TheDynaSmiles.com review for Apliiq ‑ Print On Demand

I've used various print on demand providers over the years and this company is now at the bottom of my list. Actually, they are no longer on my list as the quality of their print work on sweatshirts is so low that I will never use them again. I sell my art designs on Gildan sweatshirts every year for the holidays and this year I decided to go with Apliiq because of their excellent reviews and I wanted to automate this portion of my business. Unfortunately, their print on demand quality, especially on RED GILDAN SWEATSHIRTS, is far from excellent... more subpar and below average. Anything printed white appeared as pink. So my Santa Claus's beard was pink... a pink beard on Santa?! Oh... he had pink eyes too. One person comment how my Santa looked high... that was NOT the look I was going for. I brought this concern to customer service and they pretty much told me that's just the way DTG is, even though I insisted that my other DTG vendors were able to print white on red without issue. That was the moment I should have left but I didn't and decided to give them a chance. So I kept them as my supplier and processed over 300 orders with them between October through mid December 2022. Now I'm dealing with customer complaints daily in my inbox and on social media. Every single last complaint was about the print quality. I understand that some of the fabric will bleed through the ink but the amount of bleed through from their printing process was terrible. I offered red, green, black and dark gray sweatshirts and the print quality on all of them were extremely poor but was most noticeable on the red ones. Some of my customers have now requested refunds just from looking at the shirt right out of the package while others have requested refunds due to the art fading away after one wash. I even had one customer who bought a shirt from me 5 years ago and from this year share photos of how the shirt from this year has faded. The 5 year old shirt looks like it was the one just bought. In addition to the terrible print quality, they ran out of stock on the blanks I needed the most and didn't alert me until well after that fact. This caused me to scramble to find a replacement vendor AND to cancel orders. All in all, I had 22 order cancellations due to them being out of stock. Other issues were present but were most likely due to the rush of the season. Still, having customers request refunds and shame me on social media all because of Apliiq's poor print quality has put a stain on my business. My customers don't know who Apliiq is so I'm the one dealing with the fallout. Lastly, their online portal is outdated and does not do a good job of keeping track of the nuances with each order. If you're only using Apliiq to print your t-shirts you may fair better than me. However, if you're using them to print on sweatshirts for your apparel business... RUN!!! Shout out to their customer service rep KIM who was the most helpful even though I was not happy with all of the headaches. The one star is for her.