For what its worth, here are just some of the reasons we chose to structure our store around our partners Shopify & Printful and why we feel it is the best solution to the questions that have been submitted thus far.
Shopify’s image uploader solves the customization problem by allowing customers to upload any image they’d like to use with their shirts or other merchandise. Within minutes, a user with basic computer literacy can download their ENS avatar SVG file from any marketplace, convert their SVG to either PNG or JPG with any free online conversion tool, & upload it with just a few clicks directly to our site! Printful also allows for various text personalization options, such as embroidery, that can be used on a wide array of merchandise.
Working with Shopify & Printful enables our store operate at a high level of automation and requires very little hands-on technical support. This allows us to maintain the site for basically free & focus on other aspects such as marketing via the @ENSwear Twitter account & the day-to-day customer support.
Our store is already essentially complete with regards to basic functionality & will not require months of developement time. We could order a shirt today & have it in our hands within a week, given we receive the DAO & Community Working Group approved art & products. Those can be uploaded within a couple hours & we’d be able to start fulfilling orders immeadiately. Our dweb site its currently being deployed via ENSwear.eth.limo & we hope to add SIWE login capability very soon.
Our industry leading partners allow for huge scalabilty, versatility, & reliability! On-demand printing will alleviate production problems from single or small batch orders & will be able to support an extremely large volume of customers, whether we receive 1 order or 1000 orders at our grand opening! With our partners, we will be able to deliver our customers the most cost effective products available & a huge range of fabric options for our garments.
We are extremely dedicated to delivering the best merchandise store possible and delivers a customer-ready store with all the above benefits, and esssentially free to maintain, anywhere else!
This is not necessary with direct-to-garment printing, which is how services like Printful work.
I would like to see any proposal for a merch store automate this; users should not have to conduct these manual steps. Does your proposal include this?
Our store does not currently allow full automation of SVG conversion, but we will reach out to request quotes for the additional time & labor to custom develop this feature.
In the meantime, for users who are unable to upload their own PNG or JPG file, our management team proposes to offer a white-glove service to complete this task for a nominal fee of $2.75 per image.
We wiould of course make the store much more beautiful than the screenshot above. See https://swag.generalmagic.io/ to get an idea.
To be honest, the break down is pretty simple, it is just one of our product people managing ENS’s shop, being active on twitter, and anywhere else we think awareness will result in purchases. This same person will also provide customer support, fixing people’s orders, relaying bug reports and feature requests to our team, and doing whatever needs to be done to make the shop a success.
We discussed the $1000/month request and we can make it an option, either $1000 a month or we can add $6000 to the original quote and provide the same service without the monthly cost.
Looking at the other bids, we are much more expensive. So I imagine we will not get the bid, that said we would LOVE to take this project on. We take pride in our work, and are confident we would make it a success. We just are not in a position where we can take the financial risk of launching a custom shop given the market conditions.
Sorry for the delay. The deadlines I set on this process may have been optimistic, but this is being actively worked on. My priority is making sure we have fully explored the options before presenting the proposal.
If another extension is being considered, we’d like the opportunity to revise our proposal slightly to include our new site being developed that will be full SIWE and be able to pull raw image metadata directly from user’s wallet so they’ll be able to use with their merchandise.
TL;DR We should have our draft proposal and announcement ready next week. This will follow the snapshot --> executable proposal process.
To provide context, both @5pence.eth and I have been meeting with those applicants we believe are viable. Throughout this process, I’ve been stressing that we achieve hyper-customizable merchandise while still providing a high-quality product. Having the ENS name on the shirt is core to what we’re doing, and if we can’t offer something that is slightly better than what someone can do on their own, there isn’t much reason to provide the hyper-customization.
Finding a store operator and merch provider that I confidently believe can deliver on these two items has been challenging. These two specifications seem to oppose one another. The hyper-customization has been a sticking point for everyone we’ve talked to for two reasons: nobody is set up for this (aside from batch orders), and there isn’t a front-end storefront solution where users input their names.
That said, we’ve narrowed it down to options that we think can provide customized merch, a crypto-native experience, and minimal hands-on management from a DAO member.
We are optimistic about General Magic based on the following factors:
Their team is crypto-native
They have been highly responsive and collaborative
They are willing to work with us on hyper-customization
There is no inventory purchase required
They have a demonstrated performance delivering similar stores in the crypto space
We had very thoughtful and complete submissions to review. I greatly appreciate the thought that went into the applications submitted.
Next Steps
The merch store is slated to be assigned a subgroup and dedicated multi-sig in the ecosystem for Term 2. An executable proposal specific to the Merch Store will not be necessary pending a passing budget.
We have presented General Magic to the Ecosystem working group in the July 18th call. We have requested to incorporate the store’s start-up costs (outlined in the proposal) in the upcoming term’s budget.
A target “go-live” date is in mid-September. Future updates will be provided in the Ecosystem Calls.
When will we expect to see more ENS swag items? it’s been almost a year since we brought this idea to life and all we have is a dad hat, no shirts or other items as outlined in the pRFP Also curious about spending on another swag producer v3xlabs to produce other swag gear. Are we using two merchant / suppliers for swag gear?
How many hats have been sold? I assume that we should be seeing more merchandise become available real soon, hopefully a t-shirt and even a nice professional shirt for in person events, conferences ets?
Hey @accessor.eth, thanks for asking about the shirts! We’re testing a new supplier that General Magic is moving to. The printful setup just wasn’t generating high quality products.
We’ll have some prototypes in the next couple weeks and hope to get the store stocked as soon as the designs/quality is confirmed.
I tried to stress that as much as I could in previous discussion, that using printful is not a quality supplier of a supplier per se.
I would really like to get a full on embroidery or patch making machine. Could do some cool stuff with that. I wonder if I could find funding somewhere from outside the DAO. Could be a fun business opp. Not that this is directly related. Just me and my million ideas.
Hard to make money in this industry, so many people will undercut you with cheaper products and it is hard to stand out and sell premium porducts as there is so many cheaper alternatives
