Whoops, sorry to mislead on the profit/loss.
I've never traded
RBL as I've not understood their underlying business (along with the fundamentals
).
My understanding of it is that they produce a wide range of what in the entertainment industry would be termed merchandise.
That is T-shirts, hats, water bottles, bags, stickers, mouse mats, cups, notebooks and anything else you could possibly print something onto.
Except that what they're printing is on behalf of someone else. That it, an artist uploads their art or photography or whatever and it's then available for customers to purchase in the form of being printed on a T-shirt, mug or whatever.
So they're a middleman of sorts. Someone uploads content, that is artwork, and others can view it and buy it in the form of a printed item.
Personally I can see a market for that but I'm not convinced it's big enough to support a listed company with all the business overheads and so on. It's basically just a printing business after all - someone else produces the artwork, uploads it and customers buy it. All Redbubble does is run the website and physically print and dispatch the items.
Closest thing I could compare it to is, say, YouTube or any online music platform that enables unknown movie makers or bands to make their work available to a larger audience. Nothing stops this Smurf from making a movie and putting it on YouTube. Nothing stops me from producing some art and putting it on Redbubble.
What it's not is a regular printing service. If I had some sort of business or a band and I want my logo printed onto T-shirts or water bottles that I'm going to give out to customers or sell at shows or whatever well then Redbubble isn't really the place for that. There's plenty of small businesses doing that already. Redbubble is the place if I want to sell it to any random person online and have no physical involvement.
In terms of competitors, realistically they're competing against every other fast fashion retailer along with people selling bags and cups and so on. If the customer doesn't buy a printed T-shirt from Redbubble then they're going to buy one with some other design on it from somewhere else.
That's my understanding of the business after some research but it's definitely
not financial advice and may well contain unintentional errors or omissions. It's just my understanding of the business.