When Life Throws You Lemons…

throw them back! And that’s exactly what I’m doing. Today has been a quiet day for me blog-wise because I got some extremely upsetting news at 11:45am. I spent the first 2 hours crying, then another two hours panicking, and now I’m just plain angry. Some of you may know that I’m work from home mom but I’ve never gone into great detail on what I do.

Well, I’m a CafePress shopkeeper. Basically, since 2004 I’ve been designing graphics that I transfer to apparel and general merchandise and sell them in my own shops through the CafePress service. Over the past 5 years, one design turned into over 1,000 of them in several shops. I can’t begin to tell you how proud I was when I received my first commission check of $55.73. Then my next check came, then another until I started getting checks in the thousands. All my hard work had paid off. I found my niche in the marketplace, it was the American dream for a mom that wants to stay at home and raise her children.

Then last year I got the disturbing news that CafePress was making big cuts to their volume bonus program. It cut my income in half. Due to the fact that I was making as much as my husband, that ended up being a quarter of our total income. Can you imagine a blow like that? It was tough at first, but we adjusted and I kept plugging along even though I had felt like CafePress had just slapped me in the face.

Today I received the devastating news that my income that already got cut in half, will now be cut by another 90% because of changes they are making to their marketplace and commission structure. Basically, they are taking the ability to set my own markup out of my hands, and giving me 10% of the product value. A t-shirt that i once made a profit of $10 on, I will now get $2.49 for.

This is going to hurt my family more than they will ever comprehend. They took greed to whole new level. My checks, that I worked damn hard for, which by the way brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars for CafePress, were paying my bills, the car payment, our groceries, and clothes for the kids. It’s not just me they are hurting, but their entire community. Well CafePress, you can keep your lemons, I’m going to go make my lemonade somewhere else. Things are going to hurt us pretty badly for awhile thanks to these changes, but I’m not giving up. I never used one of the competitor services because of the loyalty I felt to CafePress, clearly that loyalty isn’t recipricated, so I’m taking my designs to a different service. Zazzle, here I come!