back
127 comments
I really like the concept but I don't understand why anyone in tech would want to be in the bulk tshirt manufacturing business. I used to be in the tshirt business: albeit we used to make high end stuff which was sold to premium retailers. As I see it, the inefficiencies in the business do not come from the ordering part. There are plenty of places where you can order tshirts. The really hard problem to solve is the manufacturing one.

Second, I don't get how you would actually make real money through this. Most of this business is low margin, labor intensive. In any low low margin business you make money through scale. However, pretty much all of the high quantity stuff is done overseas and then shipped to the US, because even then it is cheaper. We used to airship stuff all the time (a lot more expensive than boat) and it would still ending up costing us a lot less than doing it in the US

I don't know why people keep making solutions for tshirt manufacturing. It is effectively a price-conscious B2B model.

Why would we get into this business? Because of shirts like this: http://i.imgur.com/QNQqXnD.jpg

In all seriousness, we really dislike the inefficiencies of this industry ourselves. We used to contract out our print work, but we opened up 3 facilities (California, Pennsylvania, and Indiana) to improve on the quality and efficiency issues in the industry.

This is an industry where everyone uses the same equipment, same consumables, and same method of decoration, and still charge high prices because everyone else does. We differentiate ourselves by having the technology and processes (from the manufacturing side to the ordering side) and scale to move orders in and out more efficiently than anyone else.

I dont think manufacturing is the issue in the industry. The pain points that I hear companies dealing with from printing for a bunch is in actual fulfillment in various ways, as most of the printing sites are just simply e-commerce stores for merchandise and dont have a solution for the actual fulfillment of those items to the end customers. Also, for promotional merchandise, there aren't great marketing tools that are tightly coupled with this to make the swag effective in getting customers (i.e running contests / giveaways /etc). It is definitely low margin but finding ways to help companies higher up the food chain is what I think is important (TeeSpring, for example is doing a great job of this).
Maybe the trick isn't to make ordering more efficient but rather the printing process?

Or maybe even consolidating the printing process? When every other t-shirt printing website you see online contracts then subcontracts out to a network of small, medium, and large sized t-shirt printers I can see just being inefficient.

Shirts.io has their own production facilities across the United States. This is more akin plugging into their workflow, a magic black box where you input in requests and out comes t-shirts to your customers.

At scale, low margins is good margins.

Imagine if you could tie this api into a game, you level up your character and get a t-shirt with all the new equips/stats to show off to your friends...
Long ago, for many games, Activision would award an embroidered patch to any player who beat a certain score. Usually the player would photograph the screen and mail it to Activision.
Good idea. I was just thinking you could tie into people's workouts in a similar fashion.

My wife is big into crossfit and I was thinking of letting people order shirts with their personal score/time.

Bash Script + cronjob + Google Image Search + shirts.io = random new shirt every week?
Raymond from Shirts.io here.

Shirts of the week? Done: http://imgur.com/PWUsJ5s

For anyone looking to start a new t-shirt company using Shirts.io, we can give $100 in account credit for you to get started. Just email me: raymond at shirts dot io.

I was thinking of something similar years ago. Except replace google image search with wikimedia and so you'll have access to public domain images (and possibly higher resolution files).
Since you get a bulk discount, would you pay a service say, $3 - $6 a week for such a t-shirt?

Alternative idea: Reddit for t-shirts. Everyone can create and upvote shirts. At the end of each week, everyone gets the highest upvoted shirt for $3 - $6.

Thoughts?

I hope you'd get permission for commercial use of each of the images you find via Google Image Search?
i'd love to see it hooked up to this:

http://geometee.com

That's a fantastic idea. I would be down for that.
Interesting- we are starting to see more and more APIs that interface with real physical objects. Is this the new advent of APIs?

Am i going to be able to purchase a pizza delivery whilst printing a shirt and having my car unlock for the car wash guy all from my phone as I'm heading home.

What other real life APIs are there available atm?

You can already order a pizza via API :) http://hackfood.ordr.in

Disclaimer: I work at Ordr.in.

Cool thing, have an idea that I would like to try with this. However, the following part turns me off quite much: >"Shipments going internationally are subject to a charge of $8.50 per garment." Which means that if one order for $3.32 becomes $11.82? That's pretty much, even for international shipping...

Anything like this within Europe?

But are the shirts any good? No mention of material or examples of how one might look.
Very buttony and well designed. Good MVP. I notice you can order 10 shirts and send them to 10,000 locations, though.
Love this. Any plans for other print items too like business cards, letterheads, etc?

An API that serves not just T-shirt printing, but other printing as well will win a lot of business IMHO.

Shirts.io logo uses the same image as the Stripe 'cloud' but inverted on the y-axis

They also have suspiciously similar UI/UX with similar color schemes. The random green sign up button mouse over is an obvious attempt at 'throwing you off' from the idea that the design was copied.

There is an issue on your pricing page.

Your font-awesome icons are not loading correctly for me on Mint/FF21

http://i.imgur.com/NmO1yX4.png

However it works fine on Chromium.

Love the idea but I'm in the UK so that rules it out for me (shipping kills it).

Just an FYI regarding your documentation, of example GET requests (e.g., https://www.shirts.io/docs/quote_reference/)

You can describe GET requests as follows with cURL, which I find a bit smarter :-)

  curl -G https://www.shirts.io/api/v1/quote/ \
  -d "api_key=APIKEY" \
  -d "garment[0][product_id]=3" \
  -d "garment[0][color]=White" \
  -d "garment[0][sizes][med]=100" \
  -d "garment[0][sizes][lrg]=50"
In cases where you need to url-encode the parameter, you can switch out -d for --data-urlencode
I was about to yawn, until I saw the priceing. That's pretty good.
There's a company in my hometown of Albuquerque that does something similar called Inksoft http://www.inksoft.com/ except, I believe Inksoft strictly offers software to companies that sell clothing like shirts. I don't fully understand the garment industry, but from talking with the owners, they make a pretty penny.
Is everything completely automated or the API is just for placing the order?

Would be cool if the API server is connected to the printing machine controller, packaging machine controller, and some FedEx physical logistics system. When an order is placed, everything is automated, from printing to packaging to shipping. That would save a lot, and more importantly, it's gonna be so cool :)

I have a weekend project that is in "private beta" (still a few weekends from launch) that combines computer generated art and one-off T-shirts. I've been working with http://printaura.com/.

I like the idea of coding up adapters so we can switch fulfillment providers if we needed to.

Your API console isn't working for me (the Execute buttons do nothing) in Chrome. My JS console shows:

    Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token o   jquery.min.js:3
after each click. Also, the quote generator on /pricing only generates a price if Front Colors is >0 (it doesn't work for a back-only print).
I think you have a real possibility to make large amounts of money from water cooler jokes alone. This could make big money with office inner circles. Also, the random funny, odd, and cool imgur pic-of-the-week shirt could be very lucrative. Just think of all those college and high school kids wearing the Reddit best-of each week.

Good work!

Design note: that slider is awkward. There's no indication that it's moving until it hits a discrete point.
I wish this service was around 5 years ago when I was going through the hell of designing a Silverlight interface for tshirt logo / text placement. The customer was such an a I would have pull my app, launched it myself with this service as the fulfillment end. Nice work guys, best of luck with it.
Spreadshirt has had an API for a while now, spawning things like http://zufallsshirt.de/ (German, random shirt per visit, you either buy it or consign it to oblivion.)
I'm wondering if you could add a page describing all of the 'garment' options! I like what I see otherwise, but am not familiar with what each of them are, and there's no where on the website I can find that info.
When will international shipping be supported? Australia in particular.
Your pricing calculator doesn't work on mobile well. Was not able to select 1 tshirt on iPhone. Maybe add a manual text input for size as well? Looking forward to using this though.
May be its time for me to finish my weekend project. http://tshirts.imomin.com/
Using square brackets is silly because you won't be able to ever put API parameters in the URL.

By using semicolons (a la matrix parameters) or commas you could eliminate that.

Can one product be part of multiple categories? Will (product_id, category_id) tuple ever change? Can I cache the ids and use it after sometime?
this looks great, i just have one question. How are you able to make a profit by selling 100,000 1 color shirts, plus shipping and handling, and blank for 2.60?

shipping along wold be 2.60, not to mention the cost of the shirt which is at least 3.00... i would love to use you guys, just not sure you have thought out your pricing

The call to action lands me on a sign up form. Apparently I can get only very limited information before I sign up.
so is this like https://www.startupthreads.com/ where you can integrate with them to send t-shirts to clients or community members?
The Stripe and CardFlight of selling t-shirts.. I like it!
This looks like it's an API for ooshirts.com
Here come the teespring competitors.
You guys should talk to Teespring.
Stripe wants their web design back
Do you ship internationally?
What is this?
good idea!