The Water Sprite Shop is the retail arm of the Water Sprite family of websites. Through this site, we sell both our own and other people’s licenced artworks, printed onto physical products. Follow the links on this page to learn more about the shop and how Water Sprite do business.

Ethical small business, helping small business

We are an ethical small business. The Creators we support are also small businesses. We believe our Creators should make a fair return for the sales bearing their artwork. We also believe that Creators will see the best returns if we keep the costs (especially shipping costs) to you as low as possible. These are the basic principles by which we operate.

Too often, you see a fantastic piece of merch at a good price, only to discover that the cost to have it shipped to you is nearly as much again as the price of the merch. And it’s never clear how much of that sale goes to the Creator anyway. We want to avoid that, if we can. We have a number of strategies to assist with that.

Profit share for Creators

The licencing fees we pay to Creators is based on an approximate profit-share. We have calculated, for each product range, how much of the price you pay for that product remains after the production costs are paid, and we pay a proportion of that to the Creator as their licence fee for letting us use their work. In recognition that Creators who are selling larger volumes through the Shop will be undertaking their own advertising to drive sales, we offer a “Tiered” arrangement where higher sales volumes result in a larger proportion of the profits. Please see our Understanding Tiers page for a description of the tiers.

Produce locally, where possible

We have partnered with a global print-on-demand production house for the production of the major product lines. They operate over 100 production centres in over 30 countries around the world. They undertake to produce your product at the production facility that will have your product delivered to you as quickly as possible. In most cases, that will be a production facility in your country, or at least one in your region. This gives many benefits:

• Quicker delivery
• Cheaper freight costs
• Lower environmental impacts on the planet we all share
• Not only are you supporting the Creator, you are likely also supporting jobs in your or a neighbouring country

No mark-up on freight

In the spirit of keeping costs to you to a minimum, we do not add any mark-up to the shipping charges you pay for your product. What you pay us for shipping is exactly the price we are paying to have the item shipped to you (or our best estimate, where prices are not known in advance).

In some cases we sell products where the shipping charges are not individually determined. For example, products offered with “Free delivery” generally have an allowance to cover the shipping charges built in to the price. We calculate the shipping allowances with the intention that, over a calendar year, the total of all shipping allowances will closely match the total price we pay to ship those items. Of course, the actual shipping charges we pay will depend on where products are being shipped to, so that involves some guesswork.

We offer a guarantee that, should we make a profit from the shipping allowance paid by purchasers over a calendar year, we will donate 100% of that profit to a charity of our choice. Please see our Delivery Times and Costs policy for further explanation.

How we operate

Understanding Tiers

Transparency Policy

Anti-Money Laundering Policy and our Know Your Customer obligations

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Becoming one of our Creators