In this episode of the CAS Podcast, we’re thrilled to welcome Mike Angel from ColDesi, the brilliant mind behind ClickWear and the ColDesi OnDemand services. Mike takes us on a deep dive into the world of selling online, particularly through Shopify, and how ClickWear is transforming the custom apparel business by streamlining product creation and order management. We’ll also explore the comprehensive solutions offered by ColDesi OnDemand, designed to support businesses in offering customized products without the hassle.
Shopify is a leading e-commerce platform that enables businesses of all sizes to set up their online stores and sell products. It’s known for its ease of use, scalability, and comprehensive features that cover everything from inventory management to payment processing, making it an ideal solution for entrepreneurs looking to start or grow their online sales.
ClickWear is a Shopify app developed by ColDesi that revolutionizes the custom apparel industry. It allows store owners to easily create and sell custom-decorated products online by simplifying the design and order fulfillment process. ClickWear streamlines operations, enabling efficient management of product customization and orders directly from the Shopify interface.
ClickWear: A Shopify App for the Custom Apparel Business
ColDesi OnDemand offers a robust solution for businesses looking to offer custom apparel and products without the need for inventory. This service provides the technology and support for on-demand production, from printing to shipping, allowing businesses to focus on design and sales while ColDesi handles the fulfillment. It’s a scalable solution that fits a range of business sizes and needs, from startups to established brands looking to expand their product offerings.
Transcript
Marc Vila:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. And today, we have another special guest. We’re here to talk about online shopping and e-commerce, specifically centered around Shopify. And we’ve invited on Mike Angel here from ColDesi, so thank you and welcome to the show. Would you just give everybody just a quick summary of what you do here at ColDesi?
Mike Angel:
All right. Thank you for having me, Marc. My name is Mike Angel and I head on-demand business development for ColDesi, and on-demand means all things e-commerce and all things with volumes of little as one, if that makes sense. What we concentrate on with on-demand is being able to sell products, digital printed products online, and also be able to produce them efficiently. That includes e-commerce technology, order management technology, as well as equipment like DTF printers, which are phenomenal for on-demand types of businesses.
Marc Vila:
Great. So in short then, a small, medium, and large size businesses want, I just want to make sure I’m saying it differently, or sell customized products. And that might mean specifically, like you said, as little as one where an organization is ordering T-shirts that are going to have the names of everybody printed on them, so every employee. It could be an organization of 100 or 1,000 employees, and instead of name tags, they’re actually going to print the name on everybody’s shirt on the left chest. So you will help our customers develop systems to actually make that workflow happen efficiently and specifically, as you said, online.
Mike Angel:
That’s correct.
Marc Vila:
Okay.
Mike Angel:
That’s correct.
Marc Vila:
And then also as little as one. So if an organization, say, made custom headphones or something like that, and they wanted a customer to be able to go online and put a name or something like that or special art on a headphone, they could physically order that singular unit online and it outputs in a way that could be efficient to then produce and send to the customer.
Mike Angel:
That’s correct.
Marc Vila:
Okay, all right.
Mike Angel:
And we can automate that process all the way from the online store all the way to the production floor.
Marc Vila:
Okay. All right, great. I did a little bit of homework on this. Also, I’ve written a handful of articles about on-demand so I cheated a little bit, but I think it’s important to help folks understand who they’re talking to and listening to here. And the point of this podcast is really we’re going to focus on Shopify. I’d like to maybe start with, just to make everybody understands, listeners of this podcast out there, somebody you might be listening to who’s never been in this industry at all, this is their first. They’ve maybe owned other businesses, but nothing in this industry. Maybe they’ve never sold online. And there may be folks listening who have a ton of experience. So we’ll lighten it up in the beginning and then we’ll get smarter and deeper as we go along.
Shopify is what we’re going to talk about today, and Shopify is a tool to be able to sell online. It’s an online e-commerce platform where essentially somebody can sign up, get their website on the internet. You can add products and descriptions and choose from templates of how you want the website to look and say how you want to charge people with credit cards or PayPal or whatever it might be. And then hit a publish button and you have a store on the internet, and people can go online and interact with it. And Shopify is particularly popular because it’s just easy to use. You don’t have to have much money in your pocket to be able to actually open up an online store with that app.
Mike Angel:
That’s correct.
Marc Vila:
Right. And why else do you think that platform is really popular or a lot of folks in our industry choose to use it in the customization industry?
Mike Angel:
That’s a great question. Shopify is one of many platforms that a business can use to start up their own web store, but we’re working with Shopify first and we’re launching a product that we’re going to talk about called ClickWear. It’s an app for Shopify. But to answer your question, Shopify is a great platform in terms of the ability to easily start up a web store but also have robust features in the web store platform that can accommodate your growth. You might start off as a small business and get started. It’s easy to use, has great tools for you to sell products, great tools for you to market those products. It connects well with social media platforms and it can really grow with you quickly.
But Shopify also works for very large companies, huge, huge retail companies. They do this by adding a third-party application development to their platform. So we’re all familiar with apps for your phone and the term apps. Shopify allows outside developers to develop tools that can piggyback onto the Shopify store. That makes for a great platform for a startup business to grow all the way up to a huge multimillion-dollar business and anything in between. And it’s also very economical. I think they have a promotion right now that gives you a three months trial at a dollar a month to get you started.
Marc Vila:
Okay, all right.
Mike Angel:
And then moves into about $29 per month. So we feel that’s a fantastic platform to get started with some of the efforts that we’re doing to serve our customer base.
Marc Vila:
Okay, great. And transparency, we are not sponsored by Shopify or make any money. It’s just a tool that’s out there. And we talk about tools all the time on this podcast for any listeners out there, whether it’s CRM tools, email marketing tools, and all these are just tools in our belt that we all have experience with and used. And as you mentioned with Shopify, the cool thing about that product is its scalability. You can start at a dollar a month, just shoestring budget, and theoretically work up to millions of dollars a year on the same platform, which is cool. We don’t use Shopify for our online store here at ColDesi, on colmanandcompany.com, but we’ve created a different platform that’s probably not a startup platform that you’d work with with tons of other customization that you can do. But the app ability is a really cool thing on Shopify.
So the steps to setting up Shopify, as we mentioned before. You go online, you choose a template, and you sign up and then you say, “I want to start selling T-shirts.” So you write in the descriptions of your T-shirts and you start uploading pictures. And great when you’ve got 2, 3, 5 things you’re selling, but all of a sudden that scales up really fast. And what I mean by that is two products can easily turn into 2,000 products when you talk about different options and colors and logos and customers that you’re going to be working with. And a lot of that work is done not in Shopify but in an art app somewhere. So you would have to be using Photoshop or Canva or some illustrator, CorelDRAW, something like that to physically edit the art files that you’re going to be working with. So you may get a picture from a manufacturer that’s of a shirt and you’re selling a logo on it so you got to go into Photoshop or something like that and put the logo on it and then upload that to Shopify to sell online.
That’s no problem when you’re doing 10 of those. But you had recognized a problem for when you’re trying to go much larger than that. Can you maybe walk through the story of how that can scale up really fast and how much time that could potentially take?
Mike Angel:
Sure, yeah. That’s a great question. One of the challenges for not just startup businesses but many existing businesses that want to start selling online is not just choosing which web store platform to use, but in our industry, when it comes to decorating products, we have a lot of what we call variants in what we offer our end customers. And variants are things like colors. So you have a particular product, you have a T-shirt, and that T-shirt may come in, some of them come in 20 plus different colors. Not only do they come in different colors, but they come in different sizes and so forth.
Once you’ve chosen a web store platform, now you’ve got to create what we call digital assets. These are your product images. And when you’re creating your product images, it becomes a challenge in creating all of the different variants. If I want to create a forest green T-shirt for a school that I’m working with but their school colors are actually green, white, black, now I have three different color variants in a T-shirt that I need to create for them, create their graphics to put on those T-shirts, and then upload them to the web store. I’m using things like Photoshop to grab a product image. I have to edit that. I have to upload a graphic and superimpose it on top of the T-shirt to make this product image, to then upload every different size and variant color into the web store. And that process can become very challenging and time-consuming. So we recognize these challenges and these steps that you need to take to sell online, and we’ve actually worked on solutions to address that.
Marc Vila:
Okay, cool. So we’re going to talk about that solution then, but I want to do some variant math just for fun, right?
Mike Angel:
Okay.
Marc Vila:
Let’s say you mentioned the school had three colors, right?
Mike Angel:
Sure.
Marc Vila:
And then you’re also going to sell, maybe for sake of numbers, five or six different sports teams. And then each has a boys and a girls team. So you’ve got three variants for color times six variants for the number of sports times two variants for the girls and guys, which may have different styles of shirts or they may just have different logos even sometimes, right?
Mike Angel:
Correct, yeah.
Marc Vila:
So just in that one small school, you’ve got 36 different variants that you need to create in images just for that. And that’s how that math works. You do the number of colors times the number of options times the number of this. Then so as that number continues to grow, it gets to a pretty big number. And we sell blanks on colmanandcompany.com. We started off with, well, we’re just going to sell I think we started off with 100 was a number. We just said, “Let’s just start with a small number, easy to do. We’ll just pick 100 that’ll give some people some options and get a feel for how they like it.”
Well, like you said, some of these products had… And I’ll do the calculator again. So we chose the 100 products. Some of them had up to 30, 40 colors and some had 7 colors. So if we just average 20 or something like that, times 20 colors, times the number of sizes which was extra small up to some of them 5X. Let’s just even just say five sizes for each. We quickly went to 10,000 SKUs on our store-
Mike Angel:
Unbelievable.
Marc Vila:
… for 100 products just like in a snap. And we were like, “Oh, 100. Easy.” No, 100 turned out to be 10,000. So maybe the school and that example are a couple of not even extremes yet because we have almost 100,000 SKUs at this point. But one of the things to consider is that you get a school and you have to do 36 different Photoshop edits. Now, if you also may have a back of the shirt that’s being decorated, so now you’ve double that number.
Mike Angel:
So another variant.
Marc Vila:
It’s another variant so you times that, times two front and back. And then if they have, they could do a sleeve as well potentially. Then now you can add another one so now you’re times three on that variant, and then all of a sudden the teachers love it and they said, “Well, hey, the teachers want to have options for shirts too,” so now you have a whole another set. All of a sudden you could quickly jump from 5 to 10 variants to 36 to 360 variants for one customer, which means you’re in Photoshop or wherever, Canva, whatever, 360 times editing that photo.
And that is a problem that you would recognize that. Then all of a sudden just someone says, “The effort’s not worth it,” or, “I’m just not going to show the back of the shirt,” or, “I’m just not going to show all the colors online. I’ll just show the white one and then I’ll just let them choose green or black.” That just is you are lessening the experience for your customer because of the fact that how am I going to do 360 edits? And even if it only takes you 10 seconds to edit, which is absurdly fast, you have to save the file, upload the file, locate the file. All of those things are like five seconds, five seconds, five seconds times 360 times. It’s like you’ve got a week’s worth of work in editing and uploading files. So that’s the birthplace of ClickWear that you mentioned before.
I’d like to chat a little bit about that. And on the podcast, just for transparency, we’re put on by ColDesi. Both of us work for ColDesi in this particular episode, but we try not to make these a commercial. This is education, which I think is why the first X many minutes, 15 minutes, we started just really helping folks understand this online store problem. But now I want to dive into ClickWear. Let’s talk about it and of course tell all the great features about it and hopefully folks get interested. And then now that we’ve started a lightweight introduction, let’s dive into some of the deeper stuff and really help folks make a decision on how they can sell better. If they should sell online, how they could sell better online, and then how potentially ClickWear might be the solution for them. So maybe give us a summary of ClickWear, tell us what it does.
Mike Angel:
ClickWear is a Shopify app that addresses some of the challenges that we’re talking about, and it’s designed to meet the needs of the way that most of the community-based decoration business is done. And what I mean by that is we have, let’s say you’re a printer in your town and you print T-shirts and more than likely you’re addressing your immediate community with your services, and you have a relationship with that community. So you have a relationship with the local service companies like your plumbers, your electricians. You have a relationship with local schools and sports teams and so forth, and you’re already deciding through your current process or your new process if you’re out there starting new business and generating new business and talking amongst your community, you’re already generating your orders with that customer and you’re already talking about what it is you can deliver. You’re already talking about what it is that customer wants you to deliver for them. And now that you’ve established that person-to-person communication and you’ve made that sale, there isn’t an easy way for you to then have that customer purchase from you online.
Marc Vila:
Right. And so the challenge is, and this is old school versus new school challenges in ordering things, right? It’s no secret on this podcast that we tell everybody how do you make money, and it’s like, “Get some samples, throw them in your car. Get some business cards or flyers, throw them in your car. Drive around town, visit all the local shops. Go to baseball games, tell people what you do. Go to your kids’ baseball game, tell people what you do. Join the chamber of commerce. Go to luncheons for business owners.” That’s a great way to expand your business and reach potentially beyond your goals as a business owner in this industry. That’s a way to do it.
The problem is, as you mentioned there, so you talk to a, maybe there’s a real estate firm 15 miles from your shop and they are hiring. They’re hiring and firing people or new realtors who are coming in. And so they’re always ordering shirts. Maybe they even give T-shirts out, “Congratulations on your new home,” or something like that that they do. Who knows what they’re doing? But anyway, they’re ordering customized stuff. Well, every time they want to place a new order, they have to call you or email you that order, which is a great way to get mistakes in your orders because people will call while they’re driving. They forget to say something. They didn’t write a note down. We hear letters and words wrong all the time on the phone. And then same thing, email too. They’re going to email you something and they’re going to forget to include the sizes. “Hey, I need five more of these shirts.” “Okay, what size?” “This.” “Okay, what color?” “This.” Okay, now you’re back and forth there so.
Going online in this scenario, before, there’s a concept of selling online, meaning you’re going to try to get your business online, which is by advertising on Google or social media or creating a social media account that drives people to your store, which is one way. The other way that online sales is just a tool to make the job ordering easier, for one, on the end more accurate on the other. So you have your customers come through and that’s just what it is. You tell your customer, “Okay, great. Great to meet you. I’m glad. We got your first order all set. The next time you want to order, here’s another tool. You go to mystore.com and you just pick the sizes and colors you want. And then when you hit go, it comes to me and I just place the order.” So that’s a great reason to sell online, not necessarily because you’re trying to market online, which is different.
So that gets into this. Now, part of the solution we discussed was that, it’s what? It’s creating some of the art is a little bit of the frustration. Let’s just maybe gather, we can pick up from there. We’re a community-based business. We realize that selling online is important because it makes reordering and ordering again much easier for our customers. It also scales it, meaning that the person who orders the shirts for, say, a local school or something like that, can provide a link to parents and students to order online. It doesn’t have to be done necessarily through a paper form through the office or something like that. So maybe you’ll pick up from there, and how does the ClickWear app helping to create the store?
Mike Angel:
To summarize the challenges and the questions that we get are we’d love to sell online, and what are the steps to do so and how does that make my business more efficient? And the challenge that many folks were having were not just creating the product images and choosing what type of e-commerce platform to use, but also how to produce the orders efficiently.
We recognize that being able to not only make it easier for the customer to purchase from the decorator but also for the decorator to produce those orders efficiently needed to be tied together. So what we’ve done is we’ve created a tool that helps mock those products up quickly. It’s an app that connects to your Shopify store and it comes full with a catalog of the most popular products out in the industry, most importantly product images that are all consistent.
One of the things you mentioned earlier was that user experience and coming in on the site and having a nice looking site and having nice looking images. We’ve gone ahead and filled up a automatic catalog full of product images, front and backs of shirts, bags, caps, all sorts of things, and that will continue to grow. We’ll continue to add to that catalog. But the idea is that there are nice, clean images of products that you can then use the ClickWear tool to mock the products. So within the tool structure, you can choose a blank product, let’s say a T-shirt, and you can add your customer’s logo to the T-shirt. You can choose what color T-shirts in that variety of T-shirts you want to offer and the different sizes. And when you’re done mocking up your product and click add product to my Shopify store, it will then duplicate those images across all those different variants and all the different colors.
So we’re satisfying that first challenge of creating nice products at speed for those customers so that those end customers can access those products on that store. Then the art files that you’re actually using to mock the products and create those T-shirts, travel. It’s a term in the industry we call travel. Those art files travel with the product so that when that end customer, that school purchases that T-shirt, in your orders folder in Shopify, you’ll actually see the art file attached to it so that you can easily download it straight to your production floor, to your printer, to your art team or whomever is going to do the actual pressing and printing on the product. So it’s a great tool but more so a great process to meet the needs of a market that’s been underserved for quite some time.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, so that’s excellent. And I’d like to… I’m just a big fan of rewording things and saying them differently because I know I listen to a ton of podcasts and I’ll hear a guest come on who is in the weeds of a product. They’re talking about a piece of software or whatever, and they talk about it from this great high level. And then sometimes I’m like, “What did he say? What does that mean?” So I’m just a fan and I like it in a lot in podcasts when the host helps to bring it down a little bit.
So essentially what we’re saying is that you have a school that has a logo and you’re going to put that online so the school can order shirts and hoodies and all stuff like that. And there’s all the famous brands and styles that are out there. It’s available. The art’s already on ClickWear, so Port & Company, Hanes, Gildan, District, all these, you’re going to have shirts and hats and hoodies and stuff like that that the images are already there. And you literally drag in the logo and you put it where it would be on the shirt. And then when you hit save in so many words, it’ll populate it. So if you offer it in three colors, all of those images will come in all the colors. So the customer can see. They can click on green and see what the logo will look like on green, and white and then they’ll see what it looks like on white.
And all the images are meant to be for online stores. So they’re all consistent, the same size. The lighting is similar. They’re all been edited professionally designed for use on an online store. And then when the customer goes through the end and clicks buy, the art file that’s supposed to go on the shirt, the literal file is in the order. So whoever’s running the orders, whether you own your own business or you have employees, literally can click and grab the file and put it into the printer. And very, the shortest possible way of saying that, but literally take the file and put it into the printer so the right one goes on the shirt. Is that a pretty decent short version of that?
Mike Angel:
Sure, absolutely.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. What I like about that, especially a couple of things I like about that, for one, all that variants stuff goes away which is really annoying to do. We’ve done that before on our online store. We had to deal with variants and so it’s really annoying, so I love that that’s taken care of. But also the other problem that I deal with in marketing and anybody who does marketing realizes is asset management. And anybody who creates custom apparel or T-shirts or mugs or anything is dealing with that asset management as well. And what I mean is your customer provides you a logo and that’s the logo that you print on things. And then your customer emails you and says, “Hey, we rebranded. Here’s the new version of our logo,” different font or color or something like that. Great, and you save it in a file somewhere.
Well, then you update the image online and everything looks right. The customer hits order. Well, whoever’s printing, they may go into the file folder that they normally go into, grab the logo that they normally grab, not necessarily realizing that they’ve grabbed the old version, print 100 shirts, ship them out, and then the customer says, “Why’d you send the old logo?” So I think that we solve this problem of the wrong file being printed too. Gosh, in marketing we deal with that all the time where it’s somebody will do a Photoshop to put something online and they use the wrong version of the logo. So managing that is a problem in and of itself, and this tool actually just solves that automatically.
Mike Angel:
It does. And traditionally in this industry, you try to make sure that that end customer authorizes a mock-up that you’ve made for them, and so that’s the process. But using an e-commerce platform and these types of tools speeds that process up too because you’re actually creating a virtual product. Your mock is your virtual product, and your customer can see that virtual product online and it’s a quick authorization. It saves you time and back and forth, and it’s really the essence of what on-demand is. You’re creating these virtual representations of your products.
Just because they’re digital doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They actually exist. Our file exists. The product image exists. You just haven’t ordered that blank in stock yet. So on-demand in its essence is the ability to have that virtual product, have your customer access that product, purchase it. You get the order no matter the quantity, and then you order those blanks on-demand. Maybe you have some stock on the shelf but you haven’t pre-printed it, but you’re fulfilling that order on-demand. And to get to a zero index inventory is every production team’s and inventory control team’s dream to minimize that inventory as best you can. And having a platform and having a process like this and truly embracing on-demand allows for that.
And so that’s what you want to happen is to have that product represented all your processes in line so when a customer purchases it, it cues your ordering of the blank, your rate of your art file, and increases your margins, increases your turn time, and increases the variety of things you can offer because now you reduce your minimum quantities. Maybe you’ve been a print shop that offers maybe your screen printer and your lowest minimum quantity is 12 or 24 pieces because you can’t set up your presses to knock out these smaller orders and you want to move to digitally printed platforms. Well, now you can. You can do that by having an on-demand process.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, you said a few things there that are really interesting to me. One was you mentioned about maybe an item you’ve never had in stock before or you don’t normally keep in stock. So if we want to talk about, let’s just say 10 years ago, not even that long ago, if you wanted to sell a new hat or a hoodie or a shirt or whatever it was and you wanted to put it online, the process would be you would order some, get them in, either take pictures and Photoshop on, or actually just physically make some and take pictures of the made product and then post that online.
Mike Angel:
Physically print it and take a picture of the finished product.
Marc Vila:
Right, which isn’t necessarily that hard but it sure has a lot of barriers between it. Do I want to sell that product? I have to take the time. I have to print. If you’re screen printing, for sure there’s a lot of steps in there. Even just in general, it’s a project. Now, with this type of product, you can actually experiment in, what, five minutes? You can run an experiment on your site to see if a particular product or style will be viable to your customers. Meaning that you could be in the ClickWear catalog and you could search for hats and say, “Look at that mesh back, trucker style cap. I wonder if the folks at this school that I work with are going to like that.”
Logo, slap, pick the three colors you’re going to offer, hit go, put it online, and then you can go into your email marketing platform if you have one. Or just honestly just send blank emails or texts with a link saying, “Hey, by the way, I’m now offering this. What do you guys think?” And someone can see a mock-up of that product that you spent minutes creating, and they could literally order one right there or at least give you feedback. “Oh yeah, thanks. I think the students are going to love this. I’ll go ahead and I’ll include it in the next newsletter.” And you didn’t have to go through ordering all of this stuff. You literally just went on there and just clicked a few buttons and it did it for you. And then when the orders come in, then that’s when you can go ahead and actually physically place your orders with the apparel supplier, which, what, most of them come in a day, right?
Yeah, so I love that process. It really just it allows you to… Since I’m in marketing, I really like running experiments on products and trying new things. And so it immediately crushes that barrier to be able to try that out. And then the second thing is you just have to go through that. You don’t necessarily have to order something every time and produce it and put it all together. I know that that’s got to be a frustration for people. So moving from that idea then, what are a few ideal customers for the ClickWear product? I gather there’s not just one, but can you name maybe a few examples of somebody who should probably investigate this a little bit more?
Mike Angel:
It’s really a tool to help any business that is selling a decorated product. Let’s just stick with printing, for example. So if you’re a business startup or existing that is selling products that have to be printed, be it with standard art files and logos, or even if it’s user-generated or personalized, a tool like this helps you create those virtual products so that you’re in that on-demand process and you can offer that to your customer base. And by doing so, you can offer a wider variety of products than you ever thought you could, a wider variety of products. So it can be, for example, a local-based print shop that again wants to go out to local schools and organizations within their community.
But I’ve been talking recently to a company that sells pet products nationally. They sell pet accessories, so little scarves and collars and all sorts of things. And they are an existing company with a big internet following already, and they want to be able to offer a wider variety of products. They don’t want to keep inventory of all the pre-printed products so they want to be able to have control of ordering blanks, blank scarves, and handkerchiefs and things for dogs, for example, is one of their big sellers. They’ll be able to have access to order the blanks on-demand and put up a wide variety of styles on their web store. And so this now helps them quickly create mocks and offer a wider variety of scarves with different types of artwork than they ever could before. So from an established online business to a small business, it really doesn’t matter. The tools are agnostic and the business model is on-demand and it helps you achieve that.
Marc Vila:
I like that then. So I never am a big fan of getting into specific prices on the podcast because I like the podcast to be good for years and economies and prices of things change. But it sounds to me like it’s affordable. If you’re saying a startup, is it a large investment for a startup to get going with this app? We already know that Shopify can start at, well, you said a special they run now, it’s like a buck a month. But generally speaking, under 50 bucks a month, you could have a pretty nice store going with that. What about this app? Is there a big startup cost? Can you just elaborate on that a little bit?
Mike Angel:
It’s a great question. We feel that we’ve done a good job at addressing a specific segment of the market. The technical term for the tool we’ve created, ClickWear is a configurator and OMS system. Really fancy, techy, geeky words, right?
Marc Vila:
Yeah, I love the words. I like big words.
Mike Angel:
Configurators is the ability to configure a product digitally. That’s creating it, choosing colors, adding a graphic image, and sizing and mocking it up. It’s called configuration. And OMS order management is what happens after it’s been purchased. How do you track your order, match up that art file to that product to be ordered? And there’s a whole workflow process involved.
Marc Vila:
Like checking off that it’s been completed and done.
Mike Angel:
Absolutely. Inventory control and as sophisticated as you want to get, these tools will help you do that, put in the order for you automatically to some of the blanks. Companies out there that sell the T-shirts, it’ll automate for you. So there’s a lot of sophistication there. And typically up until now, this is probably the fifth configurator that I’ve been involved with in the development process. Before it, we’re in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. They were either for major manufacturers or major retailers.
And everyone’s pretty much familiar. If you’re online shopper, which 80 plus percent of the US population now buys something online or is comfortable buying something online, you’ve seen where you can design a T-shirt or personalize a product. So we’re all familiar with what actually configurators are, and they’ve been reserved for really top tier companies and retailers. And so they’re at the hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop these tools. But what we’ve done is we’ve concentrated on this specific market segment and we’ve made it very affordable. We’ve democratized these tools and for a small percentage transaction fee, which most of these tools work this way, where there’s a transaction fee involved in using the tool, which is great because you’re only investing in the tool when you’re selling.
Marc Vila:
Okay. So in so many words, you’re paying a very, very small, very, very small fee for just when the tool is only when tool is used.
Mike Angel:
That’s correct. That’s correct. So you’re creating all these wonderful products and if maybe they’re all experimental, but you don’t pay unless it’s actually purchased. And it’s a very small percentage so it’s something that can be worked into the pricing, which works out very well. So we think that’s an economical approach.
We’re also including it in some of the important equipment that helps with on-demand like DTF printers. There’s some great opportunities that the system is bundled in. And then we also have a consulting arm where for really true startups or businesses that need help getting it launched, we have a setup option where we’ll actually help you set everything up and help fast track your ability to use the app and the tool and actually create a workflow for yourself very quickly while you’re doing other things for your business, like setting it up, going and talking to customers. We can help you with fast-tracking of the use of the tools. So these are all options and very affordable and easy ways to get started and have a very powerful online business, even as a startup or even as an existing business pivoting into this for the first time.
Marc Vila:
So what’s cool about this is you could be a startup or maybe just the first time you’re ever actually selling online. Maybe you’re not a startup, but you’ve never truly had an online store. And you can have a configurator that you can start using immediately for a very low cost right in the beginning, just extremely low cost upfront, and be competing against a much larger competitor that custom-built a configurator 5, 10 years ago for $200,000.
Mike Angel:
That’s correct.
Marc Vila:
And you could potentially be using a tool that’s equal or maybe even better so it really flattens out the playing field. So a local shop can create a website where their local customers can easily order and buy and reduce the workload for everybody around, like I said earlier. Somebody doesn’t necessarily have to fill out a piece of paper, bring it to the front office of the school, and then somebody at the school has to pass it to the next person who emails you to order your shirts and go through that whole thing, which is a bunch of work for a lot of people. Plus handling the money, somebody’s got to get a check and then it goes through a whole system, gets lost. Who knows?
All of that can get crunched down into something very simple. You have a sophisticated tool that allows you to compete so somebody doesn’t necessarily feel like, “Oh, well. I’m just going to go to VistaPrint,” or something like that, which I don’t know anybody there. I’m sure they’re wonderful people at that organization. But if you’re a small business, sometimes you have to compete with these really large businesses and this flattens that out, which is really remarkable.
So what I’d like to do is give some folks a little call, the action if they’re interested in learning about the product. And then if you have a few more minutes, you mentioned DTF printing before. I’d like to just maybe just talk a little bit about that for a few minutes. If you already know everything there is, if you’re listening and everything there is to know about DTF printing and you want to be done now, fine, but we’ll keep it short just to get some of your expertise on that product since a lot about that too.
But you can go to coldesi.com and if you click on the top menu, you’ll find the area where you see stuff about Shopify and ClickWear and on-demand. If you fill out a form on one of those pages, you’ll probably talk directly to Mike here, if not one of his colleagues. And you can talk about ClickWear. You can talk about anything truly custom. So if you’re listening to this and you’ve got a reasonably sized business and you say, “Yeah, that Shopify app sounds cool, but I’m looking for this and this and this or just significantly more custom,” you can assist with that, right?
Mike Angel:
That’s correct.
Marc Vila:
So you could do all of that consulting and helping develop apps and configurators and all of that stuff that’s custom, or just help somebody get in the right direction for ClickWear as well, right? That’s a good summary?
Mike Angel:
Yeah, sure.
Marc Vila:
Okay. All right, good. So go to coldesi.com, check it out, fill out a form, live chat, talk to Mike or one of his colleagues over here at ColDesi and see if one of these tools can actually help your business grow. Those who are still sticking around, I just want to talk about DTF printing in 2020… There’s lots of 20s right now, right? So 2021, 2022 was really big. 2023 were really big jumps in the direct-to-film printing industry. And you’ve been in this industry 60 years or something like that?
Mike Angel:
Yeah, 572 years.
Marc Vila:
572 years. But in all seriousness, did you start in the ’90s? Or when did you start working in this industry?
Mike Angel:
In 1998.
Marc Vila:
1998, okay. So you’ve been in this industry about a decade longer than myself. And I feel like I know a lot so I’m throwing another decade of experience on that. I can only imagine all the things you’ve learned. And over the years, you’ve seen DTG printing come alive, embroidery machines evolve, white toner printing come in. But a lot of people are talking about how direct-to-film printing is different than a lot of those. And I’m just curious on what’s your opinion on is direct-to-film different than those and what is different about it?
Mike Angel:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So DTF, direct-to-film, is a game changer. I hate to use that term. Throughout the years, we’ve used that several times. But it truly is, and there are two things that are special about DTF. The first is it is its own thing in terms of the technical aspect of direct-to-film printing. In other words, the print itself. So it can be people try to compare it to vinyl or toner transfers or screen printing, but it truly is its own media medium. Medium?
Marc Vila:
Yeah, both.
Mike Angel:
Right?
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Because the media that it goes on is a specialty type of film, and the medium itself is actually what is being created is different than everything else.
Mike Angel:
Right. So technically, it’s a water-based pigment that has high washability. It has very vibrant look. The pigment can be profiled so it’s easily profiled to match customer color palettes. We’ve got 50 plus washes before you see degradation to the prints. You need a spectrophotometer to see it after 50 plus washes. We’ve had studies done at the Florida State University’s textile lab. It has a white ink backing which not only provides the opacity and gives the artwork pop, but provides the ability for the powdered adhesive to stick to. So basically what you have is a solidified ink, for lack of a better way to describe it. And that glue is what’s pressed on to any type of fabric.
So that is a combination that we haven’t seen before, to be able to take one printed piece of artwork and apply that same print across a wide variety of products. So anything, cotton, anything polyester. And that could go for apparel. It could go for just straight material. It could go for caps, soft-sided coolers. So you have your soft goods, backpacks. It’s unbelievable. It also has a low weld time, so it’s a very low time. You’re talking 7, 10 seconds worth of press time, and very low temperatures comparative to some of the other transfer systems. So at whether your cotton products, you’re up around 300 degrees to really get a good melt and weld and adhesion to the fabric. But if you’re on something a little more delicate like performance wear, which is very proper, you’re wearing a performance polo right now.
Marc Vila:
Miss that patches.
Mike Angel:
I’ll address that in a second why this is so significant, but you can then drop the temperature down at 270-ish, so there’s no dye migration or releasing from the substrate. And so right off the bat, technically you’ve got a beautiful print that’s stretchy, that feels good, and goes across a wide variety of products. And the transfers themselves don’t have a shelf life so you can pre-make some and store them without any issues as well. So very versatile.
The second thing that this all addresses is the ability to meet that on-demand process and philosophy we’ve been talking about. To be able to now profitably print one unit. That’s, to use the word again, game changer in the industry, to profitably be able to produce one unit. So you have a very low material cost as well. Material cost is around a half a cent per square inch. So a 10 by 10 piece of artwork’s going to run you at 50 cents or so, and you can produce it quickly. It can go across a wide variety of products.
And with that, you’re able to then sell as little as one product, hopefully through your web store. And the end customers will pay a premium for the ability to purchase just one for you because traditionally they haven’t been able to do that. You have minimum quantities, color requirements, how many color separations and all these requirements and setup fees and all sorts of things. But you can now produce as little as one unit profitably, get a premium for it, but also be able to scale with the same technology and produce many. So now you can produce redundant runs. So whether it’s 1 or whether it’s 1,000, you can do with the DTF system.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, and the setup time is pretty minimal for whether you’re doing 1 or 1,000. It’s literally going on a computer and typing in 1 or typing in 1,000 and hitting go.
Mike Angel:
True digital production.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. And so you said a lot of great things there so a few things popped in my head. One, you compared to some other technologies. So popular the technology for decades now is sublimation printing. It’s a great way to create a transfer and store it for a period of time and then place it on a piece of apparel or hard good or something like that. The problem with sublimation goods is you’re very limited on the materials and the colors and the materials that you can work with. So a ton of people are doing that technology and then they tell customers no when they want a dark blue shirt with a white logo on it because you literally cannot do that. So then alternatively, they’ll be screen printed or vinyl cut it, which has been again, another technology for decades which are both great and they look good and they wash well and all that stuff because their technology has been around forever.
The challenge is what I have right now is a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-color logo. So for one, if a customer hands you this, you’re probably going to, if you’re doing one of those methods, your first instinct is probably to see if you can get them to reduce the number of colors because that’s more work for you. And you either have to charge them more for the work, do more work for less money than another customer, or convince them to do it in one color. Direct-to-film printing as a digital process, so it really doesn’t matter if it’s 1 color or 100, it’s the same amount of work. So that’s a wonderful change too to the business is the amount of colors and if there’s gradients or anything like that. For the most part you can just be, “Oh, sure. I can print that logo.”
And then we’ve got other technologies like DTG or white toner printing, which are digital processes that you don’t have to worry about colors. And the materials you’re going to print on, I don’t want to get too much in the weeds on those things but both of those are reasonably versatile to some degree. But the problem with those is just the time. So white toner printing and DTG printing, depending on what you’re printing, how large it is, et cetera, et cetera, can eat up a decent amount of time to get those printed. And it’s not a crazy amount of time, minutes, let’s just say, a few minutes, which is not that big of a deal, but times 100 is 300 minutes. That’s a decent amount of time to work.
Where on your direct-to-film printer, to do 300, you’re clicking print, it’s going through the process. You’re not having to do all your transfers one at a time at that point in time, you’re just going through the process and you’re doing other things in your shop while it’s printing 300 of these. And then when you’re done, you’re applying them to the shirts, like you said, 7 to 10 seconds at a time, versus other processes with either curing on DTG or on white toner, could be 30 seconds or 45 seconds or a minute or depending on what you’re printing, it’s a little different. So we can just say minimum, half the heat press time, and then you’re not doing a single garment at a time when you’re printing process. You’re printing on a roll. So that’s really cool things comparing to those technologies.
Then there’s screen print transfers, which I’m not going to claim to be a super dark expert on, but I’ve done them before. And I’ll say that when I had done screen print transfers before, this was before or right when I got or just before I got in the industry, I was selling some apparel and I would order screen print transfers. And I remember one thing with these was that if I touched them while they were too hot or tapped them with my heat press again, I could melt off a part of the transfer or damage it. And for one, direct-to-film does not do that. You could tap it with the heat press a bunch of times. If you had a wrinkle in the shirt, you can just iron it. You can just hit it again and it still holds up. Can you tell me a bit more about comparing it to screen print transfers and benefits or not?
Mike Angel:
Yeah. Screen print transfers are going to fall into the same category in terms of minimum requirements. You’re not going to be able to order one screen print transfer. You’ve got to order a batch of them. You’ve got a minimum quantity. And we’re also talking about screen print so there’s color separation.
Marc Vila:
And can you just break that down what that means for just a minute for anybody who might not know?
Mike Angel:
So for every color in a logo or piece of artwork, there needs to be a screen burnt. There needs to be a screen made. And so with that comes a cost factor. The more colors, the more the print’s going to cost you, and the more the minimum requirement is going to be because you have to set up a press to do so. And so it’s cost-prohibitive to be able to, again, sell online and meet the demands of the current customer base. This is what the customer is asking for. The customers these days have budgets or they don’t want to order a couple of hundred to meet a certain price point, or they want the ability to buy a wider variety of products at less quantities. That’s just the way it is across the industry. So that’s a major difference technically. You mentioned some of the difference in terms of technically, mechanically, the heat temperatures are different, the application process is a bit different and not as tolerant and easy as it is with DTF.
Marc Vila:
Right, right. I found the first time I did a direct-to-film transfer, I just like, “Wow, that was easy.” And I’ve done I feel like every type of technology out there. I’ve done just about all of them in the customization industry outside of a few. And maybe just the only stuff I haven’t done is probably laser or something like that, but that’s a machine doing all the work anyway. But anything that involves hands, I’ve pretty much touched all the different types of transfers. And all of them have their little quirks, but the first time I did direct-to-film, I was literally just like, closed it, I opened it, and I was like, “Wow, that was actually fricking super easy.”
And you mentioned the performance fabrics. One of the challenges with doing performance fabrics are they can, I’m just going to use a bunch of words, distort, discolor, burn, change the consistency of the fabric easy. So if you have to do sublimation which is really high temperature, or you have to put it under a heat press for a really long period of time, you can actually end up with a section of your shirt that looks a little bit different. So when you get to bring that temperature all the way down to, what, 270, 280, 290, depending, something within that range for 7, 8, 9 seconds, that really minimizes the chance of that happening.
The way I think about it, at least sometimes, if you had a plastic spatula and you dropped it in a pan for a second and picked it up, nothing’s going to happen to it. It’s designed to be able to handle that heat. You’ll just pick it up, everything’s fine. But if you drop that spatula on the pan and didn’t realize it and you let it sit in there for one minute, you’re going to have a spatula that is either completely melted or at minimum warped in out of shape that you’ll never get back into shape. And I think that’s the difference is that you could put a piece of apparel that is susceptible to heat over time.
And then I was watching something on TV last night, and I’ll finish with this example because I like it. So I was watching MythBusters. You’re familiar with the show?
Mike Angel:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
It was just old season. Of course it hasn’t been on the TV for a while. But they did this myth where it was a video of people shooting shrimp out of an air cannon, and they shot it through breadcrumbs and eggs and fire. And then in the end, the fake internet video, they fried shrimp through a cannon. And so the MythBusters were trying to say can we even cook a shrimp that way? And they set up forges that make swords, I don’t know, five of them, thousands of degrees. And they shot raw shrimp through them, thousands of degrees for, I don’t know, 10, 20 feet. And the shrimp was raw on the other end because heat is okay for a short period of time for just about anything. You can put your hand on a candle.
So I think that’s something to consider. That’s a great thing about DTF is because of the short time and temperature, just the tolerance of apparel is much greater and much less dangerous to messing things up versus sublimation or anything where you have to physically put heat on something for sometimes literally a minute, right?
Mike Angel:
Right, that’s correct.
Marc Vila:
Okay, great. So yeah, that was about 15 minutes on direct-to-film printing. And so what we’ll probably do is maybe even we’ll have this episode in full. I’m hoping what we’ll do is we’ll also for those watching or listening, I am planning on probably cutting it too. So maybe we just have this little 15 minute direct-to-film talk separately. So if you’re watching that and you’re curious about some of the mentions of selling online, then please be sure to go to customapparelstartups.com and look for the episode with Mike Angel where we talk about Shopify because there’s a whole longer section just about that. Just add that note at the end there. But thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it. I’m sure a bunch of people have learned a lot and are curious, and we hope to have you on again to talk about some more topics. Do you have any final thoughts or words or anything you wanted to get out before everyone hit stop?
Mike Angel:
Oh, I just encourage everyone to sell online, to make sure that your business is selling online, and to know that we’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting to help you fast track and get that done and really help your business.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it truly is. We mentioned a lot of reasons why, but I think ultimately the kicker in business is time is the number one, and then that’s everything I think really when it really comes down to it. So if somebody has to, just going through the example for a minute, if somebody’s got to fill out a form and bring it to somebody and that person has to bring it to somebody else who delivers it to you, and then you produce a shirt and you bring it back somewhere else and it goes there, sometimes people just don’t want to do it. Somebody’s just like, “I don’t have time to go to school and fill out the form. I don’t want to have that bad.”
And then also the time for your business that you have to get an email, reply to it, get it again, reply to it, finally get the order, deliver it. Send them a proof, mock-up, like you said, make sure they say yes. And now it’s like a week before the order even got placed and then the person just says, “You know what? I was getting a hat for a baseball game and it’s already passed. Season’s over, we lost. I don’t need it anymore.” So this just allows your customers to directly go. They can order. It’s easy, reduces ton of time for them. The mock-up’s already done. You get the order, it’s got the right logo in it, the right color, everything because the customer’s seen it and approved it, and you can just print it and bring it right to them.
Whether you deliver in person or mail it, that’s up to you. But there is 100% chance that somebody would not have placed an order with you versus them placing it online. So you will get more orders just for being online for the convenience, for those percentage of people who are just be, “Nah, nevermind. It’s too much work.” Because we all do that, right? How many times have you driven down the road and it’s on the left. The store is on the left side of the highway and you’re like, “Nevermind. I don’t really feel… I don’t want to cross traffic that bad to get an extra whatever. I’ll just not get it.” And then you don’t buy it. So it’s true of physical locations and virtual locations.
Well, anyway, thanks again.
Mike Angel:
Yeah, thank you.
Marc Vila:
Everybody out there, appreciate you listening. Please visit coldesi.com to check out everything that we mentioned, all the different pieces of equipment and all that stuff. We have all that stuff available to learn about. And check out ClickWear and the on-demand products if those are right for you too. And go to customapparelstartups.com where you can check out this episode online, and I’ll put in some notes and some links to the various things that we spoke about as well. So thanks, everybody, and have a good business.