11 years of the Guild bookmark

[J.Edward]

We talk every so often about putting something together to sell as a fundraiser for the Guild, and bookmarks sound like an easy thing to start with, but between finding a supplier, international shipping, copyright etc etc, it gets complicated very quickly.

It does and that is unfortunate.
I just had a bad run with an international printer for some of my posters.
So one can easily end up with unusable stuff with the wrong printer.

It's half tempting to get a big printer and just do some print runs of stuff for the Guild.
But printing is a touchy business - costly and easy to make mistakes.

[ChickPea]

It's half tempting to get a big printer and just do some print runs of stuff for the Guild.
But printing is a touchy business - costly and easy to make mistakes.

Yeah, there are a lot of reasons why Guild merchandise never quite happens. Probably because I work in admin, I think about the business side of things if we were to do it ourselves. You know, the existential nightmare of processing orders, packaging, international shipping, what if it doesn't arrive, what about dissatisfied customers, the tax situation, someone to deal with random enquiries, upfront costs, etc etc etc...

I know sites like Cafepress take care of much of that stuff for you, but they're moderately expensive and I suspect the quality sucks. Yet, so many sites around the web raise funds from selling t-shirts (for example) and I find myself thinking 'Surely we could do that too...'

Mostly, I just want a Guild mug for my coffee!

[Mouse]

I really like that second one you did

If you do ever get to doing a money raising print run, I'm not sure about whether the Merelan City bookmarks I've made can be used to make money, since I can't sell them myself. Its the trees I've used in the original map that are the problem. I can give the bookmarks away, but I can't sell them. You could have the others I make, though. I'd love to raise money for the Guild

EDIT: Do you really have to pay tax on income raised as charitable funds? We don't have to do that in the UK - simply because its a charity. I expect you would have to register the Guild as a 'Not for Profit' organisation (or the US equivalent) to achieve that status however, because the guys doing the work would still need paying, even if we donated our bookmarks free of charge.

[ChickPea]

I don't see anything happening anytime soon tbh, and if it ever did, obviously we'd need to ask for permission before we used people's art (ugh, contracts, there's another thing...)

Really, I wouldn't think too much about it for now.