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eCommerce - Wednesday, May 18, 2005

CafePress - Profile

HQ: San Leandro, CA

Founded: 1999

Management: Fred Durham is CEO & Co-founder and the other co-founder is Maheesh Jain. They met at Northwestern University and have shown remarkable staying power for sticking with CafePress despite the market downturn.

Investors: August Capital and Sequoia Capital invested Series B in January 2005. The a:c has requested a dollar amount, but for now it seems that CafePress is burying this. Sequoia's Doug Leone joined the board.

Business Model: The company is an online printing marketplace for t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. where the logos or messages are created by outsiders and then sold and fulfilled via CafePress. According to a recent roundup in the Wall Steet Journal, t-shirts sales have been an amazing success on the Net. Everyone from College Humor to the John Kerry campaign have done better than expected with t-shirt sales. And CafePress has become a de facto standard due to the fact that it has been around for ages and has always provided good service. The company has been profitable and growing for a good long time.

Competitors: CustomInk, GetInPrint, T-Shirts.com.

Dirt: There are a number of vertical ecommerce companies that are doing substantial business but have not been able to get to liquidity, including Allposters.com, eBags, and Cafe Press. A rollup doesn't seem to make sense and the revenue requirement is just a lot more than it once was, but what is that number? $200M in annual revenues? We shall see.