Re: GNOME Web Store

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Dave:

> Just for information, last I heard KDE essentially made no money fron
> their merchandising. They request ridiculously small amounts of money
> before they list a merchandiser on their list. Looking at their reports:
> http://ev.kde.org/reports/ they have not declared any merchandising
> revenues at all for 2007.
>
> It looks like they've now taken the decision to have a very small range
> of products and a bigger cut of revenues, which is good news, and a
> model we should probably follow.

Agreed.

> > Things might move forward if motivated people from the GNOME
> > marketing-list were interested in getting more involved to make things
> > happen.  I am interested to hear if anybody in the marketing-list
> > community has any suggestions or ideas that might help.
>
> I think part of the problem with doing this on marketing-list is people
> (1) don't really know what you're expecting as a response, and (2) don't
> know how much of a mandate they have to explore options.

I think the board would be very interested to hear any suggestions or
ideas of how to move things forward.  Just having this discussion in
an open forum will hopefully raise awareness of the issues, and get more
people interested and involved.

> Are you looking for ideas for merchandise, contacts for merchandise
> producers/resellers, volunteers to help boot-strap something?

To me, it seems that we need the most help doing two things:

1) Developing a more effective volunteer team of marketing experts to
   help drive how GNOME markets itself.  This includes running a
   webstore, but also could include other marketing opportunities.

2) Finding and helping to develop new avenues for selling merchandise.
   Developing contacts for selling and/or reselling products.

In my opinion, the GNOME community is already fairly effective at
producing certain types of products (t-shirts, buttons, mugs, and
stickers for example).  If we had new avenues for selling such products,
we could likely make use of them fairly quickly.

> Your starting point could be to revisit my conclusions and assumptions
> from a few years ago:
> http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/MerchandisingAgreement
>
> There are several options for a low-overhead store: CafePress, Zazzle,
> lulu for books, ...

A good starting point, yes.  I think the work you have done so far is
great.

That said, the page has not been updated since June, 2005.  It would be
good if we had enough volunteer involvement to keep this sort of
information more up-to-date and current.

> There are a couple of options for a self-run store, if we think there's
> enough money in it to pay someone to take care of it part-time.

I think we would need a reasonable Business Plan before embarking on an
effort that involves investing significant resources and paying staff.

Lacking that, starting small with room to grow seems a more reasonable
approach.  This way we can decide to invest more money and effort if we
find that selling merchandise generates enough revenue to make it worth
the while.

It might be good to initially limit the merchandise to the types of
merchandise the GNOME Foundation already has experience producing,
such as t-shirts, mugs, stickers, and buttons.   The GNOME Foundation
already produces such merchandise for conferences and the Friends of
GNOME program.  So this seems good starting point, rather than trying to
initially enter new markets.

The Free Software Foundation sends a bill rather than supporting credit
card purchases online.  Another approach might be to use a service like
PayPal.  These sorts of approaches have their drawbacks, but might be
worth considering.  Starting small might be a way to test the waters and
find out if there is enough demand to warrant a more sophisticated Web
Store design.

> Sub-contracting: we could run the store as a franchise, and get 10% to
> 20% of the gross, depending on how well we negotiate & how much risk
> we're willing to take (stock buy-back clause, financing initial stock
> production, etc). When I looked, there weren't many people interested in
> taking this on. I talked to the people handling Mozilla (they also
> handle other big accounts), we're too small for them. And the Open
> Source Factory, our choice, went bust :(
>
> In any case, you need to decide who produces designs, what quality
> control you have, and agreeing financial conditions. And once you've
> decided you need to get designs, finance production somehow, and get a
> site up.

Agreed.  My thinking in bringing up this discussion on the marketing
list is that it would be good to have a few dedicated volunteers who
have experience with marketing to help drive these sorts of decisions.

It might be helpful to run a survey, for example, to find out what types
of merchandise and designs would be most successful and likely to
generate revenue.

Brian