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.
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.