Cafe Press

[t5Nitro]

Has anyone ordered shirts from Cafe Press? Thinking about making a shirt design and wondering where/who to go to for printing?

Quality?

[pitrow]

yes, they are pretty poor quality.

The prints themselves look ok at first, but after two or three washings they fade pretty fast. And their quality control sucks. I ordered a batch of 5 or so shirts with a small logo on the front and a large logo on the back. On each shirt the logo was placed slightly different. On the back it was pretty much centered, but up and down were all over the place and the small logos on the front were supposed to be "pocket" logos, meaning they are on the left side of the chest. I had a couple that were almost in the middle, one that was almost in the armpit and one that looked ok.

I've also had problems with them not shipping the correct things. Sometimes you'll find extras in your order (like once I ordered a mug and got two), other times you'll come up short. They are good about it though, if you contact them and tell them you're short they'll send replacements asap, no charge no questions.

In all I'd say they aren't bad for what you pay for, but if you're looking for quality you're better off finding a local screen printer and having them do it.

[krb]

My wife maintains a site on there and has had some occasional issues, especially with color management (all on their end). Things like images that are supposed to have a transparent background being printed with a black or white background. And sometimes the color of the printing is just unreliable. She ordered two shirts, same color shirt, same image, etc. and they looked very different. One looked "flat" and almost desaturated while the other was brightly colored and seemed to pop off the front of the shirt.

Like pitrow said, they are good about making things right. But if a customer had simply ordered one shirt and got the one where the image looked flat they wouldn't know any better because they would have nothing to compare it to. They would also have no way of knowing whether it was Cafe Press' fault or yours. They would simply have been disappointed with it. Maybe they would return it and you'd end up not getting any payment, but whether the returned it or not they probably wouldn't order anything else from you.