Zazzle.com Expands Image Library for Product Customization

2005-09-01 - Palo Alto, CA, USA: Fast-rising online customized products marketplace Zazzle has expanded its relationship with several of its special collections content partners, to provide consumers with more product choices. Consumers can now make customized prints using a wide variety of characters available from The Walt Disney Company. Similarly, consumers now have greater flexibility in personally customizing stamps for real postage, using content from Harvey Entertainment's comics such as Casper the Friendly Ghost and Richie Rich, 3Muses' Zodiac Girlz, and a wide selection of content available from the California State Library and content from The U.S. Library of Congress.

Zazzle has attracted a great deal of attention in recent months, much of due to the involvment of venture capitalists John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins' and Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures. The interest is driven by the fact that Doerr and Shriram were early backers of the Google search engine. At Zazzle, individuals, groups and businesses can share their interests by creating, buying, and selling customized products including t-shirts, posters, cards, stamps, and other apparel. Zazzle combines a just-in-time manufacturing process, online design tools, and what it says is the world's largest collection of online customizable digital images to enable users to create on-demand products to their own exact specifications. Users can create products for themselves, to send as gifts, to share with others with similar interests, as well as to sell through Zazzle's online user-created marketplace.

This last idea, where website owners design customized products, and offer them sale on their own site in association with Zazzle, has become known as micro-manufacturing.

In addition, individuals can choose to become contributors by sharing their unique creations in Zazzle's public galleries. Within these galleries, anyone can browse, comment and connect with others who share their interests. Contributors also earn royalties every time their creations are purchased by others.

"With custom tees a huge success and customized stamps launching to great fanfare, we are now excited to expand our partnership with Zazzle to offer thousands of options for personalized prints," said Patrick Haley, Manager of New Business Development for Disney Consumer Products. Many of the images available only on Zazzle, have never before been seen by the general public or been available for customization purposes.

Zazzle's special collections include over 3,500 authentic images from The Walt Disney Company, as well as exceptional images from The Library of Congress, the California State Library, the Boston Public Library, the Linda Hall Library and The Hoover Institution. One-of-a-kind characters are also available on Zazzle from collections such as Harvey Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox's Family Guy(TM), Robots(TM), Neopets, The Pemberton & Oakes Collection, Zodiac Girlz, Build-A-Bear Workshop and MGM's Pink Panther.

In addition to these special collections from well-known brands, Zazzle's marketplace includes thousands of digital images from artists and creative consumers worldwide that have made their creations available to the public through Zazzle galleries.