GEN 2 new clean T-shirt design...

[Mistacheese]

Blipshift is amazing if you can get your design picked.

 

[shelteredraptor]

I agree that Teespring quality sucks. I don't know shit about the industry, but I can tell the difference in quality.

 

[Gen2Rappie]

Who do you recommend?


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Well...it's kind of a long story.

TeeSpring is a website that lets anyone "design" a t-shirt, and then sell it to their friends or to any group of people that'll buy it.

The tees are printed by TeeSpring contract printers, and then drop shipped to the person who bought them.

The "designer" gets a very small cut of the actual cost of the tee.

The printing is outsourced to the cheapest person they can get. There are MANY poor quality homemade DTG printers out there. You can buy kits on eBay to convert your conventional printer to a DTG printer (Direct to Garment), and print a Google Image from home onto a tee. It's going to come out terribly, but that's who TeeSpring outsources the prints too. And that's why its bad quality. Typically you will get poor artwork, printed by a bad printer with a bad quality machine, on the cheapest Gildan tee. A recipe for poor quality.

My wife is a DTG printer (she has an ETSY shop and used to have a website until she asked me to turn it off as she was too busy to keep up with the printing jobs). I helped her start her business, and have watched her develop over the last few years. She uses a high end and expensive printer, inks, pre-treats, and heat presses. It's literally 10's of thousands of dollars to do it right (or $500 home made conversion to do it wrong).

Beginning with the artwork...it must be designed with DTG in mind. High quality image, designed with printing onto t-shirts in mind. She designs herself (self-taught graphic artist) and does a lot of custom and one-off prints. Everyone says they have "print ready" artwork, but they don't. It's just homemade photoshop or google images artwork. She has to adjust every design specific to the print, and even her own designs have to be adjusted. Just by looking at an image she knows what needs to be fixed, and when printing what techniques to use (pull back certain color saturations, double pass on the white base, X amount of time pause between double passes, X amount of time on the press at a specific heat. Each design is test printed first, then the technique or artwork adjusted to get a perfect print. We have boxes and boxes of t-shirts each with many test prints all over them which we collect as rags for later use).

NONE of that is considered by a teespring contract printer, they just print whatever image the designer sent them and ship. And that is why the quality is poor, and because of that bad business model TeeSpring is currently going through bankruptcy. Great business idea (everyone loves custom everything these days), but bad execution.

I could get into a lot more detail on it, but essentially good quality DTG is hard to find because there's a lot of cheap homemade conversions out there putting out prints. It's actually an art to print on t-shirts, and takes a lot of skill (which is built up through lots of trial and error).