Our Story

Custom Play Money is Born

While selling vintage board games on EBAY, the idea was conceived to sell customized play money. Standard EBAY auctions where created for a replacement set of standard Monopoly money. Auction Winners emailed their images and text to us, and with Photoshop we created the bills.

Winners of the auction where limited to sending one image per bill, and 2 lines of text.

Web Site Created

We created the web site www.customplaymoney.com, where you could pick the style/size of bills you wanted, upload pictures and text and see the end result rendered in the web browser. Images and text where fixed in their location on the bills, and only one side of the bills could be customized.

Google Adwords to the rescue

Within 10 minutes of uploading our first google adwords keyword for "customized play money", a large fortune 500 company approached us to create play money for a employee incentive program they had.

The use of these bills where as unique as our customer base. We did bills for promotion of the US premiere of a Hollywood movie. Our bills where shot out of cannon during live performances of a major US entertainer. A top worldwide Reality TV series sewed clothing made from our Bills. We never imagined the uses for play money existed, but we where listening and learning.

Our Popularity

Although customplaymoney.com only sold customized bills, the customers who found us with google adwords loved the idea. Below is a breakdown of the percentages of bill styles selected by those customers.

We learned alot through these years, who our customers where, how they wanted to use customized bills, what features where needed, and what other products would be usefull to them.

Rebrand/New Web Site

The time had come to create a new web site that had all the bells and whistles needed by our customers. Spendus.com was born:

Web sites go dark

Spendus.com was ambitious, and although the features where greatly improved the site became overly complex and confusing for our customers. We decided to return to our roots as CustomPlayMoney.com, and deliver the same desired features but in a greatly improved web site.

Being a small home based business, we decided the only way to find time to implement our new site was to stop taking on new orders. We took both the original CustomPlayMoney.com and rebranded Spendus.com offline from the world, and vowed to only process reorders for existing customers while we coded.

We stopped all advertisements, but could not stop word of mouth. Both old and new customers begged for our services, so we secretly have continued to provide the world play money.

Back To The Past

Welcome back to CustomPlayMoney.com.

It took us a year, but results are in. The site embraces modern web design, and performance/ease of use is vastly improved. Further new products where added, such as Scratch & Wins, Trading Cards and Coupons.

We architectured the site to be hosted in the cloud, resulting in scalability that ensures the best experience while using our Design Wizard.

Scratch and Wins, Trading Cards

We added new products to be made with our design Wizard. Scratch and Wins can have winning payouts defined by you. Trading cards are a fun way to advertise or build a team.