Steve Cooley Fine Art

Well, fully 7 days after my zazzle.com order arrived, my cafepress order finally showed up. Now I have something to compare and contrast to the first order.

So my first reaction was to the relative thinness of the shirt relative to Zazzle’s black shirts. It really does feel like a lighter weight shirt. As my wife rightly pointed out, “if you’re layering, that should be ok.” The second thing that I noticed was how much nicer the quality of the print is versus Zazzle’s output. It looks like a very similar process where they take the alpha value from the png file and print a white ink first, then do a CMYK inkjet print over the top of that… and presumably do some kind of heat treatment to set the inks. I’d have to go back and check my source files for resolution, but its *extremely* unlikely that I would send low res files off to zazzle and really high res files off to cafepress, even on accident. I just don’t roll that way. It’s high res all the time for me. So when I see the nicer quality print from cafepress, it really makes it hard to declare either one of these services as “the winner”.

So on to cafepress’ commission policy. They let you set your commission to any value you want, even to set it to $0… which can reduce the price of the item to a more palatable number. I’ll be honest, zazzle’s prices are kind of a shock considering you’re buying a t-shirt. cafepress isn’t much better, but at least I can optionally set the price for my customer if I want. Cafepress wins here, imo.

In part 3 I will outline a chart of some of the pros and cons of each service.

One note about cafepress’ print on demand for thing like this bib… they’re using a heat transfer process that does not use transparency data in your graphics… so the first time something like this bib gets dirty and you send it through the wash, the un-printed-on portion of the transfer absorbs some color and it becomes apparent that it’s a heat transfer… which sucks. I think they’re using a newer process to print directly onto light/white shirts that doesn’t employ this technique… which is good. This old method really blows. Cute design, though! Baby’s first turntable!

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