Is it worth leaving and buying a heatpress to do the work myself? I know I'll make more money that way but it will be much more work
Do you have the time and money to invest in the setup. Not only the heat press, but the website design, webhosting, merchant account, transfers. Do you have time to do the printing of all the orders you get? Do you have time to ship them all out in a timely manner and handle customer service calls and emails?
If so, then you may be ready to move on. If you feel like you're hitting a limit and you have the time and resources to move on, it could be worth a shot. I know several people that have done it successfully. Not everyone realizes all it takes to run an online shop though.
If not, then maybe you could use the money from cafepress and start setting up your own side store (start with a good domain name, etc). If you've been using the cafepress newsletter feature, you could use that to announce your off-cafepress store if you ever decided to make the switch.
I personally don't think the marketing materials that are in the package have that much impact. I don't think it takes away from your customers that wanted to buy YOUR designs.
Not all end customers want to make their own t-shirt. Not all of our end customers have the ability to.
I've been using cafepress since they started and I was selling t-shirts on my own *before* they launched. I originally just used them because I wanted to sell coffee mugs.
Along the way, I've used cafepress similar to the way that Adam does. As a marketer. I have lots of t-shirt ideas (as do most of us). Over the years, I've been able to think of a design, create the design on my computer, post it in my cafepress store and make a profit off it in less than 24 hours (sometimes within minutes). There is definitely a useful tool in the right hands.
At the same time, I've started new t-shirt lines that I knew wouldn't be right for cafepress. So sometimes I've used different fulfillment companies and sometimes I've done it all on my own (mostly screen printing), I haven't tried heat transfers...yet
I actually had a big national magazine that wanted a sample shirt for a story they were doing. I didn't have time to order and then ship it out so I shipped it to them directly from CP. They ended up using other peoples shirts that weren't cp stores. I just think the editor got all that stuff and figured, "oh this isn't what I was expecting"
I wouldn't be too sure of that. I've worked with cafepress on several news stories (one recently for a Men's Health TV segment).
Sometimes journalists (or their editors), go a different direction for the story at the last minute, or someone else picks which products will be mentioned.
The editor that got your product probably got what they expected (as long as they got it in time), but there could be a number of reasons why they didn't use your tee in the article.
The Men's Health TV segment ended up using a couple of cafepress shirts (along with one of my non-cafepress shirts

) in the piece.
Although, if you have someone in the media that is interested in your cafepress products, you should contact the PR guy at CafePress and he'll definitely work with you to make sure you make a good impression.