Author Topic: Online tshirt designers...do they get used?  (Read 497 times)

Offline printavo

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 270
Online tshirt designers...do they get used?
« on: November 13, 2017, 11:08:36 AM »
How do you guys use Tshirt Designers?
https://www.printavo.com - Printavo, simple shop management software.


Offline zanegun08

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 688
Re: Online tshirt designers...do they get used?
« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2017, 11:31:06 AM »
We use inksoft on our website, but it represents about .05 percent of our business.

I plan on redesigning our site to feature better products, and make it load faster (inksoft api is slow)

We did just run a fundraiser that had 40k dollars in sales (preorder store)

However, the amount of people that order online is very limited, and mostly small quantities.  To be successful with automated online sales you need to market it, which we don't.

Of all the orders (100's over a couple years), I think one or two used clip art or the inksoft design templates, so unless you are Custom Ink and suited towards people who have never bought custom apparel, most of our online orders had people upload pdf / svg files to complete their orders.

We could however use a shop management software that was embellishment based, had proper scheduling per machine, good quoting tools, and a backend where customers could initiate reorders from previous customer service based orders would generate more online usage. 

However if you are trying to spend time implementing a designer into Printavo I think you should spend time to make your software more suited for a production shop that handles hundreds of orders per day, and implement a very simple mockup generator (overlay SVG on Raster Mockup (S&S Garments)) that can enable people without art experience (or customer) to create and make simple edits (placement / size) to mockups and can avoid the back and forth between art -> csr -> customer -> csr -> art -> csr -> customer -> csr -> art (approved) to make a simple edit like moving the graphic down an inch. 

Our art department which is some of the highest paid people, spend a lot of time doing menial tasks like copy and pasting a vector graphic onto an image to make a mockup.

Offline CBCB

  • !!!
  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 490
Online tshirt designers...do they get used?
« Reply #2 on: November 14, 2017, 06:04:47 AM »
Bruce, I think a t-shirt designer is a waste of time.
Printavo was started to help shops manage the printing workflow. In my opinion making Printavo better on the production side gives us more time to handle our own design and customer service.

Printavo can’t be used for big production because it’s only linear. The mock-up generator makes sense, and so does improving scheduling.

Biggest thing for us is that we need to use an outside system like Trello to manage parts of the process that Printavo can’t. Printavo has Zapier but the feature is crippled.

I would say to work on existing features. The interface for adding print locations in Printavo is so clunky that we don’t use it. Would love to see more polish put on current features so we don’t end up waiting two years for bugs to be fixed when you roll something out.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Offline merchmonster

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 421
Re: Online tshirt designers...do they get used?
« Reply #3 on: November 14, 2017, 08:44:55 AM »
T-shirt designer doesn’t convert we had inksoft on our site we made maybe $500-1000 per month which is peanuts.

I also agree with cbcb that printavo needs work to manage big show workflow. We’re at 2 autos and beginning to hit a wall in terms of functionality. Your time would be better spent investing in a true production manager capability like inksoft is doing or what shopworks shopvox is
Merch Monster Screen Printing Embroidery and DTG Direct To Garment Printing
Servicing Oakland CA and the Greater San Francisco Bay Area
http://www.merchmonster.net