Swag for FUDCons

[David Nalley]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 13:08, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Mo Duffy brought up a good point in the Board IRC meeting:
>>
>> * * *
>> <mizmo> jsmith, is there real value in the number of t-shirts we
>> produce? could we be doing something to provide more value for the $?
>> * * *
>>
>> Should we consider offering alternatives for FUDCon, or even general
>> events?  Some of the ideas proposed:
>>
>> * Offer a choice for recipients to get something more {eco-friendly,
>>  sustainable}, e.g. plant a tree
>>
>> * Offer the shirt in organic material if possible
>>
>> * Sell shirts to finance other parts of the event
>>
>
> Ok I would not be for selling swag. Swag is a time honored process
> that market stuff to an attendees and everyone else who sees that
> person wearing that T-shirt.The shirts that occur at an event should
> be limited run "thanks for helping things" items.
>
> I would be interested in selling items outside of the events that we
> used to fund FUDcon and ambassadors. It would probably be a cross
> venture with some outside 'company' getting a license to use the
> Fedora Brand on certain items and then funds being split out.
>

This sounds an awful lot like what the Store SIG was working on 2-3 years ago.
Perhaps things have changed but essentially what they found was:
Cafepress and Spreadshirt would operate an on-demand style store for
us. However a number of people were frustrated with the quality and
worried that it would be received badly by those purchasing things.

We investigated the suppliers that operate the Mozilla and Ubuntu
stores - and while their quality was excellent - they wanted a
5-figure per quarter commitment of sales. (I seem to recall it was
around $20-25k/quarter, but that's all from memory) At that level
though they would restrict the number of items we could have
manufactured as they had minimum quantity levels.

Fedora France operates a spreadshirt store: http://fedora-fr.spreadshirt.fr/
Last time I talked with MrTom about it he indicated that it rarely
generated three figures a quarter. (IIRC)
Seems like Fedora EMEA e.V. I think has also toyed with the idea - and
I know this was discussed at FADEMEA2009.

EMEA has a legal entity to handle incoming money though (as does
Fedora France) In NA and much of the rest of the world, we don't. The
big blocker for NA's Store SIG efforts was that we couldn't figure out
how to deal with incoming money - and this remains a blocker. (Who
takes it in, who pays taxes, are sales taxes due, in what states, how
do we handle profits, where does that money go, etc)

We danced around the intake of money issue for around 18 months and
finally resigned ourselves to the fact that we can't sans some sort of
external (to RHT) legal entity - which is another incredibly complex
problem.

All of that to sell a few hundred or perhaps few thousand dollars
worth of Fedora stuff, just never seemed worth it. I'd love to be
proven wrong though.