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How To Choose A Factory & Create A Product With Printify

Now, I’m going to take you through how I personally create products with Printify, by using t-shirts as my example. If you’ve been following the Wholesale Ted YouTube channel for awhile now, 

Then you’ll know that Printify isn’t my primary Print-On-Demand app I work with. Instead,

The main app I work with is Printful, which I also teach inside The Ecomm Clubhouse. However, even though I primarily use Printful, the truth is,  I usually recommend beginners start with Printify instead.

Why? Well it’s because Printify is way, WAY cheaper. 

Take this t-shirt I sell in my own Print-On-Demand business: the Bella+Canvas 3001. On Printify, it costs me around $12 to produce AND ship this. Whereas,

That base t-shirt costs $12.95 ALONE. And then there is an additional $4 for shipping. Granted, I do get bulk discounts with Printful, but they still can’t match the price I get with Printify. And something I also want to note: is that my $12 price I got with Printify was because I signed up for this: the Printify Premium Subscription, which is $29 a month. 

This gives you a 15-20% discount on products, though not shipping costs. Obviously in the beginning, when you are brand new & haven’t sold anything, you don’t need to get this. But once you start selling items regularly, this is a no-brainer. It will quickly pay for itself. 

So why do I choose Printful? Well, it’s because there are some additional features that Printful offers, in-exchange for higher prices.

For example, Printful have this: a fulfillment warehouse. Here, you can ship products that you buy in bulk from manufacturers and store them here. 

Then, when a customer buys one of these products from your store, Printful will see the order, find the item stored in their warehouse, package it up, and ship it out to the customer.

This is a more advanced version of dropshipping, and something new store owners don’t need access to. 

And so the honest truth in my opinion, is that new store owners would benefit from Printify’s lower prices the most, over these features.

Of course, if you’d also like to use Printful anyway, I also teach how to use it in the video tutorial series after this one, so be sure to go watch that, if you’d prefer using Printful.

Now, something to remember and keep in mind, is that Printify is NOT a Print On Demand factory. 

Nope. This is something that also makes it very different from Printful. Printful actually have their own factories. So when you order a product from Printful. It’s them that make it. But Printify don’t run or own any factories themselves. Instead, they partner with OTHER Print-On-Demand factories around the world. These factories can offer their products through Printify. So, for example, one of their Print On Demand providers is a factory called MWW.

MWW is indeed a family-owned, American-made Print On Demand factory based in North Carolina. People often think of the Printify factories as intangible things. But they’re not. They are real companies. 

And MWW has been around since the 1930’s, producing products on demand for companies. If you wanted, you could even visit their factory. 

MWW’s most popular products on Printify are their homeware, such as their shower curtains, their rugs & and their pillow cases. 

And so it is best to think of Printify, not as a Print-On-Demand provider per se, but instead, as an app, that lets you order products from Print On Demand providers, and track your orders. 

This was actually a big advantage to me during the height of covid-19 worldwide lockdowns. Printful really struggled during Covid-19.

On one hand, their order number drastically increased, as people began to buy ecommerce products in record numbers, a trend which continues even today.

And secondly, because of new social distancing laws, they couldn’t output products as fast as they previously could. So they had more orders, but less supply.

Because of this, Printful production times soared to up to 28 business days which is entirely unacceptable for customers. Whereas because I was connected to Printify, I had access to a big range of factories. If one factory got shut down, because their city had to go into lockdown, that was OK, because I could switch to another one, and keep my business going. So the fact that Printify doesn’t produce items in-house, and instead work with multiple factories, means you massively mitigate your risk, which is another bonus to choosing Printify for beginners. 

There is however a big downside to Printify’s multiple suppliers. Their quality can vary drastically. And so it’s really frustrating when I see people on YouTube leave comments like “I ordered a sample product from Printify and it was terrible.”

I see those comments and I say to the person: “Can you please stop spreading misinformation and confusing other people who are new? You didn’t order a product from Printify! Instead, you ordered a product from a factory that Printify connects to. Can you please tell us which factory you used. THAT would be helpful!”

So, let me tell you the factories I’ve worked with, that I would work with again.

For clothing, my #1 choice is Monster Digital. Printify actually works extremely closely with Monster Digital, to ensure their quality is excellent. The clothing they produce is on-par with Printful, so I feel really good about using them for my products. Because Monster Digital’s quality is excellent, they are one of the most expensive factories to choose, and don’t always have the same selection of products. They purposefully keep their selection smaller, to maintain strong quality control. But it is worth it. During Christmas periods, Monster Digital have consistently met deadlines. This is my #1 recommended supplier.

DTG2GO is a company that I worked with, during COVID-19 lockdowns. Their prints were not as vibrant as Monster Digital’s, but my customers were still happy with the quality of the products they received. I have heard mixed reports about their Christmas production & shipping speeds. They also ended up getting impacted by COVID-19, but that isn’t their fault. 

And MWW is a company I’ve worked with. I haven’t sold their homeware, but I did sell their tote bags, and my customers were very happy. 

 Another tip too: is that occasionally, print-on-demand providers will make mistakes. So if you see one person leave a comment on the internet like “I ordered a product for a customer from Monster Digital and it was messed up – avoid avoid!” Well, I’d tell you to AVOID those reviews.

 The reality is production is never 100% going to be perfect, for any industry. You cannot expect 100% perfection. It’s inexperienced sellers with unrealistic expectations, that expect perfection.

 And so the real issue I see with those comments, is they are often left on places like Reddit and YouTube, from small stores, that have not had many orders yet. 

 Think about it. If 1 in 100 products end up having a defect, then that defect could happen to anyone, at any time.  And so if someone has, say, ordered 10 products so far from Monster Digital, and the defect happens to be in one of their 10 products, of course they will have a biased view.

 Instead, I would recommend focusing on reviews from store owners like me, who have produced products at scale: who have made at least 100 products with a supplier, and have experience working with them at scale.

 I have no idea how many orders I’ve done with Monster Digital at this stage. But I can tell you, I’ve produced WELL over 100 products, that’s for sure. And out of all of those: only 1 customer has ever complained. 

And something else I want to explain is this: Printify’s review system. Prior to COVID-19, this was a good way to assess whether a supplier was reliable or not. But COVID-19 has essentially made this useless. If suppliers have any delays at all, even just a 1 day delay, their score gets dinged, massively. Printify haven’t updated their algorithms for the pre-covid world. So I don’t recommend paying much attention to this. If Monster Digital’s score is lower than the competition, it probably means that due to social distancing rules, they are producing products a little bit slower, but the quality more than makes up for it. Customers would prefer to wait an extra day or 2, to get a better product. 

 Alright. So that’s some background on Printify, and how they work. Let’s now discuss how to make products with them by using the most popular Print-On-Demand product, t-shirts, as our example product. 

Now, I’m going to show you how to make a t-shirt with this: the Gildan 5000. This is the cheapest t-shirt that you can make with Printify. The Gildan 5000 is fine for beginners to start with, to keep costs low. However, the material is nowhere near as comfortable as

This, the Bella+Canvas 3001. This is a much nicer t-shirt. It’s a bit more expensive, but it’s well worth the price tag, once you have a product that is consistently selling. Be sure to switch to this, once you’ve got a t-shirt once you’ve got products selling consistently. That’s because with a comfier t-shirt, you’ll have a much higher chance of repeat buyers. Or, if your store is already established, you should start with this instead of the Gildan 5000. 

 But, since the majority of my subscribers to The Ecomm Clubhouse do not have an established store yet, we’re going to use the Gildan 5000 for our example tutorial. So, let’s do this! 

 All right, let’s create a product in Printify. Once you have come to your Shopify store, you go to apps, you click on Printify, and then once you’re inside the Printify app, come and click on ‘Catalog’.

 And of course, you’ve got all sorts of products. You don’t just have t-shirts and hoodies, children’s body suits, water bottles, flip-flops, hats. beach towels, fanny packs – there are so many different products that you can sell on Printify. However, we’re just going to choose a unisex t-shirt for now.

 Something to keep in mind is that even though Printify says they have over 250 products, each of these individual women’s t-shirts does count as their own product.

So you might think, well, why on earth does a Printify have so many different t-shirts? Well, the reason why they’ve got so many different ones to pick from is because they are for different needs. So for example, this one is a polo shirt. So if you wanted to sell a polo shirt, then you can come and choose this one.

And this one here is an all-over print t-shirt. So think of it like a tie dye t-shirt instead of just having a picture on the front, the design that you put onto this t-shirt goes all over the entire t-shirt, which is pretty cool. So that feels a very different type of need. 

And then we’ve got several t-shirts in that fill the need of being designed for women’s bodies. But for us, of course, we’re going to choose this one here because this t-shirt fills our needs the best.

 And it feels I need the best to being the cheapest unisex t-shirt that is available. The Gildan 5,000, it has a classic fit that runs true to size. What that means is that if a customer would normally purchase a large t-shirt and a retail store then, or large t-shirt, this will fit them. If the t-shirt was small, or if it said that it didn’t run true-to-size or that it’s a slim fit, what that means then is that they would normally have to, if they would order a large t-shirt in a retail store that a large t-shirt and a small fit would not fit them. But because this t-shirt runs true to size and means in that customers are going to be able to very easily pick a t-shirt that’s right for them, which means you’re going to have a lot less returns now because of the fact that this one here is the cheapest t-shirt, it means seeing that it’s already a hundred percent cotton.

Now I’ll show you the t-shirt that I sell in my store, the Bella + Canvas 3001, which I’ve already discussed.

So this t-shirt here is made from 100% soft cotton. So this t-shirt is definitely nicer to wear, which means that if you sell this t-shirt, customers are more likely to come back and order more, however, it costs more. So right now, I’m signed into my Printify premium subscriptions so I’ve got Printify premium pricing. Your pricing is going to be a little bit more, most are charging $8.05 for this t-shirt with $4 for shipping.

As you can see, different suppliers have different shipping costs. Most of digital’s is $4 with $8.05 for the actual product price itself. However, if we come back to the Gildan 5000, you’ll see that it’s about $2 cheaper.

Now $2 may not seem like much, but when you’re just starting out and you’ve got a low startup budget, I understand that you want to keep costs lower, which is why I usually recommend that people pick this t-shirt when they’re starting out. And once they’ve got a design that’s selling great, they switch on over to the Bella + Canvas 3001.

And the reason why I’m also showing you how to set up a unisex t-shirt is because that’s the type of t-shirt most people want to sell, because that way, you’re not limited towards one gender. So you’ve got a wider audience to market to obviously. If you’re selling something that’s very female specific or very male specific, you may want to consider a female or male t-shirt, but in general, unisex is the right choice for most niches. You’re also gonna discover that you’re going to have lots of different suppliers to work with.

So for example, if your customers are primarily based in Canada, you could come and work with the supplier, Duplium. However, for most people, you’re going to be having your customers mostly based in the United States because the United States is one of the easiest countries to sell.

And if you were selling within Europe, you would have to deal with the European Union’s return laws, which are quite complicated and annoying. So by targeting Americans and selling within America, when you’re first getting started, it’s a whole lot easier, no matter where in the world you live.

And it doesn’t matter where you live in the world. If you live in New Zealand, like me, your supplier is based in America so it’s no different whether you live in America or not. So we’re going to come and click ‘Start Designing’.

Alright, so what you do is come and click ‘Add your design.’

Click on ‘My Device.’

All right. Click on the design you want to use and click ‘Open.

You want to make sure that your doc design is high resolution. If it sees medium resolution, low resolution, then you need to get a higher resolution design. It makes sure that it is high resolution. Now you can drag and drop this design around that you want. You’ve only got this box to work in though. So I’m going to keep in mind too.

Is there outside of just dragging and dropping it? You can get more specific. So if I want this designed to be hard up against the top and in the center, I’d click this top align button to bring it to the very top of the box and then come and click the centered one, to align it in the center.

This is what the vast majority of you want to do, unless you have a specific reason that you want it to be smaller and placed somewhere differently.

You want to design and you want to put your design to make it as wide as possible to fill the box as much as possible and to then put it to the top of the box and center. It’s something that Printify can do for you, which is nice because not all print-on-demand providers do this. They already have a nice gap between your design and the collar. Some print-on-demand providers, including Printful, don’t have this big gap here. You have to allot for yourself , which is really annoying, but Printify already has a gap there so you don’t have to worry about your design being too high up against the collar.

 Alright, so you’ve put your design onto your product. Now if your product has different color variations, come here, click this, and then choose which colors you want just by ticking them. So a lot of people ask me, “How many product colors should I have Sarah?“ If my product does come in different colors, while there is no specific concept, but you think about it. If you want to present yourself as a high end t-shirt brand or clothing brand or store in general, a high end clothing brand or a product brand only wants to put their best foot forward. They want their t-shirts to look awesome. 

They would want to pick colors that could give off the best visual appearance. Don’t just offer other colors because you can. Instead, a nice number to aim for is to pick the five best colors. 

 Now you may have noticed that I have selected did black and you can’t really see my design on the black t-shirt because my design is black. It is going to print differently. It’s not going to appear just as the same color black as the black color of a t-shirt. It’s a different shade to the black that I’m printing onto it, but it’s still terrible. You don’t want this. So your designs that work well on a white t-shirt are often very different to designs that work well on a black t-shirt and Printify knows this.

 So if you’ve got a product like this with a sort of variation, what you’ll be able to do is you’ll be able to click this button ‘Make a specific design for black’.

 Now you can delete the one we just added before.

And then click ‘Add layer’.

Then click ‘My device’.Pick a design that you’ve made for the black t-shirt. So for me here, I’m uploading a design where instead of featuring black characters, it’s featuring white characters. Click ‘Open’.

And I’m going to do the same thing. I’ll click on the design then I’m going to bring this one to the very top and make sure it’s centered by clicking these.

Now it hasn’t deleted my design or my white t-shirt or my sports gray, charcoal or light blue t-shirt. It’s just created a different one for the black t-shirt.

And it’s often a really good idea to do this because black has the highest converting color overall. I think for this design here, that is probably not going to be the highest converting color. I suspect that a sports gray or charcoal would end up being the highest converting color, but usually black has the highest converting color. So once you’ve picked the colors that you want, you can also preview your design by clicking the ‘Preview’ button.

 Now you can check it out on a mockup, which is really nice and see how it looks great. So once you have done this, you can click the save product.

 All right, we are almost done. Come and click ‘Edit listing’.

 Now we need to choose which design, which color we think will be the best as the product thumbnail. So usually black’s the best option because oftentimes black can be the best option because black has the highest converting design. But I think for this one here, I think that probably the sports gray is going to be one of my highest converting colors. And it’s really easy to see the picture on it as the thumbnail. So I’m going to choose this sports gray and then click ‘Next.’

Now the product title and description that we have here is not going to be the one that we’re going to stick with. We’re actually going to edit it on the Shopify product page. But for now, we want to just give it an identifying product title. This way, we’ll be able to easily find it when we come to edit it later. You can just keep the description as it is. Also, come and click, ‘Add a size table’.

And let’s delete the tags. Choose your sizing table to be Imperial, unless you are specifically targeting a country where they use Metric. But obviously we’re talking in the United States, so we’re Imperial and then come and click ‘Next’.

Now set your product price. It is so much faster to set your product price now rather than later, but you can modify your product prices later. It’s just very easy to do it now. So pick what product price you plan to sell your t-shirts for and something you are going to notice is that the larger t-shirts, they do cost more. And the reason why they cost more is because there’s more fabric involved in making them.

It’s a little frustrating that you can’t charge somebody more for having a 2XL t-shirt compared to a small t-shirt. That would not be considered acceptable. So make sure that you price all the t-shirts the same, and just be aware that when a customer comes and purchases a large t-shirt, your profit margins will be smaller. Luckily of course, most customers end up purchasing t-shirts within the small to XL range.

So it’s not something you have happened often, but be aware that your margins will be slightly eaten into when customers pick a larger t-shirt. You should make sure though that you’re selling as many sizes as possible. Then come and click ‘Next.’

And then you just want to come and click ‘Publish product to your Shopify store’. And then you want to come and click ‘Publish’.

And boom! It has been created and published to the store.

See you in the next video!