Is Creative Fabrica a scam? 😳 What YOU need to know

okay my friends I enter upt my ski trip to bring you some crazy industry news that I feel like I need to talk about today it has just came out and came to light that about 48 hours ago a creator that I'll link the full video right down below she's incredible she talks on printon demand a lot some of her students and her clients have been using creative Fabrica assets and membership that they have the ability to use for their shops and things like that um that they've been using and guess what they've been sued by the actual creatives that create the artwork that they put on Creative Fabrica it's a little messy it's a little weird so I want to talk about it today from kind of a neutral party yes do I have a craft membership and will I talk about the differences today to give you kind of context on how we get our art and how creative Fabrica gets their art yes but what I want to do today is have more of an honest and real conversation a little bit more behind the scenes of an industry that you typically do not see now if you're not familiar with creative Fabrica theyve been running a lot of ads lately and as a consumer and business owner y'all they are racing to the bottom for a subscription fee and that is very alarming to me because when you race to the bottom guess what there is no money to provide to the creatives and the designers so on Creative Fabrica you can get a subscription right now for very very little money and you may be like oh my gosh this is an incredible deal but what's happening here is that no money is really going back to the creatives that is designing the artwork so let's talk about what really happened so as a creative like myself I could go and get a creative Fabrica subscription and under the license summary which I have pulled up you will see the license summary and what you're allowed to do you are allowed to create unlimited physical end products you are allowed to create unlimited digital end products and create your own items that you sell on print on demand pod sites right if you look over at what you're not allowed to do you're not selling and redistributing the digital files you're not converting and selling those files you're not installing or embedding um you're not converting the templates and selling these as templates you are using the art to sell something physical that does not compete with the digital art so that is the license summary here but where it gets hairy and where it gets confusing and where it gets so to be frank just not valuable is that the artwork that is on Creative Fabrica creative Fabrica truly does not own and I think that is the biggest misconception here in this industry is that websites like creative Fabrica go out Market to designers and I am going to talk about for an instance with one of my clients who actually had their art on Creative Fabrica but more on that in a moment they are going out and marketing to these artists to put their artwork available on Creative fabric.com they're not getting and buying the rights to this artwork no they are not if you go on makerson learn.com one of our designers that we work with has designed every single image an item on the website all right and we have bought a 100% not partial ownership not a license we have bought a 100% ownership of that art the reason and the way creative Fabrica runs their business is that they don't do that because they could not afford to buy gosh how much is it I mean it is crazy at what they say they have on their platform which would be you know something along the lines of 12 million plus pie of art y'all here's the thing you're fooling yourself if you think that they own all 12 million pieces of high quality designs mockups and More in their Library there's just no way that they own all of those items on the platform the way they're doing it is that they're going out there and they're licensing someone else's art and then putting it in their subscription but here is where it gets really wrong creative Fabrica has been saying and marketing that you have a license to do print on demand you have a license to use this art and sell other digital items you have a license to use this art and make physical items but guess what unfortunately for Sellers and for the typical person like me and you who reads these licenses they're truly not held up because creative Fabrica does not own the artwork at that's in the conversation right because they are just licensing the artwork to license their consumers they do not get final say on what happens with the art so here's what's happening so you're having multiple people being sued for using this artwork on Etsy and people are being charged $650 it's reported or more for removing you know and having to pay those fees to the actual owner of the AR and what I don't love about this situation is that you know creative Fabrica if you really get into the nitty-gritty of the terms of service it states like good luck like it pretty much says like we're not really responsible congratulations it's on you so it's truly a very wrong policy to say and I want to address the people who are using this service for personal use because I'm sure there's a lot of you here that are like oh like should I be worried if I'm using creative Fabrica personally number one I guess not I don't think there's anything um personally that you should be aware of but number two it's just ethically not supporting artists at the true level when you look at a website like mine at makerson learn.com we have multiple designers that we purchase art from and create multiple Avenues of revenue for many designers when I talk to designers that have put their artwork on Creative Fabrica they have been left very with a very bad taste in their mouth um you have to individually request for the artwork to be removed it takes like 3 months like just any of my friends that have worked and tried to partner with creative Fabrica because they sell you the entire moon has not ended up being very um successful for a partnership it's very one-sided so if you're wanting to support companies that are really you know out there supporting designers creative Fabrica doesn't feel from what I know to be one of the places that I would recommend and if that's important to you it's just something to be very um aware of and cognizant of of knowing how they do business and I think this is a really pivotal moment um for everyone to just take a look at this platform and to really see do I want to support something like this because if you clearly have a license to where you can use this and then you go out there and use it and the actual creator of the art comes out and says hey you're not allowed to do that there's some things going on that creative Fabrica needs to step up and be really aware of either in their policy they should either stop offering a commercial license or an Enterprise license is what they're really offering and just saying it's a commercial license um and they should have more thorough expectations with their designers because what I am seeing here is that the designers are being sold one thing the consumers are being sold another thing and all creative Fabrica to me right now looks like is that they're just trying to sell subscriptions and they're saying good luck to everyone else they're not advocating for their sellers they're not advocating for their consumers they are just out there saying Hey give us a subscription good luck and good luck we're go give your artwork to everyone and say you could do whatever you want with it and oh by the way here's the art do whatever you want with it but we really shouldn't be saying that you could do that because we don't even have a license to give that to you right one thing that's really important to note is breaking down three different types of licenses and you'll hear me talk about this on my channel quite a bit so you have a single use license which is for all personal Crafters that are just doing this all for personal use right a personal use license a single use license they can be intermingled um I call that a single use license a personal use license that is using the art for yourself making something for yourself making something as a gift that is a personal use next I like to talk about a commercial use license all right a commercial use license is when you can use the art to make something yourself like put it on a t-shirt yourself with your own hands and then be able to put it out into the world you're not selling the art as an SVG like it's being sold to you you're taking the art putting it on a shirt and then selling the shirt right that is a commercial use when we start talking about print on demand when we start talking about uh digital downloads things like that you're using the art to sell at scale and you're no longer a part of it right so I at my company categorize that as an Enterprise license and you have to have the right um Enterprise license for artwork that is owned by the company giving you the license or you are at risk with your small business and at my company we have a program called passive earners Society where we walk you through exactly how you can build an amazing print on demand shop for yourself heck we have multiple ones that we're testing at all times on Etsy for our Student Success and it's so fun y'all if you're watching this and you're on the fence about doing this journey here's what I want you to know you just need to be aware of this and be aware of the risk that this can happen and as you get more awareness as there's more that come out on this I just want to personally say I would be very weary to support a company like creative Fabrica at this time um I just want you to be really aware of that and what you can do is just be very thorough and use your intuition make sure you know that a company that you're working with actually owns 100% of the art if you're a member of makerson learn.com our designers they know that when they create a piece of art for us we are purchasing 100% ownership of it that is how and why I can give my members a commercial use license that is how I can give my passive earner students an Enterprise license and it be very very different than create a Fabrica for Creative Fabrica to get these millions of pieces of art they could not afford to buy that on the front end that is why we focus at our company on less is more quality over quantity every single day we support artists that love making designs for their full-time job I love supporting families that get to work from home because of their art right there are so many amazing people on my team shout out to our art purchaser Mary Katherine who has been on our team since before before the website even launched she's been our resident graphic designer she now works not only to create the art but she controls an art purchasing budget to work with the designers to work with our creative teams to bring it together and to make sure that we are working with amazing designers to provide them opportunities that also benefits our consumers right it's a very different strategy from me having people go out and sell designers on why they should put their r on our platform and how it's go make them a lot of money because for my friends that have done this I sent a message out to one of my clients who I knew at one point had art on there and here's what she had to say she says um part of the designer contract states you have to wait 3 months for them to remove an item I don't remember it saying you have to do a four-step requesting removal of every item if you no longer want to sell in there it took her her over 15 hours but she was so upset she did it within 2 days right so it took them almost 4 months for them to take her art off their platform after she realized this is not fruitful and not a mutually beneficial partnership right so she also states that she does not think they care much if the shops use stolen stuff um slash if you don't see it don't tell and you know she goes on to say a lot of other things so um it's just not been from what I see in the industry something that I would want to be supporting so whether you're a seller whether you're using it for personal use I think this is just really something that we all need to be aware of when deciding where to work on who to work with who to partner with um it's just a great time to reflect and look at other platforms too um I'm not go call out any other ones but you use your judgment to go and review other platforms um and say like is this what they're doing too like am I you know is this plausible right is this could this happen on another platform that I'm a part of the answer is probably so just be very very aware my friends and if you're a passive earner student be sure we'll be talking about this in depth in the program be sure to reach out if you're here today and you're like Tanner I actually want to learn more about how you do all of this I am teaching a two-day live event next week it's called the listing lab you can get a rob a ticket it's $47 and I promise you at the end of the workshop you will understand exactly how listings work and he I'll even go into detail on how you can own and truly be so confident in your designs that you will not be sued all right it'll be a lot of fun so if you want to attend the listing lab be sure to grab a ticket I'll link it right down below if you have any questions if you have any input on your experience if you have you know been a part of this in any way leave me a conversation a comment down below we'll have a conversation this was a lot of things happening all at once so I just wanted to kind of come together and give my perspective on this situation because I think it's really unfortunate for small business owners I do not think this is right I really hope that creative Fabrica and you know their team come together and kind of see this as a flaw that they can work to improve right everyone can always improve shift their business take ownership and hopefully help these clients of theirs that have not been supported and advocated for so until our next video happy crafting my friends