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Your crowdfunding campaign is ready, the budget is nailed down, and one box is left to fill: the rewards. This is where project owners often come unstuck. Too expensive, and the campaign ends up funding the object rather than the project. Too generic, and nobody pledges. An item personalised with a photo or artwork solves both problems at once: it is unique to your project, and the unit price stays manageable even in a small run.
What a reward really costs
Before you promise a tote bag at a mid-range tier, do the full sum. In the personalisation studio, the price shown is + shipping (free from €50), even for a single item. No postage to add afterwards, no surprise when it is time to send things out.
- Mug: $25.00 — the entry-level reward, the one you promise at the lowest tiers.
- T-shirt: $29.00 — the most popular tier, because the backer wears it and becomes your poster.
- Postcards: $25.00 for a set of 10 — useful as a symbolic reward at a small tier, or as a thank-you note slipped into the other parcels.
- Tote bag: $38.00 — visible, reused for years, popular on community and cultural projects.
- Sweatshirt: $54.00 — for a high tier, or an "ambassador" bundle.
Simple rule: set the pledge tier at roughly double the cost of the reward. A t-shirt at $29.00 is promised at around $58.00. What is left funds the project, which is the whole point.
The volume discount changes your margins
From ten items in the basket, a 10% discount applies automatically. From twenty-five, it rises to 15%. No code to enter: it appears on its own in the basket. Items add up, so ten different items count as ten — you can mix mugs, t-shirts and tote bags in the same order.
In practice: fifteen mugs go from $375.00 to $337.50. Thirty t-shirts go from $870.00 to $739.50. On a campaign, the $168.00 saved there is $168.00 more for the project.
Two things to know: the wooden frames and the canvas are excluded from the discount and do not count towards the threshold. And the discount applies to the basket, not to your account — so group your shipments into one order rather than ordering as the pledges come in. The details are on the page for personalised items in quantity.
Which design for a reward
A campaign reward is not an intimate gift: it has to be readable by people who do not know your project yet. Three approaches that work:
- The project logo or name, big, centred, on a plain background. Simple, and it survives both the wash and being read from three metres away.
- A photo of the project itself: the building to renovate, the instrument to buy, the first harvest, the poster for the show. It is what the backers paid for, and they like to see it.
- A drawn design: on the home page, you can describe your idea in a sentence and let the AI draw it in about ten seconds, or give it your photo to change its style. Three free attempts, no account. Handy when you have neither a designer nor a usable photo — see creating a design with AI.
On the technical side: aim for an image of at least 2000 pixels on the longer side. A photo from a recent phone is more than enough. A screenshot or an image pulled from social media rarely is. The page on photo resolution for printing gives the thresholds by product.
The timeline, the real trap in crowdfunding
Campaigns almost always promise rewards too early. Here is how to push the date back:
- During the campaign: order nothing. You know neither the quantities nor the sizes.
- At close: allow two weeks to collect sizes and addresses. It always takes longer than you think, there are reminders to send.
- Then production: we quote 5 to 10 working days in the UK, Europe and the US, up to 15 elsewhere. Allow two weeks, three if you want a margin.
So: promise your rewards for one to two months after close, not three weeks. You will keep to the date, and keeping a date on a campaign is worth more than any update you could post.
Sizes, to be settled early
T-shirts and sweatshirts run from S to 2XL, in a unisex cut. The simplest approach is to ask for the size in the address-collection form, at the same time. If you do it afterwards, you will chase three times. The size guide belongs with the form: people reply better with the measurements in front of them.
For the tiers where size is a problem — backers abroad, gifts passed on, incomplete lists — switch to a product without a size. The personalised mug and the tote bag suit everyone and ship without any questions first.
Shipping abroad
A campaign almost always brings in backers from other countries. We ship across the UK, the EU, Switzerland, the US and Canada, with shipping calculated at checkout. Everything is printed to order, in Europe, at the partner site closest to the delivery address: a backer in Germany or Belgium costs you no more and waits no longer.
One last point of honesty: a personalised item is exempt from the standard right of withdrawal. Any printing, manufacturing or transport defect, on the other hand, is replaced or refunded — tell your backers, it avoids misunderstandings.
