Apr 27 2009
Online Shirt Shop Showdown!
(from Episode #91 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)
The internet is a treasure trove of custom services. Today, I’m going to show you a few one-off t-shirt sites that will allow you to make high quality merchandise to promote your web site, club or event and maybe even make a little money on the side.
With traditional screen printed shirts, you have a minimum print run (usually about 12 shirts), you have to choose the sizes of shirts that you will print ahead of time and hope someone orders them, you have to store the shirts, take the orders, handle the funds, the shipping, the returns, the reorders, etc. With online shops…
- no minimum print run …you can order 1 shirt if you want
– no overhead …shirts are printed as they are ordered
– no trying to predict which sizes will be most popular
– no taking orders
– no handling returns
– no dealing with foreign funds and shipping problems
…you just design, create and promote.
The way all three of these sites works is basically the same: you create and supply the artwork and they allow you to choose the products you will apply that design to and offer for sale. For the purposes of this article, I will be comparing how each of them renders a design I supplied (The Lab with Leo Laporte logo) on a black t-shirt.
In my experience with these types of companies, black t-shirts seem to be the hardest to do and the hardest to do well. Traditionally, with light colored shirts, the submitted design was printed or adhered to the shirt using a clear medium. This meant that any light parts of the design would show the color of the shirt through the graphic. On a light shirt, that is usually not a problem, but on a black shirt it makes the design difficult to see. Many online shirt sites get around this by first applying an opaque white layer to the shirt in the shape of the design and then basically printing the design on top of that like your home inkjet printer. Not all sites do it this way and not all that do make black shirts this way do it as well as others.
Let’s take a look at CafePress, Zazzle and Spreadshirt and see how they fare…
CafePress
Background and Service:
If you have explored the world of online merchandise much at all, CafePress is probably the name you heard first and loudest. They were launched in 1999 by Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain. Since then the company has grown to approximately 300 employees with a head office in Foster City, California and a production plant is based in Louisville, Kentucky.
CafePress is huge and consists of approximately 1.4 million shops including online stores for Star Trek, The Discovery Channel, Phil Collins, Snoopy, The March of Dimes, Dilbert, and Wikipedia. They offer 36 different styles of shirts and sweatshirts from Hanes, Gildan, Anvil, Gerber, Bella and CafePress Brand Apparel. They also offer an organic cotton shirt by American Apparel.
In addition to shirts and “wearables” CafePress also offers over 130 different products including home and office accessories, music and data CDs, books, prints, posters and cards.
Methods:
CafePress offers two methods of printing on shirts: Direct Printing and Heat Transfer. Most of the merchandise they produce is created using Direct Printing which, as the name suggests, involves printing the design directly onto the garment. This means the ink is actually embedded into the fabric. Black shirts are created this way as well with a preliminary step of applying a layer of white ink in the shape of the design added to the process.
Heat Transfer is a less commonly used method which offers a bit more detail. With this method your design is printed on a resin applique and then heat is used to create a bond between the resin and the garment, locking the ink between the two layers. Heat Transfer designs have a weird feel to them…as if there is a large sticker on the front of your shirt…but after a few washings the slight stiffness of the design softens up a bit.
Results:
The Lab with Leo shirt I ordered from CafePress cost USD$18.99 (you can sell your own designs on your own shirts for more and make a profit, if you wish) and arrived quickly in an opaque plastic mailer.
The black shirt was a Fruit of the Loom Heavy Cotton and the design was reproduced pretty well with a bit of striping (it looks just like printing from an inkjet with a dirty print head). The process used to print the design creates a slightly worn “crackly” look and allows a bit of the black fabric to show through in the design. This is presumably due to the inks being embedded into the weave of the shirt and thus some of the black threads intermingle with the designs color. This contributes to a slightly darkened image, but will probably give greater durability to the print over repeated washings.
On the subject of washing, these shirts stand up to cold water washing, they don’t like bleach, they tumble dry with low heat and should be ironed inside out on “warm”
Setting up your shop and selling your wares:
With CafePress you can upload as many designs as you like and sell them on as many stores as you see fit to open. There is no waiting period or approval process, so as soon as you upload your design, you can get to creating, buying and selling right away. Setting up an account is pretty straight forward and the interface for determining the size and placement of your designs on your shirts is quite intuitive.
Zazzle
Background and Service:
Zazzle has been around since 2001, but publicly launched in July of 2005. They currently have a few hundred employees at their corporate office and two manufacturing facilities.
Star sightings at Zazzle include Tori Spelling and her husband who used Zazzle to create postcards and stamps to announce the opening of their inn. Michael Jordan used ZazzleStamps on the invitations to his birthday party in Las Vegas. Zazzle merchandise also represents such brands as Disney, Marvel Comics, and Star Wars.
Zazzle offers about 70 different styles of shirts by manufacturers such as Bella, American Apparel, Next Level, and Hanes. American Apparel’s organic cotton shirt is offered by Zazzle as well. In addition to shirts and apparel, they also offer greeting cards, note cards, postcards, Zazzle Custom Stamps (real US postage), posters, canvas prints, framed prints, calendars, photo prints, photo enlargements, mugs, travel mugs, steins, mousepads, photo sculptures, magnets, keychains, round stickers, bumper stickers and buttons.
Methods:
Zazzle applies designs to shirts in virtually the same Digital Printing Method as CafePress (see above), but they did not have the same results when they printed “The Lab with Leo Laporte” logo I provided.
Results:
The Lab with Leo shirt I ordered from Zazzle cost USD$19.95 (almost a dollar more than CafePress, and again, you can sell your own designs on your own shirts for more and make a profit, if you wish) and arrived fairly quickly, neatly folded and packed in plastic.
The black shirt was a 100% Cotton Hanes Authentic. The design, while just as vibrant as the CafePress shirt, it had much less striping. The design was, however, somewhat blurry looking and had an odd light halo at the edge of the design. The printing also exhibited the same worn “crackly” look and slight show-through of the black shirt material.
Zazzle doesn’t seem to provide any washing instructions on their site, but I assume it is the same “cold water wash, no bleach, warm tumble dry, iron inside out” story as with CafePress.
Setting up your shop and selling your wares:
Zazzle offers unlimited design uploads, unlimited stores and instant availability of designs for use and sale. The store set-up and shirt creation interface is exceedingly easy to use. It is a bit difficult to know how big the design is on the shirt as the interface enlarged the graphic on the shirt when I uploaded it instead of leaving it at its original size. I was able to upload and create this Lab with Leo shirt without actually creating a store, so Zazzle offers shirts that are truly “one-offs.”
Spreadshirt
Background and Service:
Spreadshirt is the new kid on the block among the three I have chosen to try out here. They sprang up in 2002 and now have approximately 250 employees worldwide and represent over 350,000 stores ranging from the “Chuck Norris Facts” shirts to those created by companies like Coca-Cola and Warner Bros. And, I should mention (full disclosure), they are also the service I currently use for my own shirts.
Spreadshirt offers over 80 types of apparel including, of course, shirts (made by Bella, Continental, American Apparel, Hanes, Anvil and more), but also hoodies, tanks, athletic wear, aprons, undies and even shoes. They also have an expanding line of organic apparel.
Methods:
Spreadshirt allows users to upload designs as bitmapped-based graphics with a rainbow of colors and gradients or as 3 color vector designs for cut-out. Bitmap-based designs are applied to apparel using a print and transfer process. Vector-based designs are all created using Plot Printing.
The way Plot Printing works is much like how vinyl signs are created–the design is cut out of a light, environmentally friendly, plastic-like medium in the color(s) of you choice and assembled like a puzzle. In the case of Bitmap-based designs on dark shirts, the design is digitally printed on a material similar to the Plot Printing material and then cut out. Once all the pieces of the vector design are cut out and laid on the shirt, they are bonded to it with heat. The result is a long lasting and very vibrant design.
Results:
The Lab with Leo shirt I ordered from Spreadshirt cost $15.90 (the cheapest of these tested by more than $3…and again, you can add a profit margin when creating your ow shirts) shipped very quickly and arrived in an opaque plastic mailer. The colors of the design are very nice and very accurate to the graphic I uploaded. It’s so accurate, in fact, that it reveals the pixel detail that the method of Digital Printing fabric hides. One nitpicky detail that can crop up with Bitmap designs made with the Plot Printing method is occasionally a few white edges can be seen where the plotter has cut outside of where the design ends. On the whole, Spreadshirt does a good job of keeping this to a minimum, but it does happen and it did happen on this shirt.
Setting up your shop and selling your wares:
Spreadshirt is a bit more difficult on the “set-up and sell” end of things than the other two companies. They have recently updated their site to offer more features like selling designs for others to use on their merchandise and being able to easily make the same products available in additional stores without having to recreate the product again each time. They have more features, but I find their new site isn’t as easy as the others to navigate and get your shop going.
You are able to upload a maximum of 10 designs on a single account for free (you can get a paid membership to upload unlimited designs) and you are able to set up as many stores under that one account as you like (Spreadshirt offers international stores to facilitate local shipping to several parts of the globe). Digital Designs are available for you to create merchandise right away and you can sell your new products as soon as they are published in your store. Vector Designs, however, must be approved due to a few limitations in the Plot Printing process (the is a minimum size that Plot Printing can handle). For this reason, it can be difficult to get your designs online quickly and if your design gets rejected it is sometimes unclear why.
One thing I must mention here is Spreadshirt’s customer service–they have people working on design approvals 6 days a week and they are very helpful with any questions about design rejections of even if you have trouble customizing the design of your Spreadshop. I mentioned at the outset that I use Spreadshirt for my own MacMerc.com merchandise. This is first because of the quality of their products but their customer service is a very close second.
In Conclusion
So which one is the best? I want to remind you again that, for all of my web sites, I use Spreadshirt. I have tried a few of these services over the years and tested them in more ways than I’ve shown here and Spreadshirt was the company I settled on.
If you don’t like the look and feel of Plot Printing, which I can understand, I would recommend you go with CafePress. They produce high quality work and continue to improve and expand.
I would not, however, recommend either of these for my Mom to make t-shirts for her bridge club–the web sites are far too complicated. For her and others who are intimated by setting up accounts and uploading designs to galleries, etc., I would probably recommend Zazzle for its straight forward process.
I guess what I’m saying is they all have their strengths and weaknesses, which is what keeps them all competitive and, in the end, that keeps them eager to win you as a user and a customer.