Evan Stites-Clayton and Walker Williams: Not Just T-shirts

Evan Stites-Clayton and Walker Williams, co-creators of Teespring, have created an innovative way of leveraging the crowdfunding model and profiting from it, too. The duo created a website to sell a commemorative t-shirt about their favorite college bar, which amassed hundreds of pre-orders via PayPal within 6 hours. The team soon received requests from individuals, clubs and communities to create similar campaigns for them albeit with their own custom products.

And Teespring, a platform for individuals to create unique campaigns for their custom apparel, was born. The duo has not only received hundreds of requests but millions of dollars in venture capital specifically $55 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures.

Teespring’s business model is innovative, easy to use, and profitable for both the creators and users. Each user can choose the type and color of items to sell, add customised designs using tools provided by the website or a third-party app, and set the price and sales goal for the items.

Teespring will not process, manufacture, and ship the items until the sales goal has been reached via pre-orders, a process known as “tipped”. The company takes charge of the production and distribution of the items including customer services associated with the orders. The items offered on Teespring include t-shirts, hoodies, tank tops, long-sleeve shirts, kids’ and babies’ apparel, and youth apparel with plans of expansion to non-apparel products.

The user and Teespring benefit from the transaction with each one collecting a portion of the profit. Such is the power of the crowdfunding business model that Teespring has become the platform for self-made millionaires whose items have become bestsellers. According to Williams, millions of entrepreneurs can be empowered to launch their own brands when every pain point, cost, risk and compromise between their creativity and bringing said creativity to life is removed.

And the duo is on a roll, too. Teespring continues to attract the attention of investors so its future growth seems assured – and it’s not such a bad thing to achieve for the Brown University students.