California Apparel News

Zazzle started business with a great splash. Now the Redwood City, Calif.–based e-retailer might start delivering on its ambitious promise.

In 2005, legendary venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins, which helped fund Google, invested $16 million in Zazzle. Now, a couple of years later, Zazzle has just wrapped up deals with high-profile businesses such as MySpace, Facebook, organic-fashion label edunLive and Beverly Hills–based music-merchandising pioneer Signatures Network. Signatures’ license library offers images of top-selling acts such as The Beatles, Madonna, Kiss and Bruce Springsteen. Zazzle’s Signatures deal closed on Nov. 19. Its MySpace deal was announced on Oct. 30.

With the strong support of these deals, Zazzle might reach its goal: to offer unique branded fashion that can be customized in a wide variety of styles and shipped in 24 hours.

At its simplest, Zazzle is an online T-shirt screen-printing shop. But with its proprietary methods of emblazoning images on clothes, its giant library of 3.4 billion images ranging from The Beatles to Disney characters, its branded fashions, and its lightning-quick manufacturing and shipping style, Zazzle hopes to turn itself into the customized-apparel shop for the multitudes of people on social networking sites such as MySpace and for the world of e-commerce.

Like competitor Cafeacute;-Press.com (www.cafepress.com), base in Foster City, Calif., Zazzle offers an online marketplace for independent artists looking to sell their graphics on Tshirts. For Zazzle’s MySpace and Facebook partnerships, the customized-apparel retailer will offer tools for people looking to sell customized T-shirts on their online profiles.

The terms of the Signatures Network deals were not stated, but Doug Furano, Signatures’ director of online marketing and business development, said in four years he expects the deal to produce business that would earn more than “eight or nine figures” in annual sales. “The biggest growth potential is in the online space,” Furano said. Signatures traces its roots to selling merchandise for rock band The Grateful Dead in the 1970s.

Signatures also will continue doing business with its e-commerce shop, Fanfire (www.fanfire.com), Furano said. The licenser and merchandiser also made big news on Nov. 15 when Beverly Hills–based concert promoter Live Nation Inc. purchased Signatures for $79 million. The deal will be wrapped up by the end of the year, according to a Signatures representative.

The promise of Zazzle’s customized fashion might hold great interest to consumers such as juniors, according to Barbara Fields, a trend forecaster specializing in juniors fashion. “They want to create individuality,” said Fields, founder of the Los Angeles–based Barbara Fields Buying Office. Girls ages 12 to 15 specifically want T-shirts bearing images of their favorite celebrities, such a s Zac Efron of Disney property “High School Musical.”

What might be trickier is Zazzle’s attempt to clothe an older, moreindependent crowd, said Tom Wallace, president of trend forecaster Label Networks. He also was a former employee of Zazzle’s chief strategy officer, Jim Heckman. They worked together at a company called Rivals.com from 1998 to 2000.

Wallace said young people are highly interested in limited-edition products. But they might not be interested in a T-shirt with images from a classic-rock band or a Disney cartoon. “It’s not about the business model,” Wallace said. “It’s about what they can license.”