velospace blog

Zazzle tries to get on demand merchandising right, but falls short.

I have written about how to make niche social networking site merchandise work. I have spent countless hours thinking about, designing, printing, scrutinizing, redesigning, returning, packing, shipping, and getting feedback on velospace merchandise. I truly care about the quality of the material that the velospace logo is printed on.

To date I have had multiple designs of t-shirts, hooded sweatshirts, cycling caps, and stickers made. Of those, only the shirts and hoodies have been sold. Why? Not because the designs were bad, but because either the print quality sucked or the garment itself sucked. I recently experimented with Zazzle and found out that they suffer from both of these problems.

I set up a shop on Zazzle, I uploaded my designs, and I placed orders for the merchandise to see how the quality measured up. I decided to try Zazzle because I was approached by them a few months ago about setting up a shop in the Sports / Active Lifestyles section on their site. Zazzle is a on demand merchandise print shop. They print your products after they have been ordered, generally promising a 24 hour turn around. Its a neat concept - rather than having to buy merch in many sizes and hope that people order it, you create a design and let someone else do the logistics of printing and shipping.

After Zazzle reached out to me I had a few conversations with some of their business development guys. During those discussions we talked about what Zazzle could offer, what velospace was looking for, and how we could partner up. In the following months, after a few emails and phone calls to Zazzle, I found out that all the pending deals they had were off. Something internally was going on over there and the velospace / Zazzle partnership was put on hold.

That was about 6 months ago, and just recently I decided to give Zazzle a try as a regular publisher and not as a partner under contract. In early January I ordered a hooded sweatshirt and some stickers from the designs I put together. The hooded sweatshirt was a disaster and the stickers were fine. This post is a write-up of my experience with Zazzle to inform people of what to expect when dealing with them.

Sublimation printing is no good and cheap garments are garbage and not worth your time.

Most merchandise print shops use a screen print method that sprays ink on top of the merchandise. The printed part raises up off the fabric a bit. This type of printing is relatively durable, looks good, produces sharp and crisp edges, and doesn’t require undercoats to print on dark merchandise. For instance, the velospace gray t-shirts with black print did not require a white undercoat to make sure the black was visible.

Sublimation printing, which Zazzle uses, impregnates ink dye directly into the garment. The ink is drawn through and becomes part of the shirt itself. There is no way to separate the print from the merchandise. Because the ink is drawn through, sublimation prints on dark garments need a white undercoat. If you print a logo on a dark garment you will have a white halo around the logo and it will look like trash. This is one of the issues with sublimation printing.

Another issue with sublimation printing is that when the ink is drawn through the fabric it bleeds. Imagine taking a felt tipped pen and letting the tip rest on a shirt. The ink will slowly bleed out and form a soft edge. The same thing occurs with sublimation printing. There are no truly crisp or sharp edges in sublimation printing.

Because of these issues with sublimation printing, I can’t recommend Zazzle. I am disappointed by the quality of the print on the navy blue hooded sweatshirt I ordered from Zazzle. The dark part of the design has a halo around it and as discussed below the garment quality was terrible.

Garment quality is key.

Quality garments are the most important aspect of merchandise after print quality is set. People associate crappy garments with the quality of the brand being promoted. Selling velospace branded merch on poor quality goods reflects poorly on velospace.

Zazzle’s sublimation printing only offer garbage options for hooded sweatshirts. The sample hoodie I ordered is a no-name cheap cotton/polyester Hanes garment. It looks cheap, it feels cheap, and if I were to put it up for sale it would make velospace seem cheap.

As far as I am concerned decent merchandise must at least meet the quality of American Apparel garments at a minimum. They use quality cotton, their stitching is good, and their sizing is consistent. Zazzle sucks because they don’t give you enough quality options as a publisher to print on garments worthy of your designs.

Zazzle is too limiting

Let me count some of the ways that Zazzle arbitrarily limits what you can do as a publisher:

• No sleeve printing.
• Low quality garments. See hooded sweatshirts below.
• No way to limit which specific colors of garment may be ordered for a specific design. You have to choose either light colors (white, gray, pink, light blue, etc.) or dark colors (black, navy blue, dark green, maroon, etc.).
• No white label interface through checkout. You have to link users through to their system for purchase and browsing, including annoying “features” that cannot be turned off (comments, things you may also like, header, footer, etc.).
• No quality hooded sweatshirts for sublimation printing. American Apparel stock is available for embroidery but not for sublimation printing. Why? Who knows but it seems arbitrary to include those garments in one half of the store and not the other.
• Pay-to-convert fee for embroidery files. If you have a logo and you want it embroidered, for example to take advantage of the much better quality American Apparel hooded sweatshirt stock, you have to pay about $30 to have a 3″ x 3″ logo converted into an arbitrary stitch format. You can provide them with a stitch file, but they offer no resources to find a program to convert vector art into stitch files.

What the perfect on demand print shop will offer

• High quality screen printing.
• High quality garments of at least American Apparel quality for all products
• Complete control by publisher over offerings for sale including ability to limit garment sizes and limit colors.
• Complete integration into the publisher’s site end to end from catalog to checkout.
• Competitive pricing with reasonable commissions for the publisher. $15 t-shirts with shipping, $35 hoodies with shipping, $15 cycling caps with shipping, and so on.
• 24 hour turn print and ship around time.
• Fair shipping costs based on actual cost to ship, including multiple shipping options (USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.).

I am hoping to find an alternative to Zazzle that has these offerings. In the quest for high quality merchandise I am not looking for a quick fix, I really care about the quality of the merch that velospace sells and I need it to be top notch.

If you have any suggestions or comments feel free to contact me.

- Greg