Demo: Sell personalized merchandise with MashON

If you’re enjoying your 15 minutes of fame, maybe it’s time to cash in with some merchandising. MashON lets you create your own customizable, branded products and sell them on your web site.

Today at DEMO, MashON is releasing a beta version of a new “shop in a box” tool called Dabble, which can be quickly integrated into any web shop including those running on mobile and tablet platforms.

MashON started in 2005 with a product called Comic Book Creator, which allowed people to manufacture their own comic books using licensed intellectual property (IP). Now MashON has over 350 products that can carry your brand, including clothing, home decor, kitchen and sports equipment. Shoppers can customize the available products by selecting colors, images and other options. MashON manufactures and ships the products on demand.

Dabble is a HTML 5 plugin that’s embedded into an existing web store to allow shoppers to customize products. The store owner selects the products and customization options such as colors and images using an administration dashboard.

Dabble’s cart adaptor interacts with your native cart (currently Magento, with Shopify, DemandWare and Yahoo adaptors to follow) so that all transactions are processed entirely within the store. Once shoppers start to order, Dabble handles the manufacturing and shipping. During its beta period, MashON won’t charge a subscription fee for Dabble.

The main advantage for customers is that they don’t have to manufacture, warehouse or ship merchandise, and they can integrate Dabble into an existing store. MashON claims that competitors like Cafe Press and Zazzle require shoppers to come to their stores to buy rather than integrating into the brand’s store. Another competitor, Spreadshirt, pointed out that this is not true of their product. Typical customers are TV studios, music artists, sports celebrities and toy companies and already include MGM Studios, The Jim Henson Company and Penguin Publishing.

MashON was founded in 2005, is based in Los Angeles, is privately funded and has 28 employees.

MashON is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.