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kerravonsen) wrote2023-12-13 04:01 pm
Printful May Be Fruitful
In the continuing saga of my print-on-demand adventures, my eyes have turned to Printful. These guys are different in that they only provide the print-on-demand back-end, you have to set up the e-commerce front-end yourself. The disadvantage, obviously, is that you have to set up the e-commerce front-end yourself. The advantage is that you are able to set up the e-commerce front-end yourself -- which means that you know who your customers are. Which I have realised is truly an advantage, because interacting with humans is part of why I want to create. I know at this point, that it isn't going to be a viable business for me. But I'm (unofficially) retired, therefore I don't have to run my own business. Yet I have been caught up in the delusion that I'm supposed to, and it has caused me a huge amount of distress.
No more! This is NOT a business! I am NOT going to market myself! I am NOT going to chase the elusive and invisible Market! (I am not going to post my products on Pinterest.) I am NOT going to do what I "ought" to do! Just what I want to do.
And what I want to do is to give my friends (and followers) the opportunity to buy (prints of) my art. If they want to. And also enable myself to get stuff with my art on it. That's all.
So, yes, there's going to be a WooCommerce site set up by me in the future. Not yet, that's a problem for Future!Me to deal with.
I have deleted my Threadless shop. The RedBubble shop is still there for the moment. I am still undecided on whether I will delete it once the alternative is set up, because there are a few things which you can get on Redbubble which you can't get on Printful.
But in the meantime, I've signed up with Printful and am testing their interface.
I found an interesting limitation of the Printful interface: even though their maximum file size (they say) is 200MB, I couldn't upload files greater than 25MB! It was driving me crazy. I spent an hour chatting on line with their support, and had resigned myself to having to reduce all my file sizes, since that was the only thing which appeared to work. But then I found out a way around that: if you upload the files to Dropbox first, and use their Dropbox interface, there is no problem. (Or, alternatively Google Drive, but I prefer to use Dropbox.) So I think it's some default file upload size limitation on their web interface which they forgot they had. This is perfectly understandable, these defaults get set deep in the web-server configuration files, and it likely would not have occurred to anyone that they needed to be changed.
Going via Dropbox, the files seem to upload faster, too.
All of the Art, some of the Products:
With RedBubble and Threadless, you upload one image, and it is put on every possible product they sell (apart from the "special" products which require non-standard image shapes). And then I would create and upload more images which better fit specific products, like mugs. (Wrote a massive suite of scripts to transform the original art into the product-specific art. Yay for being a programmer! Still a lot of work to write, though.) And if you wanted that art to not be on a specific product, that required extra work, because you have to go in and disable it for that product.
But with Printful, you do one product at a time, and they distinguish between similar products such as prints and framed prints. Even worse, they distinguish between each different type of T-Shirt! That would be hugely time-consuming if I was intending to put my art on every possible product. But I have come to the realisation that I don't have to put all my art on everything. And that's hugely freeing. That image doesn't suit that thing? Fine, don't put it on that thing then. Whereas before, I would spend huge swathes of time tweaking my image-transformation scripts to enable such images to fit on that awkward product.
As it is, the only thing that I'm going to put ALL my art pieces on is prints. Everything else is optional.
I'm not even going to offer canvas prints. Why? Because I personally dislike how my art looks on canvas, because it looks all rough and pixelated due to the weave of the canvas. I don't actually understand why people like buying print-on-demand art on canvas, unless it's like "I want this to look like a Real Painting(TM) and Not A Print" or something like that? But I'd rather my art look its best. It's not that canvas is evil or ugly, it is that canvas is best suited for Actual Paintings because they dry more evenly when painted on canvas, that's all.
I also have no intention of offering framed prints, because it adds a lot of cost, and people can get their own frames if they want, probably a larger variety and more cheaply. Heck, all the frames for my art which is hanging up in my home, I got them from Officeworks, photo-frames that my art fit into quite easily. If someone wants a fancy frame, they can get that themselves too.
As for t-shirts, I'll just offer one type of t-shirt and be done with it, and only offer t-shirts for the pieces which actually suit t-shirts.
If people want things on other products that I am not offering, they can ask me, if they promise to buy it. None of this "people might want" nonsense. Yes they might. I'm not going to go to that extra effort unless someone makes it worth my while. If you want it, you can have it. If you think maybe someone else somewhere would perhaps like it, I'm not going to bother. I have been bitten far too many times by people who have said "I want that on a t-shirt", I'd gone and designed the t-shirt, came back and told them "Here is a t-shirt for you!" and not one single one of them have ever bought the t-shirt I made. Not one.
Another thing that is hugely freeing is that for the prints - okay they call them "posters" but the paper is not poster-paper, it is print-quality 189 gsm paper, compared to standard copy paper which is 80 gsm. (GSM stands for Grams per Square Metre, it is a measure of the weight and thus the thickness of the paper).
Anyway, they have two types, the "inches" and the "cm" and the difference is that, yes, they are measured in inches and centimetres, but more precisely, the ratios are for what I call "US-style" versus international A4-style paper. Square sizes are included in the "inches" version, so that's covered too. The reason why this is important -- and now that I think about it, it may have influenced how I set up my art since I used Printful before -- is that I don't have to worry about my pieces not fitting their sizes, I just have to pick the sizes that fit my pieces, and they ALL DO. Because all of my pieces are set up from the start to be one of (a) "US-style" ratios (which is a ratio of 1 to 1.5), (b) A4-style ratios (which is a ratio of 1 to sqrt(2), or (c) square. No exceptions. I mean, my fluid art is usually done on A4 or A5 size paper, so that ratio is already there. The US-style ratio is a matter of cropping the scanned-in image slightly differently; I decide which way I'm going to do it when I'm setting up the art to be worked on digitally. But it's either one or the other, or it's square. So I don't have to worry about my art fitting the print size.
Whereas with RedBubble and Threadless, they all seem to include weird size ratios which my art doesn't fit, and in the case of Threadless, you can't disable the sizes you don't want for some kinds of prints, and you can't adjust the image to fit a particular type of print, because ALL the prints use the SAME image, even when they have different aspect ratios! You just have to put up with them chopping bits off your art, or disable it altogether. Really annoying.
What Was That Measurement Again?
With RedBubble and Threadless, when they are telling you the ideal image size for any given product, they tell you in terms of resolution; that is, X pixels by Y pixels in size. For example, RedBubble says that a good size for a zip-up pouch is 4600 x 3000 pixels, while for Threadless, their pouches are 4200 x 2850 pixels. And they give you image template files to match (at least for some products).
Unfortunately, Printful are not half so helpful. Sure, they do give you template images, but the images don't actually match the size required. Instead, there's writing inside the image saying that "this image should be 14 inches x 9.5 inches", and if you're lucky, they will include some indication of the "safe print area" (aka the "bleed margins") in the file, but don't actually tell you what the measurement for the bleed margin is.
This is because Printful are obsessed with DPI (Dots Per Inch) (aka pixels per inch). They don't tell you the resolution, they tell you the inches and the dots-per-inch. And that a file will be too small if it doesn't have at least 150 dots per inch.
So I figured, okay, I can calculate the resolution needed by multiplying the inches by 300 (because they recommend 300 DPI for good quality printing). That should be fine, right? Not exactly.
Thing is, when you're dealing with a digital image, the dots-per-inch is a meaningless fiction. The DPI is a setting in the image file's meta-data; you can set it to anything you want, and the size of the image will not change. Because the only thing that determines the area of a digital image is how many pixels it has in each direction. You can have a DPI of 72 or 150 or 300 or 1200 and it won't make any difference. Show an image at 100% zoom and the "dots per inch" that you are seeing are determined by the computer monitor, not the image. So it didn't seem relevant to me to alter that setting.
However, when it comes time to print the image, that is when the dots-per-inch may or may not be relevant, depending on whether the printer even pays attention to that setting. It seems as if Threadless and RedBubble ignore it, but Printful does not.
But they don't even do it consistently. For prints, you can upload your large image, and Printful will recalculate the DPI in order to make the image fit the different sizes of print. But with other products, they read the DPI and use that to determine how the image will fit on the product. So, say, if I upload a mug image which is set to 1200 DPI (which is what my fluid art pieces are scanned in at) then it is going to appear as a tiny image in a sea of blankness. So I had to rewrite my scripts to set the DPI to the correct value as well as change the size.
(sigh)
Mugs can be awkward. Their aspect ratio generally does not match up with US-style, or A4-style, or square ratios, because they are short and wide, as the image wraps around the whole mug. They are also awkward because you really want two images, one on each side, such that one image is on the "front" as you hold the mug, and the other image is on the "back".
With both RedBubble and Threadless, you either have to construct the mug image so that everything fits, or you have to "tile" the image in their interface, and adjust the size so that it fits exactly twice.
With Printful, you have the option of having your image duplicated on both sides - problem solved, so trivially! Why couldn't the others do that? I dunno.
Mind you, for some art pieces, I'd still prefer to make a full wrap-around image, if the art is more abstract and looks pretty wrapped around like that. But it is very useful to have the option not to have to do that; one less image that I would need to pre-generate and upload, less work for me.
I'm not sure whether there are other Printful products which have this kind of option. Both Threadless and RedBubble have hardcover journals which have a similar kind of wrap-around design, which can look awesome, but if the original art was in Portrait orientation, one needs to construct a new image with the art duplicated for the back and the front. However, Printful doesn't have such a wrap-around hardcover journal; their hardcover journal only has an image on the front. Their spiral-bound notebook does have images on front and back, but they are uploaded separately, because a spiral-bound notebook doesn't have a wrap-around cover, it just has a front cover and a back cover.
(Note that's another plus for Printful; while both Threadless and RedBubble have spiral-bound notebooks, they only print on the front cover.)
What Things Do I Intend to Offer?
- Well, as I said above, definitely prints.
- Some t-shirts, but not that many. I mean, I don't see a lot of point in making t-shirts for the pieces which are mainly abstract, even if they are pretty. But there will definitely be some t-shirts, because I'll be wearing them myself!
- Some mugs, because I like mugs.
- I was considering mousepads, because my brother likes mousepads, but I think those are just manufactured in the USA, so they would be costly for people in Australia, postage-wise.
- I'd like to offer some kind of all-over-print bag (because I can never have too many project bags), but I'm not sure which ones are available where.
One of the reasons I'm looking at Printful (and why I rejected Threadless) is that they not only ship all over the world, but they ship from all over the world. Well, sort of.
Like RedBubble, they have printing centres in different regions, in North America, Europe, and Australia. Not every place produces every product. Not every place posts all over the world. But when a customer makes an order, they try to source it from a region which is close to the customer. That's not always possible.
Some things are easy, like t-shirts; you're going to be able to get a generic t-shirt from somewhere close to you, so the postage is going to be reasonable. Likewise with prints (but not framed prints).
With things like bags, though, many of them are only printed in the USA and Latvia(+) so they take longer to arrive and cost more to post if you're in Australia. What also confuses me is that there is one bag which is actually printed in Australia, but I'm not able to select it unless I limit my selling region to Australia (rather than my preference which would be "English-speaking countries" or "Worldwide").
But if I set my selling region to "Worldwide" then I could end up inadvertently offering items that people in Australia can't buy. Not sure what to do about that.
Ah well.
(+) Why Latvia? Because Printful is actually based in Latvia. Unexpected but cool. Nice to see another print-on-demand company which isn't based in the USA.
So what are your thoughts? Are there things I haven't thought of? Are there things you would want that I haven't mentioned? Are you confused? Did you get annoyed that this is such a long entry? (No, I don't really want to know that.)