Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt (Part 1)

Philip runs Spreadshirt from Berlin, and discusses the trends in global e-commerce that he observes through his company.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as Spreadshirt.

Philip Rooke: I took over being the CEO of Spreadshirt about five or six years ago. Spreadshirt is an e-commerce platform that allows anybody to take design or content and put it onto merchandise like T-shirts and hoodies. When the idea is ordered, we print it. We deliver it. We handle the e-commerce transaction. Then the creator of the idea, at the end, gets paid a share of the profit. Essentially, we provide e-commerce services for anybody from artists to social media campaigns.

Sramana Mitra: You do both the processing of the transactions as well as the delivery?

Philip Rooke: Yes, we have 150 base products that you can print on. We use high-tech printing processes to create the end result. We handle the stocks and the transactions. Within minutes, you should be able to create ideas and put them to sale even without any e-commerce experience.

Sramana Mitra: Is this a specific kind of product? You said artists and designers. Is it products that are merchandised off images that are prepared by these artists and designers?

Philip Rooke: Some of the people that we have are artists and designers. Some of them are charities that have text or messages they want to put out. We have entertainment customers where they have some jokes and things related to entertainment that they want to put out as merchandises.

Sramana Mitra: I see. So the manufacturing of these products is also done by you?

Philip Rooke: Yes, it is. We have become a global company. We have marketplaces and e-commerce sites running in 19 countries now. To make certain that everything can be printed and delivered to the customers in three to five days, we actually have three factories in Europe although we’re just opening the third now, two in the US, and one in Brazil. That means when somebody buys something from one of the e-commerce sites running on our platform, we can print it and deliver it to the consumer and they won’t realize it’s print-on-demand because we can deliver it fast.

Sramana Mitra: Given that is the model, talk about some of your most successful customers. What kind of e-commerce businesses are they running on your platform?

Philip Rooke: I guess one of our top partners right now is a comedian called Miranda Sings. She has a website and she’s very entertaining. With us, she just launched a US, UK, and European e-commerce site where she sells t-shirts with her jokes on. We deliver it for her to 180 countries around the worldwide. When she’s doing tours or if she creates T-shirts around a particular joke or theme she’s running on YouTube, she instantly creates a new T-shirt. If you go to Miranda Sings website, you will see a shop there. It looks and feels like Miranda Sings. It’s a white-labeled shop. We are the shop. We are the customer service and delivery.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt
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