay. I can understand the psychological and emotional advantages of that. It is for a variety of reasons. It offers them more control. They want to buy wholesale from me and sell retail there (or close to it). They, like me, want to live “the American dream”, and part of that dream, these days, it seems, can consist of a. not answering to a boss b. working at home in jogging suit or pajamas c. not working on commission but having control of purchases d. the ability not to have to handle inventory but drop ship. In other words they want their only investment to be their membership and listing fees on Ebay.
“Ok,” I decided. I can live with that. I enjoy shopping on Ebay too, or one of the shopping channels like Shop.com or Mysimon.com or Shopzilla. They are all fun and unique and it's great to be able to compare prices and such.
So finally, after 10 years in the “cartoon trade” or “image licensing” (and publishing), I decided to take my images wholesale. But I waited until I could find a manufacturer who could make the clothing, not just the funny t-shirts, but all kinds of clothes, high quality and low cost. It took four years of searching.
Now our firm has the ability to sell one or ten thousand of the same items wholesale, and drop ship them at no cost to our clients. It is our “brand” and we can offer unique images on the clothes that nobody else can, very similarly to Ralph Lauren exclusively offering the Polo emblem, except our emblem(s) happen to be single panel cartoons.
This has been done, of course on tees, sweatshirts, and caps, and yes, we do that too, but in addition, we decided to do our own line of “designer cartoon-wear”; which I don't think has ever been done before, at least not to my knowledge. We can produce items for men, women and children and have them out the door priority mail worldwide within 24 hours. Not bad. And offering a 30 day unconditional guarantee doesn't hurt either.
Adding these extra values makes people want to buy more often from you. We have clients from Peoria to Italy (all reselling on shopping channels, Ebay, and from their own E-commerce websites.
It really feels good knowing I am able to sell a product line that nobody else has, and sell they enjoy it enough to resell it and make a good profit.