VentureBeat

Custom design is finally beginning to mean more than just cheesy screen-printed t-shirts and coffee mugs. With a little money, you can now order specially manufactured goods from a company called Ponoko, by tapping into a base of freelance designers who will bid to fulfill orders.

Ponoko is a startup that uses laser-cutters to create items from materials like wood and plastic. Designers send Ponoko files containing specs for items; the company then creates the item in a single piece, or separate pieces for assembly. Those items are sold through its website to customers. That basic idea is similar to Threadless, a well-known t-shirt company that sells shirts based on designs that artists dream up.

What Ponoko is adding today is very simple: It’s providing customers with a form and bidding process to have their own pipe dreams created. So if you want, for instance, a giant pink plastic elephant based on your own drawings, you can send a request to designers, then pick the lowest bid, or your favorite interpretation of the drawing. The service is called Ponoko ID.

Simple idea, it’s true, but it’s also an idea with plenty of potential. Designers and consumers rarely have any direct contact; by bringing them together, Ponoko is helping to create a market that could turn out to be very large.

That was certainly the case for CafePress, an web boom-and-bust era success based on the same custom t-shirt theme that later took Threadless to fame. With CafePress, the idea that sparked its success was simply letting customers have their own designs screen-printed onto shirts. The similarity between it and Ponoko makes it very fitting that the company is also adding Fred Durham, one of CafePress’s founders and its current CEO, to its board.

We also covered Ponoko back in May, when I did an audio interview with CSO Derek Elly in which he described the business model in more depth. Since then, the company’s user base has risen to about 10,000 people. It’s also about to add more materials to work with, so that more different sorts of items can be made, and is building tools and tutorials to make it easier to learn to design items.

The company, which was interested in taking a venture round, has decided to go after angel investment instead. It’s based in New Zealand, but has a US subsidiary.

Update: Imagekind has confirmed the purchase.

Imagekind, an online marketplace for original and reprinted artwork, has been bought by online t-shirt and gift seller CafePress, a reliable source tells us, with rival Zazzle losing out on the deal. We hear the acquisition price may have been between $15 million and $20 million, although we’re still looking for confirmation on the amount.

While these days there are seemingly countless sites that let you design and sell your own t-shirts online, CafePress and Zazzle both raised venture rounds years ago and seem to have gained market leadership. Both have also gone beyond t-shirts, looking to get their respective users doing things like buying and selling gifts. Meanwhile, other companies, specifically handmade-goods site Etsy, have also been growing and raising venture funding.

So, the purchase of art-focused Imagekind (sample photo, above) is a classy way for San Mateo, Calif.-based CafePress to further distance itself from just being a t-shirts site (sample t-shirt, below) — and put itself more directly in competition for artists who want to sell their works and buyers who like nice stuff.

The purchase also suggests that it may be too late in the game for new startups to try to create their own t-shirt, art, and gift-selling online marketplaces.

Seattle-based Imagekind, which raised $2.6 million in February of 2007 from German publisher Holtzbrinck, venture firm Crosslink Capital, the Samwer brothers (who now invest via their own firm, European Founders Fund), and a number of angel investors, has in the past rejected a purchase offer from Amazon.com. It competes directly with Art.com, another art marketplace that has also been rumored to be trying to buy the company. During Imagekind’s last funding round, its rumored valuation was up to $7 million — so maybe the company is seeing solid growth and revenue, and maybe also the bidding war got particularly fierce.

[Photo by Imagekind artist James Howe, T-shirt by Flippin' Sweet]