Zazzle: Create or Shop for Unique Designs

Cassandra Colon has been finger painting beautiful pictures since she was 2 years old, her mom and biggest fan, recalls. "You'd look at her paintings and you'd see faces or a person with a guitar in them. I thought, this is a bit unusual." She's 9 now, and still painting.

Cassandra lives in Queens, N.Y., with her mom, Jennice, an office manager for a nonprofit organization, who finds it harder every year to pay for her daughter's tuition, art classes, and everything else that comes with caring for a growing child. So when Jennice came across Zazzle.com, she was excited to find that she and Cassandra could set up a gallery of the young artist's best paintings for others to choose from to design all kinds of products.

If a Zazzle customer opts for one of Cassandra's Creations, she receives 10 percent of the sale. (Her "Red Poppy" is pictured above.) So far, she has earned about $100, and the daughter-and-mom team hope to earn more to put toward Cassandra's tuition and art classes.

On Zazzle, you can upload your own images and create unique clothing, U.S. Postage, greeting carts, and mugs, for starters. Zazzle recently added 13 new products, including hats, bags, ties, aprons, bumper stickers, keychains, and photo sculptures. But a few things set Zazzle apart from online photo services where you do many of the same projects. You can upload other images, including art work, and you can set up an individual gallery, as Cassandra and her mom have done, to contribute and share your designs with other customers.

Zazzle also has rights to images from Disney (which doesn't hand them out easily), Looney Tunes, Family Guy, Neopets and other familiar characters.

You can order one or hundreds of an item; there's no minimum order amount, though volume discounts kick in depending on how many items you order. Prices vary based on product, and they are easy to find on this simple-to-navigate site. T-shirts start at $12.95, for example, while greeting cards start at $1.99 each for a few and go down to $1.59 when you order 100 or more.

For Cassandra and Jennice, Zazzle has provided a free way to set up Cassandra's first "shop," without having to dig into web design and spend the time running an individual web site on their own. Jennice said the set-up tools were fairly easy to use. Cassandra told me she loves the nice comments she gets from Zazzle customers on her site and is proud of the fact that she is in business at the ripe young age of 9.

Zazzle is definitely worth checking out for your holiday shopping. And if you've got some designs of your own that you'd love to share, why not earn some income while doing so?