In the years since Covid lockdowns, the print on demand industry has exploded. Print on Demand, or POD, has been marketed as an easy, low-cost way for just about anybody to sell products online. You set up an account with your chosen POD company in a few minutes. It's often free and doesn't require you to even have a business license. You select the products you want to sell from their catalog offerings, like a graphic tee shirt or a cell phone case, upload a design you've created or bought, and their software creates a bunch of mockup photos of the product showing your design placed on it, like magic. It's called a mockup, because there's never an actual product in that digital process--until someone orders it, it doesn't exist. Next you can link your POD products to your existing website or Etsy store or other online marketplace. When a customer places an order for your product, the POD company gets notified of the order automatically. They take the product details from the order, such as size and color, and actually place your design on it to manufacture the product. They then send it to your customer for you. Brilliant! They charge you a fee for all this work, of course, but the benefits are supposed to outweigh the costs. They tell you that you don't have to interface with customers or warehouse any of the product. They take care of all your worries for a small fee. I often hear it called "passive income." Maybe it works for a lot of people. My experience was a bit different from the hype.
It was easy to set up my account. I opted for the free account with a higher selling fee, over the monthly subscription with a lower selling fee. Very standard startup stuff. I selected a few of my simple designs to run a test with tee shirts and sweatshirts. I integrated my account with my website and Etsy Store. Then I went through a mock customer experience: I purchased one of my items from my website, while my daughter did the same thing from a different state so we could compare results. About a week later, I got my order and she got hers a day later. Wow, what absolute crap! The quality of the sweatshirt was miserable. It was misshapen and scratchy and I don't know how to describe the color other than to say "dull white." But the biggest disappointment was the design. My vibrant, beautiful design was faded, but worst of all, it was CUT OFF! The whole bottom of the design where the lettering was was sliced off. My daughter's was exactly the same. I went back to my listings and reviewed my design image. It met all their criteria and was definitely not cut off. Messages to customer support to try to resolve the issues went unanswered. If that had been my real customer receiving that product, my reputation would have been shot before I even got going, not to mention that I'd have to refund the customer with no hope of a refund from the POD company because I couldn't even get in touch with them. Not only did I feel helpless with no control over the quality and creation of my product or the delivery to my customer, but I realized that I was missing an opportunity to personalize and further market to my customers via the packaging and mailing process. And truth be told, I actually love fulfilling my orders! It gives me great joy to see my ideas come to life and then to be loved by other people. And I want to be able to resolve any issues that may arise in a way that works for everyone involved. As long as I have the time and energy and resources to do the work, why would I outsource that?
In a way, I'm grateful for my POD experience. It let me know not to go down that road with the majority of my products. I still have a couple of products that I can't yet produce in-house; I'm working on changing that fact. But for the majority of my products, I decided instead to get my beautiful twin involved in my dream so we could create a business with products we loved that we could be proud of and that other people could love and wouldn't be disappointed to receive. We purchased our own quality machines, tools, supplies, software, and inventory. Then we put in the hard work of learning the many ways to make our own products. No get rich quick here! Hard work pays better dividends. This business isn't about the churn and burn, the profits over products, the hustling hard culture. It's about quality over quantity, champion over cheap, control not complacency. And it's about you.
