Print on Demand Dilemma

You’re looking to make some money on custom T-shirts that will also build your brand. So each product has to be as professional as it is unique. It has to look right and feel right—both when your customers place their order and when they put it on for the first time.

Now, let’s look at your options.

1. Do it yourself

But be warned: creating infrastructure to work with printers is costly. For starters, you have to build a web-based design application for customers, wade through the details of print-ready pdf standards, interface with nonstandard printer and supplier work flows and make sure what the printer ships is actually what the customer expects. And now you’re navigating a maize of a gazillion little details about cloth weight, margins, substrates, screen printing and heat press.

Clearly, print-on-demand work is not for the faint of heart.

2. Have a greedy tech company do it for you

On your next project, you discover a high-tech website that handles artwork, order collection, production and shipment hassle free. Perfect! No-brainer, right? You breathe a sigh of relief.

Unfortunately, your relief turns to regret when you realize that the fancy-schmancy techies have plastered their logo and brand all over your website and packaging, and have only left you a sliver of the margin. Not to mention the website and products they’ve provided are all a la cookie cutter. You have to fit into their mold, not the other way around.

Thanks a bunch, guys.

Let’s be honest. Your whole goal is to build your brand—not a T-shirt supply chain and not some spotlight-hogging, assembly-line happy tech company’s brand.

Like it or not, you have two choices: bad and worse…right?

Not so fast. Fortunately, there is now a better way…