Zazzle, the site that lets you custom-design and sell everything from T-shirts and hoodies to sneakers and skateboards, has launched a new feature that may well put it leagues ahead of its competitors: embroidery. And while the prospect of having an embroidered shirt may not sound appealing at first (I’ve always associated embroidery with tacky nametags emblazoned on polo shirts), Zazzle’s new feature is very impressive and will likely draw a large number of new customers.
In the past, most custom shirt designs from Zazzle and its competitors have used flat prints that are essentially glued on top of the fabric (these are higher quality than the iron-on products you’ll find in stores, but look similar). These look fine enough on T-shirts, but tend to look much cheaper (and tackier, depending on the item of clothing) than designs that are actually sewn into the fabric, and don’t hold up as well to multiple washings. Now, Zazzle’s new embroidery option is giving users the chance to have their designs sewn into their clothes, resulting in items that are much better looking and durable.
The process for producing an embroidered item is a bit more involved than for a standard Zazzle order. After selecting a suitable (non-copyrighted) logo or design, users upload their image to Zazzle and choose how large they’d like it to appear on their pieces of clothing. Zazzle then has to “digitize” this image – converting it into a format that is compatible with their automated sewing machines. To do this Zazzle uses a computerized system that does around 50-70% of the work, and then passes the files on to a large team of human workers who manually ensure that every design accurately reflects the image that was uploaded. Prices to have an image digitized vary depending on the number of stitches required (average prices seem to be around $10-$20), and the process takes 24-48 hours. But you only need to do this once for each image – once you’ve got your digitized file, you can apply the same stitching to any item of clothing on Zazzle without having to go through the process again.
The digitization process is simple for the user (you just upload the image), but Zazzle’s Bobby and Jeff Beaver say that the technology behind it is very complex – a team of Zazzle engineers has been working on it for over two years (surprisingly enough, this custom clothing company has a heavy focus on technology, with around 30-40 engineers). The difficulty associated with the embroidery technology ensures that it will be hard to replicate by competitors, and the team has also protected its IP where appropriate. Each image has to be converted to an instruction set of stitches, maintaining the complexity of the original design while still restricting the final output to fall within the physical limitations of the sewing machines.
To ensure that the customer will be satisfied with the final product, Zazzle has built what amounts to a sewing machine emulator – you can watch a clip of how the stitching will be done in the machine, and see exactly what the final product will look like down to each individual thread. These movies are a great safeguard for customer satisfaction, but they’re also really cool – I never thought I’d find myself watching a sewing video for fun (you can see a sample movie above).
As with other Zazzle items, users will be able to sell their creations on the Zazzle marketplace. The Beavers say that besides their mainstream customers, this option will give professional embroiderers a place to showcase their wares, explaining that they haven’t really had a place to do so online.
Zazzle’s embroidery option is likely to be a big seller, especially as the holiday season approaches – a custom embroidered jacket or shirt makes for a great gift. The new technology also helps separate Zazzle from competitors like CafePress (which only does pseudo-embroidery using sew-on patches).
Fantastic! Kudos to Zazzle.
Prep Sportswear, an on-demand printing platform, servicing the sports marketplace launched this service over three years ago.
Or better yet, http://www.bluecotton.com has been doing for a long time and they are name people actually know in the “custom shirts” business.
and we did it years before either of you….with patent pending.
corporatecasuals.com
oh and…it appears they just bought this from Melco. why else would there be “Melco Block” as a text option
Went to Zazzle site to check it out. Saw the embroidery on the homepage.
http://www.zazz...stom/embroidery
Goes to custom 404 error page now and embroidery is gone from homepage a moment later.
Not quite ready to launch?
awesome… DIY lacoste, here i come!
Yeah, but you can’t use copyrighted images. You could always draw your own alligator though.
Fantastic .. was wondering how much time it will take to replicate this.
Have you checked the market for custom embroidery? It’s oversaturated, and there are not too many buyers.
Let’s see how Zazzle will do, cause I had this thought before and researched it quite a bit.
Just a hint: no matter how simple the embroidery is, a lot of work has to be done before you get it on fabric. Unless Zazzle has its sewing business in China or other cheap-labor country, they will not do well…
Hey,
I run an embroidery unit in India. We could work out a way to get the cost benefits that India has to offer your way. Please get in touch with me if this is of interest.
Regards,
Hi,
I would like to talk to you about those costs of embroidering. Please contact me.
Regards,
Needs Jeans support. Embroidered Jeans are the best.
fac that this was posted on techcrunch and the fact that this actually is a tech business goes to prove Judy Estrin’s comments about challenges to innovation in silicon valley.
I’m one of those philistines who doesn’t know what you’re talking about already. Care to cite?
I’m ready to do this RFN! Appears there’s no link on their homepage for the embroidery feature though.
Yeah good news for fashion fans like us.
http://www.iboozi.com
that’s quite a lot of image analysis process. awesome. I really like the tshirts I printed there. colors were good and dyeing was durable.
Finally! Been waiting for one of these companies to do this. Great innovative minds at work! Cool.
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Great site, will have to check this out and might even buy a t-shirt with my blog logo on! http://www.genxor.com
It looks like Zazzle has a great product, but I don’t think the final statement about CafePress is correct. CafePress added Infinistitch to their store recently – which also sews the design directly onto the product instead of being a sewn on patch as described in the post. It does look like the resolution on Zazzle’s new tech is better and I am planning on experimenting with both. Full disclosure – I currently have several stores on Cafepress.
From what I’ve been told Infinistich isn’t really embroidery.
Everybody should check out the presentation by Zazzle’s founders at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar on Stanford’s site. They are pretty creative individuals. Also check this out… wwwRawHideNation.com. What do you think?
What’s next, are you gonna cover quilting and crocheting? LOL… Ridiculous.
Guys, how much did KPCB pay for this post?
When I was in high school (around 1990) I had a screen printing business, and it used to cost $150 to digitize an image for embroidery, so $10-$20 dollars for the same work is an incredible drop in price. Now, they used to charge per thousand stitches( eg. $1-2 per thousand stitches ) so I’m curious as to the pricing model that Zazzle is using. Embroidery machines used to cost an arm and a leg, at least to a 15yr old kid, so embroidery online, at this price point, is a significant development for the retail garment imprinting business.
Queensboro has been doing this already for a long time and their stuff is great quality. You can customize the colors in your logo to fit the article of clothing/color too. And they have GREAT sales too (been buying from them consistnently for the past 2.5 years).
Wearport.com has been providing custom embroidery solutions online for several months. We can do as few as 6 shirt for embroidery or 12 shirts for screen print. Our decoration partners can scale to provide several thousand shirts quickly. Our partner worked through the night printing the Phillies World Series shirts.
While showing the stitching online is cool, you should look at the quality of the product and the service. Price is also very important. Larger organizations can get significant discounts on blank apparel.
Steve,
Although you’re correct in the bulk orders, Zazzle isn’t really trying to reach the company that needs 150 polos with their company logo on it. They’re trying to reach that company’s employee who just wants one for himself.
KB
One hast to acknowledge the distribution and fulfillment capabilities of Zazzle; and, they have a great partnership with myspace which should help with musician merchandising.
Always great comments antje, even if most skip over them.
Proper Cloth takes it even further, letting you pick the fabric and shape of the garment…. And unlike Zazzle, the website works in Firefox!
So many haters. Of course this is noteworthy technology. All you need to do to confirm that is to try giving a random jpeg to a custom embroidery shop and ask how much it will cost to turn it into something that will actually work.
I also think custom skateboards and shoes are way cool even if I would fall on my face just trying to stand on one of the boards.
In a world where everyone get excited about companies that tell you what your friends had for dinner last night, it is refreshing to see some new stuff that I can actually understand.
I also agree with the earlier poster that jeans would rock.
talk about old in the tooth or what ?
Sites like Zazzle and Redbubble etc are cool. Although I would like to see them specifically target user generated merchandising for existing businesses.
At clivir.com we didn’t want to create our own merchandise so we have opened it up for members to use these types of sites to create our merchandise. They can then create what they want, sell to members and keep the profits.
There are plenty of web communities that don’t have their own merchandise so why not leave it to your members to profit to spread the word via their created tshirts and skateboards.
Zazzle continues to hit on all cylinders. I’ve loved their stamps, tshirts, and posters. If they ever launch a mass market velvet painting service… just imagine the possibilities.
Hey Custom Dress Shirts, Zazzle works great in Firefox. Not sure what you’re talking about.
I’m totally stoked about embroidery!
Congratulations Zazzle. I find it surprising that people question what a tremendous technical achievement this is. To be able to truly produce one-off high quality products at scale is a technology problem more than anything else. Zazzle has delivered and continues to deliver many times over. Way to go guys!
Josh,
I guess I’m missing the “tremendous technical achievement.” Please explain. Having 30-40 engineers build technology to create a video of embroidery stitching is VERY cool, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the core service offering.
I also question Zazzle’s capability to scale. I priced 500 hats with a simple text embroidery on Zazzle. They came out to ~$17/hat. On Wearport a complex logo on 500 hats came out to $8/hat.
Again, I don’t question Zazzle’s engineering prowess. The problem is that many web sites are (once again) showing really cool engineering over providing customers with a strong product offering.
Steve
Steve – I think the difference is that if you just want one hat with text or using any of the available items in their marketplace it also will cost you ~$20 and arrive in the same week. While I agree that bulk embroidery has been around and has been cost-effective for a long time, doing this on a pure one-off basis is normally cost-prohibitive. Ask any silk-screener or embroiderer. What Zazzle has done is take those processes to a point where you can get one item, completely customized, at a retail-level cost. That’s much harder than you may think, and meets a different market than the bulk “500 hat” order you reference. And sure, the whiz-bang preview doesn’t hurt either.
Although it’s cool to see Zazzle doing this (I buy tons of t-shirts from Zazzle for personal use, events, employee gifts etc.) – I think Threadsmith has a better offering. By “one-off” I really need “ONE-off”, so paying a per-stitch fee to convert a design is a deal breaker. You’re looking at $38 for a shirt vs. $20. Plus Threadsmith has button-down shirts… I’m too fat for a polo.
If anything, this seems to point to Zazzle’s continued LACK OF FOCUS. Were people really beating down the doors at their website saying: if you add embroidery, we’ll spend 20% more on your site? no they were not.
zazzle is ten gasping start ups in one rather than one successful, cohesive company like cafepress.com. it’s all about the management and the focus.
zazzle is a bunch of rich kids with dad’s friend’s money, spending it like a bunch of rich kids.
anyone who has met the CP management team AND the zazzle management “team” knows this.
You should really check out the real market leader here, Jason. Threadsmith, now in beta at http://www.threadsmith.com , has automated 100% of the logo conversion process, not a mere 50-70%. By taking all of the people out of the process, rather than Zazzle and other’s manual, 24-48 hr image process turnaround, Threadsmith does it in real time, at zero cost, and enables producing finished products on the same day. In the time it takes Zazzle to complete your image processing, Threadsmith can have a finished product at your doorstep! And where a one-off, custom polo shirt at Zazzle will cost $50-$100 depending on the artwork, Threadsmith uses its technology advantage to offer the same shirt for less than $20. This is groundbreaking stuff, and thoroughly patented. Check it out!
None of the examples on threadsmith are as impressive as the Zazzle examples which look pretty complicated. If they are capable of it, they aren’t doing a very good job of showing it off. The pages I saw were very simple logos
Danny, while I haven’t met the management at Cafe Press, I have gotten to know the management at Zazzle and I am very impressed with them. They are smart from a technical & business perspective, hard working, and focused. I work with numerous early stage companies, and Zazzle not only has high quality people across their organization, they are my favorite business model. In my experience, your characterization is off the mark.
>> Danny wrote: “zazzle is a bunch of rich kids with dad’s friend’s money, spending it like a bunch of rich kids.”
I think cafepress and zazzle both have great software and designs. I wish that our custom t shirt software at http://www.inkimprints.com, would be capable of having their system.
I think it is a great idea to do it the Zazzle way, but isn’t it a novelty?