The tiny roamers shop initially started as digital goods for the online teacher community. In early 2019 we decided to leave New Zealand for Florida for a short amount of time to visit family I was able to turn a digital design into a physical product, an iron-on patch, although I was horribly envious of people who were able to make their t-shirts at home! I am a very hands on person, and delegation and not being able to have quality control makes me a bit twitchy, but as my designs peaked interest, but I wasn’t in the states long enough to purchase equipment to make my own shirts, and it was too costly to send shirts from overseas, I began to explore options, which led me to drop shipping and print-on-demand.
What is drop shipping?
Drop shipping is when a product goes directly from the manufacturer to the customer.
What is print-on-demand?
Print-on-demand allows you to have your unique design printed, only when it is ordered, so you don’t have to order a bulk amount of the same design. Combined with drop shipping, this means your design is printed only when ordered, and then shipped directly to the customer. You just need to handle the listing and ensuring customer satisfaction.
Recommendations:
Test your product!
Along with reading reviews make sure you sample the merchandise you’d like to sell in your shop and not just choose a product based on how well it photographs! This is extremely important as you want to ensure not only quality print and durability, but also consider how it looks when it arrives, and how well it wears and washes, and the fit and comfort of the shirt itself. Often people will choose the cheapest printer or the cheapest shirt, only to be left scathing reviews about poor prints and low quality apparel.
My Preferred Printer: Printful
While doing my research I came across both Printful and Printify. While Printify seemed like the better option for profits, it seemed in regards to reliability Printful was the better option. There are several reasons I have chosen to remain with Printful for over a year now.
Pros
- Excellent print quality that withstands time
- They print everything in house versus places like Printify, who outsource to different printers, therefore the same standard of printing is maintained throughout.
- Mockup Generator (Have fun and play with prints and products here!)
- Integratable with Shopify, Woo Commerce, Wix.com, Ecwid, Squarespace, Weebly, Etsy, amazon, eBay, Wish, your personal website and more!
Cons
- Limited inventory. You won’t always find a wide variety of items you may elsewhere, and also not as large of a variety in regards to colors.
- Higher cost per item. You’ll end up giving spending more per item here, in exchange for knowing you’ll have better quality.
Although it's hard to relinquish the responsibility of my shop and brand over to someone else, this is the second best option to doing it myself!
Have more questions? Feel free to reach out to me via the contact form and I'll get back to you as soon as possible!