CafePress Premium Store Updates

It has been an exhausting week. First off, today is the day of Mongo’s birth…..which I’ve been trying to fly under the radar with but still people find out and wish me a Happy Birthday. Not that I mind, but I try not to be too outgoing on this day because I may not be in a good mood and why dash someone’s well wishes with my wishy washy well being?

That being said, my wife thinks that I am obsessed with the new store. Well, it’s hard to get up and running, especially during a trial period, so that you can maximize any selling opportunities before they start charging you for your premium store.

On a positive note, I sold another shirt. This little number was inspired by those Spencer Gifts tees with 13 different pictures depicting an act or emotion of the character like Anger, Hunger, Happy, etc. Mix that with the Zombie theme and you basically get the same picture for each mood.

I had to include ennui as it is just too funny to think of a zombie that way.

Now, I added that design on March 3rd and within 2 days, I sold one. Again, I don’t make that much off of each shirt, but it helps boost the visibility of the design early on and will maybe generate more sales. It came from the “Marketplace” which means someone searched a keyword that led them to my shirt, rather than they stumbled into my store and bought something off the rack, as it were.

In that regard, I’ve done some rework on the store, finally. I used the basic template and structure to get things up and running, but as I add designs and products for those designs, I find myself having a hard time managing all these products in one place. Now, being in the job I currently am, I am very conscious towards scrolling and clicks to the center of a tootsie pop. If someone searches CafePress for keywords that lead to my items, so be it, but that is only half the battle. You might also get people wandering into your store and the further they are from a selection means the further you are from a sale. If you have some good marketing skills you can drive customers into your store from outside CafePress’ website. In that case, the better your organization is, the better you can fight a two front battle.

When I first opened the store, I wasn’t thinking ahead. Oh, I’ll throw up a couple of designs and add some shirts and that’s it. But what I found was that you need to constantly be thinking and working ideas to see which produces results. If you have a niche store, selling unique designs, you probably don’t have to do as much work. Simply add a new design every so often, throw it on some products and wait. But, if your brain is constantly going, like mine, you want to try and capture everything. Hey, I just thought of a funny design, I need to go work on that. Soon, you have 15 designs. Oooh, I want that to be in different colors for the dark shirts. Take those 15 designs and multiply by that by how many colors you want to display.

Here’s a prime example. I have a store section called, “Insert Coin.” This is basically where I’ve put all my designs that are based on or inspired by video games. Being a child of the Atari Age, I thought it would be cool to capture some of those pop culture kernels of cheesy goodness and “make some shirt.” I had three ideas which I thought were clever. So far, I’ve only gotten to one. The other two are going to be awhile, because my first design spawned three more related designs and three colors for each.

Based off the old Adventure game, I put the dragons on individual shirts. Clean and simple recreations drawn on a transparent background should be easy. Let’s face it, the Atari was not that advanced, recreating a blocky dragon that looks like a duck is easy. However, there are three distinct dragons in the game, Yellow – Yorgle, Green – Grindle, and Red- Rhindle. Now, I have three colored designs on 15 or so shirts. Then, the other two designs I had for the dragons had to be produced the same way. Now, my section was very crowded with all these dragon shirts and my poor Keytar Hero shirts were lost in the shuffle. Rearranging the store to stagger the designs on each style shirt style caused any customer to have to scroll through a lot of dragons to find a Keytar Hero shirt that they may want.

Rhindle, the meanest of all three dragons.

This is where my work experience comes in to play. If I break up the section into designs. I can then have the front of the Insert Coin section showcase the individual design. If they click on that design, they can go to a section of those products and instead of scrolling through multiple designs, now they are scrolling through multiple products with the same design. In essence, I’ve created a basic shop all over again and imported it into a premium hierarchy. Remember, in your basic shops, you are allowed one design per product but multiple products per one design. I can’t believe I didn’t see this concept sooner. If I were to create different basic shops, like I used to, I would follow the same pattern. So, if I follow that model, managing my products will be a lot easier.

Now, whenever I come up with an idea for a shirt, I build the section, first. Add a design to the section and then import all of the shirt styles from another section. This keeps me from having to go through and choose each one the list. Then, I can now check all and change the name, description, and image on the shirts in bulk. With each section devoted to a design instead of a theme, this frees me from having to scroll down through 30 or so shirts checking which ones I want to change. It also makes it easier to manage the markups and color choices. Some designs don't work well on dark shirts, so I have to go back and choose those to change the image to an inverted color scheme so that they'll show up. This came into play with my Wii-knee shirts. Apparently, there is a report that Wii related injuries have been cropping up involving gamers' knees. How could I resist?

The drawn outline shows up OK on a white t-shirt.


But it would have been lost on a dark shirt, so an inverted image is used.


Just in case, I also included a design with just the phrase.

That's all for now. I still have many designs to try and get into the store, but I am just about out of trial time, so the quicker the better. Now, I'm paying $5.00 a month and as of today, I have about three months paid up with sales. Hopefully, soon, a profit will be made. More later.

Yorgle, Grundle, and Rhindle, oh my!

Part One of a Series entitled, All Your Free Time Are Belong to Us

Imagine if you will, it's Christmas morning in the year 1980 and you're five years old. The year has been somewhat good to you. You're still riding high on the fact that the Steelers won the Super Bowl despite their 9-7 season for this year. The U.S. was beginning to feel patriotic again with the "Miracle on Ice" during the Olympic Winter Games and you were still giddy and confused by the declaration that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father. "But they don't have the same last name." Still, all this aside, nothing enthralls you more than running downstairs to see the plethora of presents that Santa has left you. What did Santa bring me this year? I hope I get more Legos and Star Wars action figures. Maybe, just maybe, we'll get an Atari this year.


You see, video games have been a huge part of my life and this Christmas was nearly met with disappointment as I had finished opening all my gifts but no Atari was to be found. Suddenly, as if it were straight out of A Christmas Story, my parents said there was at least one more for the three of us kids, all the way at the back of the tree. We feverishly opened the big honking box, mystified at what could be inside. It was an Atari 2600! Well, to be truthful, it was the Sears Tele-Games version that included Target Fun instead of Combat. Additionally, they bought us three games to go with it. They were Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Maze Craze. As the ColecoVision and Intellivison consoles became available I lusted for one these as well because the quality of games where perceived to be superior. Since my parents were unwilling to buy me another 2nd Gen console, I opted to just make the best of my Atari and hold out for hopes that the graphics would get better than a square chasing a dot around the screen. I simply became creative with what I had. I would trade games back and forth with friends constantly rotating my stock. It was a frugal effort that kept me from having to buy more 4 bit titles which mostly did not provide much content or replay value as others. Where graphics lacked, I found enjoyment in compelling game structure. My favorite game to this day is Adventure. It offered the first "easter egg" in the form of a credits screen and had a level that randomized locations of objects and monsters allowing for a greater replay value as the game could be different every time.

Alas, my ownership of this game was short lived. It disappeared sometime between 1983 and 1984. To this day I maintain that it was in my house the entire time, having slipped into another dimension through a worm hole located in a chair in our living room. The ratty piece of furniture had a tear somewhere under the seat cushion and I believe that the game fell down between the cushions and was lost forever, along with one of my Lego men, and my math homework from third grade. Honest, Mrs. Kofsky, I swear I did the assignment. It just disappeared from my Trapper Keeper.

For seven years I played that Atari even though the console had declined in popularity and eventually died off around 1983-84 due to the underwhelming appeal of piss poor titles and saturation of the market by every Tom, Dick, and Quaker who wanted to cash in on the craze by stealing programmers from each other to establish lucrative gaming divisions. With the advent of home computers, and computers in the classroom, sales moved away from game consoles and found their way into Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' pockets. In the past few years I acquired another Atari 2600 while cleaning out the house of my wife's grandmother. Right now it's sitting in my garage collecting dust as I have no place for it or do I have the hookups to make it work on any of my televisions. My own Atari, I believe, is sitting in storage at Dad's office as is most other things of my childhood. Now having access to two consoles, I may consider selling one on eBay if I find it a worth while venture. In any case, I still do play Atari titles, although, they are in the form of ROM images used on an emulator called PCAE. This way, once in awhile, I can still go chasing after a dot with my red square and with only one button, there's no confusion as to how to slay the dragon. If only all of my life was that simple. Think of it, anytime I get the blue screen of death, I need to just blow on my computer as if it were a cartridge and voila, problem solved.

My Top 5 Best and Worst 2nd Gen Console games.

The Best

1. Adventure (Atari 2600)
2. Pitfall! and Pitfall II (Atari 2600) Jack Black once did a commercial for Pitfall!
3. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (Intellivision)
4. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Atari 2600)
5. River Raid (Atari 2600)

The Worst

1. E.T. (Atari 2600) Is there any wonder why there are thousands of copies buried in New Mexico?
2. Pac-Man (Atari 2600 port) Horrible graphics and little similarity to the original. Reason 2 for the Game Crash of 83.
3. Smurfs: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle (ColecoVison) Sure, the music was good. But, if you walked into a picket fence or a blade of grass, you died. Come on!
4. Swordquest: Earthworld (Atari 2600) Another popular adventure game, but extremely boring and difficult
5. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Atari 2600) Loved the movie but a one player game that required the use of both controllers and lacked half of the movie's elements meant "Welcome to sucktown, population you."

Honorable Mention

1. Cosmic Avenger (ColecoVision)
2. Circus Atari (Atari 2600) Highly addictive Breakout style game. Clown deaths are kewl.
3. Warlords (Atari 2600)
4. Yars' Revenge (Atari 2600)
5. Haunted House (Atari 2600) Simply a derivative of Adventure in a 4 level mansion but offered more difficulty.
6. Frogs and Flies (Atari 2600) I know this makes six, but I had to add this silly game because it just simplified everything to spending the day eating flies. How cool is that?