I have been doing a few media interviews recently and one of the things I am asked is the origins of RedBubble. So here it is …

In March 2006, Peter, Paul and I got together to discuss bringing print-on-demand to Australia. I have known Paul for over 15 years and Peter for about five. We seemed to have a good skill set to work together with Peter bringing really deep operational skills, Paul a great design sensibility and me almost ten years of online experience.

We spent a number of months working on the whole print-on-demand idea (think Cafepress for Australia) but we were beginning to bore even ourselves to death. Life seemed just a little bit too short to be obsessed with watching printers churn out another mug with a picture of someone’s cat on it.

I was particularly concerned that P…

We had an idea.

Only we had it a bit late, but it was so good we thought rather than waste our Sunday with sleep, food and alcohol we’d whip the plasticine out and see what you all thought about it.

What was the idea?

Well, if you were to buy someone a gift from RedBubble and have it shipped straight to them, we’d give you a link to a video that you could then email to the recipient telling them a surprise was on it’s way. The best time would be just after you’d received the shipping confirmation.

Possibly with some future tech wizardry we could even get your name and the recipients name into it, and automate the process.

Anyway, here’s the video page you’d link them to, let us know what you think, don’t get too hung up on specific details, as thi…

If each RedBubble member was 2 meters tall and if we laid us all end-to-end we would not circle the globe. We wouldn’t even come close really. And a lot of us would need to get up and go to the toilet while the others were getting ready to lie down. And just flying everybody in from places like Iran and Mexico would be a nightmare. So we aren’t going to do this.

But we have now surpassed 100,000 members. Which is pretty phenomenally amazing, as it seems like only yesterday that Ed was explaining to the strategy we used to get to 50,000 members.

To celebrate reaching 100,000 members we had a new logo competition running. We had a thoroughly inspired field of entries – here.

Opening the envelope (drum roll), we have TWO winners Faizan and Edgeplus. Both will have their logo’s up for a…

The greatest tee competition in the history of the world is over. And they’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man.

Please step forward and go completely beserk for our Gold Medallist Simon Sherry and his winning design Cruel Britannia…

…right, deep breath, and again, cheering lunacy for Silver and Bronze Medallists, geniusloci with London Calling and ToastedGhost with Call London

Three cheers, huge applause and general excitement to these three, for excellent work and well deserved prizes. Now while you’re waiting for these to hit the shops and for us to come up with something even better, you should spend some time going over the incredible entries for this comp, some of them quite the finest bits of design to ever grace the pages of RedBubble.

But

That is n…

I found this on a betamax tape at the back of a cupboard in an office on a coffee plantation in Guatamala. If you turn up the sound it’s quite good. Feel free to share it or embed it anywhere you see fit.

[Video]

It’s a sort of Part 2 to this

And there’s some glamourous behind the scenes stuff here, if you’re into that sort of thing and if you want a high res version for any reason, ask me.

We’ve just broken the 80,000 members mark. So if the average weight of an adult human brain is 1350g and we assume that we’re only creative with the right half of said brain, that means there’s currently 54 tonnes of pulsating grey matter putting out all of this incredible art.

You should be proud to be part of it. We’re certainly proud to have you here.

Oh, and I found this advert in a magazine this morning.

You can get his champion tee here but I have no idea where you can get trousers like that.

Bye