Teespring
Teespring is an e-commerce platform that allows people to create and sell products online. The company was founded by Walker Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton in 2011 in Providence, Rhode Island. Teespring's platform aims to make selling custom apparel easier. As of 2014, the company had raised $55 million in venture capital from Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
Business model
Individuals create campaigns in order to sell custom products on Teespring. Campaign creators are expected to design and market the product themselves. In exchange, Teespring fulfills orders on campaigns that have reached their sales goal, and will ship item to buyers.Teespring handles the production and distribution of the products, and customer service for products.
Products are printed or manufactured in various screen-printing facilities. Teespring offers various apparel such as T-shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts, leggings and children's wear.
History
According to founders Williams and Stites-Clayton, the inspiration for Teespring came in the spring of 2011 when the two wanted to sell T-shirts to commemorate the closing of a local bar. Rather than investing in a bulk order of shirts in various sizes, the Brown University seniors created their website in August 2011 where interested parties could submit pre-orders with their size and payment. The payment information would only be processed if they collected a minimum of 200 orders.Over 400 shirts were sold, and the two were able to process the buyers' payment information and successfully fulfill the orders. After receiving numerous requests from other organizations asking for a custom campaign, Walker and Evan decided to pursue the concept of crowd-funded custom apparel full-time.
Rhode Island angel investors Bill Cesare and Mark Weiner invested the first $600,000 in seed funding. The company officially launched in October 2012 in Providence, Rhode Island.
In November 2014, the company announced closing its Series B funding round at $35 million from Khosla Ventures to continue to fuel its growth and expansion, which includes the addition of a new facility in Kentucky that's expected to create hundreds of jobs next year. Andreessen also participated in the round.
Growth
In October 2012, the company announced they had reached over $500,000 in monthly sales. In March 2013, the company reported $750,000 in monthly revenue and a 50% month-over-month growth rate.In December 2013, Teespring was accepted into the start-up accelerator Y-Combinator which is based in Mountain View, California. Within two weeks of finishing the three-month accelerator, Teespring raised another $1.3 million including $500,000 from Sam Altman, then president at Y-Combinator.
In January 2014, Teespring closed a Series A round of $20 million from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen partner Laars Dalgaard, formerly of SuccessFactors, led the investment, his first with the firm.
In November 2014, Teespring raised a Series B round of $35 million from venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, with partner Keith Rabois joining the company's board.
As of 2015, Teespring had 220 employees in the United States. In 2015 they laid off their entire Providence, Rhode Island, staff.
Criticism
From 2016 to present, Teespring has been under investigation and has been notified to cease & desist the production and sale of illegal Smokey Bear T-shirts. The firm has chosen to ignore repeated letters to cease the sale of "Resist" T-shirts and the illegal use of Smokey Bear's image. This matter is unresolved.In May 2017, Teespring caused controversy by selling T-shirts that featured the words, "Black Women Are Trash," resulting in many Twitter users calling for a boycott of the platform. Teespring's director of seller success, Brett Miller, responded, "Once we learned of the error we immediately took steps to remove all content in question and ban the offending seller from our platform. We have since fixed the issue."
In August 2017, Teespring was blamed for selling products claiming to "reclaim" the swastika, considered a symbol of hate. KA Design listed rainbow swastika designs on Teespring in an attempt to rebrand the contested symbol used by the Nazis. Jewish groups called for a boycott of Teespring following news of the controversial products.
In November 2017, Walmart removed a shirt bearing the words "Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required" from its website, following a complaint from Radio Television Digital News Association, a journalist advocacy group. The shirt was listed on Walmart's website through Teespring. Time magazine reported that at the time, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, there had been 35 physical attacks on journalists so far in 2017.
In April 2018, the company came under fire for providing items for sale that celebrated Dylann Roof, a neo-nazi mass murderer.
In June 2018, an article by Alex Dalbey in The Daily Dot detailed criticism on social media of Teespring for pulling a line of T-shirts featuring the term "TERFs". The most notable design stated "Fuck TERFs". Teespring said the T-shirt "violates our Hate Speech section of our acceptable use policy".
In 2018, a Women's March spokesperson told CNN that "many of these fake pages are used to sell merchandise, with the proceeds benefiting individuals instead of our movement. The efforts to capitalize on movement work isn't new, but it is frustrating, particularly as we make an effort to only sell ethically sourced and produced merchandise — a rule these imposter pages don't abide by."
Following the death of Caroline Flack in February 2020, Teespring received criticism for selling counterfeit versions of the "Be Kind" t-shirts created by Leigh Francis to raise money for mental health charity The Samaritans. Teespring received criticism for allowing the sale of the counterfeit t-shirts to go ahead, preventing the charity from receiving funds.