I get two kinds of emails every single week. The first from flash sale sites knocking off the Fab model. The second from companies offering to sell my designs on a myriad of “cool products” they manufacture. Phone cases, Tshirts, skateboards, yoga mats, you name it. The pitch is usually something along the lines of “you give us your art, we’ll put it on this great stuff and sell it on our site, and you get money from each sale!”
In theory this may sound enticing. I can take something that already exists, give it to them to sell, and make a cut? Awesome! Except it never is. I’ve tried it once or twice, and here’s the problem:
- Will anyone actually buy it? These sites are volume based. They need to sell mountains of iPhone cases to make a profit. So they’ve contacted every single artist they can find to give them work. Your stuff may be exceptional, but it is buried under 1000 other images. There’s a good chance that nobody is ever even going to see it, let alone buy enough of them that you get a real check. Traditionally companies contract a handful of artists to design their products and then they push those designs. For instance “Here are 12 iPhone cases, by these four artists that we’ve curated, get yours today.” Rather than “Here is a bargain bin loaded with crap, dig in.” Which leads to to my next point…
- It devalues your work because you’re giving it away. Companies have no impetus to push work that they didn’t invest in. Essentially your time and effort have no value until a sale is made, then you get 5 cents. This is a form of digital consignment, which is a bad business model for the artist, because we stock their stores at our cost. It’s not like Walmart lines their shelves for free and pays Mattel a cut on the off chance that a My Little Pony play set finally sells.
- Quality, these are all digital print on demand products. Call me old school but I like products made the proper way. Screen printed, lithographed, injection molded, whatever. There are very few digital products that don’t feel like cheap shortcuts in my hands. Maybe buyers don’t notice, I dunno. But these products rarely represent the quality I want in the manufacturing of my work. Will digital production ever catch up quality-wise? Yes, I’m sure it will. But it hasn’t yet.
- It may damage your ability to license your designs to a legitimate company. Usually these operations don’t make you sign anything, but sometimes they do. Either way, if a year down the road a retailer comes knocking looking for some of your art to license they won’t be able to sign it on if it’s already under license to someone else. And even if it isn’t under contract, it certainly makes it less exclusive if the design is already out there on a half dozen print on demand products.
In the end I think most of these companies will crumble under their own weight. They simply have too many options and not enough quality control. Buyers want to go to a site and see, at most, a few dozen high quality options. That’s why West Elm doesn’t offer 600 different bed spreads. Without being curated the experience becomes similar to desperately sorting through 500 channels of crap to find something worth watching. Then again, maybe this model of retail crowdsourcing will take off, which pretty much guarantees that the quality of design will suffer, because nobody is going to invest much effort in making art they aren’t being paid for.
Facebook on my mind
My brain pan is pretty shallow. I can only really concentrate on one thing at a time, with a couple other thoughts stewing in my subconscious mind. For this reason I have blocked Facebook and news sites on my desktop computer. Let me explain why. I’m not an idiot, I know Facebook is largely a waste of time. So is Reddit, Digg, The New York Times…
But what I’ve really come to notice is that these sites waste my time even when I’m not on them. How so? Because they occupy my mind. Here is an example. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been wrestling with a new children’s book concept. I have part of the idea, but I can’t make all the pieces fit. On Saturday I decided to take a break and paint the bathroom while my mind ruminated on the book. I got the paint, set my sketchbook on the counter, and then, like an idiot, I checked Facebook. I made an off the cuff comment on a friends image, and almost immediately got an angry reply from someone I didn’t know. Shit, now I needed to defend my stupid position that I hardly cared about to begin with. Back and forth we went, until after the third volley I did what I always do in internet arguments. I thanked my opponent for their views, made the observation that neither of us was going to change our minds, and I stopped following the thread. So, back to painting. Except while I painted I didn’t think about my book. I thought about the stupid Facebook argument. Hell, here I am a week later still mentioning it. It had burrowed into my brain. Lots of things do this. Maybe a bad interaction with a waiter, or a run in with an asshole cop. But these things are fairly infrequent. The internet on the other hand is ready 24 hours a day to feed you shit that occupies your mind. I need to focus all my juice on things that matter. Not only my conscious mind, but my subconscious as well. The term meme has been abused, now being applied only to grumpy cat images and GIFs of people eating cinnamon. The real definition is “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” The Internet is a perfect way to distribute memes, but if I don’t curate what I see, I get bombarded with information that sticks in my head, gumming up the works, wasting mental time and horsepower and creating too much internal noise.
For the time being I’m keeping Facebook on my phone, but maybe I’ll get rid of that too.