If you've been frustrated that you couldn't order personalized photo gifts on dark garments, you can fire your therapist: the day has come. Both Zazzle and CafePress are now offering new print on demand technologies that finally make printing on black garments possible. The hurdles that had to be overcome were finding a way to make the images last on that color of garment, and preparing the image to be printed on a black surface. Both companies have the service available now.
Click on the headline of this article for the Zazzle and CafePress press release.
CafePress.com Expands Services by Offering Black Garments to Entire Community of Shopkeepers
Number One Requested Item Released to Design Community
CafePress.com, the leading online marketplace offering sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, announced today the expansion of its highly coveted black garment printing program. Beginning in 2001 CafePress.com released its "CafePress.com Colors" program to a limited number of accounts. The program offered colored garments, but required setup fees, and was not scalable to the millions of designs offered by Shopkeepers. These restrictions limited this program to only a few high volume customers. With today's announcement the company's entire community of independent Shopkeepers will be able to sell black garments without upfront costs, utilizing innovative new print on-demand technology.
"With a community of over 1.4 million shops, not a day goes by where we aren't asked for black garments. There has always been a degree of dissention in the community about our ability to offer these items to some, but not all," explains CafePress.com co-founder and CEO Fred Durham. "Unfortunately the program could not support higher volume without a new printing technology. Our number one request became our number one priority, and I am proud that today we make it a reality."
Starting today, CafePress.com Shopkeepers will be offered the tools and online training needed to begin designing black garments. Newly created items will be made available for sale over the next few weeks, beginning with a black t-shirt. Additional colored garments will roll out in the coming months.
"We faced three major obstacles with our new printing process for black garments. First, the new printing process had to be perfected in order to maintain the vibrancy and longevity of an image on black fabric. Second, we needed to develop a way for our users to prepare images for this new type of printing," adds Mahesh Jain Co-founder and VP of Business Development. "Lastly, we needed a process that could handle the volume our community demands. Now that we have jumped these hurdles we are going to step back and watch as our community amazes us with their continued drive to design new items. This is a true example of the spirit behind the CafePress.com community."
For more information on CafePress.com and Black T-shirts please visit www.cafepress.com.
Zazzle the First to Offer Customized Printing on Dark Colored Apparel
Zazzle, (www.zazzle.com), a leader in the customized products marketplace, announced that today, for the first time in the history of online apparel customization, Zazzle is offering its customers the ability to create their own designs and digital images on dark apparel through digital printing.
Digital printing was previously only available for light apparel because of several obstacles, such as the inability of the inks to maintain color vibrancy on dark fabric, and that users couldn't designate what part of the image should be printed and what should remain transparent or omitted if they wanted to print on both dark and light apparel. However, Zazzle has overcome these obstacles with cutting-edge hardware, innovative manufacturing processes, and software solutions.
Digital printing is considered the leading technology for online apparel customization because it allows millions of colors and makes it affordable to order even a single item, as opposed to other processes such as screen printing, which can only offer a limited set of colors and require the customer to order in bulk quantities because of high setup costs.
"Customizing dark apparel has always been the number one customer request in this market. We're thrilled to be the first to offer this service, as it's our primary objective to serve our customers with the highest quality products through the development of innovative technology," said Michael Agnich, Director of Manufacturing Technology. "Consumers all over the world can now create their own one-of-a-kind dark apparel products."
Robert Beaver, CEO of Zazzle adds, "This is not only exciting for our customers. But we also think this is just another exciting development in Zazzle's ongoing commitment to empower our contributors with the most innovative tools and options to create, wear, display, sell and celebrate their interests with our community."
