Project Plan 1.6

Looking at online POD first I need to look into alternatives to Cafepress and boost my images or redraw my images, in fact for a fresh start I will do that. So now to brainstorm any ideas. Cafepress seems to lean heavily to the US market and many of the items feature college football, army or military themes ‘support our boys’ etc. This doesn’t interest me and they say stick to what you know and your strengths so computer/geek themes spring to mind. Here I need to say a little about copyright and Intellectual Property or IP. It is very hard to think of an image, phrase or logo that doesn’t have some influence from popular culture, however I wish to avoid this, my idea is not to steal others ideas or ride on the back of their IP. This does make it very hard to come up with an image others will buy as they are heavily influenced by popular culture. If you think of The Big Bang Theory, it’s spot on in the computer /geek field I’m aiming for but it’s not my idea or property, but The Big Bang Theory wouldn’t be as popular itself without all the references to popular culture. The characters in the series often refer to Nintendo, Xbox and PlayStation consoles. They often talk about specific games characters like Mario, Princess Peach, to Disney IP such as Snow White, Sleeping beauty. Star Trek, Star Wars and often Marvel and DC super heroes. Without these specific references to IP that we know and love we wouldn’t get half of the jokes and we wouldn’t feel as connected to the characters as we do. If they referred to generic hero characters or generic consoles we wouldn’t bond with the characters and respond as we do. So to take that all away and start from scratch, without any such references is hard. You are effectively ruling out most of popular culture, movies, TV, comics, books and many other references that the majority of people will respond to

So we need to start from scratch and think of something new. I don’t want to just search for popular designs and the rip them off, plus I probably couldn’t do any better on American college football bumper stickers so best to try and think of something fresh

I’ve also decided to aim for the pricier products, as I’m currently on a 10 percent flat rate on Cafepress there is little profit in the cheaper products. You would need to sell a lot of bumper stickers and keychains to make a decent profit, if I was aiming for something very popular that would walk out the door like college football stickers that would be ok but I’m not. Therefore I need quality graphics on quality products. Shower curtains and clocks are at the upper end of the price scale retailer around $20 to $30 or more, that brings in a more reasonable rate of return and something I can be more excited about when a sale goes through