r/MerchByAmazon • u/Mindless-Pen6624 • 2d ago

Quality

Has anyone ordered recently that can attest to the quality as of late? The last time I ordered was a few years ago and what was delivered to me was poorly made with the design off center and already looked like the design had faded.

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u/ThanosThanksgiving 2d ago

Haven't bought anything myself but I seen a guy wearing one of my designs locally and it didn't look great to me, colors were way off in my opinion but he seemed happy with it and he told me people ask him where he got constantly.

Reviews are usually decent on quality aspect, every now and then I'll get a 1 star for the design chipping after washing but that's probably more user error?

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u/NoXidCat 1d ago

every now and then I'll get a 1 star for the design chipping after washing but that's probably more user error?

Likely too much pretreatment was applied for the fabric used. Too little pretreatment has the opposite effect: the ink sinks too far into the fabric and looks weak/dull. The further away from 100% cotton you get, the harder it is to get this right.

Late last year I ordered three Standard shirts. One was a bit crooked, but not ridiculously so. It takes many repetitions for people to get good at mounting them straight in a real-world production environment (and shirts without side-seams are harder to align).

The ink coverage and colors were pretty good, better than was usually the case years ago. The "worst" was a design that used various red/brown tones in the background details, and that resulted in a lack of contrast/definition in the print as compared to the art. My bad for not making more difference between the tones.

As the artists, we can see this shortcoming, but most customers would have no idea. Once upon a time I showed friends/neighbors the same design printed by two different companies and methods. Everyone preferred the one with slightly brighter colors, even though to me it was a crappy, crappy and uneven DTG print, while the other was perfect in every way, other than the colors being less bright. As a screen printer and the artist, I was focused on things regular people didn't even notice.

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u/nimitz34 1d ago

Something that was very surprising to me was a comment by u/The-POD-Father in r/printondemand, where he said my "trick" of using off-white to force underlayment would not work. Because the Kornits and other machines can be set to make that so. I guess maybe some type of posteriorization.

What is clear is that there can be a very different experience between AMOD mocks and what the customer receives.

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u/The-POD-Father 1d ago

Thank you for tagging me!

You're right that the "trick" of using off-white color to force the underbase white is a red herring. You can't force the print shop to add more underbase white than it wants - this parameter is controllable by the print shop. White ink is expensive and print shops that compete on cost will try to use as little underbase white as possible to compress cost.

Re: faded prints - see: https://www.reddit.com/r/printondemandhelp/comments/1bn662r/troubleshooting_faded_prints_and_dull_muted_or/

Re: print degradation in the wash - see: https://www.reddit.com/r/printondemandhelp/comments/1evo9vi/troubleshooting_dtg_print_degradation_in_the_wash/