T-Shirt Printing API | Hacker News Reader

T-Shirt Printing API

shirts.io

325 pointsmooreds127 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.

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).

On fulfillment: Order to fulfillment has manufacturing essentially baked into it. The process goes from manufacturing > shipping. The manufacturing part is where most of the hard work is and will remain.

The pain point of some company making tshirts for anything less than 1000 people is negligible from a revenue standpoint. And if your the api or conduit they do it through you will literally make pennies. Unless you setting the prices and baking your profits into them. We used to make a ton of money making tshirts, but that is because they were all custom design, cut and sown to our specs. As such, this was useless for us. Even usher wore won :)

http://bit.ly/1992yiQ

Promotional merchandise is a minute part of this printing business. This solution makes that market more efficient in ordering only, not actual fulfillment.

And I have no idea what you mean by this: "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)."

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.

Yea see then it makes sense to me, sort of. If you have your own manufacturing ability then for sure go for it.

However, I will still say that most of the money to be made is in actually selling your own designs.

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?

That's a fantastic idea. I would be down for that.

while it is a pretty neat idea, it makes me think of http://iam.peteashton.com/keep-calm-rape-tshirt-amazon/

...so now we literally have machine algorithms advocating rape without human intervention. I'm glad there wasn't a complex AI algorithm behind this or oh, the backlash.

That's what makes it exciting. You don't know what you're going to get!

The offender wrote a wonderful apology/explanation. Straight and to the point. Little BS.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130429232420/http://www.solidgo...

It's not a terrible apology, I suppose, but I'm with Tim Maly on calling blaming the algorithm a bit of a dodge, in this brilliant critique/analysis of the whole situation:

http://quietbabylon.com/2013/algorithmic-rape-jokes-in-the-l...

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?

Woot does this to some extent with their Shirt Derby. http://shirt.woot.com/derby

Definitely not a unique idea (see also: http://www.threadless.com), but I wonder if it could be bigger if it were more community oriented (Get your weekly r/pics or r/WTF shirts!), somewhere between the Shirt Derby (weekly, but with themes curated by Woot) and Teespring (highly specific, one time designs for a community and cause).

Depending on the size of the community and distribution of votes, it need not necessarily even come down to a single tee choice. Perhaps the top N tees.

I hope you'd get permission for commercial use of each of the images you find via Google Image Search?

It's fine for personal use isn't it?

I think shirts.io has the responsibility here. They'd be reproducing an image unlawfully, for profit.

I doubt that, otherwise you could argue that Kinko's would be at fault when people pay to make photocopies of copyrighted content in their stores.

Kinkos was in fact successfully sued for just this thing. Example: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/basicbooks...

You're saying Kinkos was acting as a dumb copy service and was sued for copy right infringement. But your linked case explicitly says this is wrong. Rather, they lost because:

    Kinko's has periodically asserted that it acted at the instruction of the
    educational institution, that is, as the agent of the colleges and is without
    responsibility. Yet, Kinko's promotional materials belie this contention
    particularly because Kinko's takes responsibility for obtaining copyright
    permission while touting the expertise of its copyright permissions staff (a
    "service [which] is provided at no charge to all Kinko's customers.").
    "Copyright Information Letter to Faculty Members," in Kinko's Copyright and
    Professor Publishing Handbook, at 40.

...and because of this, they have refused to make copies of documents that I have written myself. Not sure if the policies have become more nuanced in recent years, but more than once I had to remove the (c) in the footer of my documents before they would make copies of it for me, no matter how much ID I showed them. I understand why the clerks would be trained that way; was just a very strange side-effect. Felt like living in a minor Kafka piece.

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).

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.

Hey Ramond, cool site!

tiny bug in FF/Win7 on Get Started: http://i.imgur.com/cwSd78R.png

also if i have an old t-shirt that I want to restore it, is that legal? they no longer make it and it is _precious_ to me since highschool (10 years old!)

I kinda like the faded ink (/hipster), but the shirt it self is falling apart!

We're still waiting to hear back from your tech support team. Last we checked the API didn't provide a response to colors on American Apparel shirts. Has this bug been fixed?

Just sent you an email. Thanks Raymond.

How about cycling jerseys? I have a three.js app I built for customizing 3D apparel models that I've been wanting to find a manufacturer for.

http://i.imgur.com/xg67kXS.png

I'd like to take up that offer if it's still valid. Sent you an email a couple of days ago. Haven't heard back yet.

i'd love to see it hooked up to this:

http://geometee.com

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?

Here's an undocumented API for 'The Nest' thermostat: http://www.wiredprairie.us/blog/index.php/archives/1442

A quick look at programmable web turns up this... https://xively.com/

Here's a documented API for the Radio Thermostat company's line of Wifi thermostats (such as the Filtrete 3M50)

http://radiothermostat.com/documents/RTCOA%20WiFI%20API%20V1...

The RT line isn't as pretty as the Nest, but it's way cheaper.

The Model S has a basic, REST-ish API: https://github.com/timdorr/model-s-api

Mmmmm white label pizza.

Carvoyant [1] makes a small device that plugs into your car's OBD2 port, and exposes the data through an API. It's somewhat similar to Automatic [2], but available now and has an API. I've got one in my car, but haven't had a chance to play around with the API yet.

[1] http://www.carvoyant.com [2] http://www.automatic.com

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

Disclaimer: I work at Ordr.in.

Interesting! Great idea, I think I'll hack on it a bit over the weekend.

Thanks! Would love to hear what you end up hacking on.

I'm taking a look at your API now. It seems like a lot of searches around my area (Boston MA) are turning up blank. Is there any information available on the availability of restaurants on the API in different areas?

An API for general printing (e.g. business cards, letterheads, brochures, posters, etc.) is desperately needed. I can't seem to find any commercial printer that offers an API.

For business cards, stickers, greeting cards, labels, etc Moo has an API http://us.moo.com/api/

I haven't used the API but I've bought business cards from Moo and they were great.

Thank you so much. The API does seem quite complex (it looks like you need to go through dozens of steps to print). I wish they could take Stripe's approach and simplify it somewhat. This seems like a great opportunity for someone to disrupt this market.

infraprint.com just started one about two weeks ago. I haven't had the opportunity to test it yet but it looks like it has all the features that you might need.

I'm planning to use them to print and mail custom letters through the USPS for a credit repair site I'm building.

This looks promising. Thank you!

For credit repair, you'll need to do certified mail for certain requests. This is something we're getting ready to launch :-) Feel free to reach out (info in profile), if we can help.

I've been working on something like this with the printer I use at http://cheergram.com.

There are a few hurdles like dealing with large files and handling them when out of spec, but its definitely a good idea.

Hi there, Founder of TryPaper.com here, we handle some of the core printing & mailing processes all via API :)

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?

Spreadshirt has an API. But they are more focussed on small orders instead of bulk.

As I understand shirts.io, they're also focused on small orders. Otherwise an API would be overkill, no?

But are the shirts any good? No mention of material or examples of how one might look.

They do offer various specific brands on the quote page. Looks like you can get American Apparel which is what Threadless and many other use.

Ahhh in the dropdown. Thanks

I see a lot of reference to Gildan shirts in their APIs. Might as well be dyed burlap.

In pricing (https://www.shirts.io/pricing/) under garment, they do have a wide variety of other quality alternatives to burlap.

Funny--I love Gildan t-shirts since they actually last for a good while and don't shrink.

There are a few different styles of Gildan shirts. The SoftStyle shirts are passable quality, the others I would stay away from.

I actually don't mind Gildan's quality, but "dyed burlap" gave me a nice chuckle.

"Are our shirts any good? No. Our shirts are fking great."

"Are our shirts any good? Not really. Why are you even on our site?"

Raymond from Shirts.io here.

You were saying? http://i.imgur.com/vSySViF.jpg

Raymond from Shirts.io here.

For anyone interested in seeing our print quality, we can give out $100 in free account credits for you to print some samples. Just send me an email: raymond at shirts dot io.

Here's a shirt we just printed: http://i.imgur.com/PHa4hBL.jpg Here's me wearing a shirts.io shirt: http://i.imgur.com/Jcsq2uf.jpg

Hey Raymond,

I have a fairly specific question. My interest in T-shirts has become refined in recent years. I only like T-shirts that are super soft. Have you guys tested a niche of super soft T's at all? I might be interested in using the API if I could brand a custom T-shirt site focused first of all on the softness of the T, and if you could guarantee the softness.

You'd be looking for a ringspun cotton or a triblend t-shirt from a high-end brand like American Apparel or Canvas. It all depends on how much you want to pay.

American Apparel and Canvas are on the high end of the market. They each offer both ringspun and triblend styles. You're looking at $3 to $4 per shirt over the cost of a basic cotton tee.

If you want a "value" soft tee, you should consider the Gildan Softstyle or Hanes Nano T. You can get these for only $1 to $2 over the cost of a basic tee, and you'll still feel a noticeable difference.

The AA tri-blends are my go-to shirt. A service like this would be well worth it if they offered either this or the Summer shirt over the normal 2001 / 2102.

Canvas triblend is another option, usually cheaper than the AA tri-blend and has a more "solid" feel, while still being soft.

Three things that frequently disappoint with T-shirts bought online:

* Thick neck ribbing. In theory this would reinforce the neck, but it looks awful, and is a sure sign of a badly designed T-shirt, in my book.

* "Wing" sleeves. T-shirt sleeves should follow the contour of your arm, not stand out at 45 degrees. It looks nerdy.

* Bad fits. Most T-shirts are just too loose. A "fitted" design that is less loose around the chest works better in my opinion.

Where do you think your shirts stand in terms of the above issues?

I pulled their products API and put it all into a page:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22293/shirt.rendered.htm...

They're missing AA 50/50 and Tri-blend, the only two types of tshirt I'll wear (maybe standard AA in a pinch). Once you've worn AA's blend shirts you'll never want to wear another type again, assuming athletic fit works well for you.

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.

Good catch, suspiciously similar.

There is only one Cloud Icon in the Entire Universe: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThereIsOnlyOneCloudIconInTheEn...

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 :)

+ Quadcopter delivery for the last mile.

You might dig http://amplifier.com/

Disclaimer: I have absolutely no affiliation to Amplifier ;)

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/

What exactly is the goal of this project?

I wanted to play with Fabric.js and may be sell gravatar tees.

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

1. We print hundreds of thousands of shirts every month, so our cost of goods is much lower.

2. The base price includes free shipping to a single address. If you want to split the shipment to multiple addresses, each additional address costs $3. So if you want to ship each shirt to a different address, just add $3 to the per-shirt price.

that makes sense, i did forget to add the pricing for different addresses... thanks for the reply

The call to action lands me on a sign up form. Apparently I can get only very limited information before I sign up.

If you scroll down a few more pixels, you'll see links to the API documentation (https://www.shirts.io/docs/overview) and their capabilities (https://www.shirts.io/capabilities/)

so is this like https://www.startupthreads.com/ where you can integrate with them to send t-shirts to clients or community members?

We (StartupThreads) also have an api in private beta that companies have used to ship swag. A little different than this but this looks cool.

Agreed. This looks like a lot of fun. My company (a traditional swag distributor) is working on an ecommerce site at SwagExpert.com. It's being built using real-time data on almost a million products (including apparel) that comes from an industry provider's API.

I like how this not only provides the product data but a mechanism for manufacturing and fulfillment as well. Very clever.

Good to see you here, Frank. We met a few months ago at SXSW and I rock the shirt you gave me regularly.

Nice! I have rocked the "Keep Calm and Swag on" shirt as well. Will catch up on email.

The Stripe and CardFlight of selling t-shirts.. I like it!

This looks like it's an API for ooshirts.com

It is! It's said that on their footer :)

Here come the teespring competitors.

You guys should talk to Teespring.

Stripe wants their web design back

... really not sure where to go with this particular comment.

shirts.io would appear to be using Bootstrap, which will give a common popular minimalist style to their site - of which Stripe is a good example (but I don't think they use Bootstrap).

However, I'm not really seeing anything on their site that immediately screams 'We cribbed our design from Stripe'.

Do you have something you can point to?

I thought of Stripe too.

1. Logo looks similar-ish 2. API functionality in a similar place 3. Similarly proportioned "reasons to love us"

Not a bad thing -- Stripe's design is good.

Apparently they've been accused of copycat designs before. http://www.t-shirttalk.com/2012/06/15/dont-clone-a-t-shirt-c...

I'm not sure it matters a whole lot though. Great artists steal and everything...

It's a basic Boostrap site with jQuery UI. There's nothing here that looks like it was taken from Stripe's website.

You should probably talk to PayPal first...

http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/08/did-paypal-just-clone-strip...

I instantly thought of Stripe when I saw this site as well.

Apple wants their angled blueprint graphic back from Stripe: http://web.archive.org/web/20031204202248/http://developer.a...

Do you ship internationally?

They do, but it's an extra 8.95

Thanks!

What is this?

good idea!

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