One of my favourite t–shirts is one that my wife made for me, that features a logo for this site, it also features a hand-painted qr code that actually worked!
However as that shirt ages and starts to fade I thought it would be interesting to look into getting other clothes with custom designs. So I set up a cafe press store: cafepress.com/makergeek
This was pretty easy really, just register for an account, create a shop, upload a design. It does a pretty impressive job of rendering your design onto the various items they sell, I was particularly impressed with the glass, where they render the logo wrapped around the surface in a pretty convincing way.
You can do all sorts of customising, for the moment I’ve just selected a subset of the products they sell that looked most interesting. I ordered a tshirt, a long sleeve shirt for myself and a hoodie for my wife. I’m very happy with the quality, the garment itself is very nice, and the quality of the printing looks great.
Having done this I’m rather inclined to only ever buy customised t-shirts from now on 🙂 of course the point of the shop is that whilst it provides me an easy way to buy things with my own (well my wife’s) designs on. It also provides a way for anyone else that happens to like them to buy them to.
There is a modest markup on the clothes which means that anyone who does buy from my store helps to support this site (I have a few recurring costs in domain names and hosting etc)
I may now need to spend time coming up with some more interesting designs to join the basic maker geek logo…
I’m also interested if anyone has any experience with similar sites to cafe press , and any observations on the comparison, I’m happy with cafe press, however I wonder if there are other options with wider ranges of things to put designs on? If you have any thoughts then hit me up at @makergeek on twitter, or +danielwould on google plus.