It’s always disappointing when you see someone else wearing the same exact shirt you are or you give someone the same birthday card that was just read out loud.  This happens to me all the time and it’s frustrating when you spend good money and time trying to find unique clothes, cards, or whatever.  I keep thinking, “If only I could design my own stuff at a cheap price.”  That’s when I stumbled upon Zazzle.com, which has opened my world to a lot of new ideas.

Zazzle.com is a website that lets you design your own shirts, mugs, cards, stamps, buttons, stickers, and calendars.  When I found this site, I was pretty shocked.  It’s rare to find a site that will let you make one item at a pretty reasonable price.  It’s also rare to find a site that will let you sell your design idea to other visitors to make a profit. Of course that kind of eliminates the reason you turned to Zazzle in the first place; but maybe you have some designs up your sleeve that you don’t personally want to use but might put a little cash in your pocket.

With so much self-expression taking place on the Internet through blogs, podcasts, music, and videos, Zazzle is capitalizing on this concept through material goods.  The site has gotten a lot of attention, especially after all of the improvements to the site following the 30 million dollar investment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.  Now it’s very user-friendly and equipped to manage sophisticated designs.

When you visit Zazzle, you can instantly start creating your shirt or other product.  You can upload photos or designs, or simply use their wide variety of design options.  It’s easy, even if you are a computer novice or not very creative.

For those of you who aren’t interested in creating your own designs, you can also browse through hundreds of designs that others have created.  There are a lot of phenomenal designs that you won’t find at Target or Wal-Mart, and there won’t be as many people wearing them.

If you have a knack for design, consider posting them on Zazzle.com.  People can view your products and purchase them.  You can make any percentage you want from the sale, but Zazzle always takes a fixed cost.  Obviously, the more percentage you take, the higher the price of the product.  This is a great option if you have good ideas but don’t have the funds to produce them on your own.  Using Zazzle is completely free and 100% profit for you.  They have also made it easy to add a “marketplace” to your Facebook or MySpace account so your friends can buy your products.

With that concept in mind, bands are finding Zazzle to be a great online resource.  Zazzle recently teamed up with MySpace to help bands get their products onto their pages.  This is great for musicians that can’t afford to print up bulk orders of shirts.  Their products are still available to their fans but it doesn’t cost them anything to have the service and product available.  Zazzle handles all of the orders, inventory, and shipping.  Artists simply design the products and enjoy the profits.

Zazzleis also a great site for those of you needing to make a special gift or a short run of shirts.  The holidays are coming up and there are endless possibilities on this site.  They even have gift ideas to make things easier.  Creating products through the Web is much easier than trying to have them done anywhere else.  You simply upload the photos or image you want on your product, and you place your order.

While there are several other sites offering similar options, such as CafePress.com, I have found Zazzle to be slightly more user-friendly and technologically savvy.   Zazzle is also one of the few places to get customized stamps since it’s so hard to be approved by the postal service.  The site just feels good and makes it easy to create what you want quickly without any trouble.

I recently designed my first shirt on Zazzle.com to test out their service.  I used a design I created in Photoshop, which I uploaded with no problems.  Zazzle provided me with a few different human models to display my design and shirt, which is a very unique aspect to the site.  You can choose a model that suits your body type to get a better idea of what it will actually look like instead of solely depending on the digital display.  The entire process probably took 20 minutes, which was far easier than going to the mall in search of a cool shirt.  It ended up costing me about $25 for a T-shirt, but it’s nice to know that no one else on the planet has it.