What is the best Direct To Garment/Print on Demand company?

Posted on Posted onBy Bucky Banks
How to find the best POD/DTG printer.

There is no shortage of Print-On-Demand companies selling Direct-To-Garment products. Most of them are offering some type of fulfillment service and they all seem to offer something a little different, we hope to help you find the service that works best for you and your products.

The last few years have seen a marked increase in the quality of direct to garment printing making it an ideal time for artists to make the leap into opening an online store. Some of the vendors we will discuss offer a marketplace to sell your products while others offer APIs to “push” your products to those outside marketplaces and sometimes even to your website.

For our purposes today we are going to cover 3 different POD companies and go over our experiences with each. We hope to add more POD vendors to this list as test out different services for our own projects. In the end, we hope to help you make the right vendor choice for your POD/DTG venture.

  1. Printful
    What Printful lacks in product selection they make up for in print quality. By far the best looking Print On Demand t-shirts I have ever worked with. The colors are vibrant and the white is a true white unlike some of the other POD vendors. Their Dashboard makes it possible to push your products to any number online retailers like Etsy, eBay, Amazon, and it even integrates with Woo Commerce if you are running your own t-shirt website. The pricing is a bit lower than some of these other options as well and since margins are low in POD space every little bit is helpful.
  2. RedBubble – RedBubble has really good print and comparable to Printful, they have a lot of products and from what I have seen they come out nice but don’t tend to last as long. I had a water bottle that an artist friend made through Red Bubble and the design started to peel in less than a year under “normal use” circumstances. These products are probably fine for self-use but I would be wary of selling them in an e-commerce format since returns come out of your pocket.
  3. Zazzle
    Zazzle has been around the longest of all the POD companies I have used and while their service is quick and they do offer blind shipping their prints tend come out a little on the lighter side and their white always looks a little off on black t-shirts. If they upped the ink output on the printers I may have never jumped ship and went elsewhere. That said, the prices are also higher than some of the other POD options out there. They do have a good range of products, far more than some of the other vendors who have better print quality.

I recommend going with a traditional screen printing company if you plan on selling in large quantities. POD and DTG tend to work out better for printing smaller quantities and customized/one-off merchandise.