Profile: Philip Rooke, CEO, Spreadshirt

A quick glance at Spreadshirt and you might assume it’s just a company that prints T-Shirts; no big deal. But with four active revenue models and sales of €65m last year, you might change your mind.

Your ears also might prick on hearing that CEO Phillip Rooke, is a former director of Tesco.com – one of the most cutting edge ecommerce platforms in the UK.

This is no simple operation, founded in Leipzig in Germany ten years ago, the company has sales and marketing across 17 different countries and looks after delivery to 45 countries.

I caught up with Rooke to find out more about the company, what its biggest challenges are and how he has seen ecommerce evolve over his 16 years working online.

What exactly does Spreadshirt do?

We are quite a sophisticated, rapidly scaling business. We work in the print-on-demand, merchandise and customisation industry in which there are four ways to make money.

The first is to create a model where people can sign up and make their T-Shirt designs, another is to create a marketplace for people to sell their designs, a third way is to create a white label solution which allows people to set up and run their own shops and the third is to allow other companies to use your API and plug into you systems.

We have competitors in all of these markets but we are the only company crazy enough to do all four at once.

It means we are dealing with a wide range of ecommerce and customer and fulfilment issues. Underlying our success is the ability to work with and cater for everyone. We work very hard to simplify for consumers and businesses, what is a very complex business where there are thousands of small processes.

How did the company start off?

The two founders noticed that there were lots of people with design ideas but the process of setting up a shop was too hard so they set out to provide a white label shop system which people could use, making their designs, placing them on a virtual shop and we do all the hard work of printing and delivery, paying them their percentage.

What Spreadshirt quickly found was that the design tool was very attractive and lots of people were registering as shops who actually just wanted to make the T-Shirts for themselves. So we added the ability for consumers to simply buy and make the T-Shirts with us.

It became apparent that many of our shop owners had plenty of ideas but no marketing capability therefore no traffic to their shops and no way to attract customers. That’s when we decided to create a marketplace.

Off the back of that we found that lots of businesses just wanted to plug in and use our systems so we made our API available to allow other platforms to use what we have.

Why do you think it has been such a success?

We solve two problems. The first is that for many small brands and designers the process of setting up a business is complex. There’s the transactions, the stock risk etc. we take all of that away, there’s no risk, no stock requirement as we are print-on-demand.

The second problem is consumers have grown up in a world where everything is available. People have all sorts of interests, political ideas and hobbies. Just liking something on Facebook has been devalued – people want to wear things that express who they are and say what they care about. Finding those things can be tough.

If you have a very specialist interest, say a certain type of wind surfing and you want a T-shirt, but you are in Leipzig in two foot of snow. You can’t find exactly what you want. You will be able to find it on our marketplace. We have big ideas and small ideas – all catered for. From Wikileaks to goats – there are two different people who operate goat specialist shops and lots of goat designs in our marketplace.

There are plenty of weird and wonderful things.

Who founded the company?

It was founded in Leipzig, Germany by Lukasz Gadowski – it was an extension of his MBA. He set it up here, the first printing press was in his bedroom, now the head office is in Leipzig and employs 180 people and one of our two European factories is here, there other is in Poland. We have sales teams in Paris, Berlin, London and in Boston and factories in Pittsburgh and Las Vegas.

The sales teams run operation in 17 different countries and we will be adding 3 more countries this year and next. We had 17 countries when I arrived but I stopped county expansion because I wanted to improve our processes before we pushed out to more.

What is your biggest challenge in running such a large operation?

The biggest challenge is delivery because everything ordered is done print-on-demand.  We look after 50,000 with 35,0000 on the marketplace.

If we are doing our job properly the customer shouldn’t know we are print-on-demand because we make sure they receive the products just as quickly as if they were mass produced. If you order in the UK, it is processed and printed in Poland, then gets back to you within five working days.

Any issues around currency?

We operate in five currencies and we’re adding a few more this year. There are issues around currency conversion – our main currencies, the Dollar, the Euro and Stirling have all been quite adventurous in the last few years and the Greek crisis hasn’t helped when our base currency is the Euro.

We pay sales tax in 17 different countries and the sheer volumes at which we are selling in a number of other counrties, Australia for example, means that we are qualifying for sales tax in other countries too.

We have unified the sales taxes to make it simple for our customers. Our publishers and customers shouldn’t have to care one second about VAT – that is what we offer. We take that nightmare away.

How do you manage with all of these issues?

The Spreadshirt platform is essentially about automising all of those complexities – underneath it all we are building a platform that allows us to do these things relatively easily with lots of automation – we have a large engineering team and everyone from finance through to marketing works on how we can reduce complexities further.

Do you have a lot of technology that is unique to you then?

Yes it is unique to us but we can offer the API for other companies to use. There’s the issues around multiple payments, multiple delivery and tax, copyright checking etc. The company would be 40% bigger if I ignored copyright, but we don’t steal other people’s ideas.

We have specialist and industry-wide problems, our platform takes all of those things in. We may in the future resell the technology but it is certainly not something we could outsource.

What considerations have gone into the design of the site?

Fundamentally design considerations have changed – they were very much around enabling function for people, so less about being a pretty, glossy design site. Over the next two years we are looking at a redesign that will make our design much, much better. We have gone through the stage of being functionally-lead to hopefully becoming much more customer experience-lead.

Getting the functions right was the critical part of the business and making that pivotal but we became profitable in 2010 and now we can look more into design.

I’ve used your site to create a T-shirt and found it incredibly user-friendly

Absolutely, the design tool is incredibly user-friendly but some of the other tools need work such as the shop builder – we have got a lot of improvement and we can make it better. The version of the design tool on the site now is version 7, I have 7.5 in front of me – the first mobile version in HTML 5 and we are starting work on version 8 which will be much much more fun!

How do you see the company growing over the next few years?

There’s lot of improvement to do. The new countries we are adding this year wont supply substantial growth for a few years so we’ll wait to see the results for that.

Mobile however is offering very rapid growth and the rise of the tablet as an ecommerce browsing machine is happening much faster than anyone expected. There were lots of early adopters at first but now it is less centred on them and becoming an every day tool that people use to browse or play with. In the US, which is our biggest single market, at the weekend 25% of our traffic  comes from a tablet.

Have you got a tablet optimised site?

Not yet and up until three weeks ago, you couldn’t use the design tool on a tablet because it is built in flash but we now have a HTML version running so at least you can do the same things on your tablet as you can on your desktop. Next we will optimise for tablet.

Sounds like you have a lot to do?

If I could double the number of project managers and developers I have I would still have a massive list of tasks that would take three years to get through.

For example we are just launching a new product for blogs and newspapers which is a T-Shirt icon that publishers can have next to their headlines which people can press to create a T-shirt from that headline. We did a test with CNN and it worked well, some of these headlines are funny and do relate to people’s lives so they want to wear them.

As someone with a lot of experience what do you think of the current ecommerce environment?

Firstly, it has been 16 years since I did my first website, media and e-commerce still struggle to have enough talent in them. There are plenty of cowboys but not what I would call talent.

There are also a lot of fads online which create hype, things which appear on the surface to be really exciting but take a long time before they become a business reality. Take mobile for example, people have been talking about it for years but sizeable mobile revenues have only really appeared over the past few months.

Social media is the same. There is a big difference between sharing on Facebook and Facebook commerce and yet most journalists want to talk to me about Facebook commerce, not the real ecommerce issues. These fads come through and they have little to do with what our customers actually want.

I also don’t think ecommerce is customer-focused enough. In my five years at Tesco I saw real customer focus but I haven’t seen it anywhere else!

How can ecommerce start being more customer-focused?

The amazing thing is the value you can get out of testing products on consumers. We are testing prototypes of what we are creating, testing in lots of different countries. You can find out what different customer attitudes are in a day’s worth of testing, go away fix it and test it again and build solutions.

We ran a test the other day on a Korean shopper on one of our competitors’ platforms and we could see how his experience was. We don’t operate in Korea yet but it is on our list and this testing gave us great insight into how the Asian market reacts and shops.

www.spreadshirt.co.uk