Be smarter with your merchandise: Here’s how print-on-demand can help entrepreneurs leave more brand footprints

Be smarter with your merchandise: Here’s how print-on-demand can help entrepreneurs leave more brand footprints

By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.

 

Raitis Purins, Marketing Director of Printful, was in the recent episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur where he talked about how merchandise can extend the value of a brand and create brand ambassadors. He also discussed how their company helps entrepreneurs get noticed.

 

Image from LinkedIn

 

Putting Your Ideas on Print

If you have an idea and want to put it on a shirt, hat, mug, or whatever you can imagine, Printful has eased the barrier for you to start doing that. And the order quantity is all up to you — it can just be 100 mugs, 50, or even just one.

In the past, promotional items had to have a minimum order, making the cost expensive. It was a problem that they encountered when they were starting out as Startup Vitamins.

Through that business, anyone can order motivational quotes and put them on their wall. Having posters as a product was easy — they can be cut to any size and printed with any colour. It was easier to make them on demand.

Then, they thought of also offering that in the form of shirts, hoodies, and mugs. When they started studying and looking around to see if anyone could do that — in high quality and in a quick manner — they found that no one was around to offer that service.

It was nearly 10 years ago when they came up with the idea of offering anything on demand. They purchased the equipment and started figuring out how to make their idea a reality.

Printful was made by developers who didn’t want to leave their computers just to print something on a shirt. They wanted to do things as lean as possible so that no one had to move, which lowered the price of their products at the same time.

 

Image from Printful

 

Printful’s Worldwide Footprint

Founded by Latvians, the company started its first facility in the USA, knowing that their biggest market is there. Now, they have facilities in three locations: California; Dallas, Texas; and Charlotte, North Carolina.

But to provide a good service, they acknowledge that shipping and logistics are important (This is why everyone buys on Amazon: They can do their job and deliver quickly). They realised they needed a new facility, so they opened a new one in Europe. Now, they also have facilities in Riga, Latvia (where the team came from), Spain, and the UK.

They further expanded in Mexico and Canada. They also have partners in Japan, Brazil, and Australia.

Currently, they have a presence in more than 10 locations all over the world. This means you can design a product and have it made anywhere around the globe where you are closest.

 

Making Merchandise with Printful

Printful has a design-making platform where you can upload your brand logo and assets, pick a product, choose the right colours, and play with different features (like fonts). With just a few clicks, you can also order your merchandise.

They offer more than 400 unique products, including different colour versions. For example, they have shirts available in 30 colours and sizes. Their shirt is their most popular product to date (When it comes to thinking about merchandise, it’s the shirt that comes to mind immediately).

They also have hats, hoodies, sweatshirts, leggings, bikinis, shorts, and swimwear. They also got non-apparel products like bottles, phone cases, posters, and backpacks. Your design can be printed or embroidered.

Basically, they have everything you can imagine — even beanbags. You can deploy your brand assets across different products.

 

Screengrab from Printful

 

Having a minimum order is often a stumbling block for people who want to start merchandise.

If you use Printful, the minimum order volume is zero. You can come to their website, register, play around with different designs and products, and no one will ask you to pay for them.

When you want to purchase something, their pricing is made for one item with at least one design. For instance, their cheapest shirt costs less than £10. You can order just one shirt that costs that. If you want to order 25 pieces, you can also do that and avail of their bulk discounts.

If you want to offer merchandise to your customers, you can publish different products with varying colours on your website and let those stay there. If someone buys your merchandise, it’s only then that Printful will proceed with the order and print your design on the selected item.

Then, they will send it to your end customer without mentioning Printful. Once your customer receives what they ordered, they’ll only know that it came from your e-commerce store, not from Printful.

Because you will be holding no inventory or stock, it also has a positive impact on sustainability.

This was one of the factors that the folks at Printful considered important when they were starting out. In their facilities, you’ll find that there’s almost no waste. Everything they’re printing are bought. This is in contrast to the usual setting wherein a company would print 25 shirts, for example, and end up not being able to sell all of them.

 

Image from Printful

How a Brand Can Use Merchandise

There are different ways you can use merchandise from a marketing perspective. You can always use mugs and shirts as your giveaway on social media. But, basically, merchandise is a way for you to put your brand outside your website and let your customers can feel or touch your brand.

You can also give it to superfans who will be happy to wear your product and walk around the city in it. In some way, they can be your moving billboard.

Musicians, though not “entrepreneurs,” can also benefit from merchandise. Though they typically make money through playing concerts, making their own merch also comes to their mind. However, they’re unsure how many people would actually buy their products. They can take advantage of print-on-demand (POD) to address that.

Merchandise is essentially a way of prolonging a brand. People who want to support you will be happy to wear your merchandise.

 

Integration with E-Commerce Platforms

Printful is not a shirt-printing company. Printing on a product and sending it to customers is the easiest part. Raitis considers their business an Information Technology (IT) company because they have created integrations with different platforms such as Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Magento, and other e-commerce websites.

They’ve created their website so that it will be easy for you to set up your Shopify store, for example, with Printful.

 

Screengrab from Printful

 

In a couple of minutes and some clicks of buttons, you can connect the two apps, upload your design, pick the right products, and have your merchandise “pushed” into your Shopify store. The products will appear in your store, and no one will see that it’s from Printful.

When someone buys and pays for your product on Shopify, Printful will immediately receive that information and only then will they charge you for that order and start with the fulfilment. From a cash flow point of view, their platform allows you to sell your merch to an end customer before you even buy the product from your supplier (in this case, Printful).

 

Efficient, Quick Fulfilment

Their goal at Printful is to allow customers to receive your merchandise from the facility nearest them, whether they’re buying from the US or Australia. They offer the quickest fulfillment possible.

They do acknowledge that some product preferences are based on location and season. For instance, hoodies are more popular during snowy months or in places where it gets colder faster. In Spain, shirts with pockets are the trend because they need a place for their cigarettes.

The customisation or localisation can be done on how you design your product.

 

Image from Unsplash

 

For merch companies in the US, one of their peak seasons is the election. Every day before the election, someone would say something — and they can easily put that statement in a product and sell it. In the country, people use merch to show who they support politically.  

However, in Europe, it’s something that will never be trendy. What you can see, on the other hand, are merchandise items that are mostly about social causes. For instance, with the Ukraine-Russia war happening, some stores created Ukraine-related items and some portion of the revenue are being donated to Ukraine.

 

On Timeframe, Idea Testing, and Mockups

The timeframe for creating merchandise with Printful depends on how long your design process takes. It will take you longer if you’re not much of a designer. But the magical part about POD is that you can easily test your ideas.

Then, if one of your ideas becomes a hit, Printful will be able to fulfill orders as quickly as possible — whether it’s just an order of one item for one customer or 1,000.

They guarantee to fulfill any item within two to five business days. In most cases, it will take them two to three business days, depending on the location.

It’s challenging to compete with Amazon in terms of the quickness of fulfillment. However, note that what you’re selling or using to contend with is the uniqueness of your design. Your item will never be available on Amazon or anywhere else.

With Printful, you also don’t have to do any product shoots. They have a mockup generator to let you show how your merchandise looks in real life. You can then load the items you’ve designed onto your website and, in a couple of minutes, start selling them. You can also share the link to your site with your network so that anyone can immediately buy your offerings.

 

Screengrab from Printful

 

Most of Printful’s customers are small customers (those who get around 10 orders a month). But the company also works with more prominent brands like Coca-Cola and SpongeBob SquarePants.

A wide range of customers can use Printful, thanks to their customisation. You can create your unique design or even personalise a product. For instance, they can print one item with the customer’s name.

Their products are made on demand. You don’t have to order 50 shirts prior and alter them afterwards. In other words, they offer products that no one else offers — and they offer all these under one roof. They can provide you with shirts and mugs. If you do it on your own, you’d need two different printers or look for two different suppliers.

In the past year or so, they had more than 300,000 customers who made at least one order and generated a little less than $300 million in revenue. This proves just how many people are using their platform.

Raitis always reminds his team that their goal is to build solutions impacting tens of thousands of customers. Because when these small customers grow, it will also have an impact on the company.

In this regard, Printful is very much in the framework of serving entrepreneurs because of the scale advantage.

 

Getting Printful Noticed

For Raitis, the most important part of getting your business noticed is to do a great job. If you do so, everyone will refer to you. Your satisfied customers will work as a word-of-mouth machine to help you grow your business.

 

Image from Printful

 

Sharing their first stages as a brand, he noted that there were two key things that Printful did. The first one is working with a partner.

For anyone to be an e-commerce seller, they need something to sell. And they at Printful offer that. They had Shopify (the leading name in its field) as their very first integration. They had an app on Shopify, and people started noticing them and checking out what they’re offering.

The other thing is investing in search engine optimisation (SEO) so people can easily find them on Google. They’ve been doing that since day one, and now, it works like a machine.

For businesses, it’s helpful to provide an answer to questions people are asking on Google. You want to give them an incentive to naturally come to you and see what you are and aren’t offering.

 

To learn more about Raitis, you can check out his LinkedIn page. To find out more about Printful and how they made merchandise more accessible, visit www.printful.com.

This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here. 

Cover image by atlascompany on Freepik