All posts in Minecraft Flower Experiment

After coming with the idea, building a first final version (which looked awesome), putting the website up and starting accepting orders; only then it crossed my mind that I might be infringing on Mojang’s (developers of Minecraft) intellectual property. I submitted the website to Minecraft’s subreddit to see if it got some visits out of that and it got quickly shut down by moderators, pointing at this very fact. It was the first time anyone had brought it up and it made me thinking they might be right.

I contacted Mojang on Twitter and by e-mail and after two weeks I finally got an answer through their Branding Guidelines:

You may not make any other commercial use of the Minecraft Brand or Minecraft Assets for example you may not sell any merchandise that uses the Minecraft Brand or Minecraft Assets. If you upload videos of the game to video sharing and streaming sites (like YouTube) you are however allowed to put ads on them.

That pretty much sums it up. Apparently they’re not open either to any kind of partnership at this point.

A few days after I put the website up they also announced Minecraft Papercraft Studio for iOS, which even if you can’t print out a flower like ours with it, it’s still a move in the same direction. If you like Minecraft and things made out of paper you should definitely check it out.

After talking to Mojang they said they’re cool with us doing this if we change the design of the flower “enough”. I don’t know how much is enough but if it means it doesn’t look like the one in Minecraft then there’s no point in doing this in my opinion. Anyway, I might still retake this endeavour at some point but for now it stays the way it is: I’m not accepting any orders, although you can download high resolution images of the flower for free from the website (at the bottom).

Stay tuned for the next experiment 😉

We finally put the website for the experiment up. You can check it out at 8bitflorist.com. Feel free to like it on Facebook and tweet about it 😀

Here on the right side of this post, you can see how the final version of the rose looks. I think the image is good but in real life is looks and feels absolutely fantastic. If you’re a fan of Minecraft you owe it to yourself to get one. I know I’m biased, but I mean it. Every time I look at it on our living room table I smile.

OK, some notes on the website.

Other than a purchase option (powered by Gumroad), I also wanted to provide a free download of the images we use to print the flower and the pot in case anyone wanted to do it on their own and just was on a very tight deadline and none of our shipping methods was enough. It’s at the bottom of the page, above the “Buy now” call to action. At first I thought about having an email-only form hooked up to Mailchimp to collect emails of those who downloaded the images, but then I thought: why not create a different product on Gumroad and set the price to 0+ (meaning people can set the price to zero and get it for free, or donate whatever they want)? Gumroad is awesome and they also let you send e-mails to all customers who bought (or in this case, downloaded for free) a product of yours, so I’m using them to run my little mailing list instead of Mailchimp. That way I have everything under the same service: sales and mailing list.

I’m using Google Analytics too so I’ll be sharing traffic stats at some point as well.

Finally, I settled on a final price: $19.95 shipping included. It’s not as cheap as I would like but without knowing how much we’ll sell, I can’t take the risk of ordering 10,000 copies and being able to price the product at $14.95 or so. Besides, I don’t think there are that many people who’d buy at $15 but not at $20. I think both numbers can be considered impulse purchase friendly. And after all, this is meant for gifts, and spending $20 on a gift is not considered a lot by any means.

Foldable.me‘s, which we love and kind of drew inspiration from for this experiment, are priced at $11.95 shipping included, which is awesome. However, I’m sure they move massive volume, since they have an amazing product. Actually, I know of quite some people that have bought a few after seeing ours. Also, their product fits in one sheet of paper printed on one side, while we ship four sheets of paper, two of them printed on both sides. On the plus side for us, though, all our prints are the same, while each of theirs has a unique design so they can’t print 10,000 of the same paper doll. Still, until (if ever!) we get to thousands of units sold, there’s no way we can get anywhere near $11.95 shipping included.

Tomorrow I’ll start contacting Minecraft and videogame blogs and websites and see if we can get some coverage and feedback. Exciting times! Will keep you guys posted.

I love the words “shipping included”. It makes buying physical products online so much more enjoyable. No need to think about “Where is this being shipped from?” or “How much extra is it gonna cost me?” And it’s not something that only the big players like Amazon can do, you can run a small shop and still follow this practice. From the start I decided I wanted to include shipping in the price for our little experiment.

We’ve been contacting a few shipping companies (UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc) and we’ve basically found out two things that apply to all of them. One, they usually focus on 1 to 2 day shipping. I wanted to include free 1 or 2-week shipping (which is cheaper) and then maybe offer the option of paying extra for 2-3 day shipping. The second thing we’ve found, though, is that they’re freakingly expensive, even for a lightweight product like ours. The very cheapest option is something like $30 to ship an envelope, unless you have some really serious volume, in which case it goes up down to maybe $15. I guess this pricing makes sense for more expensive items or very sensitive documents that need to be shipped fast, but not in our case, when it costs as much to ship (or even a lot more, depending on the destination) than the actual price of the product being shipped.

Still, being impatient as I am, I appreciate having the option of fast shipping (as outrageous as the price may be). If I found this particular product, wanted to buy it as a gift and didn’t have 1 or 2 weeks before my deadline (say, a birthday), I would totally pay $20 or $30 extra for faster shipping. Heck, I’ve done that before and I didn’t even have a deadline to meet. So yeah, if I can easily integrate (technically speaking) “pay extra for faster shipping”, I will.

I’ve been thinking today about how are we going to collect payments for the experiment. I thought about Stripe, but it’s US only. PayPal also came to mind, but I’ve had so many problems before (and heard of even more horrible stuff happening to other people), that I don’t think I want to take the risk. Then I thought about Gumroad, which I’ve had the pleasure to use before (as a customer, purchasing some of Nathan Barry‘s products), so I know it provides a good experience for the customer.

I was under the impression that it only supported digital products (to be downloaded or delivered by email), so I was excited to find out they now also support asking for shipping information (address, country, zipcode, etc). In other words: support for physical goods that need to be shipped. You still need to upload a file when you create a new product on their system (as a seller), but I contacted them and they said that in this case the best thing is to add a PDF saying something along the lines of “Thank you for purchasing X, your product will be shipped to you soon and, blah blah blah“.

Gumroad’s fee is 5% + $0.25 so I’ll need to take that into account as well when deciding on a final price. However, for the ease of use and quality of the service they provide, it’s a steal. I’ll write more about them once I have actual experience using it as a seller.

After contacting a few printing companies here in Barcelona, I finally decided to get a sample print from a couple of them. More than the prices, which were quite similar, I used response speed & quality as the main indicator for who I wanted to work with. I feel like nowadays I find myself associating quick responses to customer satisfaction all the time. That’s why I always try to reply to my emails as soon as possible. But I digress.

One thing that I already knew of manufacturing physical products (in this case printing them) but that still shocked me was how big of a difference in price per unit there is based on how big is your order (in terms of number of products manufactured).

For example, if I only order 500 items the price per unit is five times bigger than if I order 10,000. Considering the product at hand and my marketing budget for it (zero), this makes it tricky to set a price for consumers. Personally, I’m aiming for 500 orders, so I’ll set the price accordingly. If I end up selling thousands, then I’ll have a higher margin, which added to the volume, means I’ll make a nice profit. If I sell a few dozen units, I’ll lose some money (plus lots of time), but not too much. I still haven’t decided about the final price, but I’ll write about it when I do.

We finally settled on a name for the website: 8bitflorist.com. If you go now there will be nothing, so don’t waste your time. How did we come up with it? Glad you asked.

The obvious name was something like MinecraftFlowers.com but I didn’t want to run into legal issues by using their trademark (although I did buy that domain, more on that later). Keeping that in mind, we thought about PixelFlower.com or PixelFlowers.com, but they are both taken. Then my girlfriend came up with 8bit Flower, which I really like, so I registered that one as well. But then I thought, would it be better to call the website / shop 8bit florist, since it’s a place where we sell flowers. And so the final name was decided.

Now, I also registered a bunch of other domains which I plan to redirect to the main one. It’s an old habit of mine, which I recommend, but for this small experiment it may be overkill:

minecraftflower.com
minecraftflowers.com
8bitflower.com
8bitflowers.com
8bitsflower.com
eightbitflower.com
eightbitflowers.com
eightbitsflower.com

I really like it 🙂