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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   722 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 20, 2026

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How much quality control do you do on the items that the POD platforms are selling? Have there been any that you rejected for being too poorly made regardless of how good the rest of their platform might be?

Quality control is difficult because every platform sources from multiple different suppliers/manufacturers. And then there is always liability for errors with the individuals working at the factory that day. Redbubble for example offers like a hundred different products, I have only sampled a tiny fraction of those. On most platforms if the customer is unhappy with the quality they can get a refund or return and I don't have to take care of their returns which is good for me as a designer.

There are certain categories where I can't find any good quality sources at all for, for example towels. No one prints on cotton towels for POD, they are all really terrible polyester microfiber items that the customer also hates. This goes for everything from wash cloth sizes to beach towels.

No one prints on cotton towels for POD, they are all really terrible polyester microfiber items that the customer also hates.

Polyester's so much more friendly with sublimation, and screen-printing so hard to do on small (and semi-automated) orders, that it's hard to really serve this section. If you were doing them in-house, a DTG printer's surprisingly cheap in those formats and pretty capable for cotton terrycloth, but I dunno of any vendor doing that as a POD service.

Yup... I don't want to specify my sources but there are a handful of Chinese suppliers (some of them have factories in the US) that do 1 MOQ POD items on a wide range of materials, any of them surely can do cotton terry DTG right now but they all only offer the polyester microfiber. I think it's a cultural difference (Chinese suppliers just want to use the cheapest possible material in any situation, unless their customer wants to foot the bill. My brother works in semi high end food chains and the Chinese won't buy from him because they want the cheapest possible produce, same mentality). Non Chinese suppliers are always more expensive and less efficient to work with and especially the past 2 years Chinese are undercutting the domestic suppliers massively to the point that I've switched anything I can to a Chinese supplier and make like 3x profits in some cases vs american suppliers

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