Possible fund raiser ideas

Site Discussion Team Discussion
1

Hey all i just got in touch with one of the forum members who has a screenprinting business…member kylefromdirtnapp, my thoughts is that we can get some t-shirts/polo sshirts ordered for the team and perhaps design our very own official T-Shirt for folks to buy. I think he-man.org had some shirts a while back so I think this could be a very good idea to bring extra funds for the website as well as create more exposure.
The problem right now is coming up with the funds but I may have a few things in mind to come up with them. The message below is what i received from him, and it seems he would be able to cut us a deal.

[B]
“Thanks for thinking of me! Cost kinda depends on what color shirt, how many colors you print, and quantity. Have a look at my site, www.dimgraphics.net -there’s a pricing section that will get you pretty close. Of course, I’d love to do shirts for the site, and could cut you a deal! If you have an idea of an image you’d like to use, shoot me an e-mail or PM.”

[/B]For those that would like a t-shirt I can place an initial order, perhaps i can take orders first and go from there. By taking orders and funds first before having the shirts we would not need to come up with the cash up front. We would have to come up with a set price according to all the costs involved but once that is set in place we can start taking orders.
We would also need custom art for the t-shirts (Kyle…you come to mind buddy, sorry) to make these the official TCL shirt.
This is a project that could take a bit of time but i think folks would be pleased with the idea. Please your thoughts…i think we can make this happen. I’ll be doing most of the job anyways but i will need a certain amount of support from you guys and plenty of ideas to send to forum member kylefromdirtnapp

2

Chris here…

Awesome idea and one I’d be right behind, the only question in my mind is using our site’s logo, as technically the ThunderCats logo on which its based is copyrighted to WB. However, I think you’d be OK having, say, an illustration of the ThunderCats along with a symbol saying something like “TCL” and the address www.thundercatslair.org underneath. Keep us posted how you get on with this! :slight_smile:

Take care… :slight_smile:

3

I would say that we can use the logo on that is on the top of our forums minus the Thundercats symbol.I would need a modified ThunderCatsLair logo like the one on top of the forums but without the Tcats symbol. Also
Basically the logo would have to be ThunderCatsLair.org

We would have to come up with character designs to place on the front or back of shirts, also keep in mind that all areas where thre is art would have to bear the sites name for legal purposes. We could let members vote on the designs too to make it more members friendly ;).

We can do an initial run of t-shirts that would be sort of the official TCL shirt and then we can expand on doing single characters.I really like the Lion-O design that is on the front of the website so we could perhaps go with that

I found a thread on he-man.org on the voting and a little bit of information

http://www.he-man.org/forums/boards/showthread.php?t=95851

Just a suggestion to display on the back of the shirts…minus the Thundercats logo of course and adding the .org to ThunderCatsLair

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y161/RODZM/T-shirtsuggestion.jpg

On a side note I also noticed online that there is acompany that would make custom legit mailing stamps. www.stamps.com can let you upload an image and let you create your own custom stamps. Pretty cool but i dont think it would be good if we sell these at a slightly higher value than their website to come up with extra funds. Anyways here is what i came up with, pretty neat though and affordable at 20 for $18.99

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y161/RODZM/LionOstamp.jpg

4

those are pretty cool manny.

5

My Dad owns a t-shirt printing company and could probably beat any deal that a forum member could pull together. I could be wrong, but if you give me the same info that you’ll provide dirtnapp, I’ll get my Dad to see what he can do. He’ll do it at cost for us and can do anything we want.

He did the t-shirts for the Halo3 release in Canada at all the EB Game Stores, they looked kick ass!

Ciao
Mark

6

´Hey guy I have another idea that could work slowly bt surely. how about we make an announcement via te forums. Maybe a thread on the announcement section placing an Amazon.com referral link. We ARE affiliatd with Amazon via their Associates program. Matter of fact next month we should get a funds transfer from Amazon in the amount of 20 something dollars. All it takes is writing a short paragraph telling people to use that link which in term gives us revenues for each sale made thru that link

7

Chris here…

For myself I think it’s probably a good idea - which is just as well, MannyC my friend, since you’ve gone and posted about it anyway, LOL! :smiley: No problems as far as I’m concerned, anything that supports this site and gets revenue coming in to keep this baby online is fine by me! :slight_smile:

Re: t-shirts, etc., I hope no one will be offended by me saying that this is another one of those things that seems to be hanging in the air somewhat unresolved - maybe this would be a good thing to talk about at the proposed Team Meeting for early in the New Year? :slight_smile:

Take care… :slight_smile:

8

I sent an email to Val about the shirts so lets see what he says. I think that in order to get around the legality issues the characters cannot be identical to the Thundercats characters, by that i mean that there would have to be some sort of variation to the character but still close enough to hold to its original view. Also the website name would have to be on the t-shirt minus any Thundercats logos. Thats just my thoughts so lets see what Val says

EDIT:

Just received a PM from Val concerning the shirts so if anything i suggest we use this model if we are to make any shirts at all. Read the PM below…

[B]Well, technically, we were running a risk with those shirts.

what we did was create our own art.
So, the shirts techically sported fanart, not licensed art owned by the company.
That narrowed the concerns to character likenesses… which helps SOME, but not completely.

then, we made sure not to sport any logos or character names that are legal trademarks.
No “Masters of the Universe” not “Skeletor”, etc.

Using he-man.org was actually a very gray area.
Because of the word “he-man”
But we have an agreement in place wiht Mattel in regards to the domain name. They own the word He-Man; so we don’t have ownership over the domain name.

Still, we needed the domain name to do that to make sure the fans were clearly purchasing fan shirts endorsing the site.
Not shirts for sale to violate a license.

Even with all of that precaution,
If Mattel had told us to stop, we would have had to.

I think the fact we only made about a 100 of each design,
we didn’t distribute anywhere other than our site,
and that we made about a 1.00 from each shirt,
made it less of a concern for Mattel.

Once you start profiting from their characters,
it can get even hairier.

[/B]Guys I just found a place http:www.cafepress.com and we can do shirts fairly cheap and best of all we can publish a Thundercats price guide for a very minimal cost. Your thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Check it out http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/help/learn_book.aspx

9

I think the shirts would be a high-risk project leaning towards copyright infringement. Because we are using images that depict a particular brand, we’d be running the risk of doing something illegal, regardless of whether it’s for non-profit purposes. In other words, just having our site logo on a shirt would be copyrighted material because of the cat symbol.

Unless we come up with a brand new logo for the site without the cat symbol, I don’t think the shirt idea is going to work. :frowning: