design disney

Disney is now empowering consumers to design their own cards, stamps, and T-shirts. That's pretty great.

Disney's online shopping site on Wednesday launched its first "You design it" feature in a move aimed at riding the fast-growing trend toward giving choosy Internet shoppers exactly what they want.

Disney partnered with online customization site Zazzle.com, which licenses thousands of images from Warner Bros., Marvel Comics, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, among others, and also allows users to sell their own art for use on personalized T-shirts, greeting cards and postage stamps.

It took Disney, which aggressively protects its copyrights, about two years to figure out how to open its vast art archives and still control how consumers could use its characters.

"Disney very much wanted to create the Disney experience and ensure products we ultimately sell to consumers protect the brand and reinforce a lot of what it stands for," Zazzle co-founder and Chief Executive Robert Beaver said. "That was our challenge from an engineering standpoint."

Zazzle's Disney boutique, which can be accessed via disneyshopping.com and disneyinkshop.com, allows consumers to select a Disney character, T-shirt style and color and to add a name or phrase from an approved list.

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