The clothing industry's largest waste problem is making things nobody buys. Print-on-demand removes that specific problem. It does not make a t-shirt free of cost to the world, and we would rather say so than sell you a leaf icon.
A conventional run is a bet placed months in advance. Everything left over at the end of it was made for nobody in particular. Made-to-order removes the bet. It does not remove the shipping, the packaging or the cotton.
Three of those four steps are a forecast. The waste is what the forecast got wrong.
There is no step in which something is made for nobody. That is the entire environmental argument, and it stops there.
Every piece is printed after someone orders it. There is no season's stock to clear, no unsold run to shift at a discount, and no warehouse holding inventory that may never sell. This is the whole reason the shop is built this way.
The only line on this page that needs no caveat.
Printify routes an order to a print provider close to the delivery address where one is available. A parcel that crosses one border instead of three is a shorter journey, and shorter journeys are most of what we can actually influence.
Which provider takes a given order depends on the item and where you are.
Garments are printed with water-based inks. The blanks themselves, and whatever certifications they hold, come from the manufacturer — we list what the manufacturer states on each product page rather than restating it as our own.
No certification named on a product page belongs to us.
Everything below is a gap. We would rather print the gaps than a badge we cannot evidence for a single order.
We do not offset shipping emissions, and we are not going to describe the shop as carbon neutral. Buying a certificate would not change what the parcel does on its way to you.
Whatever your order arrives in is the print provider's, and it varies by provider. We do not currently control it, so we will not describe it as a choice we made.
Each item was made for one order, so a returned piece has no shelf to go back to. This is the real cost of made-to-order, and it is why the size guide matters more here than in a normal shop.
Check the size guide first →TO CONFIRM: packaging materials per print provider, and whether a take-back or recycling route exists for worn-out items
If a line on this page stops being true, it comes off the page. Nothing here is meant to survive a change in how the shop actually works.
