Do you create custom category folders to show off your Zazzle products? Or use your product images on Facebook, a blog or another social media site? Or to create Zazzle advertising banners for your site or blog? Or showcase your designs on your Zazzle store header? To showcase your products effectively, you need to show them!
But you may be doing what I’ve done in the past: taking various size screenshots of all the desired product images and then placing them into Photoshop (or other graphics software). The screenshots all have useful names like this does:
Screen shot 2012-02-14 at 1.06.32 AM
Another – better – way is to download as many as 75 product images simultaneously where Zazzle assigns the product name to each image for you. What a time and trouble saver!
To see how this works and examples of instances where you would use the images, check out this video. And please excuse the wayward mouse pointer – I just got it and we’re getting used to each other!
Citing raw material cost increases, Zazzle.com announced a price increase in the forums today:
As of midnight last night, we increased the price of all Rickshaw products to keep in step with the dramatic rise in the cost of raw materials used to manufacture these cut and sew products. As everyone is aware, we do not do this often, but we are committed to this new and rapidly-expanding product line and felt the increase wouldn’t jeopardize their sales
The new base price of the bags is $85.95, so expect to see many of them priced over $100! So many of us Zazzlers fell in love with these bags and have been planning to buy our own, so this will hit us, too. It was particularly surprising as the bags have only been available since mid-January! I only remember one or two other Zazzle price increases in nearly four years of Zazzling, so this is a rare event as Eric mentioned in the forums.
Although cotton prices doubled in 2010 after natural disasters badly affected crops in Asia and Australia, prices fellback steeply since March of 2011 as production increased and demand fell per Commodity Online.
While cotton producers may shift into higher paying crops in 2012-13, thereby decreasing the global cotton production, the timing of this particular price increase was a little surprising.
Presumably then, it’s some other raw material. I hope so, because all the new products announced last night are made of cotton!
A low key announcement by Zazzle.com late tonight has got the late-night designers firing up the coffee pots! Zazzle has released four new products in connection with a new partnership with American Mojo.
American MoJo products are produced by sustainably employed single moms in the USA and contribute to breaking the cycle of poverty for single moms and their children.
Introduced tonight are
square and lumbar cotton couch pillows
cotton kitchen towels
cotton dinner and cocktail napkins (in sets of 4 each)
cotton placemats
Here’s what the new products look like with coordinating dots & lines designs:
Kitchen Towels starting at $15.95
Placemats, starting at $19.95 Napkins, dinner sets starting at $44.95 and cocktail sets starting at $34.95.
Pillows, square starting at $59.95 and lumbar starting at $49.95
Are these prices a bit high? Not so much when you consider that each is custom made in America and there are NO MINIMUM orders. And these prices, truthfully, are just the starting prices. Many designers will choose to set their prices much higher. But you will be able to get really custom home decor items that you not only don’t have to sew yourself, but with a custom design as well!
I would like to feel the weight and “hand” of these myself. Eventually!
Also worth noting, all items are printed edge to edge, giving you the most design flexibility and the pillows, which are a good size compared to others on the market, are printed on both sides.
Here’s my first pillow to show you that!
Front side:
Reverse side: Now I’m off to design a few more before going to bed!
If you want to try your hand at, click on any of the dots & lines images above to be taken to create pages (affiliate links). Give it a shot! It’s fun and – you never know – you could be Zazzle-happy yourself in no time!
Colorzilla is a great little tool that sits up at the top of your browser window and lets you take color readings from any point in the browser window.
With this tool, you can easily pick a color out of your photograph or design image as you work on Zazzle (or any other POD) and use the result to give your text, border or background the best coloring. It makes a huge difference to your finished product!
Here’s a six step process of using Colorzilla to color some text using a candy jar.
STEP 1:
Start with default color text and chosen image on product, here a candy jar.
STEP 2:
Switch to design view and use the magnify glass to see a close-up of the design.
STEP 3:
Click on the Colorzilla eye-dropper and touch the point to a desired color within your design.
STEP 4:
Click the drop down arrow on the Colorzilla tool and choose the Hex color without the pound sign. That will copy the number for you.
Step 5:
Open the text color box. Paste the new color number that you just copied over the old one and hit return to lock it in.
jar with default color text
Step 6:
Check out the new color on your text in the product view. Good? OK, you’re done! It is a big improvement!
With Colorzilla, giving your products a finishing professional touch is a lot easier! It’s available as a free add-on for Firefox or Chrome. Or you can go to Colorzilla to download it.
If you’re like me, you don’t buy postage stamps as often as you once did. The electric bills, the car payments, the rent are paid online now so we don’t write checks and send those in the mail much anymore. What we do still mail is more of the fun and celebratory stuff in life: birthday cards, baby announcements, bridal shower invitations, graduation announcements, wedding invitations, thank you cards and Christmas cards.
Ordinary post office stamps were fine for all those bills, but now we want to sometimes splurge for special occasions and get unique or custom postage!
• Real U.S. postage
• 100% satisfaction guaranteed
• 3 sizes for all mailings
• Produced in as few as 48 hours
• Vibrant printing & color
• FREE customization
People sometimes wonder: is it legal to design my own stamps or use really awesome designs like what I find on Zazzle.com? Yes, it is! The U.S. post office has guidelines about what is allowable, but they are pretty generous. Keep in mind that nakedness, bad words and religion are the main no-nos. And you cannot violate intellectual property laws or personal privacy either.
After several years of designing stamps on Zazzle, I finally purchased some myself recently. Just before the latest rate hike, unfortunately! Drats. I ordered sheets of both the small and the medium stamps: Pinecone on a Snowy Branch Painting and Heart of Shells on the Beach.
Packaging
Very well done! The sheets arrived in a cardboard envelope with a cardboard folder inside so they were in perfect condition. Mine were dropped off by UPS at the door, so no worries about the envelope getting bent fitting it into a mailbox.
Product
I was astonished at how GLOSSY and how BIG the stamps are!
Unlike post office stamps which have a very matte finish, these stamps are high gloss. If you think of glossy photos, that’s a good comparison. The colors print really well and true to the image on the screen. (Note: I have a calibrated monitor, so your results may differ!)
On the images above, standard U.S. postage stamps from the post office are laid over the Zazzle custom postage stamps so you can see the size and gloss differences.
I have to tell you that I must never have looked at the actual sizes of the in the past, only relative sizes and proportions, because I never realized these custom stamps are almost twice the size of standard post office stamps. The small stamps – which feature a square image – are almost 2 inches tall!
Small: 1.8″ x 1.3″ (image: 1.1″ x 1.1″).
Aspect ratio: 1 x 1.
Landscape or Portrait orientation.
20 stamps per sheet.
Choose from thirteen postage denominations.
Medium: 2.1″ x 1.3″ (image: 1.4″ x 1.1″).
Aspect ratio: 3 x 4.
Landscape or Portrait orientation.
20 stamps per sheet.
Choose from thirteen postage denominations.
Large: 2.5″ x 1.5″ (image: 1.7″ x 1.2″).
Aspect ratio: 5 x 7.
Landscape or Portrait orientation.
20 stamps per sheet.
Choose from thirteen postage denominations.
Price
These particular stamps are currently, by size: $21.80 / $23.10 / $24.40. Prices vary by the rates of the different kinds of postage, starting with 32¢ postcard stamps and going up to $5.15 priority stamps. (Note: prices may change as the Post Office raises rates, or Zazzle revises prices or a particular designer does.)
You do pay a premium for the customization, artistry and short print runs!
Recommendation
Would I recommend Zazzle postage stamps? Absolutely! The ability to create or order very small runs of stamps is awesome. And the printing is wonderful. If you have a special occasion coming up, custom stamps will really set off your cards or letters.
I would suggest that you choose the small stamps for postcards, however. You can see in the matching postage stamp and postcard image that a bigger stamp would overwhelm the postcard!
Many designers create sets of wedding or party invitations with coordinating postage. If you are looking for custom stamps, check out the options below.
Colorzilla is a great little tool that sits up at the top of your browser window and lets you take color readings from any point in the browser window.
