LARSOC REPUBLIC review for Fuel: Print on Demand

Feb. 27, 2023

FUEL failed to meet our high professional standards and is no longer our exclusive vendor for Fitted Crew T-shirts, 50/50 Hoodies, and 15 oz Mugs. This POD vendor is not worth the effort for the following verifiable reasons: Their quality control department has been found lacking, their support team inept, and their app full of fatal flaws that will make your business fail. I do not recommend FUEL as a business partner in the POD market. 1) T-Shirts and Hoodies were far too often shipped with misprints, wrong prints, missing prints, wrong product blanks, and wrong product sizes. Customers would get the wrong size print other than what was mocked up. 13" large on the back would be printed 11.5" instead to save ink. Wrong print on the back with the correct print on the front. Inconsistency in specific print location as per the mockup generator. Gildan blanks swapped out for Jerzees blanks without communication or permission or a refund for the difference in blank price. Mugs arrived broken as they were missing protective packaging or were shipped using inferior packaging materials. 2) Fuel would print shipping labels within two days, but production would occur 5-7 days after the order was marked fulfilled - when contacting the shipping agent, USPS/UPS would state they did not have the package in their possession. Fuel also never allowed for size changes when a customer ordered the wrong size as they've already printed the shipping label. Orders couldn't be canceled or changed as a result. 3) Their mockup generator would have color selections for products they did not have in stock or keep stock on. Production times would become up to 12 business days on certain colors and sizes as they waited for blanks to arrive. They would print a shipping label to maintain their production time claim even though their facility still wouldn't have any blanks in stock at any of their printing facilities. 3) Fuel support staff would only politely respond with auto-generated replies - "I'm sorry...." They often ignored requests or questions and I'd have to ask again when looking for order updates on messed up orders or orders that had too long of a production time. These things happened far too many times and at my expense. My profit margins verifiably decreased 30% after switching to FUEL. The only thing about doing business with them was their low prices - of which they sneakily increased their shipping fees to increase their profit during COVID-19. They have two packages sent instead of one when customers ordered a T-shirt & a Hoodie combo and claim they were produced at different facilities. (not good for the environment or for our budget). When asked to disclose their facility location as proof, they ignored all requests. I do not believe their print facilities are located in the continental United States as result. For all of these verifiable reasons, I'm cutting my loss and moving on to a new POD vendor to further grow my graphic design business.