Every business needs to have their own logo merchandise but who wants to think about purchasing large quantities from a screen printer or other provider to just have it sit around in the garage. If you haven’t yet heard of it, there’s a great company out there called CafePress that allows you to put your images onto their merchandise mix and sell it (or buy it) from their website. You can get a free store or pay about $5 a month for a premium shop which you can make look exactly like your website.

You don’t pay anything for the merchandise, you just add your designs and mark up the price depending on how much money you want to receive (If you’re buying for yourself, you just pay the base price of each item). So for example, if the base price on a t-shirt is $13.99 and you sell it for $$18.99 you keep $5 off each purchase. Some may say that’s not very much but as a former screen printer myself, I know the amount of effort it takes to get shirts printed. You a minimum order amount, setup fees, and a huge loss if nothing sells.

CafePress offers everything from t-shirts and sweatshirts to bumper stickers, books, cds and yard signs. Here’s a list of some great ideas you can do with CafePress to promote your business:

• Open a shop to sell logo merchandise to your customers. Don’t just put your logo on the t-shirts, make them unique and graphical so people will WANT to wear them. Did I mention with a premium shop you can add as many designs as you want for free? This lets you have fun and experiment with different designs.
• Buy small ticket items to give away to your customers. Stickers, magnets and buttons can be bought in bulk so you save money.
• Create custom items targeted at specific customer groups. Since there are no minimums you can create custom mugs targeted at just your ballet students vs your jazz class.
• CafePress also offers custom printing. Make custom Greeting Cards or Postcards to promote your business.  Did I mention no minimums? So again, you can create several designs to target customers.
• Create a company calendar and send to your top clients or have in your place of business.
• Outfit yourself in logo merchandise (shirt, bag, hat) so that everyone sees your name, and url when your around town. Throw on a bumper sticker as well.
• Host a design contest and let your customers create the “next” shirt design. Award them with a shirt of their own (that promotes your business).
• Did I mention the amount of traffic CafePress gets? You can promote your designs in their marketplace and actually make money off them. Getting hits to your store doesn’t hurt your search engine ranking either when you have back links to your company website.

Chekout the quick store we setup for Idaho Web Solutions. We went with the free basic shop and only added a limited number of shirts to begin with. Took less than 10 minutes and now I can go buy one for myself to promote my company and website.