Double-Crowdsourcing

I'm currently conducting an experiment in double-crowdsourcing. It's a combination of enhancing my art capabilities and reducing my production costs. A few months back I sketched out an image that basically was a play on the idea of a piggy bank. Instead of the image we're used to, the pig was the one investing coins into a human bank.

At this point, I don't have the artistic capabilities to make my image pretty enough for a T-Shirt so I decided to leverage the talent at Crowdspring.com to enhance my concept into a workable visual. This investment was made assuming that I would be able to then go and sell that final product to T-Shirt distributor.

My first attempt was through Threadless.com (the famous Chicago-based T-Shirt shop that is now experimenting with Twitter slogans on shirts). Threadless was offering $2500, for every shirt that was selected to go to print. Alas, that didn't work out for me. Partly (in my opinion) because the level of submissions are much higher on that site.

The second attempt, currently in motion, is with a small store called Cameesa. Cameesa's model is a bit different from Threadless in the sense that it prints shirts when enough "investors" decide they want to buy a specific shirt. The owner of the design gets a smaller flat fee plus future profits on shirts sold. Currently I'm at $40 out of the $500 minimum investment needed.

My hope is that this experiment proves successful. Not just because I want to recoup the cost of my design, but mainly because I'm striving to show that crowdsourced business models aren't just "taking business away from traditional models" but they are creating new business opportunities for private individuals.