About Dice Breakers

The Game

The Dice Breakers concept started as a conversation starter for a group of friends with a paper and some polyhedral dice. Seeing as we already knew each other, we tried to make the questions a bit more insightful or harder hitting than many conversation starter topics, but that didn't mean we couldn't throw fun or silly topics in the mix as well. One weekend I had the urge to try and develop it into something to share outside my friend group, which started my dive into learning some basic web development.

The basis for my idea was a voting style conversation starter generator, where anyone would be able to create an account to add their own starter prompts, and vote for their favorites so the list could begin to filter the better prompts to the top and drop the worse prompts off the bottom. It was a fun few months learning how to make that dream come to life! Now I'm at the point where it's mostly stable and functional, but there is always more left to do (like build iPhone/Android apps, or build an interactive dice to roll).

Suddenly, Shirts!

In the process of building DiceBreakers.app, I realized how much I enjoyed the creative/design aspect. And personally, having grown up with my fair share of social anxiety, I've always enjoyed silly t-shirts as their own form of conversation starters. I mostly just design whatever comes to me in the moment - which seems to be roughly equal parts fun/silly, animals, or camping/outdoor themes. Anyway, in my mind, designing/selling t-shirts was a way for me to enjoy another creative endeavor, while hopefully bringing a some extra awareness to the website.

Charity

So why did I bring charity into it? Honestly, I'd say it's half to help these charities that are meaningful to my heart, and half as a social experiment. Rather than putting money into marketing, I'm hoping I can rely on word of mouth instead. I want to live in a world where people help people, and support causes that are meaningful to them. Ideally, people love these shirts enough to not only buy them, but also tell their friends they found a fun/cool/whatever t-shirt shop that also donates to charity. Will this work? I'm not aware of any other companies pledging over 50% of profit to charity, so probably not, but it's a risk I'm willing to take!

How Much Goes To Charity?

I intend to run Dice Breakers as transparently as possible when it comes to the charity pledge. As Dice Breakers has only just begun, I have incurred some startup expenses and am currently not profitable. However, I have decided that Dice Breakers will not include these expenses when accounting for how much goes to charity. When you purchase a shirt (or other apparel), I will only consider costs directly related to that sale.

The exact math varies depending on number or shirts ordered, sizes, promo codes, and taxes - but my cost to produce and ship a shirt within the US is roughly $16. My shirts cost around $20/each shipped (reach out to me if you don't have a promo code). This means ~$2-3 from each shirt purchased goes to charity, depending on if the shirt is a standard 50% design, or a special 75% to charity design.