La Fraise - European Tour just started
La Fraise, a french T-Shirt Content Contest Website (similar to Threadless), was taken over in July 2006 by Spreadshirt. After the deal Spreadshirt announced the internationalisation of La Fraise. Now - 6 month later, the Exciting Commerce Blog (german) and HipHipUK (english) posted, that La Fraise expanded it’s operation to several european countries:
For the time being there will be a launching in Germany, England, Finland and Norway.
A few words about La Fraise: La Fraise has a strong and active community in it’s background (approx. 75.000 users). The company was founded by Patrice who was able to build up the site to be the 2. largest T-Shirt Design Contest Project on the internet. The whole thing started as a blog project - Patrice, a passionate and charismatic blogger always understood how to inspire his people. Consequently, the company and it’s founder are strong connected (=which will be a challenge for the new La Fraise Crew). Similar to Threadless the business model is an ongoing t-shirt contest. Users can submit their designs, there is a public voting by the community - the best/ winning designs get printed.
No doubt, the existing community and a wide range of already printed T-Shirts will be a jump start, when entering the new foreign markets. Not bad so far…
But for all that, in my opinion the expansion plans wont be a bed of roses for the guys of Spreadshirt/ La Fraise. Patrice, La Fraise’s retired godfather, is not any longer part of the business management - as far as I know, he was only kind of an interim consultant for the first few months. First of all, without Patrice, one of the previous main factors of success is missing. Also there is a big questionmark, if it will be possible to transfer the current concept to different countries.
Additionally, force the expansion of a community is just conditionally possible. Usually such a project is growing organically. It’s up to the users out there, if they accept the idea or even better spread the word. Especially the aimed target group tend to be quite idealistic. The creative folks will expect the right spirit and authenticity. Especially Spreadshirt, which often has the reputation of a virtual copyshop, printing all sort of stuff, is not very popular among some of these people. I guess especially in this combination that might be an important point - and I am sure, the spreadshop guys are aware of that.
Indeed, it can be fairly challenging to launch such a service. One example is “The Derby“, Spreadshirt’s first attempt to establish a Designer T-Shirt Contest (mainly in Germany).
Although Spreadshirt could access it’s huge designer community (the creative part of their shoppartners, “open Logo” und “TheDraw” users) the project never really rocked. In my opinion one reason for the La Fraise takeover.
Conclusion:
It remains exciting. Let’s see if the new La Fraise Crew can conserve the originally La Fraise Spirit and even more important, tranfer it to other countries. One bonus might be the recrution of Adam Fletcher, author of the HipHipUK Blog, who already has access (at least in the UK) to part of the targeted people.
However their will be still enough oppurtunities for the small independent labels/ projects out there. Often able to move faster, loaded with great ideas and inovations they tend to give a more authentic impression. “A Better Tomorrow” from germany or “Teetonic“, based in the UK would be such examples. However, good luck to all parties concerned.
Tags: Community, Crowdsourcing, Design Contest, La Fraise, Spreadshirt
Januar 15th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Hello Sven,
good summary, thanks for your input. You raise some valuable points that I would like to give you feedback on.
The name La Fraise Crew really stands for how we see each other these days. The crew is quite young and diverse in characters and cultures as you will see in some of the next posts in the blog.
We cherish that, really. It is important for us that everybody out there sees that we have different opinions internally and that they have a lot to say in La Fraise. This “internationalisation” in fact is the result of long, sometimes difficult discussions with the Fraisiens. We are very happy to see the comments in the German blog where people are giving us shout outs for the start. We get a lot of response that people feel included in La Fraise as it is now.
We certainly also see room for “small independent labels/projects” (we actually see ourselves like that, too) out there. As the new kids out there we want to have a look first, get in touch with people and see what we can do. We hope we have some cool ideas up our sleeve, but we will let the others see if they agree.
We are eager to talk to anybody who wants to talk with us, also from you guys !
Cheers,
Matthäus of the La Fraise Crew