Hi all. At LGM we threw some ideas around for Gimp-Merchandizing. I am a little bit involved in this, since the company I work for - kernel concepts - has a lot of experience with doing these things for various free software projects. I am usually the person, preparing artwork provided by the projects into something suitable for the product in question. While I am convinced that we do a good work there and I'd very much welcome doing stuff for the GIMP please understand that I want to leave the selection of a partner for merchandizing stuff to you, by no means should my involvement with the GIMP imply in any way that GIMP should do the stuff with us. Having said that, here are some ideas what we have done already and what could be explored. Also have a look at our shop, where some of the stuff we have is presented: http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/product_info.php?cPath=22_30&products_id=75 Options: - T-Shirts and hoodies. We prefer silk-screen printing for T-Shirts, which gives a great durability of the shirt. It might be possible to create special effects like e.g. night-glow paint or colors with glittering stuff in them. (we did this for some LinuxTag-T-Shirts, but this may have to be re-evaluated, since our printing-provider recently changed his color-source) - Mugs. We prefer silk-screen printing for the mugs. The openstreetmap mugs we did some time ago are done in some sort of transfer-print, and it turned out that the quality is not as good as we expected. We also have done some frosted-glass mugs, which can be printed on in "clear". - Pins. In fact we did a Gimp-Pin as the very first pin and grossly overestimated the "sellability" of a gimp pin. As a result we're now sitting on 100's of Gimp pins, which don't sell. So there might be an option for a special deal :) They're silk-screen printed in 5 colors and beautiful. These are something I hand out frequently on community events, unfortunately I did forget them at this LGM. - Stickers. We have a contact, who creates stickers with an epoxy cover, pretty much as you know them from PC case stickers. They are not cheap but can be manufactured in small quantities and can be arbitrarily shaped. "Regular" stickers for distributing are something we still need to evaluate a bit. We once created a set of custom shaped linux penguins: http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/images/tux_aufkleberbogen.png However, creating a custom shape for "mass-printing" stickers is expensive. It might be possible to ask for a "standard" layout of a page full of stickers. We did not do this yet, but it should be fairly easy to figure this out. - Keyrings and other small stuff: the guy creating the epoxy-stickers also offers products, which provide a place for the epoxy stickers. Some of you know the key rings with a shopping-basket-chip I handed out to some people. This kind of stuff. This could be an interesting option, since there is no setup cost and manufacturing can happen in fairly small quantities. - Pens. For the FSFE we did a pen with "analog printer" printed on it. I wonder if it would make sense to have "real world" brushes and/or pencils with some reference to GIMP on it. - Ties. Michael keeps asking for them. We once did a Tie with the BSD-Daemon on it. They're not cheap, minimum order is about 40, and I am not *that* happy with the quality, they feel a little bit weird. - We also evaluated pins with blinking LEDs on them. Unfortunately we tend to care about regulations in Germany and when confronted with the requirements for the "Elektro- und Elektronikgerätegesetz" our supplier promptly retracted his initial offer, remarking "oh, you're the first one to ask for this"... Please feel free to continue the brainstorm. We're not scared of new challenges :) Tomorrow LinuxTag is starting again in Berlin and kernel concepts again manages the merchandizing booth there. Feel free to drop by (I'll be there on Friday and Saturday) and evaluate stuff. Bye, Simon -- simon@xxxxxxxx http://simon.budig.de/ _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
