Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
PROVIDENCE, United States — Teespring Inc. hired EBay Inc. executive Robert Chatwani as chief revenue and marketing officer, aiming to turn the startup from a custom T-shirt company into a broader e-commerce service.
Chatwani has worked at EBay for 12 years, and took over as chief marketing officer for North America in March. He’s leaving as the Internet marketplace works toward a spinoff of its PayPal digital payments unit.
The addition is the first top-level executive hire at Teespring, which printed more than 7 million shirts last year, outside of the startup’s two founders. Chatwani is charged with helping the company to expand internationally, branding new product lines and working to bring more buyers and sellers onto the platform.
“We went out and looked for somebody who had experience building businesses to the scale we think Teespring is headed,” Teespring co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Walker Williams said in an interview.
ADVERTISEMENT
Today, Teespring has 300 employees, more than $100 million in annual revenue and $56.9 million in venture capital funding from firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures.
“I joined EBay when we were less than 5,000 people and now we’re 35,000 people,” Chatwani said.
San Francisco-based Teespring manufactures and sells T- shirts designed by people around the world. The company plans to introduce new products such as hats, stickers, posters and smartphone cases.
Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz.
By Eric Newcomer; editors: Jillian Ward, Reed Stevenson.
