But are the shirts any good? No mention of material or examples of how one might look.
"Are our shirts any good? No. Our shirts are f king great."
Raymond from Shirts.io here.
You were saying? http://i.imgur.com/vSySViF.jpg
T-Shirt Printing API
71–80 of 131 posts
Re: T-Shirt Printing API
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a fantastic idea. I would be down for that.
while it is a pretty neat idea, it makes me think of http://iam.peteashton.com/keep-calm-rape-tshirt-amazon/
...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.
Re: T-Shirt Printing API
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For business cards, stickers, greeting cards, labels, etc Moo has an API http://us.moo.com/api/ I haven't used the API but I've bought business cards from Moo and they were great.
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.
Re: T-Shirt Printing API
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Thoughts?
Woot does this to some extent with their Shirt Derby. http://shirt.woot.com/derby
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.
Re: T-Shirt Printing API
#75Interesting- 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?
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.
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.
Re: T-Shirt Printing API
#76I 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…
Why would we get into this business? Because of shirts like this: http://i.imgur.com/QNQqXnD.jpg
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.
Re: T-Shirt Printing API
#77Bash Script + cronjob + Google Image Search + shirts.io = random new shirt every week?
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).
Re: T-Shirt Printing API
#78I 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…
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…
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)."
Re: T-Shirt Printing API
#79I 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…
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.
At scale, low margins is good margins.
Re: T-Shirt Printing API
#80I 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…
Why would we get into this business? Because of shirts like this: http://i.imgur.com/QNQqXnD.jpg 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, sam…
Yea see then it makes sense to me, sort of. If you have your own manufacturing ability then for sure go for it.
However, I will still say that most of the money to be made is in actually selling your own designs.