Print on Demand: Embroidery with Printful

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Flora and I'm a Dutch embroider and designer. When I'm not busy caring for my little boy, I'm busy with embroidery or designing t-shirts. These days, prints on-demand is very popular as passive income. Prints and t-shirts and mugs, etc, is what we see most these days. But how unique would it be to create a t-shirt with an embroidered illustration? Even though it is prints on demand, your clothing will have more exclusive look and feel. Create an embroidery design is not as hard as you think. You don't need to make a special file for it. I will help you through the guidelines of making the vector fit for sending it off to print full. I will also take you to all the steps of how to place your embroidery on a t-shirt and how it's integrated with etsy. 2. Print on demand : As a starting point for this course, let's assume we are coming to this subject completely cold and answer the first question, what is print on demands? Well, print on demand is a method of buying and selling certain size of items which have buyers select the designs as they are only produced when they are purchase. This retail model has advantages for these manufacturers. Low-risk as they do not have to hold large stocks of many different combinations of items and designs. This will lower infancy costs and result in lower retail prices. The types of products usually found in this fields are mainly clothing, such as t-shirt and hoodies and hats, but also some other categories like books for instance. This can be very useful if you are either designing products for your own platform or just one-off items for everyday wear. Well, with that cleared up, let's take a look at some of the major companies in this fields and the services they offer. These companies are Printify, Teespring, Society Six, Redbubble, and Printful. First, let's look at Printify. They allow you to choose your own printing provider. This does offer great choice, but it can be a bit confusing as the different printers provide many different option. However, they offer a large selection of products. Embroidery is only available on hats and polo shirts, but not on t-shirts. For our purposes today we are looking for t-shirts, so we shall move on. The next one is Teespring. I think Teespring is a company that is a mainly a content creators. It's easy to use in combination where you Twitch or YouTube channel. But the shirts are offered on their own platform. Identifying the prices a little higher than some of the other services. That can make it a little bit harder to make a profit on shirts if that is what you're aiming to do. However, the main point for us today is that they do not offer an embroidery service. Society Six and Redbubble are again marketplaces like Teespring. Their aim is to empower artists, to make the artwork and designs available for sale on a variety of items. One downside is a fixed price on everything except for prints. It's not up to us to decide the price of an item and hence any profit margin. One upside of the marketplace structure is that it can provide traffic to your products. For our needs, Printful is the company we will focus on and a company I use most often. They are the only company that offers embroidery on demand on t-shirts. Here we can see they offer a range of t-shirts styles. Each of these is available in a wide variety of colors. For a small fee, Printful will turn your embroidery design into an embroidery file, produce a sample should and have it sent to you. After that, all you need to do is to take a photo of your shirt for your own store. All subsequent orders will go to Printful. But then providing all the shipping information to the customer. For example, I put mine in Etsy and when somebody orders it, I don't have to take any action. It's a fully integrated system. A major plus point is that they also shift from both the US and Europe. There are no long shipping times or custom charters as customers are supplies from whichever hub is closest to them. Another nice point is when somebody orders from Printful, the package they receive will have your logo and branding on it. This looks like it comes from you rather than Printful and it's a nice extra touch. 3. What if I don’t have any design experience?: If you don't have any experience with design tools, then don't worry, there's a shortcut we can take. This is a website which you may have heard of called Fiverr. It enables you to connect with freelance designers, and indeed all sorts of creatively skilled people, writers, artists, etc. I've used this system myself many times and highly recommend it if you're looking for some specific creative skills or inputs. Here we see the front page of Fiverr, and we can simply type here into the search fields what sort of input we're looking for. This time we will select illustration from the drop-down menu. This will show us a selection of artists offering illustration services. You can search through this list to find someone with the art style you like. You can see their prices and review scores from previous customers. Generally, the prices are very reasonable and I find the standard of work offered as high. The prices often range from a single interaction and costing slightly more if you would like the option to revise the design a couple of times. When you click on the artists, you can also see if the artist has orders waiting in queue and it's expected turnaround time. Here we see the prices, and here we see again that there are many styles on offer for illustration. One thing which I can point out here is that some of the freelancer are pro-verified, and that means that they are recognized by Fiverr in a chosen field. Often this means that they've won prizes or worked with big companies. This can often mean these vendors have higher prices. If you want to send a design to an illustrator on Fiverr, it's important to frame the requests correctly to keep communication clear and give them the best chance of delivering what you have as a vision. For this, we need to make a briefing for the vendor. You will find an example in the project section of this class. It often helps to also conclude an example picture to help convey the message. You can take the briefing I've provided and just modify it to your needs. 4. Guidelines for creating an embroidery file with design tools : First, we're going to look at the T-shirts we are going to use. We going to products and pricing. The women's clothing. When we click on women's clothing, we will get a selection of all the embroidered shirts we can use. I really liked the first one. It has lots of colors to choose from and I really like to fit but we will get more into that once we place the design in a shirt on print form. Here we see all the specification we need for our design and what colors you can choose from. These are the colors that you can choose. When we go up, you can see a download button. You can download the file for whatever program you are using. I'm using Illustrator, so I'm going to download the Illustrator file. I'm going to open the embroidery guide first. It's the teacher guideline. Here's the all important things you need to keep in mind. I pulled up a summary from the website with the most important ones that you need to keep in mind. Use true size graphics. Always similar file that is four-by-four, so you know for sure that the file is in the right size. They have a template that we also download that we're going to use in a minute. You will see that it's really easy. You can just place it in there and you always set your files in a right size. Use solid shapes and colors. You cannot use a really thin space between the letters or the graphics because it will be a little bit bigger than you think or a bit smaller than you think and you don't know if it's going to touch each other. You might risk that the space between the letters or graphics is too small and you cannot see what it is anymore. Always submit a graphic file with a transparent background that is actually same as if you were making a file for T-shirt. It has to be without a background, so no white background. Otherwise you will have a white embroidered background, and stay within a maximum stitch counts. That means that if you just have a big embroidery piece, it doesn't mean automatically that you will go over the stitch count. It means if you have a lot of tiny spaces that are in a different direction or have a lot of dots in it, it will need so much more stitches than if you would have a solid space and the stitch gun is 15,000. I made various embroidery 1,000 and never had anything happened that they said I over seeded the stitch count, so I don't think that's something you can easily do. Now, I've shown you all the technical specifications that you really need to know. We are now going to start with our file. I'm going to open with a file from Freepik and just open it as a normal file. This is an illustration I took from Freepik. It is a website where you can get free illustrations. You do have to credit them and you can use them for a T-shirt, etc. I really like that plant stand and I'm going to take the plant stand and put it in another file. I'm first opening a new file to place the image I took from the Freepik design that is 300 DPI. I took a screenshot from the color palette, so I know which colors I can use. I'm going to delete every other single thing that is around the plant stand so I can take it and copy it in the other file. First, I'm going to make sure it's big enough for me to see all the leaves and all the details. I like to plan design but for it to work, I have to have enough space in-between the leaves, so I'm going to make some tiny leaves. I'm going to get some tiny leaves and delete them from the image. The way that I think it will work better with embroidery because you will see it from a distance. Then it's better if it's not really tiny leaves. If you can really see the outline of the leaves and what it is, so you get a sense of really what the illustration actually is. Now, I'm going to look at the color palette and the site with color I'm going to use, I like the light green, is really nice colors. I'm going to select everything and choose that color. I'm just going to keep that black because I like to contrast and I want to place it on a white T-shirt. Now, we're going to the second file that we downloaded and click an all the eyes, so that they are not visible when we place our image, you can use the guidelines if you want. You can keep them in there for as long as you are not saving the file to make sure that it is in the middle. But I'm not going to do that because I do want to play around with it a little bit after, I'm going to place it in the T-shirts. I'm going to grab my image and copy paste it in this file. Now, we're going back to the other file and you can see here what it says about saving. I'm in an Illustrator file, so I'm going to save it as an Illustrator file. That's what the document says, so that's what we're going to do. Next up, we're going to place the file on the T-shirt. 5. Placing it and intergrate with etsy: When you are on the website of Printful, you can go to Products & Pricing and we're going to choose a "Woman's clothing and Embroidered shirts". Now, we do have lots of shirts to choose from. I then really like this, it is a really nice fit. I think the unisex premium the Bella + Canvas. Because of the plan's illustration, I want to use the color white. It will pop out nice and you can see here where it's stocked in. I think it's always a good idea to just do USA and Europe, you don't know where your clients are going to come from. You do have then less options because some things are not in the warehouses in Europe or in the US. We're going to use the embroidery and here you're going to choose your size. All the size that you want your model to show in it, the size that you need for your sample. Then you order a sample and here you see my two shops. My floor store is just my shop that I started out with that I didn't know how to integrate it here like with my Etsy. This was just something that I created in the beginning. This is the one that I really use, is integrated with my Etsy and the currency is Euro and you can see here this is my logo. This logo will show up on all the packaging and that's really nice touch that Printful does. It looks like it comes from your shop. I'm going to click on that one. The mockup is always a man. I don't know when it's intersex, like the mockup that they use here is a guy. I don't know why, but that's how it is. We're going to upload the file here down on there. It says uploads the file. Here you see all the images that I already uploaded and I use some of them that. You see when I use them that it says flat apparel, that it's digitized and paid for flat apparel. Some are not that I didn't use in the end. This is the one that we made. I'm going to select, "Choose" it. What you have now is that you see the design on the shirt. You can play around with it, you can have the grid off, you can zoom in. I tried to make it small because that's how I like it and I also like it when it's all the way at the top. As far as I can put it on the top of the shirt, I'd like to do it on because I think that looks better. I always keep the middle ground a bit how it is, and then you can use it and just set to the size that you want. This is the middle. I already put it on top. I'm going to zoom out and I really like it as it is here. We put it on top. Zoom in to see if I have a correct. I'm going to zoom out again. Now you have to pick your track colors. That is also very good that they added it because it's like a last check also for yourself. Now we only have two colors. First I'm going to use black and you see that the whole image stays as black. Because it picks up on the images that I selected when we made to design, when I now choose the Kiwi-green, it automatically adds it to the leaves. Then I do continue. Now, we come to the overview page. You see an overview of what we actually ordered. It's the t-shirt size L with the left chest, and because of the discount, it's a little bit cheaper. Here you see what the cost is of that sample. Then you continue to shipping. After that you will get the sample sent to you. I'm going to show you how that looks. Here we have the design, the sample that was shipped in, and this is how it looks. I really like it. I'm really happy with it. It's one of my favorite, it sells really good and I'm happy how it comes out. Let's see how we can now add it to our Etsy. I'm going to show you how you can connect it to your Etsy store. Well, first of all, you have your Printful account where you made your files and everything. Now, you want to add it to your Etsy. What you're going to do is really easy. You just go to this website, your dashboard, and then etsy/register. Here you see a button, you just click on it. I already did that. I already gave access but when you click on that, then you will just give access and everything will go automatically after that. Now, I'm going to show you how you add the products to your Etsy, which is also very easy. Here we are at the dashboard and this is the dashboard where you can find everything related to your account.. Here we go to Stores. You see here my floor store, and here my FullmentalneedleShop, that is the name of my Etsy store. I'm going to Add and then I can add a product. I can go to Women's clothing, T-shirts. I'm going to choose this one again and then you click to "Embroidery". When you then go to upload a file, there you see what I already had is like digitization for flat apparel that means that I can choose it. I'm just going to leave it like this. I have to do the black colors again and then I can proceed to mockups. Here you see all the mockups you can choose from. Women mockups. You can also have the flats lifestyle mockup or men's mockups because this is an unisex. You can choose what you want to do. Then you go to proceed to description, not prescription. If you're familiar with Etsy, then you can see that this is actually exactly how Etsy works. This is how you put your description in on Etsy and your product title. It works actually the same. Here you see all the things that I detect that I used. Here you can choose if you want it for men or for women or unisex. Also, something that is interesting to look at and that is the profit. If you do it here, then it's all on all of them. Then I submitted to my store. You see here that I have other things. It picks up everything that I have on Etsy. All the things that are not related to Printful, it will just not be seen and ignored. Then I can click here, "Edit in Etsy". Now, you'll be directed to my Etsy shop. I can change the pictures how I want it. I can do it however I want, and I hit "Publish" and that's it. You don't have to do anything anymore if you're familiar with Etsy then you know that if something is shipped out or something is maybe a gift, everything will be handled by Printful. You don't have to do anything anymore. You don't have to hit that button that it's shipped or anything else, everything will be automatic. That is really nice. That's it. That's how you make it and add it to your Etsy shop. 6. Trials and errors: I thought I'd take a minute to share with you some of the designs have tried using this embroidery on-demand service and what's some of the lessons I've learned along the way. Sometimes when an order is submitted, it can be unsuitable for the Printful embroidery service. This can be because of a number of reasons such as too many different thread colors or if a design is too difficult for the embroider machine to produce. For example, if the lines are spaced too close together. If this happens, Printful will send a message, like this one I have here, saying that the order has been received but that there is a problem. They will specify what that is and propose a solution. Here we see my first attempts are well-designed. As you can see, the contrast between the two shades of blue didn't really work here, the colors were too similar. Also, I think that the design was too big for the shirt. One thing to remember is that the illustration Printful provides is a mock-up and not the actual final appearance. This is not a problem, but I find it helps to plan a little on the small side when designing for our best final results. This design was the one shown in the error message from Printful earlier. As you have seen, I had too many colors in the original design. When this was fixed, the end results were still uniform. This design was also too small for the subjects, the face lost detail as a result. If I were to do it again, I would also draw the tree branch differently as the width of the stitching is too large, and it results, it looks like a climbing neon green telephone pole. With this design, I decided to be as simple as possible. It actually works out really well. The stitching really works with its in-design elements. This one is one of my favorite and I often wear this shirt myself. For this design, I chose a plant pot graphic. In the middle is a very thin white line, which has been done with a running stitch, which I think works really well. This design shows a bit, what it can be done with negative space. Detail can be added to a design by omitting stitching from certain areas, such as the gaps in the leaf. This design of a cute alpaca originally had more colors. But Printful suggests this, the simplest scheme. I think this is actually much better. Just four colors to give the right amount of detail. I also really liked the size ratio on this shirt. Here we have an example of my trustee assist in submitting an incompletely unsuitable design. It's representing our seagull larger advert. It's a long story but you can find it on my Instagram. As you can see, there are too many shades and colors in the original image. It's basically a bad brief for the artists with a photograph as a starting image. It'd have been much better to provide a simpler illustration of the seagull and ask the artist to work with that. 7. Class project: For this project, we have two choices. For those who wish to use Fiverr, they can download the sample briefing to use to send to the artists, or you can draw the vector yourself. Either way, I'm happy to review the final design and give input as to whether it's suitable for Printful service. This can be one of your own designs or something you found online.