Delving Into the Derby

F contracts are just non-exclusive D contracts. So you can put your designs on other sites. Same royalty only situation though.

I don’t remember the “no text” days, but I thought there was some sort of rule that said there was “no text only” - there has to be some sort of graphical element in the design.

I would like to see more non-shirt template derbies. When I started, there were some of these more often, but then it stopped.

And I, too, wonder what this mysterious “F contract” is (not that I have the time and gumption to open my own store somewhere).

I do like the idea of the first 24 hours all being in the fog. It seems like if you don’t post in the first half hour, you’re pretty much screwed (and some of us are college students that have classes at 12 pm CDT), and a limitation of number of entries per derby (maybe 3?) would be nice to go along with that.

And yes, yes, yes to the ban on politics!

It was NO TEXT, not no text only, for many years at first. I started in 2009, and it felt like it was like that for many years. People used to argue about a zero vs a circle and dashes. Giving way to discussion about keyboard characters vs more pictographical representations of actual words… People were very passionate here at one time. It was like facebook before facebook…

There was a time where a new rule was created mid derby that banned “Flying Penguins” and got one of the awesome leading shirts rejected. Woot’s had a lot of unwritten rules over the years.

“…the only difference between a D Contract and an F Contract is the level of exclusivity. In an F contract, you still receive the $2 commission per unit sold, but you get to retain the rights to the design, and only grant Woot the non-exclusive rights to print and use it. This means you can have the design here on Woot, but also anywhere else they allow for non-exclusive designs (which is almost everywhere).”

  • Original entries are good - and necessary if you want that exclusivity thing. There is some gray area with “similar shirts exist”, though. Woot will need to decide exactly what that means and consistently enforce it. Are you ready to do that?
  • The “contain all original elements” can get tricky and you’ll need to be clear. What about fonts? What about all of those cool design tools like stock photos or fancy photoshop brushes or other tools people can purchase for commercial use?
  • Including design mock up is good.
  • “Clearly related to the derby topic or theme” requires consistent moderation. Are you prepared for that?
  • No likenesses of real people or public figures is good.
  • “Entries cannot contain photos” is iffy. What if the artist took the photo or otherwise owns the photo?
  • Please don’t make me email my art file as soon as it’s submitted. If I don’t have a chance at printing in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd (with the $1000) I don’t want to finish the print file and make it print-ready. When the Honorable Mention rule was changed to an automatic D Contract, I was told by Woot staff that I could opt out by not giving you my print file. Please don’t change that.

As for additional suggestions:

  1. Post the rules. Please make the rules easily accessible and easy to read. If you want no politics, say no politics. If you want no flying penguins, say no flying penguins. Please update this each week as necessary. The needs of the Woot Derby tend to evolve over time.

  2. Post the prizes. Please make the prizes easily accessible and easy to read. Many design contests post both the rules and prizes in an easy to read format, and then post a link to the legalese. Something like, “1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners get a flat $1000 for the first day of sales, $2 per shirt that sells after that day, and a Permanent Exclusive Printing contract with Woot!” Also, “Honorable Mentions will be selected by our staff. Designs will receive $2 per shirt sold and a Permanent Exclusive Printing contract with Woot!”

If you’re going to stick with that D contract, you might as well own it and celebrate it. Make sure that people know up front that their 10 hours of work is only going to get them $2 per shirt sale - which could be $2 times zero. Forever. Congratulations!!! :smiley:

  1. Email notification for those who clicked “I’d want one”. My supporters asked for this one. They want some kind of email sent to them saying “Hey, that shirt you voted for is up for sale! Go get one!”

  2. Please include the option to Opt Out of the Honorable Mention. I would rather take the design back and work on improving it, instead of Shirt.Woot take it for $2/shirt royalty + $0 for Permanent Exclusive Printing rights. I would submit more often if I could opt out of Honorable Mentions. I would also submit more time intensive pieces if I could opt out of Honorable Mentions. Every time I work on a Derby entry, I have to limit myself and think, “How much time do I want to spend on a design that may make me $0, forever?”

Are we still limited to 6 spot colors? I thought I read somewhere that we got bumped up to 8. The submission page says 6.

Some people are acting like it’s all open and argue that the printing on demand does not have limits like screen printing. I do not know this either. If it’s all open then we need that to be made clear, hell, even offer a tutorial about do’s and don’t with gradients, since half-toning may not even be needed.

There was an email that went out on May 31 that said, “We’re no longer imposing the 6-color limit! Fair warning: using an excess of colors may limit the non-shirt products we are able to print your design on. We recommend 6-12, but you’re free to add as many as you like.”

I’d like to Opt In if that’s possible… I can’t even buy one of those recently.

Thanks for explaining the F contract. Now that I know what it is, I second the idea of going back to it for EC sales.

At the very least, could the D contract be changed to allow artists to sell the design on any NON-SHIRT items? Since Woot doesn’t sell journals, totes, cards, etc., for every design, I don’t see how letting the artist sell their design on non-shirt items counts as direct competition. I often see a lot of customers in the forums say “Wow! I love this! But I want it as a tote.” I know Woot may want to offer more stuff for everything in the future, but until that time comes, I don’t think letting us sell a design as non-shirt will hurt.

Or what about letting the Honorable Mention exclusivity expire after one year, and then letting the artist sell it in their store AND at Woot, still with $2 per shirt at Woot? (I realize the less-exclusive D-contract is only $1 per shirt, but I think everything should be $2 per shirt now that the prices increased.)

Is that really what y’all are getting for an EC these days? That’s pretty much unconscionable, especially if they’re keeping that hush hush. I’ve done the tee curating thing and it physically hurt when I’d see an artist who trusted me make like $50 bucks, and that was with non-exclusive rights. I don’t really see how someone could write up an exclusive contract knowing that someone might not even make enough for a sandwich.

And yeah, 1000% agreement with “Are you ready to do this?”… all the rules in the world are meaningless if woot won’t enforce them properly or clarify them. Some stuff is always gonna be nebulous and case-by-case, but a dedicated, consistent rejectionator is the only way that any rule matters.

EDIT: It depends on what you mean by EC, a daily still gets 1K I think, just like the derby winner. Side sales and woot-offs just get sales.

I feel you, but the overall site just isn’t selling large quantities of a single design like it used to. I don’t know of the last design that was actually screen printed. People like me are not professional designers and get a small stipend each month from woot from our catalog of shirts. If I can sell 50-100 shirts on a side sale, I am feeling pretty darned good about it, these days.
I don’t know the profit margins, but there has been $1000 given to designers for their shirts and I am certain that they have not broken even on that particular design. Now, spread the loss from that design over the “free” usage of other people’s designs a maybe the outlook is not so grim.
On a final note. I enter the contest, and more often than not do not win. My design either gets printed or sets in a folder on a thumb drive. I have a teepublic page, but I sell maybe 2 things a month. So if I can sell 5 copies of a shirt on woot, vs. zero elsewhere, then I choose to let woot have it. I think they are pretty easy to work with if you decide you want it back. I think the only way they would say NO is if it were within the first 3 months and it is selling really well or they paid you $1000 for it.
That’s just my rather pessimistic pragmatic 2 cents.

There are 27 ECs this week, tho.

There are a lot of things that are different about shirt.woot now. I’ve been scarce for half a decade, and even then people were bleeding out from the community. And the community was a big part of what sold shirts.

so was a $10 tee with free (if slow) shipping.

so was an industry standard blank for that low price, with solid, proper screenprinting.

so was a long tail theory where eventually everyone found something they wanted, because there was a separation between popular, voted work and curated, diverse work.

As those things started eroding, so too did buyers. Posting 27 Editor’s Choice tees in a side sale for one week is not only deeply non curatorial, but it’s spreading a shrinking viewership across too many options in too short a time.

Eventually that effects the folks who are submitting to woot. You may have some prolific creators stick around, but how often is their best work going to be what they submit? Fablefire isn’t a threadless alum (unless that’s changed recently). She’s not a cult favorite designer that got a lot of vote love but rarely could convert sales. Her work, at best and worst alike, was popular as anything Woot has done.

And while I rarely cared for that work, she deserves to be paid for it if she is considered worthy of printing.

Going rate for freelance art? Start at $25/hr and realize depending on who you’re chatting up, you might be offending them with so low an offer.

There’s a reason places like Teefury and Teextile and RIPT didn’t keep back catalogs (I have no clue what they do now… I doubt the latter two even still exist). To do so meant an exclusive contract, and an exclusive contract means you have to be able to guarantee a certain amount of money to continue to bring in artists. Woot gave $500 early on, moved up to a grand, and after day one gave residuals. It was a solid move, ESPECIALLY for an artist who wasn’t printed elsewhere, or a novice who just wanted to have fun with art. There were LOTS of non-pros printed in derbies. There were lots of legitimately poorly done shirts printed in derbies (Fable herself got a pretty longstanding hit by parodying one that was legitimately just cheap clipart: Plan B was 100% a snarkfest, as I recall, on a clipart winner a few weeks prior).

It’s one of the best and most infuriating parts of the derby: literally anyone could hypothetically win.

But back to non-exclusive contracts. Teefury (and Tilteed, I can honestly say) got to flex their muscles based on that non-exclusivity. Teefury has mostly used it to skirt copyright violation, of course, but lots of designers in the early days were willing to take the risk because they knew they could re-sell, or re-submit, their design elsewhere. A handful resurrected on other similar daily sites. Some printed on legit catalogued ones. Some folks took their designs and sold them on their print on demand sites, to who knows what kind of success.

And if they never sold them again, they made $50 or whatever on them.

It’s the exclusive part that makes this ridiculous for woot. They don’t need to do any legwork curating. They lose no money putting up 27 ECs (though the artists likely do given how thin that spreads the average wooter’s budget). And then the tees get buried in over 10,000 available shirts, if they’re even still available. They make no splash, being on a side sale, and they consequently make no money.

If a shirt site can’t promise a flat prize that is justifiable for the time spent, it shouldn’t option a shirt in an exclusive contract. If a shirt site can’t promise sales enough to justify an exclusive contract, it shouldn’t require one.

You can still make your $20 more than zero with a non-exclusive contract. Woot is definitely more exposure than a quiet printshop page on cafepress. But if you can’t pay an artist the going rate, stop doing side sales of new product.

The C-contract was $2/sale with all rights reverting back to the artist afterwards – but that was before the back catalog and fewer POD sites.

The only design I recall reprinting at a non-POD site after the contract was Ocho’s Slow Morning; it reprinted at TeeTurtle one year and one week later. The only C-contract design I recall get offered here again is Jabba the Fluff.

I was disappointingly shocked when Every Night arrived as a DTG. That was a daily in July 2016.

The low for a daily is 9. Yes, Adder – nine.

I hear ya. A year and a half ago, I posted this. Alas … :frowning:

Questions
Do we still have to hold the horses on derby designs 2 months after the derby ends?
With the new non halftoning color rules, can we mix colors on a same layer?

Ideas
About the EC,i agree with Fablefire that it can be bothering not to be able to re-use the designs.Specially the pop culture based ones:))))))Why not release the exclusivity after some time?
Or,(not sure the idea would be financially interesting for woot )focus on less designs in the EC and give a mini cash prize to each one.

The derby is fun, there is a quick turn over,you design,you get printed(or not).That’s what i like,plus the fog stuff that helps having some heart attacks,that’s cool.Thanks folks.I learned a lot by participating along the years and i had some EC selling really well.

For someone who has never won a derby and only made it in the fog once please don’t remove Editor’s Choice. I can understand if people want to change the contracts around since they may not get many sales.

Honestly these are all great suggestions but I am not sure it will really change much. People are still going to vote for their favorite artist and they’re going to get the most votes. Sometimes that translates into sales and sometimes it doesn’t. I submit to the derby for fun and if I spend a ton of work on a design I just submit it directly to bypass the voting. The great thing is they always give that option.

I did browse a bit, so I’ve seen the differences. I can’t get all the info at once but I do try to do research.

And yesterday a derby winner sold under 400, which would have been abysmal sales for even an unpopular daily once upon a time.

Something is broken in Wootmark if a site that once sold thousands of individual shirts is now struggling to sell 100. And while I can certainly postulate what might have started breaking it, the end result is that there are dramatically fewer people buying shirts, and dramatically more shirts to buy, with staggeringly less diversity than ever.

And maybe a small start to fixing it would be a) consistent rule enforcement, and b) some basic respect for the artists fueling their sales (which A falls under as well). Don’t make a designer give up the rights to sell their art just by entering a design. Don’t make them give up the rights to their art for 10 sales. Don’t make them compete for sales with over 30 new designs in one week, let alone ten thousand old designs. Don’t make them give up print rights and then feature their design as a click through option that is anything but front and center advertisement.

Trying to get feedback on the derby is fine and good but at this point if an artist is still only selling a fraction of what they used to there’s probably something bigger going on than anything the derby is providing.

Can votes get locked after a period of time? Meaning that votes can’t be taken away – they’re fixed – after an hour or so?

I’m specifically thinking about the fraud issue from a few weeks ago and if someone casts a vote, they should mean it. Vote confirmations (emails, opt-in) would be nice too for accidental clicks – which I make on my phone from time-to-time.

Maybe a “voted for” tab in your personal account profile. So each derby is listed, and in it it could show which ones you voted for, and then send you to their page if any of them go to print.

I agree, please keep the weekly Editor’s Choice sales. In spite of my disagreements with portions of the contract, I also think that Woot has been a good home for my shirts. It allows us little people a small piece of the pie vs. no pie at all. Going back to the old system, where ONLY those with large social media followings got printed, would probably scare away even more participation, both with voters and artists.