Taiwan Startup Brings Indie-Designed iPhone Cases and T-shirts To Your Doorstep

Taiwan-based Fandora is a startup that works with over 2,000 designers to bring some of the coolest designs to printed products like iPhone cases and t-shirts.

On Fandora, designers can set up their own online portfolio to showcase their creative work. While showcasing is cool, Fandora also allows designers to turn their designs into actual printed products that people are willing to pay for on the Fandora Shop.

Fandora manages the full scale manufacturing, printing, and logistics but also shares a part of its profits with the designers who it works with. Despite setting up the Fandora Shop just three months ago, the e-commerce site is seeing encouraging signs of a product-market fit in Taiwan. To date, it is generating around $10,000 in revenue each month and managing about 280 orders each month, but both of those numbers are growing fast.

With five founders — Steven Su, Adrian Chen, Kevin Lin, Komashiro Chen, and Layra Liao — Fandora is a product under the registered company LABIN Technology Inc., which was established in December 2011. The team also went through appWorks’ incubation program. Prior to Fandora, Co-founder Steven Su said that the team went through several failures including its attempts to clone Netflix and Twitter.

The idea of Fandora came about as the team, through a friend, that there wasn’t any site supporting the indie designer community. Fandora was first set up to be a social platform for designers before the e-commerce arm came into play, but it’s that which has turned out to be a potential cash cow for the team.

In the future, Fandora plans to raise a financing round to speed up its growth. Steven also plans to launch an English version of the Fandora Shop next year.

In June, Society6, an e-commerce site that also sells printed iPhone cases and t-shirts was acquired by Demand Media for $94 million. If anything, it may suggest that the potential is there and Fandora seems to have the early tell-tale signs that it could succeed in Asia too.