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Printful allows creators to market and sell their own products easily

  • Writer: Erin Eng
    Erin Eng
  • Sep 27, 2020
  • 2 min read

Updated: Sep 28, 2020


I was browsing through my instagram and was enamored with a brand of athleisure wear that had a California bohemian vibe, and I was obsessed with wanting a pair. But not obsessed with paying the $100 price tag for a pair of leggings and $60 for a sports bra. Since I'm a designer I have a penchant for wanting to make my own things when I can't find what I want easily.


I used to have an Etsy store 10 years ago. After doing some research (watching a few youtube videos) I discovered that I could print my own apparel with the Printful integration which also works with Shopifiy, Amazon Seller and a whole bunch of other ecommerce sites.


I got super into uploading designs I had created for something completely different, some mid century inspired water color paintings I had made earlier in the summer. I liked the color palette and thought they would make for a great yoga wear line, so I had to experiment with this. The process in printful is pretty easy, and I was able to create many designs and see how they looked on actual models and create a whole bunch of product templates within one day.

When you upload your design the interface is pretty easy, you just have to drag and drop the image to the template provided. You an move around the design a bit, but I had to move things around in my illustrator file to get it to look how I wanted to on the final bra top. You can see in the Printful interface there is a "front", "back" and "inside label" file that you have to design. It's helpful to know a little about graphics software but if you don't I think there are some easy apps you might use for cropping.

I uploaded my the raster image of this green peacock inspired print, and then put it into Illustrator to create a scalable vector image. This is useful because it can shrink or grow and you won't lose any resolution. It's pretty tricky to upload something and make sure it's going to be printed out well and there's so many steps in between that you want to minimize risking the money you spend on prototypes and any customer complaints.

Here's my logo and label that is printed into the back inside of the pant. At first I had done a very colorful one, but i think the basic will look good and not stand out too much with whatever you happen to design.


 
 
 

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