What is Print on Demand?
When you ask the question “What is Print on Demand?” you actually have to start in a different industry. The Print on Demand business model (otherwise known as POD) is a fairly easy model to understand. Initially started in the publishing industry, it allowed for prints of single or small quantities of books to be printed only when the order was placed. This opened up the industry to publishers who until then found it uneconomic to print such small numbers using traditional printing methods.This model started to be adopted by other printing industries, namely the clothing industry. Over the past few years various POD clothing companies have sprung up, leading to many people, including ourselves, to start our own clothing sites. The basic business model is split into two sections: Design and Fulfilment.
POD Design:
This is our part. We’ve set up this site and have either curated designs from online designers or commercially licensed suppliers, or we’ve come up with the designs in-house. We then select the products we’d like to place these designs on, and upload them to our store.
Then with a bit of social media and marketing, we sell these designs to our customers. All of this is theoretical. None of these products actually exist until you order them. This saves us having to bulk order and then store multiple product lines. We can focus on design while everything else falls under ‘fulfilment’.
POD Fulfilment:
The fulfilment is handled by one of our Print on Demand partners. Depending on which product or depending on your location, our POD partners will pick, print, pack and ship the products to you.
Most of the time, your orders will be processed through one of the POD regional facilities. This will in affect lower the shipping costs to you as the customer.
Sadly we can’t promise that this will be the case with all products. But we have tried to be diligent with out choices so that wherever possible the products have as little shipping costs attached to them as possible.
We have also tried to select the highest quality of base products to ensure that whatever it is that you buy from us will last a long time. A funky T-shirt design is great, but if the T-shirt it’s printed on falls a part in a matter of months, or the graphics wear off really easily, it’s all been a waste of time and money, for all of us!
