Cameesa - The Blog

Although the Democratic National Convention has made Denver a wild place the past few days, I am most excited for tomorrow night. Wednesday the 27th, Rage Against the Machine will be playing next door to the DNC. On one side of the street you have who could be the future President of the United States, and on the other, a powerful band willing to stand up to and question authority at all costs.

While I was ironing my new super fly Cameesa T and thinking about tomorrow I made an interesting connection: I think Rage would like Cameesa. Here are a few reasons:

1. No presence of “The Man.” Cameesa cuts out the buyer, who supposedly knows the tastes of the buyers, and replaces them with the actual market. Cameesa’s community decides what is printed and sold. There is no controlling authority.

2. Cameesa is run by its community, not a money-hungry CEO. By supporting a design, a community member is directing Cameesa’s activities. Cameesa prints what its community demands. Without Artists submitting high quality designs and the Community making them a reality, there is no Cameesa.

3. Fair revenue distribution. Before Cameesa makes a cent for its production efforts, the Artist and Supporters earn on every T-shirt sold.

4. American Apparel T-shirts. High quality Ts made in Los Angeles by insurance-holding, fairly-paid workers in healthy working conditions. Learn more about them here

I am not suggesting that Cameesa likes Rage (but we do), but these characteristics help define Cameesa. I believe that these principles can be respected by individuals around the world. Who knows, maybe Morello will be wearing “Take Me to Your Reader” at the Republican National Convention next week.

I subscribe to Google Alerts for the terms crowdfund, crowdfunded, and crowdfunding, among other things.  The other morning when I awoke I was alerted to an article on crowdfunding from the Sydney Morning Herald.

I checked it out, and noticed a few familiar names on the crowdfunding scene: Sellaband and MyFootballClub.  But there were two other companies that I had never heard of: Catwalk Genius and BeerBankRoll.  After poking around a bit, it appears that Catwalk Genius plans to use crowdfunding to sponsor fashion designers.  A noble cause, but I didn’t learn much more since their website is not currently functional.

The other company, BeerBankRoll is much further developed, and aspires to be a crowdfunded brewery.  They have received a fair amount of press around the web, and appear to be steadily signing up people who believe in the idea.  As I lurked around the nether regions of the site, I noticed that they are actually located in a suburb of Chicago!

It’s rare to find crowdfunding companies, but even more rare to find one in your own back yard.  It was encouraging for me to see that crowdfunding is starting to proliferate in the United States.  Hopefully we can catch up to our UK/European brethren soon.  I feel like the biggest challenge is education on the concept.  Once people grasp the premise they start to feel comfortable with participating.

Congratulations goes out to Jon Turner aka vonmonkey for being the first Cameesa Artist to become 100% Supported by the community. I’m glad it made it through because I really want to wear it. A big thanks also goes out to all the Supporters.

It was popular and caused waves in the community when initially uploaded. This weekend it heated up, quickly reaching the 100% mark.

I like Jon’s background on the piece:

From The Times, July 14th 1892: “Oxford: The academic community remains abuzz with gossip after the disappearance of young Jeremiah Mugglestone, MA (Oxon.), lexicographer, last seen on Saturday morning. Mr. Mugglestone, the youngest fellow of Balliol, whom Jowett described as being possessed of ‘the finest mind in the Empire’, had reportedly been in a disturbed state for several days.
“Colleagues state that he had become obsessed with the notion of ‘beings from another world’, and claimed to have discovered an ‘alien’ code hidden within the text of a pocket edition of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. A close friend, Dr. Cadmus Bodway, puts Mugglestone’s behaviour down to ‘a suspected case of library fever’; nevertheless there have been no sightings of the scholar, while his distinctive bowler hat and personal copy of the aforementioned dictionary have been found abandoned amid a scorched patch of grass in the South Parks. A mystery indeed”

vonmonkey about his initial impressions and thoughts about Cameesa.

Check it out here

What amazes me is how well vonmonkey was able to not only grasp the site, but his analysis of the underlying effects of using crowd funding. I couldn’t have written it better myself.

Cheers Jon! We look forward to seeing “Take Me to Your Reader” make it into print. At the current pace of Support, it should be there in no time!

One of our artists, stevebalistreri, recently submitted a real-life design, the Flabongo. (http://cameesa.com/support/design/28/flabongo-evolution)

In my 26 years of existence, I have done my fair share of partying, but I have never encountered a Flabongo; hence, my inquiry on Steve’s post asking “what the hell is a blongo?” (http://cameesa.com/forum/post/12/new-design-flabongo)

Even after Steve explained the Flabongo concept, I was still somewhat puzzled, and skeptical of the Flabongo.

So, this past Saturday night, I attended a Lincoln Park house-party at a friend’s place. As midnight struck, a mysterious creature entered Brendan’s home. It was pink, had no legs, and its insides were ripped open. Lo and behold, the Flabongo had entered my life for the first time ever. I was stupefied and amazed as to what I was seeing. Who would have ever thought that I would see a design on Cameesa.com - for the first time ever - and get a real-life taste of it, only days later.

I flew off the couch and greeted the gentleman who brought the Flabongo into my life. As I approached him, he quickly jumped back because he thought that I was going to kiss him (note: it’s atypical to kiss strangers in Chicago…although it has been accomplished before.) I told him the entire Flabongo/Cameesa.com story but he clearly did not understand my amazement of Flabongo.

The moral of the story is : “Cameesa.com brings people together, whether in designs or real life.” I want to deeply thank Brendan for a great party, Steve for the Flabongo design, and the gentleman, whose name will remain confidential, for bringing Flabongo into my life…..I miss you dearly.

Cameesa would like to Congratulate Andy and Ari!!! This wonderful couple made a life-long commitment to each other and decided to get married on June 21st, 2008. Congrats.

What else happened this weekend?  The Fab Five members of Cameesa were physically united for the first time. Qasar flew in from Boston, Justin from Austin, Vik from Canada (eh) and I drove to Michigan with Andy. It was a glorious afternoon for a wedding, some Polka dancing and a memorable night of shenanigans. We were together one minute and separated the next.  As I type, Andy is relaxing with his wife, Ari, on a beach in the Caribbean, Q is in Australia hunting crocodiles, Justin is sweating in Texas, and Vik is probably working.

It was great to see everyone. Pictures will be posted once Q gets back from vacation.

P.S. It was also Justin Lewis’ birthday on Saturday, so Happy Birthday Justin.

Rumplo is a platform that let’s people rank and track their favorite T-shirts and T-shirt designers. It was built to be a promotional platform for those whose business is T-shirts to potentially receive a larger following. I haven’t gathered any background information on traffic numbers yet but it does look like they have a fair bit of content on there. About 21 pages worth of T-shirts. I also found our friend Joe from Fantastic Bonanza on the site. The platform seems promising and I’ll need to give it try.

There’s an interesting new community platform and social network for fashion called Fashionspace. Started in the UK by Holly Bellm and Harry Bridgeman it is:

“A place to buy, sell or swap your independently designed, vintage or 2nd hand fashion and network with other designers, creatives and fashion-lovers”.

I think this was a niche just waiting to be filled, a community platform centered around fashion and specifically fashion designers. As VentureBeat reports, the platform launched last October and possesses a community of 22,000 active members and 800,000 monthly unique visits. Holly and Harry built the community by leveraging relationships with an initial group of designers that would provide credible content. Bellm’s hopes Fashionspace will help uncover new fashion design talent as MySpace has done for undiscovered music talent.

The one advantage I see over other community platforms that Fashionspace intelligently built in, is a commerce platform to allow community members to set up their own boutiques. The feature is very relevant for their niche community of independent designers. There are no fees to participate or to set up a shop. Fashionspace generates revenues by taking a 10% cut from sales transacted on their platform.

Out of curiosity I went to see what they had in their T-Shirt section. For the full story visit VentureBeat.

Think of all of the things that you love. In my case, i love anything that is challenging, and requires a team. A point in time where ideas are constantly flowing and the possibilities are endless. A team where everyone cares for one another and would give up anything for each other. Simply put, a family.

A place where there is no single dictator, everyone is equal, and any idea is a possible goldmine. Analogous to a green-light session, where every idea is plausible and NO does not exist. A concept of synergy amongst each other, a concept of encouragement and infinite strength.

For example, I felt this when I was getting my Masters degree at University of Chicago, and we were assigned a database project to model a professor evaluation survey. I remember sitting in a board room with two of my colleagues, Raja Bose and Carlos Rivera, and spending countless hours trying to figure out a database model. I remember thinking at this moment : “I love to be around brilliant people that are open and don’t bring others down”, it is much more energizing, and healthy for yourself and the others. Our model ended up being 20 pages taped next to each other, this is definitely something that I would have never designed on my own.

This where I visualize Cameesa in a very short period of time. I respect everyone on the team and I strongly feel that everyone brings something different to the table, I feel that once the ball gets rolling then the opportunities will be endless.

When was the last time you were part of a great team?

Cameesa is in the process of evaluating shirt printers, so Andy and I got a chance to meet with the wonderful staff of Sharprint, a t-shirt printer on the West side of Chicago.

The staff of Sharprint are extremely professional, personable, and humorous (humor is always a plus in my books). Upon arrival we met Lana, the Omega Team account manager, and received a tour of their gigantic facility, which produced over 6 Million Prints last year. With Cameesa’s help, they can definitely boost the number.

After our tour, we had the pleasure of meeting Sharprint’s artist, Tara Zanzig, who showed us the wide array of Sharprint’s printing capabilities, ranging from embroidery and embossing to foil and mixed media. Tara’s expertise were evident as she talked about Sharprint’s printing methods.  Thanks Tara, this will provide a large amount of flexibility for the artwork our Cameesa’s community will produce.

Next, we returned into the factory to get a real taste of the glory, a hands-on tutorial of shirt printing. Simon Perez, a wizard on the manual press who has been with Sharprint since 1993, gave us this lesson. Simon was very welcoming and even laughed with me as I messed up my first print.

I got a chance to print my first shirt….well….my second shirt…..I messed the first print by cutting off Harry Caray’s face half way down the shirt, Oops!

Before we knew it, our tour was coming to an end, on our way out, George Kilian, the owner of Sharpint, came over and introduced himself to us. As he inquired about Cameesa I thought to myself : “Kamil, you are looking at a guy that started a company in his garage with a vision, and today he provides over 100 jobs in West Chicago…..man that is admirable.” Back to reality, now we are in our garage trying to raise our little baby, Cameesa.

This tour made me realize two things : 1) I love meeting cool people, 2) I missed Andy (Welcome back to Chicago!)

I am actually wearing my Harry Caray t-shirt as I type this Post, it’s Sunday and I need to do the laundry.