KarmaloopTV has a great interview with Aaron Levant, founder of the Agenda Tradeshow and Agenda Showroom. He talks about how agenda got started and offers some great advice to peeps who are trying to get started in the apparel design world.
Better late than never, right folks? Well it’s a few days late, but here’s the final part of our 5 part review of On Demand T-Shirt printers. If you missed any of the previous articles, you can get links to them all by clicking here.
I think everyone has heard of Zazzle; they are the Pepsi to Cafepress’ Coke. I can understand why. This site is designed mainly it seems for people who want to create their own product and not so much for sellers, while it is offered.
The link to access the selling side of things is way at the bottom and says ‘Publish Products’. Wow, why not give it a button at the top so people can more easily find it?
Anyway, I would have to say that the Zazzle interface is the most unintuitive of all the interfaces that I’ve used. During one part of the process I thought to myself, “Ok, my design is ready so I can push the little button that was at the bottom to sell the design and I clicked on a button to select the tee type and the button disappeared completely.
I then went to the main page and lost my design only to find it as an unfinished design. Once I went back in, I was able to click the button and get the thing up and running.
I have to say that setting up a shop on Zazzle is only enjoyable if you enjoy pain. And while I like a little roleplay as much as the next guy, the repeated spankings from their interface got a little old. Getting back to the site, they have lots of shirt colors and they also have the ability for folks to add their designs to the site and make money off of them. Not so unique now huh Spreadshirt?
These guys do digital printing only, no flex, flock, or screen printing here. The file formats that they allow for designs are JPGs and PNGs. Once you accept that you’ve been a Baaaad boy and work your way through their interface, you can customize your gallery (note that they do not call it a shop so pain must be a part of the gallery experience).
You have a Comment Wall where people can talk about your designs and you with them. A cool idea, though I’m suprised that the quotes don’t consist of “ZOMGWTF HOW DID U FIGUR OUT HOW 2SETUP UR SITE?”.
Anyway, other features for your gallery include, a fan club which lists people that love your designs (pretty useful actually), 20 different themes or your own custom one, you can decide which side to put your navigation on (in case you’re a lefty that wants to stick it to the man), and much more. While the site seems very social networking-esque, there isn’t much here for serious designers.
Pros
- Some premium level features that the other guys don’t offer (comment wall and fan club among them)
- Lots of shirt colors available
- You can use your own design or someone else’s
- Designers can make money here
- I am in ur site social netwrkng wit ur ppls
Cons
- Holy craptacular interfaces batman
- Some additional premium shop features would be nice (No Seriously, like an easy way to set one up)
- Only Digital Printing here though you could make a nice coffee cup for grandma
- Do I need to bold the first one and increase the font size or what?
Where where you this week?! If you missed it, here’s part 1, 2 and 3.
A relative newcomer to the online t-shirt printing scene, I’d heard good things of these guys and thought that I should give them a shot. Wordans is located in Quebec, Canada though I’m sure most Quebecians would like to drop that whole Canada part.
Account creation was fast and the only downside for me was that upon completion of the account creation, I was dumped to their main page instead of to their shop creation page. In a way I can understand why they did this, the login is for folks buying and selling, but I guess I had grown used to being dumped right into the shop creation. No biggie though. I found the shop creation link up top and moved on.
I went into the shirt creation interface (they refer to it as their Wordans Experience) and was immediately greeted with a sign of hope. I found Gildan shirts mentioned by name and an icon for American Apparel shirts. I love choice, have I ever mentioned that? Anyway, moving on. Tons of shirt colors. All of them I think (all of the ones available by the vendor that is).
Now on to the image upload. It is built into their Jimi Hendrix… er Wordans Experience as a tab at the top, nice. I had one problem with the Wordans Experience interface… I couldn’t upload images. I remembered seeing an ‘Upload Image’ button outside the interface so I went there instead.
Do you remember where I said that Spreadshirt had two unique features? Well apparently they are unique just like everybody else. Wordans has a very similar “choose your commission” kind of thing except that you decide how much you want to make from each sale in currency.
And that other unique feature, the ability for designers to make commissions when their designs are used and sold on other people’s products? They have that too and more designs appear to have been uploaded than what I saw in the Spreadshirt archives. Good news all around. Where was I? Oh yes, I was talking about image uploading.
Once I used the other ‘Upload Images’ button that I told you about, you are given three choices for your image uploads: PNGs, JPEGS, and GIFs. They recommend a minimum resolution of 1000×1000. You may be saying to yourself, “Great, another digital printing operation” and to that I would say, “Whoa boy” not this time.
They do digital printing, vinyl (flex and flock), and SCREEN PRINTING!!!! Yes folks actual screen printing is available on orders of 35+ shirts. But wait, there’s more. I read in their FAQ that they will also make design changes/improvements on screen printed designs for free with 50+ shirt orders. Niiiiice. And remember what I said about finding Gildan and American Apparel shirts? They also offer Bella (great ladies tees) or the brand of your choice.
I should also mention that their shop also includes being able to select a featured star product, eight templates or you can roll your own in advanced mode, you can add a link to your blog, to your flickr rss feeds, and lots more. In fact, they also have little snippets of code to allow you to integrate your store with your blog or facebook page. Talk about going above and beyond. The only downside from these guys is that their interface needs to be fixed (the upload images button). That would make this site perfect in my eyes.
Pros
- They do it all, digital printing, flex and flock, and screen printing
- Easy shop setup
- More premium level features than the other guys offered
- Every shirt color from every vendor is available
- You can use your own design or someone else’s
- HUGE library of uploaded designs to choose from
- Designers can make money here
Cons
- Image Upload button broken in the Wordans Experience
- Some additional premium shop features would be nice (Just Kidding)
- I can’t think of anything else *shrugs*
Stay tuned for our final installment tomorrow, we’re taking a look at Zazzle.
Jumping into the middle of things? Don’t miss part 1 and part 2.
To my understanding, Spreadshirt has slowly been taking the world by storm though I don’t want to make too many such comments as they are a German based company.
Their site is nice.
While I haven’t felt the need to mention account creation in my reviews of the previous sites I must say something here. They ask for too much information. We haven’t even gotten to first base yet and you want to know all of my prior flings? Hold on now. If you are a web based business, why do you need to know where I live? This is the 21st century. I could be on any continent running a business. My address shouldn’t matter, but I digress.
Needless to say, the shop creation took a bit longer with these guys than with Cafepress or the ultra speedy Printfection. You do get some nice premium level features for your shop though including: eight shop themes and multiple language/currency support.
When it comes to shirts and colors, Spreadshirt has the most options I’ve seen so far. When choosing shirts, you get to encounter one of the two unique features that Spreadshirt has made their name on… personalized commission percentages.
Want to make 100% commission off of each shirt? No problem, though the price of the shirt does magically double for your customers when you do that… weird huh?
I mentioned that Spreadshirt had two unique features didn’t I? You wouldn’t call me a liar would you?
Seriously though, if you are a designer that has no want to sell shirts but simply wants to sell your designs, Spreadshirt is the place for you.
What does that mean for budding designers? It means that you can make money selling other peoples designs. For some reason that makes me feel dirty.
Going to shower now…
I’m back and feeling much better.
Ok, so besides the Open Source use of designs, what else makes Spreadshirt special? Well they do more than Digital Printing. Great right? Well maybe.
They use flex (aka Vinyl) and Flock (similar to Vinyl) and heat press them. What does this mean to you the budding designer? It means that if you don’t want to go down the Digital Printing path, you are limited to three color designs. Unless you want to use their writable flex (why god? why?) or specialty flex (glow-in-the-dark or glittery) where you only get one color.
If you are into vinyl (the safe word is banana) then this site may suit your needs, otherwise I would suggest that the serious designers move along.
Pros
- They do more than just digital printing with the addition of flex and flock
- Some Premium Level shop features come free-of-charge
- Almost every shirt color imaginable
- You don’t need to BYOD (Bring Your Own Design), they have lots to choose from
- Lets you make money when other people sell your designs
Cons
- Weird site navigation
- Account creation requires too much information
- Flex and Flock, while another option for designers, is not suited to designs with high color counts
- The lack of shirt vendor choice makes me sad across all of the sites thus far
Stay tuned for tomorrow, when we take a look at Wordans!
Teefury is a brand spankin’ new site built on a familiar concept, but with a twist. Something like a mix between shirt.woot and tinyshowcase (except for tees), the site offers a limited number of a single design each day at an awesome price of just nine bucks each.
What makes it different than woot is that the designs printed come from already established artists that have been hand-picked from the folks at Teefury.
It looks like day 1 was a huge success, with the premier design selling out sometime in the early evening.
And our favorite thing? It’s a little morbid, but the dead bird (from their logo) that shows up when a design sells out:
We’ll be keeping our eye on this one!
