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I would like to get some t-shirts made of a couple of my designs, both for myself and to sell. I'm pretty sure the most cost-effective option would be to put in an order with a local printer, but I've never sold t-shirts before, and I'm hesitant to put down cash up front for even a small inventory. Also, my designs aren't a good choice for screen-printing, so I need somewhere that can do Direct-To-Garment printing. I was hoping to hear from anyone who has experience using any of the fulfillment companies online. How is their customer service for artists? How is the print quality? Are shipping times reasonable? How about their non-shirt merch like phone cases/skins? So far I've found: Cafepress Redbubble Nuvango Zazzle SpreadShirt Oh and here's the designs, for the curious:  
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Sep 9, 2014 15:14
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| # ? Apr 19, 2024 07:03 |
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try society6. They're ok, but I think you get a fixed cut off tshirts (2.20 $ per shirt), as it was originally started as a poster-only site.
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Sep 11, 2014 08:45
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I would so buy the one on the bottom. PM me when its up on a store.
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Sep 25, 2014 04:05
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Well, since nobody seems to have any experience using these shops, I'll post my mine in trying to set up accounts with them. Cafepress: You can get your art printed on about anything you can imagine thru Cafepress. Shirts, clocks, blankets, bags, drinkware and dishes - you name it, they have it. You can tweak the image on each individual item as well. However, their website is unintuitive, labyrinthine, and an all-around pain in the rear end. For some reason I can't seem to get anything approved for the general Marketplace, although I can set up an independent shop just fine. I tried emailing their customer service about it and got an entirely unhelpful reply. It was an upleasant experience trying to deal with their site. Nuvango: I have a phone skin for my iPhone 4 that was made by them, and I like the quality of it, so I wanted to try them out. The website is more casual and artist-friendly. They have a policy of allowing original art only. When you upload art for sale, you are allowed to upload a "main" version, plus a vertical and horizontal version for products in those orientations. You can't otherwise tweak the image, which is frustrating, because if you use their interface for creating one-off items, it has a wonderful ability to customize layout. Nuvango doesn't make shirts (yet), just phone/laptop skins and cases, canvases ad prints. Zazzle: Couldn't actually print images on dark shirts with a gradient on the outer edge from print to shirt color, so I didn't look any further. Spreadshirt: Actually seems pretty cool but I decided not to use it. They have a focus on helping you set up a "shop" website as a platform to sell your products from. It seems like a sound marketing plan and they have a lot of good advice so I might look into them again in the future, but it's not what I'm looking for right now. Redbubble: Actually my favorite out of all of them. They offer shirts, phone/tablet cases, pillows, duvets, and prints/cards/posters. Offers a small amount of tweaking for individual product layout. The website is professional but intuitive. They offer the sort of printing I need, and even better, the images I have put up have been getting views despite a complete lack of publicity on my part. I'm going to go with them, at least for now. In the end tho, all of my searching led to a local print shop who can do the sort of printing I need, has a very robust and useful website, and is willing to work in small quantities. I have 3 shirts ordered from them to get a feel for the quality of their printing, and if it's up to snuff, I'll definitely be ordering from them for convention sales, at least. The price difference is pretty staggering.
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Sep 25, 2014 14:49
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We've used Tee Fury for our Podcast TShirts for awhile: https://www.teepublic.com/show/5215-bloody-good-horror-2013 They do direct garment printing and the quality is good. Much better than Cafe Press and Zazzle. When we first started, they had a 'pre-sale 30 shirts in a month before we start printing' deal, but they changed that two weeks into us trying to sell the shirts. Now they do them at a reduced cost for the first two weeks I think, then the standard $20 per shirt. Their customer service has been very helpful and we've never had complaints from customers. Also, I"ve worn mine at least once every other week for a year now and it's held up really well.
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Sep 26, 2014 17:43
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