I am very sorry to say this, but it isn’t a good thing to do this.
It has been raised a couple of times that we should do some merchandise and it has been discussed many times at length. We have however decided against doing this because of a long list of reasons. Here are a couple:
- For a start, we could not find a very good supplier which would meet our criteria. Those are except obviously having good quality products for a great price a provider that can manufacture in multiple places; at least in Europe and the US because those are our biggest markets. It is not feasible to ship anything across half of the world, neither price-wise, nor is this any good for the environment.
- This will bind a lot of resources. We are already very busy, do we need to have a gift shop? Things need to be designed, dealt with, there will be returns, exchanges and a lot of admin for zero profit. The calculations that we have done are pretty bad for us. Drop-shippers will collect pretty much the entirety of the profit and we will therefore spend lose a lot of money by having this.
- Then, we cannot afford to lose donations. I have heard this in so many places before where people were grateful for a piece of software and said things along the lines “Oh I should donate, but I would rather buy a t-shirt instead”. Obviously it is perfectly fine to buy a t-shirt if you would like one, but it is not at all there to fund the project. There used to be a time where this was possible but this is not longer the truth. So, if you have $20 that you would like for the project to have, you will have to donate them and not buy a t-shirt where we might end up with 50ct of all of it. You spent $20, but we have not received much of this. Those two things should simply not be confused.
- The actual design. I am very disappointed to once more see the tux being brought back. It is dead. It has died some horrible death a long time ago. There are reasons for it. One of the is that it is three-dimensional and has shadows. You cannot print such things on a t-shirt. It will look horrible. It is also sitting on a background. The reason to phase out the tux was to prepare to have some merch with a nice and clean design and not a 20 year-old picture slabbed onto a little bit of fabric. The feedback that we have received on our new design was foremost great. It got a lot of praise from lots of people; on the other hand, some people have taken their negative feedback too far on this very forum. This is absolutely playing a role in why I didn’t want to have another debate on what colour the mug should be. Maybe black? no everybody has black. Maybe white? No that is too bright for the people who are on dark mode 100% of the time now. Hmm, maybe pink? But is it the right shade? Or maybe something else? See I could go on. The design is the design. And I would like that people will finally accept this if they don’t have anything productive to add to it.
@tratru, please make it very clear on the page, that this shop is an unofficial merchandise shop. We cannot be affiliated with this, because it simply is not our shop. You are also missing all requirements that it takes to run an online shop in Europe, no address, no contact to the seller, no nothing. There is definitely not a “new” IPFire logo coming and there is no more tux.