UPDATE: Although I stick by a lot of what I said below (they still need to get rid of the tongue in cheek emails which can come off wrong), Bountee is doing much better than I expected when I first wrote this post, and since this post is result #3 if you search for them on Google, I thought it would be nice of me to say so.
Yesterday, I signed up for a Bountee account to see if anyone wanted to buy some of my doodles on some t-shirts. It was all cool and relatively simple, although the SVG only requirement was a bit annoying. However, this morning I wake up to find that every single design that I uploaded has been rejected. Here’s the email that I received:
Hi,
It’s Bountee here! We’ve had a good look at your proposed design and are ever so sorry – but we won’t be able to send this to the site at the moment :(The reason given by our quality control robots for not being able to make your design ‘live’ was:
———-
COMMUINITY SUITABILITY:
Bountee provides a place for illustrators and designers to create and sell their shirt designs, and for shoppers to find and buy new tees. But most importantly we are aiming to provide a consistent quality of t-shirt design to our community.
All of the designs submitted to Bountee go through an approval process – where our group of ‘acceptability robots’ rate and grade the design for its suitability for placement within Bountee.com. It’s important to understand that this isn’t a direct comment on the design itself – your shirt might well be rather good and have potential to sell tonnes – but more of a case that we don’t feel that the design is right for the Bountee community at this time.
We’re really sorry – but if you do, truly believe in the potential market for your chosen design, we would highly recommend both www.cafepress.com and www.spreadshirt.com.
Thanks for visiting Bountee, and we hope you understand.
———-
We hope you understand, and thank you for designing with Bountee.com.
Love, Bountee
p.s. You could always tweak the design based on the feedback above and re-submit the design?
http://www.bountee.com
I have a few bits of critique here. First of all, whoever writes the copy for this email needs to rethink it. Being cutesy and saying “Love, Bountee” and repeating your site’s name multiple times in a rejection letter just makes the rejected person feel more jilted. Try a nice formal: “We’re sorry, but your design didn’t meet our standards” with a link to those standards. The “robots” are insulting as is the tone.
Now, one of the shirt designs that was rejected was the face appearing in this post. It’s a minimalist doodle, but why was it rejected? Why? Because they didn’t like it. Plain and simple. Either that or their service is too shoddy to make such a simple sketch an attractive t-shirt. In any case, they’re not setting themselves up to win, because they’re building up an unnecessary exclusivity. They should get out of the way of the designs and let the sales numbers determine what’s what.
In any case, I went with another option.
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Wow, yeah. Don’t have people who write ad copy write rejection letters, huh?
Hi CK,
It’s Steve from Bountee here – and I just wanted to say a few words in response to your post if I may.
Firstly, you’re right.
It’s too much of an autocratic process at the moment and we’re working on a more ‘community led’ solution as I type.
We have been quite simply swamped with the number of designs that we have received; but that hasn’t been the issue. What we have been more than a little surprised at is the content of a lot of these ‘designs’. Something which we had hoped that limiting our submissions to SVG only would have gone some way to resolve.
Over the weekend we received submissions that included (the perhaps obvious) crudely drawn penises, blatantly copyrighted imagery, text with arabic script (which we didn’t have translated) alongside celebratory pictures of the twin towers burning, white power slogans and various levels of offensive material too numerous to mention.
We also fell victim to a lot of people testing out the the system with clipart and similar style artwork.
It appears that your line drawing fell foul to an over zealous team.
We haven’t been transparent with our process – and that is a mistake (hindsight is a great thing right? :/ ) but just so that you know; every design is approved (or not) by a chain of individuals and the majority decision of this ‘group’ is taken as the final decision of approval. Quite how your design didn’t make it through the process is unclear to me – and I’ll be sure to go off and check – but we had hoped and still, genuinely believe that for the moment this is a system that is working ‘ok’ for now.
We’re sorry that it has resulted in some ‘rogue’ refusals and we are frantically trying to make the whole thing more robust.
What I will say – in our defence though – is that we are literally 1 week old, and are not a multi-million dollar funded company with cash reserves and allusions to a fancy, cash rich exit strategy. We’re just a couple of guys who built a t-shirt site in our spare time and who wanted to share it with our peers.
And I hope that we’ll learn as much as we share.
Apologies again.
I got the same thing for decent ideas nothing x rated or anything.. I uploaded (and yes the SVG deal is a Royal PIA)
Tried 4 or 5 designs and got the same letter for all of them..
Simply .. I dont need them.. they needed me.. I bring in quite a bit of income to some of the other PODs..
my theory?
Bountee
You lose
You Lose
YOU LOSE
all the money I would have made you..
What Bountee was afraid to say, I am not. Your drawing would not make a good t-shirt. That’s why the website is there. Nobody would buy a shirt with disproportionate facial features sketched on it.
I applaud your brave rudeness, Cale, as well as your inability to follow the point of this post.
maybe your designs got rejected because they sucked? that doodle face could have been drawn by a 2 year old. i joined 2 days ago and have already sold 2 shirts. maybe instead of whining about it…you should work harder on your designs?
“It’s a minimalist doodle”. yeah, right.
Thanks for the kind(er) words C.K.!
We’ve worked a lot over the past few months and I think everything is starting to rock on pretty perfectly now.
It’s critique like yours that has helped immensely – so an acknowledgement from a one-time, fierce critic is praise indeed.
:)
Thank you!