PoD 1.3

After returning from holiday to a blank Merch sales report that was a little disappointing. Also I’d had a product removed due to alleged copyright infringement, now I say alleged because I’d done my homework and checked there was no copyright. The image I used was a meme on the Parental Advisory logo which being merely  black and white bars with text was deemed as not sufficiently unique to be copyright. Here is a lesson that applies to all POD sites, if there is a complaint, rightly or wrongly they will take your product down, this is because it’s not worth their while, for your little product, to argue and have a potential lawsuit and the costs associated with that. Now this doesn’t bother me, I had an product taken down before due to having a Steve McQueen image on it, as he was one of my childhood heroes and an ardent motorcycle fan as I was in my youth I decided to make a product in his honour, I created my own image, not wanting to steal others Intellectual property or fall foul of copyright and thought that ok. However I didn’t realise that although sadly Mr McQueen is deceased he, or rather his estate, still own his image and the rights to it. Apparently all celebrities, living or dead, own the rights to their image, the exception is public figures such as politicians who apparently are fair game! The product was taken down and fair enough I broke the rules and don’t want to make any money off the back of others peoples IP, the same with the Parental Advisory product, I didn’t agree with the verdict in this case but no point in wasting time and effort arguing the point I’ll just create something more unique and definitely my IP

This is something I’ve made the decision to do, create unique, genuinely creative IP that I can own, protect and promote with pride. I could resort to memes or churn out ‘Worlds 2nd best sister ‘ T-Shirts, mugs etc and probably make money but it’s not how I want to proceed. Nor do I want to trick people into buying my products, sneakily inserting them into Reddit channels with posts like ‘wow I like this T!’ and then placing a link to my own product, I know this happens and good luck to those that use this creative marketing strategy but it’s not for me

So Amazon Merch isn’t working, I need to swap out these designs for something more on-trend or market the ones on Merch more actively, or rather at all! I’m currently looking at more on-trend designs as I’d rather this was more passive than aggressive income, but as stated I don’t want to resort to memes and flash trends so I’m currently fighting the urge to create T’s with pineapples or flamingoes which are everywhere at the moment