Creating Customized T-shirts And Accessories - A New Experience In The Indian Market Place

The Indian apparel marketplace for t-shirts is huge (valued at INR 12500 Million as per IMAGES-KSA Technopak survey for the year 2001-02, probably close to INR 20000 Million today!) and has been so far dominated by ready-mades.
This means that, although a customer has a huge variety of t-shirts to choose from, she still could not get that particular design she wanted or that particular slogan she wanted if it was not in stock. This provides an opportunity for offering made-to-order products to individual customers based on their own designs, delivered quickly and with no minimum order quantity restrictions!



The concept of Customized T-shirts
A blank t-shirt with a specific, customer provided artwork or photo printed on it is generally referred to as a Customized T-shirt. The blank t-shirt can be chosen by the customer as per color, type, other requirements and quality considerations and the printing process can vary depending on the numbers required.
The popular printing processes include screen printing for large batch sizes and heat transfer or direct to garment printing for smaller batch sizes. While the concept of customized printing on t-shirts for individuals is not new even in India, it has been largely restricted to a few small players doing this in malls and some photography shops having a few standard templates to plug in photos.

For large corporate buyers with large order sizes, there are plenty of options but individuals looking at 1 or 2 T-shirts to express their passions have not had much to choose from. An easily accessible place, physical or online, where individual customers can try out their own designs (not just photos) and see what it looks like before deciding to buy it will be of immense help and this is where a site with an easy to use design creation application will have a role to play.

Creating a customized T-shirt
The design (also called artwork) is the heart of any customized t-shirt. While blank t-shirts are pretty standard, the quality and creativity of the artwork sets apart great t-shirts from ordinary ones. Depending on skill levels, an individual can design the artwork using software like Adobe Photoshop and then provide this to the manufacturer who will reproduce this on a t-shirt.

Alternatively, for ease of use, there are design interfaces offered by some websites that can be used to arrange, resize, edit or reshape different images on a t-shirt. Whatever the method used to make the artwork, the following basic guidelines will ensure that it looks good when printed on a t-shirt:

* Texts such as slogans, names etc can be typed in one or many lines but ensure that the text is not too crowded. The size of the letters should be a minimum of 1 inch to ensure good readability on a t-shirt.
* Ideal text length should not be more than 4 words of average length in a line and not more than 4 lines in the 10 inch by 10 inch print area. This will ensure a text size of about 1.5 inches which is comfortable for reading from a few feet distance.

* Ensure that the quality of the artwork is excellent (300 dpi) as this will ensure high quality reproduction. Define a print area of reasonable size; a t-shirt covered entirely in prints may not be ideal. Optimum print area would be about 10 inch by 10 inch maximum on the body of the t-shirt.

* High quality (300 DPI) photos, caricatures, cartoons, etc are great for printing. Lower DPIs can be used but the quality will be compromised a little bit.

Other customizable products
Apart from T-shirts, products like Ceramic coffee mugs and beer mugs, Mouse pads, Ceramic wall tiles and Coasters can be customized with whatever artwork an individual wants. The print area available for printing will vary based on the product that is used but in general, good quality printing can be carried out if the artwork is of good quality.

Conclusion
Evolving consumer preference and high level of competition is driving the world of manufacturing towards mass customization. T-shirts are no different and by their very nature, lend themselves to being a preferred means of expression for the passionate individual.

As the customization process is made user-friendly and the cost made economical, customized t-shirt and other accessories market is expected to grow rapidly. While the online market place in India is presently small, the entry of many new players providing quality products is expected to contribute to explosive growth in the coming years.

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