I really like the concept but I don't understand why anyone in tech would want to be in the bulk tshirt manufacturing business. I used to be in the tshirt business: albeit we used to make high end stuff which was sold to premium retailers. As I see it, the inefficiencies in the business do not come from the ordering part. There are plenty of places where you can order tshirts. The really hard problem to solve is the manufacturing one.
Second, I don't get how you would actually make real money through this. Most of this business is low margin, labor intensive. In any low low margin business you make money through scale. However, pretty much all of the high quantity stuff is done overseas and then shipped to the US, because even then it is cheaper. We used to airship stuff all the time (a lot more expensive than boat) and it would still ending up costing us a lot less than doing it in the US
I don't know why people keep making solutions for tshirt manufacturing. It is effectively a price-conscious B2B model.
In all seriousness, we really dislike the inefficiencies of this industry ourselves. We used to contract out our print work, but we opened up 3 facilities (California, Pennsylvania, and Indiana) to improve on the quality and efficiency issues in the industry.
This is an industry where everyone uses the same equipment, same consumables, and same method of decoration, and still charge high prices because everyone else does. We differentiate ourselves by having the technology and processes (from the manufacturing side to the ordering side) and scale to move orders in and out more efficiently than anyone else.
I dont think manufacturing is the issue in the industry. The pain points that I hear companies dealing with from printing for a bunch is in actual fulfillment in various ways, as most of the printing sites are just simply e-commerce stores for merchandise and dont have a solution for the actual fulfillment of those items to the end customers. Also, for promotional merchandise, there aren't great marketing tools that are tightly coupled with this to make the swag effective in getting customers (i.e running contests / giveaways /etc). It is definitely low margin but finding ways to help companies higher up the food chain is what I think is important (TeeSpring, for example is doing a great job of this).
On fulfillment: Order to fulfillment has manufacturing essentially baked into it. The process goes from manufacturing > shipping. The manufacturing part is where most of the hard work is and will remain.
The pain point of some company making tshirts for anything less than 1000 people is negligible from a revenue standpoint. And if your the api or conduit they do it through you will literally make pennies. Unless you setting the prices and baking your profits into them. We used to make a ton of money making tshirts, but that is because they were all custom design, cut and sown to our specs. As such, this was useless for us. Even usher wore won :)
Promotional merchandise is a minute part of this printing business. This solution makes that market more efficient in ordering only, not actual fulfillment.
And I have no idea what you mean by this:
"Also, for promotional merchandise, there aren't great marketing tools that are tightly coupled with this to make the swag effective in getting customers (i.e running contests / giveaways /etc)."
Maybe the trick isn't to make ordering more efficient but rather the printing process?
Or maybe even consolidating the printing process? When every other t-shirt printing website you see online contracts then subcontracts out to a network of small, medium, and large sized t-shirt printers I can see just being inefficient.
Shirts.io has their own production facilities across the United States. This is more akin plugging into their workflow, a magic black box where you input in requests and out comes t-shirts to your customers.
Imagine if you could tie this api into a game, you level up your character and get a t-shirt with all the new equips/stats to show off to your friends...
Long ago, for many games, Activision would award an embroidered patch to any player who beat a certain score. Usually the player would photograph the screen and mail it to Activision.
For anyone looking to start a new t-shirt company using Shirts.io, we can give $100 in account credit for you to get started. Just email me: raymond at shirts dot io.
also if i have an old t-shirt that I want to restore it, is that legal? they no longer make it and it is _precious_ to me since highschool (10 years old!)
I kinda like the faded ink (/hipster), but the shirt it self is falling apart!
We're still waiting to hear back from your tech support team. Last we checked the API didn't provide a response to colors on American Apparel shirts. Has this bug been fixed?
I was thinking of something similar years ago. Except replace google image search with wikimedia and so you'll have access to public domain images (and possibly higher resolution files).
Since you get a bulk discount, would you pay a service say, $3 - $6 a week for such a t-shirt?
Alternative idea: Reddit for t-shirts. Everyone can create and upvote shirts. At the end of each week, everyone gets the highest upvoted shirt for $3 - $6.
Definitely not a unique idea (see also: http://www.threadless.com), but I wonder if it could be bigger if it were more community oriented (Get your weekly r/pics or r/WTF shirts!), somewhere between the Shirt Derby (weekly, but with themes curated by Woot) and Teespring (highly specific, one time designs for a community and cause).
Depending on the size of the community and distribution of votes, it need not necessarily even come down to a single tee choice. Perhaps the top N tees.
You're saying Kinkos was acting as a dumb copy service and was sued for copy right infringement. But your linked case explicitly says this is wrong. Rather, they lost because:
Kinko's has periodically asserted that it acted at the instruction of the
educational institution, that is, as the agent of the colleges and is without
responsibility. Yet, Kinko's promotional materials belie this contention
particularly because Kinko's takes responsibility for obtaining copyright
permission while touting the expertise of its copyright permissions staff (a
"service [which] is provided at no charge to all Kinko's customers.").
"Copyright Information Letter to Faculty Members," in Kinko's Copyright and
Professor Publishing Handbook, at 40.
...and because of this, they have refused to make copies of documents that I have written myself. Not sure if the policies have become more nuanced in recent years, but more than once I had to remove the (c) in the footer of my documents before they would make copies of it for me, no matter how much ID I showed them. I understand why the clerks would be trained that way; was just a very strange side-effect. Felt like living in a minor Kafka piece.
...so now we literally have machine algorithms advocating rape without human intervention. I'm glad there wasn't a complex AI algorithm behind this or oh, the backlash.
It's not a terrible apology, I suppose, but I'm with Tim Maly on calling blaming the algorithm a bit of a dodge, in this brilliant critique/analysis of the whole situation:
Interesting- we are starting to see more and more APIs that interface with real physical objects. Is this the new advent of APIs?
Am i going to be able to purchase a pizza delivery whilst printing a shirt and having my car unlock for the car wash guy all from my phone as I'm heading home.
What other real life APIs are there available atm?
I'm taking a look at your API now. It seems like a lot of searches around my area (Boston MA) are turning up blank. Is there any information available on the availability of restaurants on the API in different areas?
Carvoyant [1] makes a small device that plugs into your car's OBD2 port, and exposes the data through an API. It's somewhat similar to Automatic [2], but available now and has an API. I've got one in my car, but haven't had a chance to play around with the API yet.
An API for general printing (e.g. business cards, letterheads, brochures, posters, etc.) is desperately needed. I can't seem to find any commercial printer that offers an API.
Thank you so much. The API does seem quite complex (it looks like you need to go through dozens of steps to print). I wish they could take Stripe's approach and simplify it somewhat. This seems like a great opportunity for someone to disrupt this market.
infraprint.com just started one about two weeks ago. I haven't had the opportunity to test it yet but it looks like it has all the features that you might need.
I'm planning to use them to print and mail custom letters through the USPS for a credit repair site I'm building.
For credit repair, you'll need to do certified mail for certain requests. This is something we're getting ready to launch :-) Feel free to reach out (info in profile), if we can help.
Cool thing, have an idea that I would like to try with this. However, the following part turns me off quite much:
>"Shipments going internationally are subject to a charge of $8.50 per garment."
Which means that if one order for $3.32 becomes $11.82? That's pretty much, even for international shipping...
For anyone interested in seeing our print quality, we can give out $100 in free account credits for you to print some samples. Just send me an email: raymond at shirts dot io.
I have a fairly specific question. My interest in T-shirts has become refined in recent years. I only like T-shirts that are super soft. Have you guys tested a niche of super soft T's at all? I might be interested in using the API if I could brand a custom T-shirt site focused first of all on the softness of the T, and if you could guarantee the softness.
You'd be looking for a ringspun cotton or a triblend t-shirt from a high-end brand like American Apparel or Canvas. It all depends on how much you want to pay.
American Apparel and Canvas are on the high end of the market. They each offer both ringspun and triblend styles. You're looking at $3 to $4 per shirt over the cost of a basic cotton tee.
If you want a "value" soft tee, you should consider the Gildan Softstyle or Hanes Nano T. You can get these for only $1 to $2 over the cost of a basic tee, and you'll still feel a noticeable difference.
The AA tri-blends are my go-to shirt. A service like this would be well worth it if they offered either this or the Summer shirt over the normal 2001 / 2102.
They're missing AA 50/50 and Tri-blend, the only two types of tshirt I'll wear (maybe standard AA in a pinch). Once you've worn AA's blend shirts you'll never want to wear another type again, assuming athletic fit works well for you.
Shirts.io logo uses the same image as the Stripe 'cloud' but inverted on the y-axis
They also have suspiciously similar UI/UX with similar color schemes. The random green sign up button mouse over is an obvious attempt at 'throwing you off' from the idea that the design was copied.
There's a company in my hometown of Albuquerque that does something similar called Inksoft http://www.inksoft.com/ except, I believe Inksoft strictly offers software to companies that sell clothing like shirts. I don't fully understand the garment industry, but from talking with the owners, they make a pretty penny.
Is everything completely automated or the API is just for placing the order?
Would be cool if the API server is connected to the printing machine controller, packaging machine controller, and some FedEx physical logistics system. When an order is placed, everything is automated, from printing to packaging to shipping. That would save a lot, and more importantly, it's gonna be so cool :)
I have a weekend project that is in "private beta" (still a few weekends from launch) that combines computer generated art and one-off T-shirts. I've been working with http://printaura.com/.
I like the idea of coding up adapters so we can switch fulfillment providers if we needed to.
I think you have a real possibility to make large amounts of money from water cooler jokes alone. This could make big money with office inner circles. Also, the random funny, odd, and cool imgur pic-of-the-week shirt could be very lucrative. Just think of all those college and high school kids wearing the Reddit best-of each week.
I wish this service was around 5 years ago when I was going through the hell of designing a Silverlight interface for tshirt logo / text placement. The customer was such an a I would have pull my app, launched it myself with this service as the fulfillment end. Nice work guys, best of luck with it.
Spreadshirt has had an API for a while now, spawning things like http://zufallsshirt.de/ (German, random shirt per visit, you either buy it or consign it to oblivion.)
I'm wondering if you could add a page describing all of the 'garment' options! I like what I see otherwise, but am not familiar with what each of them are, and there's no where on the website I can find that info.
Your pricing calculator doesn't work on mobile well. Was not able to select 1 tshirt on iPhone. Maybe add a manual text input for size as well? Looking forward to using this though.
this looks great, i just have one question. How are you able to make a profit by selling 100,000 1 color shirts, plus shipping and handling, and blank for 2.60?
shipping along wold be 2.60, not to mention the cost of the shirt which is at least 3.00... i would love to use you guys, just not sure you have thought out your pricing
1. We print hundreds of thousands of shirts every month, so our cost of goods is much lower.
2. The base price includes free shipping to a single address. If you want to split the shipment to multiple addresses, each additional address costs $3. So if you want to ship each shirt to a different address, just add $3 to the per-shirt price.
Agreed. This looks like a lot of fun. My company (a traditional swag distributor) is working on an ecommerce site at SwagExpert.com. It's being built using real-time data on almost a million products (including apparel) that comes from an industry provider's API.
I like how this not only provides the product data but a mechanism for manufacturing and fulfillment as well. Very clever.
Good to see you here, Frank. We met a few months ago at SXSW and I rock the shirt you gave me regularly.
... really not sure where to go with this particular comment.
shirts.io would appear to be using Bootstrap, which will give a common popular minimalist style to their site - of which Stripe is a good example (but I don't think they use Bootstrap).
However, I'm not really seeing anything on their site that immediately screams 'We cribbed our design from Stripe'.
Second, I don't get how you would actually make real money through this. Most of this business is low margin, labor intensive. In any low low margin business you make money through scale. However, pretty much all of the high quantity stuff is done overseas and then shipped to the US, because even then it is cheaper. We used to airship stuff all the time (a lot more expensive than boat) and it would still ending up costing us a lot less than doing it in the US
I don't know why people keep making solutions for tshirt manufacturing. It is effectively a price-conscious B2B model.