CafePress.com

Full review
CafePress is an extremely funny site - a sort of Open Source community for the self-promotion industry.

The brick and mortar behind the .com
The product they are selling is one that's been sold for over a hundred years. They have a variety of blank coffee cups, buttons, t-shirts, pens and similar chotchkies and the ability to print a bitmap onto them. This, they market as a service to people who want to promote a message.

The Market
The natural, expected market for this service is the corporate marketers. They've always given away such stuff in order to get their logos in front of customers - especially existing ones. So whenever they'd sell a good-sized order of something to someone, they'd give away the mugs, shirts and scribes to make sure the customer remembers where it came from - for next time.

However, in addition to this core market, another bubble of a market emerged - amateur comics with silly messages. Anyone with a PC, Mac, Linux or any other kind of computer can easily create a bitmap image. It's so easy that I taught my niece to use Microsoft Paintbrush when she was just two or three years old.

Although not everyone is an artist worthy of a showing on a coffee cup - everybody still has a funny joke - something they wouldn't mind having on a T-shirt. So, instead of drawing a picture, you can simply type your message. And thanks to the simplicity of the font technology in all these bitmap editors, that message can be presented in a professional, comical or other style - as appropriate.

Storefronts
While there are a large number of companies who will perform this printing service for you - and who are likely more local to you than CafePress - CafePress takes it a few steps further - providing a place for you to then market your products to the world.

While this might not be useful to the corporate marketing tchotchky market - it's a god-send to the comics and other messengers.

Using their storefront wizard, the whole thing can be done in a very few steps:
1. Create a name for your storefront (like "http://www.cafepress/epinions") (2 minutes).
2. Upload whatever images you want printed on the products in your store.
3. Select the products you want to sell - including the colors and styles, and the images and image-placements for those products.
4. Select the mark-up for your product.

Outrageous Pricing
A t-shirt costs what $0.10 to make? $0.20? On CafePress they cost upwards of $10.

There are no bargains to be had on CafePress.com; everything luxury-priced.

If you go to your local Target, K-Mart or other discount outlet, you can get all the materials you need for any CafePress product for much less. Then, you can take them to your local printer and have them customized with the same bitmap you would have used here - and still not pay as much as the bare-shirt costs on CafePress.

What you do not have to do when you use CafePress is get your butt up off the couch and go do it.