I Was Wrong About Print On Demand. This Changes Everything Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 So, six months ago, I made a video telling everyone to stop wasting their time with print on demand. And I meant it. I've watched hundreds of my students try it. My own kids run a print on demand store, and the math just never worked out. You cannot build a real business on such low margins. But in the last couple weeks, I discovered something that made me sit down and rewatch my own video.

00:21 Because everything I said about Pod was true about the old model, but not this new one. This next generation of printon-demand companies, let's just call it printon-demand 2.0, will allow you to create a genuinely viable clothing business without worrying about inventory or requiring any upfront capital. But first, let me tell you why I've been down on print on demand for so long.

00:42 Because you have to understand this before the rest of the video makes sense. Print on demand, as most people know, is not a clothing business. It's a printing business. Companies like Printull, Printify, and Custom Cat are print shops. They buy blank t-shirts wholesale from suppliers like Bella Canvas and Gilden. They print whatever design you upload onto that blank, and then they ship it to your customer.

01:06 That is the entire model. And here's why you can't make much money with it. My own kids run a print on demand store. It's called Kid in Charge. They sell entrepreneurial t-shirts aimed at kids who want to start their own businesses. And it's a real life store that ships real orders today. and they've been running it for years. Their t-shirts sell for about 20 bucks each and on every t-shirt they sell, they clear at most $5 per piece.

01:29 And that is the entire margin on the business. Now granted, that is passive income. And to be straight up, that is the best part of this business model. Nobody has to manage inventory. Nobody has to pack boxes. Orders just come in and get fulfilled. And that part is great. But there's a huge limitation on your earning potential. At five bucks for a t-shirt, my kids need to sell 200 shirts a month just to clear $1,000.

01:54 Now, that might sound a lot to a teenage kid, but you cannot support a family. Here's another reason why the old print on demand model sucks. If you're on Printull or Printify or Custom Cat, your entire catalog is whatever Bella Canvas and Gilden and Next Level just happened to make. which means the same six t-shirt shapes, the same five hoodie cuts, and the same 40 colors that every other print on demand seller has access to.

02:20 And their catalog hasn't evolved in over a decade. This means that every print on demand seller out there is competing on graphics alone. [snorts] And when the only thing separating your store is the design on the front of a Bella Canvas T, you are in a race to the bottom, especially in the age of AI. Let me throw in some numbers to illustrate why the pricing model is broken as well.

02:42 A blank t-shirt on Printull cost you around $12 per unit printed. That is your cost before shipping and before anything else. Now, with this new company I'm about to talk about, that same category product cost you only around $4 to $6 per piece. But honestly, price is not even the main point I want to make in this video. This next crop of printon-demand apparel companies are true clothing companies that just happen to do print on demand.

03:07 And that changes everything about what a seller can actually build. Now, the company I'm talking about is called TapStitch. And as far as I can tell from watching this space, they are the only company doing what they're doing at any real scale right now. And here's the thing that makes them fundamentally different from every print on demand company out there.

03:27 They design and manufacture their own inventory. They're not buying blanks from Bella Canvas or Gilden and printing on them. They are a fashion clothing company that runs their own factory and print on demand is just how they distribute. And that one difference changes everything. Their catalog is over 800 garments and every single piece of it is clothing.

03:47 They don't sell mugs, phone cases, or just random commodity products. They are a clothing brand, not a merch store. And because they focus on apparel, they actually design fashion. So, we're talking modern athleisure, leggings, sports bras, workout tops, shorts, fashion pieces like jeans, varsity jackets, button-down shirts, and stylish sweatshirts.

04:08 These are clothing categories that no other print on demand shop can offer you because Bella Canvas doesn't make jeans and Gilden doesn't make varsity jackets. Also, the fits and the fabrics follow what's trending right now because as a fashion clothing company, they have designers who look at what's in style, and you are not limited to anyone else's selection.

04:28 Now, I wanted to see if the quality actually held up against what they claim because pretty pictures on a website don't mean anything. So, I had my daughter order a bunch of tops from Tapstitch. And I picked her for this exercise because she is an athleisure connoisseur. Her entire wardrobe is fashion sweatshirts. She wears them everyday. She has strong opinions on fabric weight and fit, and she knows the difference between a good one and a cheap one.

04:53 Heck, this sweatshirt you're looking at right here, she paid over a hundred bucks for. And her verdict on the Tapstitch pieces was that she cannot tell the difference in quality between what they sent and what's already in her closet. So, as someone who spends an ungodly amount of money on sweatshirts, what is your take on this tap stitch sweatshirt?

05:12 >> I would say it's really good quality. It's very thick and it's very soft. You can see the material right here. And I would say compared to all my other really expensive sweatshirts, I know my dad always tells me that I'm spending a little too much, I really enjoyed designing this. And I'm really happy with how it turned out. >> And I noticed you're wearing a tap stitch shirt, too.

05:32 >> I am. It's very soft. I actually really like it. It's very comfortable. Going into college, I think this is going to be something I'm going to be wearing all the time. >> Now, I trust her judgment because what's already in her closet is not cheap. By the way, if you're interested in trying Tapstitch right now, they are giving you 10% off and $20 in free clothing towards your store.

05:50 Use the link below. And then there's the shipping. I ordered these pieces and had them in about a week. Now, compare that to what actual premium athleisure brands do. If you go to Vari right now, which is a $5.5 billion brand, and you read their own shipping page, they will tell you that standard orders take three to four business days to process and then another four to five business days to arrive, which means you could be waiting up to 2 weeks for a pair of joggers from an established brand.

06:19 Well, TapStitch got it to me in about a week. So, this is a fashion company that designs their own line, manufactures their own inventory, ships in about a week, and the quality actually holds up. Plus, you can add your own designs, your own brand label and hang tags to make it your own. Once you understand that, the next question is what you can actually build with it.

06:41 So, what does this mean for someone who wants to actually build a real clothing business with no money? Let me walk you through how companies like Tapstitch fundamentally change the print on demand model. Now, the first thing that changes is what you can sell. On the old model, you were stuck selling graphic TE's and hoodies because that is what the print shops carried.

07:00 On the new model, you can build a full apparel line. And we're talking matching athleisure sets, jeans, jackets, button-downs. You can put together an actual outfit and photograph it as an outfit, which is how every real fashion brand markets itself. You cannot do this on a traditional print on demand company. The second thing that changes are the margins.

07:20 On my kids store, a $20 t-shirt clears about five bucks with fees. On a trending fashion piece like this yoga tank top, where the blank runs you around $9 to10 bucks, and you can retail it for $50 or $60, you are clearing $40 to $50 per unit before shipping. Heck, Lululemon is charging $58 for a similar tank top. Those are margins that a small brand can actually build on.

07:46 And it's the difference between passive side income and a real business. Now, the third thing that changes is who your competition is. When you are competing against every other Bella Canvas store on Etsy, you are competing on design alone. When you are selling athleisure that looks and feels like Viori and Aloe, you are competing in a market where customers are already trained to pay $80 to $100 for a pair of leggings.

08:10 Now, I want to be straight up with you. Starting a clothing brand still requires a ton of work. Companies like Tapstitch allow you to start your own trending fashion line, but it does not remove the other problems. You still have to build a brand. You still have to shoot content, and you still have to run ads or grow organically. But this new print on demand model opens up an entire fashion category, which brings me to the part that I think most sellers are underestimating right now.

08:36 Most people don't realize this, but the big fashion brands you know and love today built billion-dollar businesses on a specific marketing playbook, which is easily copyable today when you use a company like Tapstitch for fulfillment. Let me explain what I mean. Go pull up Alo's Yoga Instagram right now. What you'll find is a woman in an outfit on a yacht, a woman in an outfit walking through a coffee shop, a woman in an outfit sitting on a beach.

09:04 It's beautiful photography. aspirational lifestyle content. And here's the thing, the Aloe logo is barely visible in any of the photos. Now, go pull up Viori and you'll find the exact same pattern. It's the exact same lifestyle photography with the brand name practically invisible. Go pull up Lululemon. Same exact thing. These are three brands worth a combined $60 billion, and none of them are pushing their logo down your throat in their content.

09:33 They're selling you a lifestyle and the outfit is just what the woman in the lifestyle is wearing. Now, here's why this matters for a brand new seller. Brand recognition used to be the moat. If you were competing against Lululemon in 2010, you had a massive uphill fight because their name was on every yoga pant in the country. But if the brand names are no longer front and center in the content that actually sells the product, that moat disappears.

10:00 Which means that if your clothes look like their clothes and your social content looks like their social content, the shopper scrolling Instagram cannot tell the difference at a glance. They see an outfit that fits their aesthetic. Then they tap and now you have their attention. That is the door that TapStitch opens. They offer the same fabric quality and design as the mainstream brands based on what my daughter told me.

10:23 You can customize it with your own designs and put your own brand logo on it. and you can use the same lifestyle content playbook. The brand name doesn't matter nearly as much as it did before. Now, the athleisure market is $460 billion globally right now, projected to nearly double to 890 billion by 2033. That is a category doubling in size over the next 7 years.

10:47 And the brands that dominate it today were built by people who started small. Biori was founded in 2015 in a garage in Ensenas with $300,000 from friends and family. The founder didn't pay himself for two years and today the company is worth 5.5 billion. Aloe was founded in 2007. They did not open their first retail store until 2016. 9 years of grinding before they had a physical location and today they are worth about $10 billion.

11:18 Lululemon was founded in 1998 in a Vancouver yoga studio. Those companies built their brands by slogging through wholesale first, then investing in their own factories. So, it took them years. The difference now is that you no longer need a factory. You don't need any money. You just need a design idea and a Shopify account. Now, in terms of making your own design, AI content tools have gotten good enough now that you can build lifestyle photography and ad variants for a fraction of what a photo shoot used to cost.

11:47 So for social content, for ads, for lifestyle photos, AI has drastically lowered the cost of building the exact kind of content that Aloe and Viori are using to sell their brands. And because of all these factories, this is the first time in my 19 years in e-commerce that starting an apparel brand is actually accessible to a solo operator. So here's where I land on all this.

12:11 6 months ago, I told you to stop wasting your time on print on demand. And based on that version of print on demand I was looking at, I meant it. My kids store is proof of the ceiling because five bucks a shirt is not a real business. But the model itself has changed. A printon-demand clothing company that runs their own factory now opens up the possibility of starting a profitable DTOC apparel business.

12:36 And if you're already running a printon-demand store that works for you, keep it running. Nothing about this video says that the old model is dead. But companies like Tapstitch now allow you to build a real fashion brand and that is definitely worth looking at again. Now that you understand why print on demand is back in vogue, make sure you watch this video next on how to determine whether your business idea is a winner.