Hello, everyone - we at ArtworkTee have received many questions from you guys over the past few days. We wanted to make sure that we answer these questions clearly, so we took some time to consider them and write down our answers here.

We want to have an honest and open dialogue with you guys. We ask that you approach us, and honestly, all of your furry friends, with an open mind and a willingness to listen.

Let us state this clearly - we welcome your criticism. We want to learn and improve, and the only way we can is for you to let us know what you think. We are new to this, and people who are new at doing things need help learning the ropes. None of us have ever run a marketplace website before, and as far as we know, no one has ever had so many furry creators selling on a single shirt website. This is new territory and we’re learning as we go. Our email and direct messages are always open if you have any problem with our business or our site. We will do everything in our power to fix any problems or issues that arise.

Now, let’s go over in detail the questions we’ve received. The list of questions were compiled from several sources, including social media, Telegram messages, and emails we’ve received. We have done our best to answer each of these questions in full.

Question: “Does ArtworkTee pay artists and content creators?”

Answer: Yes. For every sale on our site, the artist or content creator receives a commission of $5. This default amount can be changed up or down at any time by the artist if he or she chooses. This is one of the highest royalty rates on any website - you can compare this to Spreadshirt’s default rate of $2 per sale, or the shirt Woot default rate of $1 per sale to the artist. We have paid our artists many thousands of dollars, and our content creators too have earned many thousands of dollars with us. We are so excited to help members of our community make money doing what they love - our content creators are the backbone of our site, and we do everything we can to help them succeed.

Question: “How do artists get paid?”

Answer: Every artist’s royalties are kept track of by our online system, which calculates the royalties owed from each sale. There is no minimum payout on ArtworkTee, unlike most other tshirt sites, which typically have a minimum payout of $20. To us, this seems absurd. If a person has to make 5-10 sales to make a withdrawal, that’s really unfair to small creators who are getting started. We support all our creators and want them to be able to succeed from the very beginning. Artists can log in to their dashboard and see a summary of their sales, as well as visit the “Orders” tab to see information about each sale. At any time, artists can go to the “Withdraw” tab to see exactly how much they’ve earned since their last payment, and to withdraw payment to their payment gateway of choice, including Paypal or Skrill. There is no limit to how often artists can request payment - if they like, they can request payment after each sale, unlike most tshirt sites, which typically pay monthly. In some cases, a different approach is needed, and we work with artists and creators personally to figure out what to do. For example, sometimes we commission artists to make designs for a specific content creator, for a convention to use as their official merch, or for sale at our convention booths. In these cases, we work with the artists to figure out a commercial use agreement.

Question: “Does ArtworkTee own the artwork uploaded by users?”

Answer: No. As you can see in our terms of service, we do not ask artists for exclusive contracts or for ownership of their characters or intellectual property. The agreement in our terms of service is for a non-exclusive right to display the artwork that the artist chooses to upload. This is the standard for sites like ours, and is the same way that Redbubble and Teepublic operate. To be clear, this means that the artist is absolutely free to make their own products with their art as usual, to post it on other tshirt sites, or to do whatever else they want. Their artwork is their property. The only time when ArtworkTee owns a piece of artwork is when the artist gives explicit written permission in special cases.

Question: “How much do you pay for a tshirt art commission?”

Answer: Our policy last year was to explain clearly that the work was to be used for a tshirt, ask the artist how much they would like to be paid, and pay the agreed upon amount. We have updated our policy on this, based on your feedback. We now pay artists their asking price plus 200% as a commercial use fee. We are also going back and paying artists back payments for the work they’ve done in the past, to help make our compensation more fair.

Question: “Why didn’t you pay more for art commissions last year?”

Answer: In hindsight, we clearly should have. We did not know that artists would be dissatisfied with the amount we agreed to a year after the purchase was made. Last year, we had a far lower volume of sales each month, and like most startup businesses, we were losing money each month. We made the offers in good faith by stating our intentions clearly, as in this example. “Hello, this is ArtworkTee. We would like to purchase a commission of this character. We would like to print it on tshirts. How much for this commission?” It was not our intent to pay artists unfairly, and we apologize that we didn’t pay more at the time. We can’t go back and change our actions, but we can fix our mistakes now.

Question: “Can I get a sample of my artwork on a shirt?”

Answer: Yes! We are happy to provide free or discounted samples to our artists for giveaways, promotional photos, or any other purpose. We know how important it is to our artists to see how the tshirt looks printed, as well as how awesome it feels to get to wear your artwork on your chest. If you are an artist with us and would like to get a sample of your products, simply contact our customer support team via email or chat and we will be happy to help you.

Question: “Who is ArtworkTee, exactly? Is ArtworkTee the same as drawponies?”

Answer: ArtworkTee is a company made up of many hardworking individuals, including production staff (Tory, Michael), online customer assistants (Ramon, Aaron), managers (Melody, Neil) and web developers (Faizan and his team of developers). Many other people have helped us on a part time basis, including Desmond, Prosper, Terry, and others. Here is a statement from our general manager, Melody:

My name is Melody and I am the General Manager of the company ArtworkTee. I have been working with Neil for a few years now and thought I would share my experiences.

I met Neil years back at an anime convention where I was the host of a tabletop roleplaying game session. He just so-happened to be one of the players who chose to play that day and our friendship started after I narrated an underworld adventure where the players navigated the perils of Tartarus.

After I started working with Neil, I had the opportunity to visit many conventions with him. It was thrilling to visit many different conventions, meet new people and see new places. Before this, I had never worked outside of my home state and felt that my life had been limited to jobs which never utilized my full set of skills. If it hadn't been for Neil, I would have been stuck in retail and restaurant jobs for who knows how long.

As I traversed the country, I started to realize what a completely different world existed outside of the small social ecosystem I had lived in my entire life. Convention work gave me opportunities to meet other people with like-minded interests, in fandoms that I enjoyed being a part of, and visited them in places that changed how I perceived life.

Before working with Neil, I cannot think of a time where a single job changed not only my life, but my view of life as well. I would say that never before had going to work managed to inspire me or fill me with joy. That changed when I met Neil. I found that I could not only make a living, but I could develop long-lasting relationships in an environment that rewarded enthusiasm and encouraged initiative. I loved sharing my excitement with other fans and seeing how each and every one of them responded to positivity and genuine interest. It helped me realize I had sorely missed this type of positive interaction in daily life and in virtually all my other jobs.

There was another benefit that arose out of working with Neil. In the years before joining his team, I had experienced multiple traumatic events where now-former friends attacked both my emotional well-being and my personal identity. After removing myself from their presence, Neil's job provided me with a positive environment to heal and finally be myself. I was finally able to openly identify at work as part of the LGBTQ community and started coming out as transgender to various friends, and though some did not accept me for who I was, Neil openly accepted who I am along with encouragement from other co-workers in our team.

As I worked with Neil over the years, he would constantly check up on me, making sure I had what I needed, that everything was going okay when I was out of town on a work assignment, and ensured that my health and safety were always top priority. I would talk to him about the people I met, the friends I made, and the memorable moments that solidified my happiness at the conventions. I started comparing other employers to this one, and thought about how much effort they did (or did not) put into ensuring my wellbeing and realized that I was lucky to work with someone like Neil who actually showed compassion towards me time and time again. I never realized there were other ways to serve as a leader other than the stoic professionalism I had grown accustomed to in previous jobs.

If I hadn't started working with Neil, I imagine my life would be a lot more limited, I wouldn't be as open as I am now, I wouldn't know my true value as an employee who can do far more than retail and restaurant work, and I wouldn't have had the chance to express my true gender identity in an environment that has not only been nurturing but inspirational as well. Most importantly, before working with Neil, I never had the chance to prove myself as a leader in a workplace environment, but now I've had that opportunity many times over, working alongside others and guiding them with what I've learned.

- Melody


One of the individuals who works for ArtworkTee, Neil, used to use the name drawponies for their personal artwork page. Since he already had some followers on his pages, it made sense to adapt them for use for the social media pages for ArtworkTee instead of starting from scratch. Here is a statement from him:

“Hello, my name is Neil Wacaster. I have been a furry since 2011 and a brony since 2012. I love creating awesome stuff for both the furry and brony fandoms. I have created hundreds of artwork pieces, which you can see in the back catalog of our deviantart page, http://artwork-tee.deviantart.com. A note, some of the images on that page were made by other people, if that’s the case then it’s noted in the description. My art pieces start with a sketch and then I ink them in Manga Studio to create a finished piece, or I draw over them with Copic markers to create a traditional art piece. Here is a short “Speed draw” video to show me starting the process of a digital art piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4tzpnkVWBo Here is a video to show me creating a traditional art piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm3F8vWpQ28

In 2015, I made some very lazy and stupid mistakes. I used a few stills from the MLP show not as reference, but as the bases for a few art pieces. This was wrong, and I am sorry that I did it. After a lot of self-reflection and consideration, I decided that it was time to really take my artwork to the next level and moved to California to take some college-level art classes. I took courses at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art for 9 months, pursuing an intensive course of study and learning both from my classmates and from the excellent professors there. My artwork improved, particularly when drawing humans and anthros.

With the help of many others, including Ramon, Tory and Faizan, I started ArtworkTee in 2017, trying a lot of different ideas and eventually coming to the conclusion that we should focus on tshirts. Now, I help primarily with customer service and help manage all the many tasks we have to accomplish each day to keep the business running. I have done my best to learn from my mistakes and improve my art skills, taking a problem area and turning it into motivation to learn and grow. I’m so glad to be now growing a great company like ArtworkTee. I love getting to spend time with the awesome people who work here. It doesn’t even feel like a job, it feels more like a family.”

Many of our other team members have also had positive experiences working for ArtworkTee, including Ramon, one of our full-time customer service employees. Here is a statement from him:

“Hi! My name is Ramon Raul R. Demetrio. I have worked for ArtworkTee as a customer service representative and social media manager for almost 1 year and 3 months. My experience in ArtworkTee has been wonderful. My co workers are friendly and easy to mingle with. We help each other to improve the company. I help provide our great customer service, like resending shirts for free, no additional payments or return fees. Neil is the best man i ever knew, he helped me when I was at my worst and my best. My favorite experience in ArtworkTee is when we have some spare time with coworkers, talk to each other online, and share what happened during the day. ArtworkTee is a place where a guy like me can work from home and spend the day with my young son, and I’m very thankful for this.”

Another team member who has helped us greatly is Tory Evans, a brony and a veteran, who is from Houston, Texas. Here is what he had to say:

Hello, my name is Tory Evans. I'm not a permanent part of artworktee but I greatly enjoy whenever we get to work together. I'm kind of a general handyman who builds tools, sets up and maintains machines(which I love to do), makes shirts, and my favorite, sell at conventions. I'm not a furry, but I love meeting people and talking about their fandoms and passions. Plus, I'm a massive Brony and I get to sell Pony shirts too. The artworktee team is full of great people who listen to me rant about philosophy, movies, and tease me about being a furry in denial. I'm genuinely passionate about making shirts with them because I believe self-identity is extremely important. T-shirts are such a fun way doing that.

The ArtworkTee team and I laugh, joke, and are genuinely happy to serve the furry community.

Question: “Do you have to be popular to be part of ArtworkTee?”

Answer: No - anyone is welcome to join our website and sell their designs. Sellers must abide by our terms of service, but considering that the terms boil down to “Sell only artwork you own and don’t post nsfw art,” that’s pretty easy for most people to follow. We help over 400 vendors sell with us, making us one of the largest shopping sites in the furry fandom.

Question: “I want to do or enter one of your tshirt giveaways, how can I do that?”

Answer: We do frequent giveaways on our social media pages to help promote our artists, because of the great customer feedback we’ve received. Artists can contact us and, subject to our approval, we will add their name to the calendar for a giveaway. We will typically help create a gif or image post to promote their giveaway. For customers, they simply need to follow the instructions in the post to enter the giveaway, and then check back when the contest ends to see if they won. We will also contact the winner(s) via direct message to let them know that they’re the lucky winner and give instructions on how to claim their prize.

Question: “Do you pay shipping for winners of your tshirt giveaways?”

Answer: Yes! No matter where the winner lives in the world, we don’t ask them to pay a dime. We provide the product free of charge and don’t require the winner to pay for shipping.

Question: “I heard that (fill in the blank) sells with you - do you support them?”

Answer: No. As is clearly stated in our terms of service: “ArtworkTee is a marketplace, not a consultancy or agent. ArtworkTee does not endorse any actions or statements by any artist or creator. Compensation, product samples, discounts, promotions, etc do not constitute endorsement.” In the same way that other platforms like Twitter and Facebook don’t endorse content creators, neither does ArtworkTee. Like other marketplace websites, including Etsy, Amazon, and Ebay, we do not judge our vendors based on their actions off of our platform, especially not messages sent in private. This would be an unfair breach of privacy, not to mention impossible to maintain for 400+ vendors. As long as a person complies with our terms of service, they are welcome to sell with us. The exceptions to this include criminal behavior, abusive behavior, or threats of violence against another person. Because our content is uploaded by and created by users, it’s our job to moderate the designs and make sure they don’t violate our terms of service, just like any other user-generated content website. We check every design as it is posted, and also rely on our users as a secondary check to let us know if a design that infringes our terms is posted. We are dedicated to making ArtworkTee the best marketplace for furries and other fandoms to sell shirts, regardless of their religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, heritage, disability, or any other factor.

Question: “I received a product that didn’t fit, or was defective in some other way. How can you resolve this?”

Answer: We will be happy to provide a replacement of the product or a full refund. In most cases, we don’t require the customer to send the item back, and we encourage our customers to give the mis-sized item to charity or to a friend. If the product is defective, again, usually no need to send it back. The simple fact is that tshirts are made by hand and, on occasion, some shirts will not be up to our quality standard. We will happily replace a customer’s order with another product of the same design and type or, if the customer prefers, a comparable product from our inventory. We want our customers to be 100% satisfied and will do everything we can to make that happen. Our full-time customer service staff is available during business hours via email or instant message to help with any issues.

Question: “I received a message inviting me to join ArtworkTee. Why?”


Answer: Our talent scouts have been looking for new artists who might be interested in joining ArtworkTee. If you received a message from us, that means that we are very impressed by your work and would be honored if you chose to join our site. Some people have expressed that they felt that we should not have contacted them. To those people, we apologize. It was not our intention to cause anxiety or frustration. It was our goal to show you that we appreciate your work and invite you to be one of the first people to sign up for our new site.

Question: “Can I sell traditional artwork on ArtworkTee?”

Answer: Yes! We welcome artists who use all sorts of different mediums, including digital cartooning, digital painting, pencil sketches, mixed media, watercolor, and every other way that furries make wonderful artwork. It is usually more challenging to get a clear print when a person is using a traditional medium to create their artwork, so we have a few recommendations to help. First, make sure to scan your artwork in the highest resolution possible. If you don’t own a scanner, then we recommend going to a local printing shop or office supply store. These places usually have scanners that can accommodate even very large traditional pieces and transfer them to a CD or USB drive. We then recommend that, if possible, you remove any background on the piece by opening the artwork in a digital media software, such as Adobe Photoshop, selecting the background, and carefully erasing it. That way, we don’t accidentally print a big white square behind your beautiful work. Alternatively, some of our artists choose to print their traditional pieces only on white shirts to make it easier to smoothly transition from the background to the art piece.

Question: “Do you offer discounts? Can artists create their own discounts?”

Answer: Yes. We frequently do promotions to help our artists sell even more of their wonderful work. We are working on adding the feature to let artists create their own coupons, but for now, artists simply need to contact our customer service staff and we can help them create a custom promotion. These discounts can range from 5% to 20%, depending on the situation.

Question: “How do you promote ArtworkTee?”

Answer: According to our statistics from Google Analytics, in a typical month, about 10,000 individuals visit ArtworkTee.com, generating about 60,000 pageviews. These visitors come from all over the world, including over 90 countries. These visitors come from many different sources, including social media, paid promotion, sponsorship, and organic search.

By far the largest amount of our traffic comes from our awesome artists posting links to their products on their social media profiles. We appreciate our artists’ passion and creativity, and as often as possible, when an artist tags us in a post, we retweet it to our 6,000+ followers on Twitter to help them generate more sales. Many of our customers have said that they love the chance to buy some of their favorite artists’ work on a shirt or a hoodie - it feels good to support the artists that they love and get a cool thing to wear too.

Another way that we promote our designs is with social media accounts. artworktee is one of them, as is Furry__memes. Rapid_Rescue is the moderator for the latter account, and makes sure that the account complies fully with the Twitter guidelines. For example, as it states on the profile, the DMs of the account are open for anyone to contact if they do not wish their art to be posted on the page. The account was created and maintained in part with our help, but our moderators have the final say. To help keep the account independent, we note that the posts are sponsored so Twitter users know they’re sponsored by a company. We’re happy that many furries have enjoyed the posts and have let us know that they make them laugh and brighten their day. Some people have claimed that the account doesn’t credit sources, which is not true. Every post has a link to a source where the image was posted. The artist is almost always named and linked on that page, meaning that if a person sees one of the tweets, in almost every case the artist of the post can be found in one click, and the source in two clicks. If the original source isn’t mentioned where the post was found, then moderators are happy to help find and link to the artist’s pages in the comments on the thread. Like most businesses, we use social media to help more customers find our products. It’s great to see many furries and many other fandoms finding and enjoying our artists’ awesome work through Twitter, Facebook, and other sites.

A third way that we help our artists make sales is through our affiliate program with Shareasale. 250+ coupon sites, marketing firms, and blogs help promote our artists with affiliate links. Those promoters are incentivized to sell our products to their fans by a small royalty fee of 10% whenever they send a sale our way. Shareasale is expensive ($500 up-front cost, plus additional fees when sales are made through them). By working with us, artists have access to this marketing magic without the large costs. It’s just another way we help our artists succeed.

Question: “What method do you use to print your shirts?”

Answer: We use both DTG (Direct to Garment) printing and screen printing, depending on the needs of the customer. Each of these printing methods has their own advantages and disadvantages. DTG printing is great for small orders of less than a dozen shirts, especially if those shirts have a large amount of colors or gradients. This is the method that most on-demand tshirt companies use, including Redbubble, Teepublic, and others. While this method is more expensive per shirt than screen printing, it offers incredible speed and flexibility for getting shirts ready. Screen printing, by contrast, is best for large quantities, especially of shirts that have limited colors and have big, bold shapes. This method takes more time to prepare for a print run, because we must make the screens, dry them, and prepare them before putting them on the screen printing machine. However, the cost is lower per shirt, and it’s possible to do a lot of fun things with the inks. For example, we often do UV reactive shirts or glow-in-the-dark designs with screen printing, which isn’t possible with DTG without super-specialized equipment. The bottom line is, in general, if we’re printing less than 12 shirts, we use DTG, and if more than 12, screen printing.

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Whew! That was a lot. Thanks to those of you who are still reading all the way down here. I hope that answers all of the questions that you had for us - if not we’ll be happy to continue to answer your questions. Again, our email (artworktee.staff@gmail.com), our Telegram (@artworktee) and our Twitter DMs (@artworktee) are always open. If you have any questions at all, we are happy to help.