A shop for somebody with an audience and no warehouse.
The same storefront the farms get, pointed at a different problem: a person with two hundred thousand followers, a good idea for a product, and no earthly idea what a pallet costs.
What usually happens instead.
A creator with an audience is approached by a merchandise company, signs a deal at somewhere between eight and fifteen per cent of net, and gets a shop full of printed cotton within a fortnight. The first drop sells, the second sells less, and by the fourth nobody mentions it.
The reason is always the same. The product has nothing to do with the reason anybody followed them. A hoodie with a logo on it is a tax on affection, and audiences work that out quickly.
The creators who build something durable sell a thing they would have made anyway — a sauce they actually cook with, a tool they actually use, a book they actually wrote. That is a harder, slower, much better business, and almost nothing in the merchandise industry is set up to support it.
The two models, side by side.
| Print-on-demand merch | A real product | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first sale | Two weeks | Six to eleven months |
| Creator’s share | 8–15% of net | 35–60% of net, after cost of goods |
| Stock risk | None | Real, and it is yours |
| Repeat purchase | Very low | The whole point |
| Survives the audience moving platform | No | Yes, if the list is yours |
| What it says about the creator | They have a shop | They made a thing |
How a creator storefront works.
Decide what the thing actually is
Which takes longer than everything else combined and is the step people skip. If it is not something you would use yourself weekly, stop here.
We introduce a maker
From the marketplace where it fits, or from the wider trade where it does not. The maker quotes you directly and we take nothing from it.
The box gets costed before anything is designed
Weight, dimensions, cardboard, courier band. The same screen the farms get, and it refuses to publish a negative margin.
You launch to your list, not to your feed
A feed is rented. A list is owned. Every creator who has done this and survived says the same thing.
We review it after a quarter
With the arithmetic. Roughly one in four should stop, and being told so early is cheaper than finding out late.
What a creator gets, and does not.
Included
- A hosted storefront on your own domain
- An introduction to a maker who can actually produce it
- Packing and postage costed before launch
- Your customer list, exportable, permanently yours
- A quarterly review in plain arithmetic
- Six per cent, the same rate the farms pay
Not included
- Any use of the Diddly Squat name on your product
- Any endorsement, mention or promotion by anybody on this estate
- Fulfilment — somebody has to pack it and it is not us
- Stock finance of any kind
- Exclusivity, in either direction
- Any guarantee that your audience will buy anything at all
The uncomfortable truth about creator commerce is that the audience size barely predicts the outcome. We have seen a nine-thousand-follower account sell out a run of a genuinely good thing in a morning, and a four-hundred-thousand-follower account shift eleven units of a hoodie. What predicts it is whether the creator would own the product if somebody else had made it.
Creator storefronts, at a glance.
6%
The same rate a farm pays.
Costed first
The box, before the design.
Your list
Exportable, always.
No borrowed name
Ours stays off your packaging.
The version for farms.
The same tool, pointed at a market garden rather than a channel.
