My Long Response written because my first response was very negative. I waited a bit and read what others wrote and thought I'd chime in: 1. I appreciate your asking for opinions. 2. Being a productive member of the community, as you suggest, will be noticed and appreciated in short order. This builds trust. Then you can "get away" with all kinds of things. But note: there has been a lot of cooking food here. People used to share recipes and pictures of food (including the loot from dumpster diving). What you are doing and your passion for it might be seen as cooking. 3. If your revamped website can include writing, links, or blogs by you or others on ways to be more environmentally responsible in cosmetics and cleaning and if you post scientifically-based articles which might incidentally mention your products, that could be seen as a contribution. Maybe you can change your name to be the goto person for that sort of thing, the way minimum_wage is the goto person for living on minimum wage. A lot of that goto stuff happens in personal messages. People have read the kind of things I've written in the past and write me questions about sex and love -- although I imagine insomniasexx (that sex you don't sleep through) gets more. 4. One thing that's entirely missing from this site is commercialism. People are often so grateful to the team that they want to make contributions to offset the costs of keeping the site running. I'm not even sure the swag (see tiny print at bottom) makes any money to support the site. insomniasexx might know the answer to that. People give stuff away here. We mail each other things. We sometimes support writers by downloading or buying their books. So welcome to the community. We like you so far, but get some sleep.
To the best of my knowledge, we haven't sold very much via the swag link. Maybe 5 to 10 items? And I'm pretty sure we have the margins set at zero. We make no money on Hubski -we do this because we love it not because it's making us rich. Thankfully, we have day jobs :)
Hubski should change suppliers then. I can buy those items from manufacturers well below the cost posted on the swag link. If they're seriously interested in selling a few more swag items, I could probably help them. I'm assuming that the reason they haven't sold hardly anything is because no one in their right mind would pay $31 for a TPU case that's commonly sold without a logo online for $8. (That's the excellent quality name-brand ones, you can buy the crap ones for $1.50) You can buy them in bulk and have them printed for less than that. Same thing for shirts and stickers and such. Not a judgement, just an observation.we have the margins set at zero
Pretty close to it; for example, 100 stickers will get you a pretty dang good price. Not truly on-demand though. There are certain order points.
We give stickers away for free and don't put them on the swag page. Everything else there was put up so that people could have access to them, not for us to make money. I suppose someday we may get to the point of creating and housing our own swag store, but right now the entirety of our focus is on making/keeping Hubski a place for thoughtful discussion. Everything else is secondary. I appreciate the thought though. If we were ever to make t-shirts ourselves, I know we could get a FAR better deal. I have a t-shirt guy that someday I'll use. kevinstep
Heh. I shall get some sleep. When I'm dead! ;) I won't just shill for my site. That's certainly not an option. I wouldn't ever want to be that guy. Thanks for the long and thoughtful response.