I’ve been wanting to sell some puppet/theatre merchandise for a while, including offering cast and crew t-shirts. These days you can easily set up your own t-shirt business, with the helps of POD (print on demand) companies that do small numbers of runs and all the work. The problem is most of these companies are in the US, and generally find it difficult to print on dark materials. When you’re wanting only black tees, that becomes an important factor in choosing the right POD service.

Anyway, a puppeteer in the US has been selling his own designs using Zazzle.com, and I bought one of them. I wasn’t very happy with the quality of printing or t-shirt, or the fact it took three weeks to get here. Cafepress.com is a similar service, but they don’t allow printing on the back of tees - a deal-breaker for me. So I tried Spreadshirt.com.

Here’s the design I uploaded. (Click on all images for bigger views). For some reason I liked the idea of this as a tee image.

Here’s what the tee looked like in the Spreadshirt.com design process (yes, I wanted the image upside down… don’t ask me why):

UPDATE 28 Aug 2009: It seems I’ve deleted the image from both my computer and my site. Sorry 

The tee cost about $30 - $20 for the tee, and $10 for shipping. Not too bad considering a new shirt costs about that anyway, plus the shipping from the US, and it being a custom-made item.

I waited about one week (9 days, including the weekend) to receive the shirt. Which is pretty good considering Zazzle took three weeks.

I can honestly say I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. I ordered size Medium (ladies), which is what I normally fit into, and it is a good fit. It’s probably a tiny bit too small, but not so small that I wouldn’t wear it (I’m wearing it now!) or I would return it for.

Add to that the quality of the actual shirt is good. It’s like wearing a Bonds t-shirt; whereas Zazzle’s was so thin I have a feeling it will fall apart after 10 washes. … Then you have the quality of the printing.

Here’s what the t-shirt looks like, and next to it a close-up of the printing (sorry for the blurry left image; the right image looks better).

UPDATE: See above. No images, sorry.

If you compare it to the original image, you can see that the t-shirt printing is actually quite a lot different in colour. The eyes are turqouise when they should be green, and the brown of the hair is quite faded. (The photos of the t-shirt and the original image of the puppet was taken with the same camera under similar lighting conditions, so I know for sure it’s the printing that’s wrong) I’m not entirely disappointed - it’s possible I need to reformat the image file to be better suited for the printing, and it’s also possible that I should have used a different printing technique (they offer two). Plus, it’s only that I know what the actual photo looks like and can make a comparison; other people would not look at the tee and say it was badly printed.

All things considering I’m pretty pleased. I’m going to try a couple of other designs, and further test the Spreadshirt service. If things go well, I’ll be offering some tee-shirts for sale right here on the blog.

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