Latest update: September 2023 | by Lili
What is Teespring?
Table of contents
- How does Teespring.com work?
- IP infringement on demand
- Harley Davidson vs SunFrog
- Online brand protection on Teespring & Co.
Teespring, or as they want to be called nowadays, Spring, is a website to help budding designers create and sell products. (As most users still refer to the site as Teespring, including Spring’s own support site for its merchants, we’re going to use both names in this article.)
As its original name suggests, teespring.com started out as a platform for designing and selling T-shirts. Today, designers can choose many other types of products, including hoodies, tank tops, leggings, phone cases, mugs, tote bags, and even home decor like pillows, posters and blankets.
Teespring.com has about 2.9 million monthly visitors, most of them from the US, UK, Germany, Canada and France. The company has several well-known competitors, including Redbubble, Spreadshirt, Teepublic and even Merch by Amazon.
How print on demand services work
How does Teespring.com work?
Using Spring couldn’t be easier. First of all, aspiring designers have to register by submitting their basic data like a name or brand name and email address.
Teespring.com login
Once you have your Spring account, logging into the platform is fast and easy. Designers can even use their social media accounts to get started.
Screenshot of teespring.com’s signup page
Then it’s already time to start creating. With the help of Teespring’s Launcher, designers can pick a product type and upload any content (e.g. text, images, etc) they want the product to feature.
The platform offers all kinds of design support for users, including tutorials, formatting tips and much more. Once the products are ready, Spring can guide designers through the process of selling as well. This includes marketing and promotion, production, shipment, customer support and handling payments. Teespring.com only prints products that were actually ordered, which means there’s no surplus stock designers have to worry about.
The platform doesn’t charge its users any upfront fees; Teespring’s commission is built into the price of the products created. This means that once a designer sells something (or uses a sales-driving tool provided by the platform), Teespring gets to keep a certain percentage of the selling price.
That looks all peachy. So what is the problem?
IP infringement on demand
Teespring is not known for its strict security measures. As you’ve seen above, creating an account is easy for honest designers and fraudsters alike; the information users are required to submit is easily faked and not rigorously verified by Spring.
The platform offers the option of a two factor authentication, which helps ensure that users’ accounts are as safe as possible. However, this only protects the existing accounts from identity theft, and doesn’t help against potential IP infringements.
And it’s just as easy for users to create an original product than an IP infringing one. No, it’s actually easier since they don’t have to bother with an original design, simply copy-paste a brand’s logo, product image, name, or any other piece of trademark-protected intellectual property.
Some fraudsters try to trick the system and create names and logos that resemble well-known brands. Let’s take a look at such an example. How about a T-shirt from tspring? Or tee spring?
Image of a T-shirt with a fake brand logo “tspring”
Teespring and IP rights
Teespring does have an IP-protection policy. This aims to prevent both the misuse of copyright-protected assets of brands outside the platform, and Spring designers from stealing each others’ property.
Teespring also provides tutorials to its users on how not to infringe on somebody else’s IP rights. This is a commendable effort and shows that the platform is trying to step up its IP protection game. However, while this may certainly help prevent accidental infringements, it’s not likely to deter seasoned fraudsters who know perfectly well what they’re doing.
Due to the lack of serious verification processes at the time of registration, anybody can create an account and start selling IP infringing merchandise in the blink of an eye. Then, should the threat of detection become too real, they can pack up shop and disappear just as quickly, taking all their earnings with them. And that’s money they made off your brand’s trademark and copyright protected assets.
After all, not every brand owner can be as lucky as Harley Davidson was.
Harley Davidson vs SunFrog
As we mentioned in our article Who pays for test purchases, SunFrog, a print on demand service that infringed on Harley Davidson’s IP rights, was ordered by court to pay Harley $19.2 million in statutory damages. (By the way, what a great idea, getting the infringers to pay for damages which more than cover the costs of your test purchases!)
Back in 2018, the verdict paved the way for print on demand services to take IP infringements more seriously. SunFrog, a platform very similar to Teespring, allowed users to print Harley Davidson logos and other trademark-protected imagery on merchandise and sell them. They didn’t have any copyright protection tools in place, and even though the infringing listings were removed after Harley’s initial warning in 2017, SunFrog didn’t take the necessary steps when the same or similar listings reappeared on the platform.
There was a key moment in this story: the detection of unauthorized listings. Nothing would have happened if Harley didn’t notice the sale of infringing products and realize the loss of revenue and image these were causing them.
This is the damage IP infringements can do to your brand
But what if your brand lacks the resources to look for IP infringing listings on- and offline? Will you just accept your losses and move on?
Luckily, you don’t have to: globaleyez is there for you.
Online brand protection on Teespring & Co.
As we’ve seen above, Spring and many other print on demand services function as regular online marketplaces. Customers looking for specifically designed merchandise can buy products on these sites just like on Amazon, eBay and the rest.
Which means that our marketplace and image monitoring services work just as fine on Teespring and its competitors as on Amazon & Co. We discover web content, including product listings and images that infringe on your brand’s IP rights. With a test purchase, we can confirm that the products in question are indeed unauthorized, and should you wish to take the next steps, we can enforce your rights and demand takedown of the infringing content from Teespring and the rest.
Don’t let fraudsters ruin your brand’s reputation and steal your revenue on print on demand marketplaces. Contact us and let us devise a strategy together to protect your brand’s IP rights on Teespring and any corner of the internet.