This lesson shows how to create your first product in Printify (a t-shirt), choose a supplier, upload a design, configure variants, and publish it to Shopify.
** Core Idea
Creating a product is straightforward:
- Choose a blank product
- Select a supplier (or use Printify Choice)
- Upload and position your design
- Select colors and variants
- Publish to Shopify
** Practical Value
- Navigate Printify catalog
- Choose between popular shirts (Comfort Colors vs Bella Canvas)
- Understand supplier selection vs Printify Choice
- Upload high-resolution design
- Adjust placement and sizing
- Select color variants (focus on best-performing ones)
- Preview product before publishing
- Publish product to Shopify
** Product Selection Insight
- Comfort Colors 1717 → thicker, vintage look
- Bella Canvas 3001 → softer, thinner, more modern
- Preference depends on niche and customer taste
** Supplier Model (Important)
Printify is NOT the manufacturer.
- Printify = platform
- Print providers = actual printers
This affects:
- quality
- shipping time
- consistency
** Warnings
- Low-resolution designs will print poorly
- Too many color options can overwhelm customers
- White shirts often expose design weaknesses
- Express shipping may override your chosen supplier
- Different suppliers = different quality levels
** Key Insight
You are not just uploading a product.
You are making decisions about:
- product quality
- customer experience
- brand consistency
** My Recommendation
Start simple:
- Use one shirt type (e.g., Bella Canvas 3001)
- Use 3–5 color variants max
- Prioritize black if it fits the design
- Place design in upper center
- Always preview before publishing
Choose ONE supplier and stay consistent unless you have a reason to change.
** Additional Insight
This is your first real product creation step.
From here on:
- quality matters
- consistency matters
- decisions compound
This is where your store begins to take shape.
* Transcript
00:00
Now let's add in our very first product to the
00:02
store, a t shirt. And this is actually quite nice
00:05
and simple to do. First, make sure you've got your
00:08
design file ready, which is the image that you want
00:10
to upload and sell onto your products. Then we'll come
00:13
back to Printify. Click on the catalog button in the
00:15
menu. A list of product categories will appear. We're gonna
00:18
start with t shirts, so click on t shirts under
00:21
either men's or women's clothing since we're gonna be selling
00:24
a unisex t shirt. Either is fine. When you do,
00:27
you'll see a big list of t shirts to choose
00:29
from. If you already know which blank t shirt you
00:31
want to use, that's great. But for most beginners,
00:35
this can be a little bit overwhelming. So to help
00:38
you make your choice, here are 2 of the most
00:40
popular t shirt options right now. The first is the
00:43
Comfort Colors 1 7 1 7 by Gildan. Its big
00:46
selling point is that it's soft and has a vintage
00:49
look and feel with vintage inspired colors that are super
00:52
trendy.
00:53
This vintage style, though, does mean it's a thicker style
00:56
shirt. The second is the Bella Canvas 2001.
00:59
Its claim to fame is that it's not just soft.
01:02
It's extremely
01:03
soft. Bella Canvas is also a sweatshop free brand, which
01:06
Gildan is not.
01:08
Because of the fabric, this t shirt is thinner though
01:10
than Comfort Colors. Whether people prefer thicker or thinner t
01:14
shirts comes down really to personal preference.
01:17
So which should you choose? Well, it's entirely up to
01:20
you. Personally,
01:22
I love the Bella Canvas 3001
01:24
and the Bella Canvas brand overall, so that's what I'm
01:27
going to use for this video. Once you've chosen your
01:29
shirt, click to open it up in the product page.
01:32
Now, here's something most people don't realize. Many people think
01:36
Printify is the 1 actually printing and shipping these shirts,
01:39
but it's not. If you scroll down and look at
01:42
the list of print providers for this shirt, you'll see
01:45
that the products are printed and shipped by external print
01:49
shops. Printify itself is not a print shop and they
01:52
don't have any of their own printing facilities. If you
01:55
visited Printify's headquarters,
01:57
you'd find offices, not printers. Printify is a tech company.
02:01
Their job is to build the platform that these external
02:04
print shops can then use to sell their products to
02:07
the public. Think of Printify like Uber Eats, but for
02:10
print on demand. Uber Eats doesn't cook the food. Right?
02:13
It just connects customers with restaurants through its app. In
02:17
the same way, when you order a burger through Uber
02:19
Eats, Uber Eats doesn't make your burger. The restaurant does.
02:23
Printify works exactly like that. All of these print shops
02:26
that you see listed under the print provider section are
02:29
separate suppliers
02:30
listing their products through Printify
02:32
and this is important because when you pick a product
02:34
like the Bella Canvas 3001
02:36
and you see that multiple suppliers are offering it, well,
02:40
you've got 2 choices.
02:41
First, you can choose to use the Printify choice option.
02:44
This means that you are going to let Printify's algorithm
02:47
decide which supplier to use for each order. If you
02:51
want to go down this route, click start designing
02:53
under Printify choice. But secondly, you can instead choose to
02:57
pick a specific supplier yourself
02:59
by clicking choose manually
03:01
and selecting from the list. Now, there's no right or
03:04
wrong choice here. If you're not sure which to choose
03:08
or if you expect to have customers from different countries
03:10
and want Printify to route borders to local print shops
03:13
for faster shipping, Printify Choice can be a fantastic option.
03:17
But if you've already watched reviews or you have your
03:19
own preferences, for example, if you've watched my Printify review
03:23
where I reviewed different print suppliers, you might want to
03:26
select a particular supplier. Because as a lot of my
03:29
longtime viewers will know, for apparel, I've actually had really
03:33
good experiences with Monster Digital, who are also known as
03:36
TSC Miami.
03:37
My customers have really liked the shirts that they've produced.
03:41
So for me, I usually choose them manually.
03:44
But again, that's my personal preference.
03:46
So once you've made your choice on who is going
03:49
to make your t shirt, you will then come to
03:52
the product design editor. From here, you can just find
03:55
your design file on your computer and upload it. Once
03:57
it finishes uploading, make sure it's in high resolution.
04:00
I only recommend using high resolution designs for printing and
04:04
then you can choose your color variants. You'll see the
04:06
design previewed on different shirt colors. Some designs look terrible
04:10
on white but fantastic on black or vice versa. For
04:13
this particular design, it looks great on dark colors,
04:17
especially black. In my experience, black t shirts tend to
04:20
be the best sellers overall. If there's a color that
04:23
you don't like, just untick it. For example, I didn't
04:26
like how mine looked on white, so I turned that
04:29
color off. You can also adjust the size and placement
04:32
of your design by dragging the corners to make it
04:35
larger or smaller and dragging it around to reposition it.
04:38
You can also use the alignment tools to center it
04:41
horizontally
04:42
and choose whether to place it higher or lower or
04:44
in the middle. Most t shirt designs though look best
04:48
printed in the upper center. At any point too, you
04:51
can click preview to see how it will look. You'll
04:53
see mock ups on a flat shirt, on a hanging
04:56
shirt, and even on a shirt being worn. When I
05:00
previewed my initial version, I decided that the design was
05:03
a bit too wide. So I went back and scaled
05:06
it down slightly and I placed it again at the
05:09
upper center and previewed it again. And this time, I
05:12
was happy with it. So once you like how it's
05:15
placed, click save. Your product should now be saved as
05:18
a draft in your Printify account. So you can just
05:21
click start publishing
05:22
to send it to your Shopify store. And on the
05:24
publishing screen, you'll see that there are lots of options
05:27
for customizing your listing. Later on in this course, we'll
05:30
be editing things like titles and descriptions
05:33
directly inside of Shopify because Shopify gives you more control.
05:37
But while we're here, there is 1 thing you might
05:39
want to double check and that is the shipping options.
05:42
You can choose whether to offer express shipping for the
05:44
product if it's available.
05:46
If you enable express shipping and a customer chooses it
05:49
though, there is 1 important thing that you need to
05:51
know. When express shipping is used, Printify decides which print
05:55
provider will handle the order even if you chose 1
05:58
manually earlier. So in my case, even though I selected
06:01
Monster Digital as my supplier, if I turn on express
06:05
shipping and a customer chooses that option, Printify may send
06:08
that order to a different print shop. And as I've
06:11
mentioned before in previous videos that I have made, I
06:15
prefer to know exactly which company is printing my products.
06:20
Now, some people don't mind. It's a personal preference.
06:23
But since I like having that control, I untick express
06:26
shipping. But again, that is completely up to you. Since
06:29
we'll be doing a more detailed edit of this product
06:33
listing inside of Shopify later, you can just leave everything
06:36
else as is or make any tweaks that you want
06:39
to now. But, yes, when you're ready, click publish. Printify
