Pixiq

First, businesses aren't required to donate anything to anyone, so the fact that we're donating a portion of a product's revenue is greater than many businesses are doing. $0 of the piece of pizza I had today for lunch went to disaster relief. If they told me they were going to give $.50 to the Red Cross—and not change the price—I'd have been happier.

We didn't design the bands as a fundraiser, and never said we did. The article says

"We launched our f/stop wristbands in February and they’ve been a huge hit. We’ve gotten lots of requests for an all-white version, and those just came in. We’re also now giving fifty cents from each wrist band sold to help the disaster relief efforts in Japan via the American Red Cross."

*We're also now..." In other words, we've decided to make less on these and give some to relief efforts. We didn't design these as being only a fundraiser, and we don't market them that way. We happen to be selling these (because that's what our site does, we sell things) and we're giving some of the money from them to the Red Cross.

We've already collected $300 for the Red Cross since we started offering the donation. Before these raised money for the Red Cross funds were going to the ASPCA and we raised $300 for them.

We're currently developing a t-shirt project that will have 100% of the net proceeds go to disaster relief. We've made that a kickstarter project to pay for the printing of the shirts (Kickstarter doesn't allow you to do fundraisers) and when that's covered, the whole net of the shirt will be for Red Cross. That will be between $5000 and $10000 of donation to the Red Cross depending on whether the Kickstarter project is successful.

It would be the "end of story" if you were right.

First of all, you're incorrect on the unit cost. Price a 6 color bracelet produced from one of the companies that doesn't use arsenic in their bands. It's six color because the charge is for the bracelet color plus the colors in the Nikon style bands. Now pay for 4000 pieces of each type out of your pocket before selling them, because that's what we do.

Now if all we did was sell two wristbands, you'd be closer to accurate. I could sit in my underwear all day and watch Oprah season 25 and eat Cheetos and just occasionally put something in a bag.

Net profit is a calculation not just of gross profit-unit cost, but gross profit-minus all associated cost of operation.

Photographic.ly is part of MacCreate, which means that it's one of several sites we run. We've got a staff that does shipping and fulfillment of the few dozen SKUs we carry. Each day we have between 1-3 people (depending on how much volume we have in a week) packing, answering customer service issues, restocking inventory, etc.

On the MacCreate side there are 6 people who write for us on a freelance basis, all producing content that's free to the end user, but which we pay for. There isn't a cost to read our sites, and there is more than 4 years of information there.

The shipping department has on hand currently more than 2000 envelopes/boxes/bags for the various products, a car-sized container of packing materials (most of which we reclaim from inbound shipments) 2 computers, three printers, 10 shelves and an industrial dehumidifier to keep the contents in the rooms at low humidity. And we're about to pick up a new shipping storage area for some products we're going to distribute. So that's rent and utilities at two locations.

We've got two servers and a video production station to make the content for MacCreate, and two Drobos for backup.

Oh, don't forget advertising, we have a few campaigns running for the wristbands, so that's another few hundred dollars a month.

When it's all accounted for (and I know, because I sign off on the accounting) the profit on each band comes out to be about $2.50. And of that we're giving $.50 away.

Now, I don't care personally if you don't want to buy a wristband, and I don't care if you think we're not giving enough to relief efforts. Personally I've "quietly" given quite a bit of money, and not-quietly we're going to be doing much larger projects that are specifically fundraisers.

But don't besmirch me because you think that it's not enough. At the same time you're complaining about the fact that we're giving something we don't have to give and being open about how much of it's we're giving (instead of saying "some proceeds")

Starbucks had a 10.7Billion dollar gross revenue in 2010. They're giving 1.2M to disaster relief. That's great, right, lots of media attention, a note up in every Starbucks I've been in. Probably nothing to sneeze at. That's a million frigging dollars. But that's four cents per latte. FOUR CENTS.

I'm glad you found a place to make a one-off wristband. I wish you'd simply donated quietly though.

But look at those numbers. That's .0112%

Hey C36. While you and I disagreed on the numbers involved here, we've taken a few of your comments to heart.

We're trying to raise $10,000 for Red Cross now. That's a big chunk of change. 100% of proceeds to donation, if the project launches. (If it doesn't get funded, we'll do 100% of net profit, but have to pay for the shirts ourselves, so that'll drop it to $3000-5000, still a good bit of money.)

Check it out

http://www.pixiq.com/article/a-crowdsourced-photo-mascot-t-shirt-to-rais...