Apparently messaging apps aren’t the only ones attracted by stickers. For Aria Rajasa, Gary Lilardi, and Bima Satria, selling t-shirts is only the beginning. Their company, Tees, will be expanding its business to include custom order fashion accessories beginning with stickers for mobile phones, tablets, and laptops, as Rajasa teased the first sticker designs on Instagram today.
We contacted Rajasa after he posted the photo on Instagram and asked him about the future of Tees. As he said during his pitch at Echelon Satellite in Jakarta a few weeks ago, Tees is making money right now but as Rajasa put it, “we’re ramen profitable”. The company has reached break even point in terms of operational cost and revenue but it’s still some ways before achieving a full return on its investment.
He confirmed that the next immediate step in Tees’ future is gadget skins or stickers. Given market behaviors, Tees will initially offer custom designed stickers for the iPhone, iPad, Samsung Galaxy devices, BlackBerry, and laptops. He’s not going into cases just yet because the market’s not big on single case orders according to his research.
The mechanism will be the same as Tees’ t-shirt orders. Customers submit their designs and place an order for a single sticker which will then be delivered to their address. Those who own stores on Tees will also be able to sell their stickers on their stores, sharing the revenue with Tees on each sale. Existing t-shirt designs can certainly be used but Tees will also be accepting new designs just for stickers. Rajasa said that Tees is looking to partner with local vendors as well to provide exclusive stickers.
If a submission happens to breach copyrights, Tees will take them down based on request of the copyright holder. Rajasa said, “we’re implementing the YouTube model. If the copyright owner wants to take down the designs, we’ll take it down. It happened with the Sheila on 7 t-shirts before”. Sheila on 7 is one of Indonesia’s most well known bands and as with most popular acts, their fans tend to create their own merchandise. Tees plans to implement a flagging mechanism to streamline the complaints process to deal with copyrights issues and offensive materials.
Tees expects to be able to sell the stickers quite soon and plans to set the price to start at Rp 50,000 (USD$5). No, the Tees tattoos are just an April fool’s prank.
