Of all the Print on Demand shops I have, Threadless is the one I more often than not forget to mention.
It's also one of the big one that I never ordered from until recently, but now that I have, I can give you all my Threadless shopping review. From ordering to shipping to reviewing the print quality.
I placed my initial order late April using one of the vouchers they give to artists from time to time to buy samples. That particular one was a 30$ voucher and I decided to put it toward getting myself a t-shirt since it's their most popular item. I went with my retro surfboard design on an extra soft t-shirt and went with a 2XL size so I could have a loose fit. The t-shirt at retail price is 24.95$ but because I was buying from my own shop from my artist account, they deducted my royalty from that price which comes at about 4$ and then 11$ were added for International shipping. Having me pay 1$ out of pocket. I usually take advantage of promotions and discounts to buy my products from PoD sites because shipping to India costs a bomb, and then there is always the threat of having to pay custom duty hanging in the balance.
Once my order was placed I got told that it would take 3-4 weeks for my t-shirt to be delivered, so the long wait began. In general all the orders I placed with international partners in the past took 10-15 days so I did expect it to reach during that time frame. Threadless uses DHL to send their orders to the last border point within the US and then the regular postal network takes over. Nothing unusual there, most PoD tend to do it and I was fully expecting India Post to do the last leg of the delivery. Things unfortunately did take a different turn when at the 3 weeks mark the parcel tracking said "reached destination country" but didn't specify where in India. I waited an additional week with still no update, at which point I contacted Threadless for help. They were very quick to reply and asked me to wait for the 5 weeks mark before letting them know if it had been delivered. With that deadline passed and still no t-shirt, I contacted them again and they immediately initiated a replacement, which is their standard policy for lost or damaged orders (free of cost might I add). And the new t-shirt went into production to be shipped on June 4th. The weeks passed, and a few days before I was set to take a vacation with my family around June 20th, the tracking placed my order in Indonesia which seemed odd because I never got a country update with the first parcel, but in the face of me about to take off for a holiday I didn't get into it further and made a mental note to check upon my return. It's by July 6th that my order finally reached me with a stamp saying "wrongly delivered to Indonesia" or something along those lines. The big bonus is I didn't have to pay any custom duty. Normally parcels originating from the US do but this one didn't. No idea if it was because it came in via Indonesia or not. They didn't even open the parcel to check what was in it. At this point it's entirely possible that the international mail dispatch center tossed it into an Indonesia bound bag rather than an India bound one. Probably a case of human error at this point, most likely from the US postal services who took over by that point. It was a bit uncanny to have a delivery mishap twice for the same order though. The t-shirt was exactly what I was expecting in term of quality, the fabric is soft, the cut is good and it is indeed the loose fit I was expecting. The print is good and the color matching perfect, what I get on my t-shirt is what I also see on my screen, down to the tiny details. The reason I didn't write this Threadless shopping review sooner was that I wanted to see how the t-shirt fared after a few washes. I'm proud to announce that said t-shirt has been through multiple washes and hasn't faded or lost shape, the print is still as good as new on it which is a huge plus point in terms of quality. All in all and in spite of the rather funky delivery, it's one place I would be willing to order t-shirt again from in the future.
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