June 1, 2005

evisionArtists are featured in the 2005 Cafepress Holiday Gift Guides

evisionArts is proud to announce that two of our evisionArtists are featured in the 2005 Cafepress Holiday Gift Guides. Artist Maryo's popular "Deelybopper Pugs" design is proudly worn by a rescued pitbull mix in the "Gifts for Pets" guide. Artist Allison Leete's best selling Westie Angel ornament is lighting up the general Holiday Gift Guide. These beautifully produced gift guides, full of fun holiday products, can be downloaded here:

May/June, 2005

Art Tiles by Maryo and Allison Leete are featured in an article in Pug Talk Magazine

The tiles were featured in the Lucidities column, a regular feature written by Lori Mohr, about life with Lucy, her beloved pug.

May 17, 2005

Transforming Art into E-Commerce: How Artists are succeeding in the Online Economy

Digital artist Mary Ogle trudged from publisher to licensor to gallery, meeting with rejection after rejection. She was told repeatedly that her work simply wouldn't sell. Then she seized control of her own marketing by creating an e-commerce web site, and sales soared.

Ojai, California (PRWEB) May 17, 2005 - The World Wide Web is dramatically changing the marketplace, and consequently the way artists reach their audience. Digital artist Mary Ogle uses Cafepress, an e-commerce services provider, to transform her artwork into t-shirts, mugs and other popular clothing and gift items, and then sells them online.

Ogle and her two partners, Miki Klocke and Allison Leete, use their e-commerce enabled web site, evisionArts.com, to connect with interested buyers from all over the world. "We've received orders from as far away as Japan and Cyprus, to as close as next door," says Ogle, "When your store is online, there really isn't that much of a difference."

The artists of evisionArts.com use Print on Demand technology to remake their designs into wearable, functional art. "With Print on Demand, there is no guessing about how many of each design you will need," Ogle explains, "the item is not printed until an order is placed." "Since we don't have to worry about being left with a lot of unsold items," Ogle continues, "we are able to cater to niche markets - like pug lovers and classical music enthusiasts - topics we ourselves are interested in."

Trained in the more traditional medium of oil painting, Ogle was at first unsure about translating her artwork into more functional art. "But then I realized I was being silly," she says, "Hanging something on a wall doesn't make it art. What is important is getting your work out there and sharing it with the world. When people use and wear your artwork in their daily lives, you've created a special connection with them, and that is what I believe art is all about."

For additional information on the artist as e-commerce entrepreneur, or evisionArts, contact Mary Ogle or visit www.evisionarts.com.

About evisionArts.com:

evisionArts.com is an online store featuring the artwork of Mary Ogle, Miki Klocke and Allison Leete on t-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, art tiles and other functional and decorative items. Launched in 2001, evisionArts.com transforms digital painting, pastels, oil painting and photography into wearable, useable art for daily living.

Contact:

Mary Ogle, founder
evisionArts.com
805-646-2277
http://www.evisionarts.com

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May 4, 2005; Page A1

By Accident or Design, Selling T-Shirts Is Big Business on Web Internet Surfers Buy Souvenirs Of Their Virtual Journeys; 'Right to Bear Arms'

By PUI-WING TAM
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Dan Mowry thought he knew just how to turn his family entertainment newsletter into a successful online business. Two years ago, he designed an attractive site and loaded it up with features to entice readers and advertisers: electronic crossword puzzles, a history quiz and cartoons. Almost as an afterthought, he designed a T-shirt with his company's logo, a circus ringmaster holding a megaphone.

Today the online and print newsletters have flopped. But the shirts are pulling in up to $3,000 per month, as Mr. Mowry joins the growing ranks of entrepreneurs profiting from an improbable but lucrative Web business model: selling T-shirts.

All over the Web, bloggers, artists and entrepreneurs are unexpectedly finding that T-shirts are more reliable moneymakers than the original ideas that brought them to the Internet.

CollegeHumor.com, a site offering jokes and pictures from college campuses nationwide, sells T-shirts that say "My other shirt has its collar up," "What Would Ashton Do," and dozens of others. Its parent company, Connected Ventures LLC, says it takes in roughly $200,000 in monthly revenue from the shirts, about half of its total income. "A year from now things could be very different, but for now, T-shirts are a great way to monetize the Internet," says Josh Abramson, one of the site's founders.

It turns out the T-shirt is a perfect fit for online commerce. It captures the Web's renegade allure and allows surfers to show off their virtual journeys. Easy to make and deliver, T-shirts often cost $15 or less online.

More than 1,500 Web sites now sell T-shirts, says Rodney Blackwell, a Sacramento, Calif., entrepreneur who runs several Web sites. Mr. Blackwell, who began cataloguing the number of sites offering T-shirts in early 2004 for one of his Web properties, tracked just 500 such sites last year before the market exploded.

"So many people wanted their T-shirt sites listed on my page that I had to turn people away and institute a listing fee of $19.95," says Mr. Blackwell. He says he now adds 60 sites every month to his list, which is displayed on T-shirtcountdown.com, where visitors can vote for the most popular shirt.

Recently, one of Mr. Blackwell's own creations -- a T-shirt declaring "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me..." -- ranked No. 5 on that list. The shirt is available on Mr. Blackwell's ihateclowns.com, an elaborate site whose name accurately describes its philosophy. The nine-year-old site covers its expenses by selling up to 90 T-shirts per month for $15 per shirt, Mr. Blackwell says.

John Wooden of Brooklyn, N.Y., runs a parody of the official White House site on whitehouse.org, and pays for it by selling anti-Bush T-shirts with messages like "Proud Blue Stater." He says he covers all the costs of running the site by selling tees and lives off the rest of the earnings, which total several thousand dollars per month. "It's not a bad living," says Mr. Wooden, who declined to provide specific revenue figures.

It's not hard to make money on T-shirts. Mr. Mowry, the accidental T-shirt merchant, often gets his shirts from CafePress.com, a San Leandro, Calif., company that prints designs on shirts and other products and even ships them directly to a Web site's customers.

CafePress charges a vendor like Mr. Mowry a base price of $8.99 for a T-shirt with a customized logo printed on it. Mr. Mowry then charges $19 or more for the finished product. That leaves him $10 per shirt in pretax income. Using a local apparel printer, which charges him only $5 for a basic T-shirt with printing, Mr. Mowry's profit margins can be as high as $14 a shirt.

Mr. Mowry's best-selling T-shirts today include one with the message "Shiny Objects Distract Me," written in colorful fonts on the front. Another is rubber-stamped with the words "Does Not Play Well With Others." Mr. Mowry has since sold off his newsletter and last year he launched a site that sells T-shirts, dubbed thetshirtzone.com.

Mary Ogle, an Ojai, Calif., oil painter, created a site (evisionarts.com) in 2001 to sell her art prints at $150 each. But she sold no more than two prints a month. Two years later, she added a line of T-shirts and various tchotchkes featuring blue bears, pink cranes, mother hens and other images from her artworks. Sales took off and today she says she sells several hundred tees per month, taking in up to $800 in revenue.

Nick Bayne, 25 years old, an entertainment producer in New York, began buying T-shirts on the Internet last year, after coming across the CollegeHumor site that sold tees with clever puns and cartoons. In the past six months, Mr. Bayne says, he has bought six shirts online, for $18 apiece, and plans to buy more to add to his collection of 100.

Among his favorites: A shirt featuring a lead character of the movie "Napoleon Dynamite" that he says he could only find on the Web. Another shirt shows a picture of Che Guevara and says: "I have no idea who this is."

"It's a guilty pleasure," Mr. Bayne says. "There's a point where my girlfriend will tell me I'll have to grow up, but until then, one definitely can't have too many funny T-shirts."

CollegeHumor.com asks visitors of its site for T-shirt ideas and receives an average of two suggestions a day. "The majority of them are awful," says Mr. Abramson, adding that many of the submissions are far too crass.

To generate T-shirts with smarter messages, Mr. Abramson and three business partners look for puns and draw inspiration from television shows. Recent results include one that declares "Your Retarded" and another with a picture of a man with bear's arms and the message "Right to Bear Arms."

Write to Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@wsj.com

Thursday, Apr. 28, 2005

Web site turns T-shirts into profit
by Ellen Lee
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

SAN LEANDRO - It's a place where animal lovers can help "Save Toby," the cute bunny rabbit destined to become dinner unless its owner raises $50,000 in donations and merchandise sales. Admirers of Pope Benedict XVI can show their devotion by buying fan club T-shirts and mugs. And political junkies can wear their support on their sleeves, from "Hillary 2008" baby tees to "Condi Rice 2008" sweatshirts.

CafePress.com is a San Leandro company that has turned the ordinary business of making a few bucks off T-shirts and other tchotchkes into a profitable dot-com operation.

The company, founded by college buddies Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, lets anyone from professional photographers to elementary school kids turn their latest creations into a product that can be sold online.

"People had ideas, but they didn't know how to turn them into reality," said Jain, vice president of sales and marketing. "They didn't want to take the risk."

CafePress.com sought to make it easier. Once customers upload an image, they can either make a product for themselves or open an online store to sell their items. CafePress.com manages the store, acting as the customer service liaison, the credit card company, the shipper and the manufacturer. Buyers can also shop online through CafePress.com's marketplace, which includes some 8 million products and is growing at a pace of about 1 million new products a month.

Mary Ogle, an artist in Ojai, opened her online store, evisionArts, in August 2001 after hearing about it through other artists. Her site includes more than 200 designs featuring cats, pugs and other animals, all created on the computer since she lost sight in one eye several years ago.

"They're a great service for the independent artist because it's a whole new way of keeping control of your art work, but getting it out there in the market place," she said. "Publishers and licensers get so much money, and the artist gets little. ... That's how I did it for a while, (but) it's not worth it to me."

CafePress.com offers about 70 items such as mugs, clocks, mousepads, even T-shirts for dogs, all of which can be emblazoned with a design. It sets a base price for each product -- a hooded sweatshirt for $24.99, a throw pillow for $15.99, a magnet for $1.25 -- and then the seller determines the actual sale price and pockets the difference. CafePress.com cuts the sellers a check once a month.

Ogle said she marks up her products by about $6 to $10 after finding that higher prices in fact sell better. Her store has grown so much that it now amounts to nearly half of her income.

"At first I was happy if I sold three items in a month," she said. "Now I probably sell anywhere from 100 items in a month to thousands of items (during) Christmas time."

JibJab, the animation studio that last year created the popular election parody, "This Land," opened its online store a week or so after "This Land" took off. Its store now includes items highlighting characters from five of its animation productions.

"The best thing is it's a business we wouldn't have had," said co-founder Gregg Spiridellis. "Once the store was up and running, it required little effort on our time."

Durham, a political science major, and Jain, an economics major, met as undergraduates at Northwestern. After they graduated, their first business involved a telephone match-making service for radio stations that hooked up listeners. Their first client was a Top 40 radio station in Seattle, and others soon followed. A year later, in 1996, the duo sold the company for $1 million.

During the late-1990s, the serial entrepreneurs tried on a number of businesses, including designing software to allow small businesses sell their products online, helping businesses re-order and print business cards, brochures and other products, and creating an electronic catalog for pharmaceutical companies.

Lessons learned there made their way into CafePress.com, founded in 1999 in Durham's home. It started out targeting independent rock bands -- both Jain and Durham happen to be fans -- to let them create T-shirts, mugs and mousepads with the band logo. It has since expanded to include artists, bloggers, musicians such as Phil Collins, StarTrek.com and the comic strip Dilbert. It has also added a book-publishing and CD-making service.

The company, which has been profitable for more than three years, has received funding from such firms as Technology Perspectives Partners, PacRim Venture Partners, and most recently, Sequoia Capital. It declined to state its revenues but said they have doubled each year.

Philip Monego of Technology Perspectives Partners heard about CafePress.com in 2001, finding it a standout among the dot-com rubble. "We were just beginning to count the dead in piles," he said. "(CafePress.com) was satisfying a real market need, rather than trying to create one."

Jain expects that need to grow, despite competition from all fronts, such as Wal-Mart, which allows you to personalize items, and online companies such as Zazzle.com.

"There is unlimited potential in this business," Jain said. "There is unlimited creativity in the world. As tools get better (such as digital photography and digital arts software), Cafe Press lets you manifest that creativity."

Ellen Lee covers technology and telecommunications. She can be reached at 925-952-2614 or elee@cctimes.com.

August 1, 2003 - Ojai Valley News - Ojai, California

"Digital art is art," says computer artist Mary Ogle, known as Maryo. "It's just another form of painting - another form of printmaking. The computer is one more creative tool for the artist to use." Trained in oil, Ogle has made the transition in the last five years to working for the most part directly on the computer. Her lively and colorful imagery is composed and finished on the computer and sold as limited edition prints.

A Florida native, Ogle grew up in Jacksonville. "I always wanted to be an artist," she says. "My mother always said I was was born with a pencil in my hand. I say that must have been painful for her." Ogle studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and then came west to go to the Art Center in Los Angeles. She moved to Ojai about three years ago because Los Angeles was "so much effort," and has grown to love Ojai's natural beauty.

When she lost her eyesight in one eye, the computer became her first choice as a medium. "I've learned to compensate, and still paint in oils, but working digitally is easier because I can zoom in for a closer look at what I'm doing." She is largely self-taught on the computer and until recently drew with a mouse in a program called CorelDraw then moved the picture to Photoshop to paint it. "I now have a graphics tablet which you draw on with a stylus (a kind of pen). Each pen stroke you make on the tablet is transferred to the screen. It's a much more natural way of drawing than using a mouse."

But, says Ogle, there is no shortcut for traditional training. "It really helped me to be a traditional artist first and I still go to life drawing classes. My drawing gives my work a kind of structure that it wouldn't otherwise have and I think that line is really important. She counts among her influences Gustav Klimpt, Egon Schiele and turn-of-the-century children's book illustrator Homer Pyle, "for their incredible use of line." While still studying at the Art Center and before she ever came to Ojai, she saw an exhibit of Ojai photographer Horace Bristol's depression-era work when he had been all but forgotten and loved his sensitivity to his subject matter.

As well as the figure, Ogle is drawn to landscapes and still lifes. Of her imagery, she says, "Water and reflections seem to resonate with me and often appear in my paintings. I don't necessarily consciously think about it when I'm painting - they often appear all on their own."

She sometimes refers to photos and sometimes uses drawings - especially for the figure. Her subjects are always familiar and very personal.

Lately she's been inspired by her friend Tracey Ryder, the publisher of Edible Ojai to create a series of food-related images. She pulls many images up out of her past. of her cool-looking painting of an iced tea glass and pitcher with lemon slices, she says, "I come from Florida, and to me, iced tea is a comfort food. Nothing else can quench your thirst in the hot humid atmosphere of the South like an ice cold glass of tea can."