The year of the pandemic has made online shopping more of a necessity than just a matter of convenience. During the lockdown last year, people resorted to shopping almost everything from groceries to essentials online.
With the growing need for online shopping platforms, companies resorted to more accessible ways to enable their customers to shop. One can now not just buy goods from e-commerce sites but from social media platforms as well. This also made way for social media influencers and content creators to market their line of products.
We all followed our favorite influencers during the time of lockdown and watched their cooking videos or exercise routines among many others. This gave them an opportunity to launch their own range of products like sports and gym wear, cookbooks, fashion apparel, etc.
Spring, formerly known as Teespring, a social commerce platform that allows people to create and sell custom products. The US-based company was founded in 2011 by Walker Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton. Almost 10 years down the line, the brand has started gaining a lot of momentum.
In 2018, Youtube partnered with Spring to help creators design and sell merchandise straight through the platform. Essentially, if creators want to design a t-shirt that their fans can purchase, a shelf appears just below their videos with a variety of items that fans can choose to purchase. This means that instead of watching a vlogger plug their merchandise with a link every few seconds in their videos, the merchandise will appear directly on the page.
Chris Lamontagne, CEO, Spring., expressed about his company, “We have been in existence since 2012 and as an organization, we particularly identify with the creator economy. Over the years, we have seen creators come up with wonderful products but their full-time role isn’t commerce, it’s being a creator. That’s where we come in, we’ve created a platform that is designed to support creators in commerce, by which we mean the sale of goods, both physical, digital.”
The company has now expanded in India as well giving Indian creators an opportunity to sell their products digitally.
So how does the platform works? Creators with over 10,000 followers can join Spring and create a product on the platform and sell it via Youtube. Spring takes a small share out of the sale of the product in return takes care of various tasks related to commerce, like logistics, sales tax, and customer service.
