‘Creator Commerce’ Drives Teespring to Hyper-Growth
Teespring has released new statistics demonstrating the power of creators monetizing their audiences through creating and selling their own merch. Powered by a category dubbed as ‘creator commerce’, the platform has reported four quarters of compounding growth with 97% growth in Q2 2020 alone.
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Teespring pivoted in 2018 to focus on building a creator-first platform and forged deep partnerships with YouTube, Twitch and Instagram that has resulted in explosive growth of 300,000+ creators signing up to the platform to build their socially integrated ecommerce stores. Teespring revealed it has on average 2400 global creators signing up to its platform every day, and has paid out over $80M in creator profits over the past 2 years. Average revenue per successful creator has grown by 31% since lockdown, showcasing the power of creator commerce during COVID.
In response to ongoing monetization challenges for creators, Teespring has focused on building a platform-wide approach, making many, if not all of its features available to creators of all sizes. Whilst the platform hosts some large creators eg. Phil DeFranco [6mil YT subscribers], Liza Koshy [17mil], Faze Clan [8mil], Will Smith [8mil] and Mr Bean [21mil], it also supports more niche creators – the likes of Team Kentucky; Mauna Built and the Fitness Marshall. The effects of COVID-19 on online shopping have been monumental – retail websites generated 14.34 billion visits in March 2020, up from 12.81 billion global visits [Statista.com] in January 2020.
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Teespring stats show that its growth in successful selling creators on the platform has been monumental with 213% growth since 2018. One key catalyst of success for the business has been moving away from its roots of tees and apparel. In mid 2019, Teespring rebuilt its technology to allow creators to design their own bespoke products – for example animator Joshua Slice created a Lucas the Spider plushie, who sold 85,000 units. Bespoke and non-apparel products have driven $49M in sales since launching and are currently growing 109% YoY. As they continue to accelerate, it is expected that non apparel categories will be the majority of all sales by the end of 2021.
CEO, Chris Lamontagne comments “For us, tees and apparel should be like what books were to Amazon – it was only the beginning.. It will always be core to our business, but the future is deep diversification of product range, allowing our creators to sell anything to their communities. Teespring is leading the way in bringing an unrivalled offering to creators which can only be achieved through our deep-rooted relationships with the creators we work with, The company’s return to ‘hyper-growth’ follows a dramatic and well documented turnaround led by Lamontagne. The business has pegged its next phase of growth as potentially its most transformative, as it undergoes a radical facelift [due in early September] as well as a product redesign that will help carve the way for selling digital goods and a new set of deep social partnerships soon to be announced.
Teespring, CEO, Chris Lamontagne comments “It’s our continued objective to make ecommerce social. We continue to strive to create a platform that will act as a utility for our creators in helping them build their businesses. By removing all of the difficult parts of selling online – eg, design, social selling, customer service and fulfilment, we are in essence, creating a Shopify designed specifically for creators. We have a lot of work to do, but it’s great to be back on our growth track”.
