A Crowdsourced Photo Mascot T-Shirt To Raise $10,000 for Japan Relief

April 6, 2011 @ 12:23PM

A Crowdsourced Photo Mascot T-Shirt To Raise $10,000 for Japan Relief

A Kickstarter Project To Raise Money With a Photography Twist

By David Schloss

Topics
News > New Products & Announcements

We’re working on a new idea for a fundraiser for Japanese disaster relief via a t-shirt project and we need your help. The long version is below but here’s the short version: t-shirts with the Photographic.ly mascot on it, a Japanese Maneki Neko (Lucky Cat) with a camera taking a photo.

We're trying to get the printing cost raised via Kickstarter then if we hit the goal 100% of proceeds from shirt sales goes to the Red Cross. The shirts will sell for $20 and so with our 500+ shirt run we'd raise $10,000 for the Red Cross.

A few weeks ago one of the Pixiq readers had a spirited series of comments about our donation as part of our wristband sales, and while his numbers weren't accurate his point was great, that everyone wants to do more. This can do much, much more.

We’ve just launched our first Kickstarter project, and it’s for our Photo Cat T-shirt. You can help us fund this project, get a shirt and help Japan all at the same time.

What’s Kickstarter? It’s a great site that’s dedicated to raising funding for all sorts of creative projects. People contribute and when a goal is met the funding goes to the project. If the goal’s not met, the funding gets returned. It’s a great way to, well kickstart something.

We’re developing this shirt as a fundraiser for Japan disaster relief. Kickstarter doesn’t allow you to do fundraising through the site, so the Kickstarter item is just for the production run of the shirts.

The way this helps Japan disaster relief is simple though—we’re going to give the net profits of this run of the shirts to the International Red Cross. If the project gets funded, the costs of the shirts is covered, and if that happens then the complete proceeds of the shirt goes to relief efforts. (If the project doesn’t get funded we’re still going to do the shirts, we just will have to pay up front, which means we will have to order fewer, the costs will be higher and there will be less back to relief.) efforts.

Help us fund this project and you’ll be ensuring a greater return goes to disaster relief. And you still get a shirt (and some other premiums).

We came up with this Photo Cat mascot for the relaunch of the Photographic.ly site.After we made the mascott we decided to put him (her/it) on a t-shirt to wear at our booth at SXSW. We did a short run of digital prints.

We were completely blown away by the requests for the shirts. We kept getting asked about the design. Since the shirts were digital printed they were expensive and hot. The digital process puts down a thick layer of ink—okay for a trade show, not so good to wear daily.

Luckily the folks from Jakprints were there as well and when they saw the shirts they told us they could do them as a 10-color simulated spot shirt on American Apparel and do them cheaper than digital printing.

Soft, durable shirts with silkscreening? Sign us up.

We thought instantly of Kickstarter. What better way to fund a project that was crowdsourced into being than by appealing to the creative community here. As soon as the project hits its mark, the shirts will be ordered and 1-2 weeks later they’ll head out to people who support this project.

So we’re raising the funds needed to produce these shirts in a quantity large enough to make them a product. We’ll add them to the gear we sell on our Photographic.ly site.