Just when we thought that the flow of money had sadly come to a trickle, a very, very generous benefactor has come forward with an incredible offer. We’d been thinking all week about how to continue raising funds for disaster relief in Japan, despite the fact that the auction was so much more successful than we ever imagined. Recovery costs are estimated at 235 billion dollars and the images coming from Japan continue to be heartbreaking. During the course of the auction, we heard over and over that people who really wanted to give and participate were priced out after a certain point, so we were sure that we wanted to offer some sort of t-shirt after the sale. Besides that, we love our disaster bear logo drawn by illustrator Dave Gordon and weren’t quite ready to retire him.

What our anonymous benefactor has offered is to match Cafe Press’ production cost dollar for dollar and donate it to our charity of choice, GlobalGiving. Say a t-shirt costs $25;  the mark up of $5 is what we’ll donate to GlobalGiving and $20 is what Cafe Press takes in production and profit and what our benefactor will match with a donation to GlobalGiving. Click here to see all the great gear whose purchase will continue to help the Japanese people.

Also see GlobalGiving‘s nice write up on Handmade For Japan and many others here.

 

 

 

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Thank you to all our artists for donating such amazing work, the galleries for believing in our auction and giving us choice pieces, and the donors for thinking creatively about how they could contribute. The support we’ve gotten for our efforts to raise money for relief efforts in Japan was has been overwhelming from the start. Thousands of people help spread word of our auction, commented on Facebook, and others jumped into the bidding to raise more money than we ever dreamed of making. Our small team volunteers worked until late hours and under a lot of pressure to get the listings ready for the opening of the auction and without them, this could never have happened. Dave “Emergency Illustrator” Gordon came up with our logo overnight on the second day after our inception and Kelly Severns Curtis, my long-time web designer, put aside paying jobs to donate her expertise in putting up our website and customizing Facebook to our needs. Most of all, with all three of us working 18-20 hour days, I want to thank our families for their support, especially Robin who put up with my crankiness, exhaustion, and monkey mind. I hope this project can continue in some form since recovery in Japan will be a long process. First though, we have to get some art out to the eager winning bidders! p.s. notice how Poncho is looking at Butchie across the screen :)

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