Hi guys!
In my first review, I decided to cover Spreadshirt, a platform where artists and designers can sell their designs and the customers buy products, on which these designs are printed (T-Shirts, mugs and more). The designers earn royalties for each sold product with their design printed on it.
I will show you both views (designer and customer) and what advantages and disadvantages this platform for each of them brings.
DESIGNER PERSPECTIVE:
Pros:
If you don't want to deal with any additional work, then you can simply put your designs into their marketplace and the customers will then be able to select your design and put it on any item they want.
But, Spreadshirt also gives you the possibility to create your own online shop, and the designs, that you put in it, are not limited only to your designs: you can use any design from any other designer on Spreadshirt.
You probably ask yourself: "Why would I do that"? Because, if someone buys a product in your shop, and the design wasn't yours, you will still earn royalties (of course, they will be much smaller than those from your own designs, but still...).
Another great thing is that you can decide how much you want to earn for each sold print (be aware that if your royalties grow, the price of the product will also grow, and the chance, that you manage to sell your design, gets smaller and smaller).
Cons:
If you decide to use their online shop, then you have to advertise it in order to grow your community and to get more customers. And that requires a lot of time and effort.
On the other hand, if you decide to use only the Spreadshirt marketplace, your design will most probably have huge difficulties to get selected, since there are really, really a lot of designs on Spreadshirt.
I once made an experiment. I wanted to see, how long it would take someone to find my design in the Spreadshirt marketplace (if they searched for the exact same keywords that I used in my design description). The result was shocking! Even doe I knew what I was looking for, I still had difficulties to find it.
CUSTOMER PERSPECTIVE:
If you want to buy something on Spreadshirt, then one of the most important things to take into account here is the product quality. So let's take a closer look into their T-Shirts and the flex printing (according to Spreadshirt, this is their most durable print, so let's see how good it really is).
This is the T-Shirt, that I ordered (it is one of my older vector designs).
To start with the T-Shirt itself, I have to admit that the quality is pretty good and the T-Shirts are thicker than on many other similar platforms.
The other very important thing is the quality and durability of the print.
Flex printing itself provides great colors, which are very strong and vibrant (almost fluorescent)!
But there is a part where my opinion splits into two.
On the one hand, after wearing it a few times and washing it (with the print on the inside), the result looked like this:
As you can see, there are a lot of wrinkles on the wing of this dragon, and unfortunately, the entire print looks similar to that.
On the other hand, there are no areas with missing color or with the change of color intensity. The colors are still very vibrant and the T-Shirt still looks great (unless you take a closer look).
Conclusion:
At this moment, I don't use my new designs on this platform, but I still think that Spreadshirt offers some good quality products, and I don't see any reason why you should not use it.
I hope that this short review was somehow helpful to you and see you next time!