Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What volume of e-commerce does she do on this platform?

Philip Rooke: Unfortunately, that’s confidential information but the top people with us are selling tens of thousands of items per year. Many of my top partners make profits in excess of $100,000 because essentially, they don’t have to do the work. We just have to send them their commission payment afterwards.

Sramana Mitra: When you start somebody up, other than providing you with the images, fonts, and texts that goes into the shirt, do they have to do anything else?

Philip Rooke: In the last 12 months, we’ve had 70,000 people coming onto our platform, 69,000 of whom have come to our platform, registered, and put up a shop or put their ideas to sell in our marketplaces. We run marketplaces in various countries and we do the marketing. Other than providing a little bit of basic information and setting the shop up the way they want it, they don’t have to do anything. We do it all for them. 59,000 of these partners are self-service partners. They do it without ever connecting to any of our sales teams.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about a bit about the marketing. For every single merchant that’s on your site, you do the marketing?

Philip Rooke: We really have two business models. One is we give our merchants their own shop – a white-labeled shop. They market those. Often, they have their own websites already or have YouTube channel. They will use that to drive traffic to their shop. The other model is we have marketplaces in the 19 countries we operate in. Our sellers can list things in those marketplaces. We do the marketing then. We do a lot of search engine marketing – both paid and unpaid. We also have a following of marketplaces of people who like looking for T-shirts.

Sramana Mitra: Who does more business on your site in terms of these sellers? Are they selling themselves or are you doing it?

Philip Rooke: It’s 50/50 at the moment. Roughly, I think about 50% of our business is from the shop program. About 45% of our business is from marketplaces. Then we have another 5% where we list the bestselling things onto Amazon and eBay.

Sramana Mitra: My question was a bit different. If I were to put something on your site, what would you recommend me to do? Put it on your marketplace and let you do the marketing, or would you recommend that I do my own marketing. Where would I build a bigger business?

Philip Rooke: If you already have fans and audience, which most of our celebrities and campaigns do, then you should have your own shop because they would like to buy from you. I would also recommend those same people to put in our marketplace just to increase the reach. If you’re an artist and you’re creating ideas, we have many people who specialize in making themes.  In which case, they’re making designs but they don’t know how to market.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Philip Rooke, CEO of Spreadshirt
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