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Interview with Philip Rooke

Philip Rooke
Philip Rooke
CEO
Spreadshirt
Spreadshirt

We have seen product counterfeiting grow on Amazon
The print on demand industry is a relatively new entry into the world of apparel. It is gradually making a mark for itself in the industry. Of course, like all other it has its own pros and cons. It is especially growing in the developed markets. Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt, an e-commerce platform for print on demand apparel and accessories shares details of the industry with Fibre2Fashion.com

What is the size of the global print-on-demand apparel industry – both online and offline?

The size of global printed textiles industry is approximately $165 billion. We estimate that approximately $2 billion of this is online. However, this is a very fragmented market. We currently track over 200 competitors in the US alone.
 

Please share details of your third party vendors.

Spreadshirt handles all of its own printing and handling through its five international factories. We do use some third party vendors for base products such as t-shirts from Gildan or American Apparel. However, two years ago we started our own base products manufactured as per our requirements.

How many buyers and sellers do you have on your platform?

Spreadshirt provides individuals, businesses and organisations with a platform for buying, selling and creating ideas. The global community includes more than 70,000 sellers. Our recently launched new commission models include a volume model, making sale on Spreadshirt, even more lucrative for our partners.

What is the expected growth of this industry in coming five years? What are the likely contributing factors to this growth?

Expected growth in the industry is really hard to forecast, as it is a combination of disrupting the traditional apparel retail markets, changes in the promotional goods market and creating new opportunities. However, the print-on-demand industry is growing in exciting new areas, driven by consumer demand for the designs they want to wear and specifically around the memes that they are interested in or social comments they wish to make. Marketplaces for crowd-sourced designs, like Spreadshirt or Redbubble, are booming as the wide variety of creative designs are much more appealing to buyers than creating their own or buying the standard licensed items found in shops. Social influencers from all genres such as Youtube creators are also bringing about a new drive in merchandising. These new brands have rapid and variable product lifecycles and strong consumer loyalty, so are changing the way products are being created and sold. This is creating a new industry in micro-merchandising that is largely possible because of print-on-demand technology, connected via the Spreadshirt shop platform. In addition, at the end of last year, the ecommerce giant Amazon launched, Merch by Amazon, a service that lets games companies create and sell t-shirts, which are then shipped to customers by Amazon on-demand. While this might cause other industry players to worry, I am delighted to welcome Amazon to the market where they will be a valuable contribution, especially as they are targeting the gaming industry which has been slow to respond to the benefits of the print-on-demand market.

What are the challenges facing this industry?

In recent months, we have seen the product counterfeiting issue grow on Amazon, with hundreds of sellers copying our listings but pricing the items cheaper. This practice violates our trademark and customers that click on the cheaper-priced product might not necessarily know that it’s fake. The product can then take weeks to arrive and is of poor quality. This means official sellers like us are losing out on the sale, and often get the blame for fake products via Amazon reviews. At Spreadshirt, we expect to lose several million dollars in the US this year. And we are not alone, this is an industry-wide issue.

Where are your investments directed? Please share details.

For Spreadshirt, recorded revenue for 2015 was EUR 85 million. We also took nearly 2 million orders and shipped over 3.6 million items to 180 countries. Our average basket size went up as global orders increased by 7.5 per cent and nearly 11 per cent more items were shipped than in 2014. So the 5.4 million visitors each month to the Spreadshirt site were buying more per visit. We continuously invest in platform developments, especially the buying and selling processes and simplify merchandising for both buyers and sellers. This aligns with our goal of enabling our community of international sellers to publish any idea on every product we offer globally, in 60 seconds or less, as we become a $1 billion game-changer in the apparel and accessories industry.

What latest technologies are integrated to your platform?

Over the last year, we have made many changes to our mobile interfaces. In some countries, 45 per cent of our traffic is via mobile devices. This provides a whole series of challenges in both the design and functions of our sites. We are currently reworking all our interfaces to be mobile friendly. We also invest heavily in our t-shirt designer tool. The key to creating a good experience is to make it as simple as possible; it is not simple, but our task is to make it look and feel simple.

Which countries serve as the best markets for this industry, and which are emerging in a big way?

The US is our biggest market for print-on-demand marketplaces and micro-merchandising. But increasingly, we are finding that pop-memes from games, Youtubers and general entertainment companies are creating a global fan base. This means that we regularly deliver one idea from these new Merch stars to over 100 countries.

Who are your competitors? Please name some key players in this industry.

Spreadshirt has no direct competitor offering the full range of services offered on our print-on-demand platform. We are the only company to offer three different models on one platform: selling via international marketplaces, selling via white-label ecommerce shops, and via our create-your-own technology, where consumers create and buy their own ideas directly. However, our most direct competitors for create your own products are Customink and Shirtinator and Cafepress and Zazzle for their marketplace model. There is also newcomer Red Bubble, which has a more artist-centred approach. But since we offer both our sellers and customers a lot of unique features, I think this gives us an edge over the competition. Our ease of use, superiority of the platform technology, high quality printing, multi-production sites and best product materials makes us the best in class for custom apparel and accessories.

What macro environmental factors affect your growth?

As a business, we are recession proof. Unique designs and vast consumer choice means customers can come to us for a great gift or highly valued items at a relatively low price. So, we are not affected much by economic cycles. We have an international consumer base that generates ideas and products which have a global following. This means that we sell across the world and have to deal with macro factors such as the currency, border and trade barrier issues that come with that.

Please share details of your global expansion strategies.

Internationalisation has undoubtedly been a major driver in our growth. It has allowed the sellers on our platform to reach more customers and for Spreadshirt to reach more sellers. That has given us scale. We will add more countries in a few years. However, at the moment we will drive our international expansion by making it much easier for sellers on our platform to be able to trade in all countries.

What is your global employee strength? Please explain.

We currently have approximately 500 employees from more than 20 nationalities working predominantly across Europe and the US. I believe is important to encourage an agile and innovative company culture, as well as nurture new ideas and ways of doing things. It really does take a world class team to develop a global platform for virtual, print-on-demand products. Without a good and motivated team you cannot succeed!
Published on: 29/06/2016

DISCLAIMER: All views and opinions expressed in this column are solely of the interviewee, and they do not reflect in any way the opinion of Fibre2Fashion.com.

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