11 KiB
S03|L12 - how to create and add a tshirt with printify
Links
Notes
Description
Review
Summary
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
06:42 will now publish the t shirt to your store. It
06:44 can take a few minutes for all of the files
06:46 and images to load into Shopify.
06:49 You don't have to sit and stare at the screen.
06:51 You can close it if you want to while it
06:54 finishes on in the background.
06:56 But yes, we are done with this. We can now
06:59 move on to the next video.