Inkfruit: Designer vs. Customizable T-shirts?
Inkfruit is a newly launched portal where people upload their t-shirt designs and unlike other portals that allow users to customize the t-shirts, Inkfruit is taking a different approach – high quality designs.
“We believe that they [i.e. competition] offer a service where anyone can go across and buy a custom tshirt with his own name, photo, visual, graphic etc. On the other hand, Inkfruit stresses on a limited collection of great tshirts. The quality of the tshirt is much better. Our products are of a print quality that can compete with the likes of Lee and Pepe. This can be ensured because we follow screen printing as a process in manufacturing and not computer printed transfers which are fused on to the t-shirt.”
I liked the quality of few tees @ Inkfruit, but the question is on sustainability. Players like Pringoo are putting up the right incentives for designers to sell their designs at their site. Having said that, the market is in a nascent state and there is place for atleast 4-5 players and the right business model is yet to be seen?
Inkfruit is running an ongoing weekly contest (prize money Rs 20000), and the winning designs are then screen printed (not transfer printed) on t-shirts.
What do you think of inkfruit’s approach?
I do have open ended qns for the team – will the designer get royalty for his/her design? Is there a revenue sharing agreement?
Anything you would like to ask/suggest them?
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
Cool ..Love the idea , something like a mashup of http://www.zazzle.com/ and http://www.threadless.com .
i always wanted to order something from Threadless but the Shipping cost was prohibitively high .now we got an alternate . if their Print Tech is as good as Zazzle [which I know is too good ] than their main challenge is to get enough creative ppl infused in this . they should go to colleges like NID and NiFT and Other Creative school and talk about the venture . I am sure it will catch up
or a better way is to partner with Threadless to distribute their design here in india . I will be first one to order if that happens .
How is this different from Myntra.com ?
They too allow you to upload designs, have contests and print the t-shirts (and have some fancy machine for it .. may be screen printing)
I tried to request a invite and got a error in line 692 in main.php
(I’m from itasveer.com, and we’re a photo and custom merchandise printing service)
. And we look up to businesses like them as role models, with all their cool talk about how they have invented proprietary technology to print breathtaking dark tshirts blah blah. It was heartbreaking! Cafepress seemed (just) slightly better off but nowhere close to the quality we would have the courage to “sell”. Myntra’s prints on dark tshirts are very bad too. Spreadshirt as I mentioned above was pretty good. So Prashant, when you say Zazzle is too good, do you speak from experience or do you take their marketing talk too seriously like we used to :p
Prashant, since you mentioned Zazzle was so great I felt I need to add our own experience here. First let me put a point about on demand garment printing technology forward so that we’re on the same page..
On demand printing is actually pretty good for white garments, and other lighter colors but printing on dark garments is way off the mark right now – unless its a rubber transfer, which has somewhat limited appeal. Prateek, screen printing cannot be done in single quantities, thats not what Myntra does. So by on demand I mean what companies like Zazzle, Cafepress, iTasveer, Myntra do. Threadless, InkFruit do screen printing. There are other kinds of on demand printing too, have a look at Spreadshirt, which IMHO beats Zazzle, Cafepress hands down in terms of quality (although it could be said its like comparing apples and oranges, as the technologies are vastly different)
Before I digress a lot, coming back to what we found out in our testing of all these printing services. We primariy were testing for printing on dark garments as thats what the tricky part is. Printing on white is fairly easy, and we do it damn well ourselves
We got a black tshirt from zazzle just a couple of months back to see if their claims of awesome printing on dark garments were true. I hope I could put it mildly but the tshirt absolutely sucked
I think I beat the word count on Ashish’s post in my comment, apologies
Awesome Animesh – Thanks for sharing your insights!
You reinforced my earlier belief that pluggd.in’s readers are more intelligent and insightful than the author!
Well recently a desi turned Firang NRI friend of mine stayed with me for a day ,in his luggage I saw a Grey Tee Shirt which was having excellent Punk rock style of Drwaing , It was very impressive , He mentioned that his Ex Girl Friend [a European chick ]designed it for him at Zazzle.
May be it was color of love which was doing the trick .
Hmm.. a drawing (vector like) can be printed awesomely on spreadshirt’s technology, or screen printing – and spreadshirt is european too, are you sure it was zazzle :p, or maybe was it light grey, which means printing the same way as you would a white tshirt. Because I’m pretty certain what we got was no fluke!
it light grey indeed,
I am wondering Animesh how did you miss pringoo.com.
Is their dark color printing good? I have one of their dark color t-shirt, but would love to know your opinion as your comparison were interesting.
Kamol, we tried, the pringoo folks weren’t too informed about the technology they were using (well to be fair, their customer service rep wasn’t). We even tried to ask them simpler questions like whether the print had a feel to it or not (is it rubbery or on the garment). Their customer support rep wasn’t even willing to find things out and let us know. So that turned us off spending money on them. Do you like their dark colored tee, maybe I’ll order one then. Can you answer these questions of mine too
Animesh I am very satisfied with pringoo’s printing on my black colour t-shirt, which I have been using for past 2 months.
I do not know much about technologies behind all these t-shirt printing, I just care it should look cooool. When you named all similar companies then I wondered how pringoo gave me a quite satisfactory printing on black. That’s the reason I raised my question in earlier post thinking you can share their inside story.
I have tried dilsebol.com too , but from them I bought white coloured t-shirt not a dark one.
guys lets respect the effort put in by all these ventures. afterall, they seem to cater a genuine need/demand. as a customer i have this desire to send funny one liner to my girlfriend on tee. however, as a tshirt lover i would compromise on nothing less than awesome graphics. one technique might have limitation over the other, but that certainly does not mean we should stop catering to such demands. i hail the entrepreneurial spirit of all these ventures
Hi all, I am from Inkfruit! Better late than never
, it is great to see this post and the discussion is definitely very interesting.
@Prateek Myntra basically focuses on customizability where you get customized mugs, tshirts and lot of other stuff. Inkfruit is all about great tshirts.
@Rajiv Well Inkfruit has changed a lot, I don’t think you will have similar problems again.
Hi I am sivam , I run http://www.JuJups.com. This discussion is interesting. Printing technology seems to be in a growth stage. Have you had a look at http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome
they print on cotton. This is exciting as it will help things move beyond t-shirts
It seems good discussion is going on tshirt printing