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 http://www.cafepress.com and http://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?
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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