Product creation. Ways to automate it a bit?

Hi team,

It is often the case that for every graphic design we have to create dozens of different products (different apparel type, different apparel colors, and different per-layer colors for the design to fit the color of the apparel). This is a very time consuming task and using the API to do this is extremely difficult, due to the complexity of creating products, positioning designs, etc.

It would be absolutely awesome if we had a way to specify some kind of templates that could take the items in a particular Topic/Category and then copy the product replacing the design, and using the original layer colors but for the new design. Ideally, for this last part, we’d have a way to map layers if they are not in the same exact order on the new design).

Another option would be to generate a bunch of things automatically and then have a way to just go through the list and check a checkbox for the items that we’d like to keep. The current automatic product display can’t be controlled by partners, and that rarely fits the product lines that we choose for our designs.

In general, any improvements to the way products are created manually, would be of great help.

Also, it is often the case when we need to repeat the same process for a US shop and for a EU shop. It would be great to have a way to import items from one shop into another, and then have some logic to automatically turn, let’s say, American Apparel items from the US one, into Organic T-shirts on the EU.

Thanks!

Hi @zerodayclothing,

have you logged in today? Maybe you find something along the lines of what you’re looking for :wink: ?!

Hmm. Could you please elaborate a bit more? I’ve just checked and I still see the same product designer.

Unfortunately, this is not easy because of many reasons.

First of all: Legal issues. Your European account is based on German law (as our headquarters are located in Germany), your US account on US law. So we can’t just let things be automatically imported from one to the other. Also, the European copyright is wayyy stricter than the US one.

Secondly: There’s different apparel (as you pointed out) on the two platforms (for target market reasons). A logic like transferring an AA item from US to an organic one in EU is a complicated thing to do, since we need to import the design first (legal issue again) and build a mapping between the two different apparel assortments. The print areas might be different, which would lead to the items not being a 100% match, maybe not even a 90% match. Which would lead to results not being very satisfying…

Third reason: Complexity. Trying to automate things that include a lot of variables (design, apparel, meta data of the design, prices…) is a rather complex task. And - as stated before - the results might not even be satisfying.

We get the idea and we know about the current pain to do everything twice per platform. However, there are issues we need to sort out first (see reason one and two) and we need to prioritize this ‘feature’ against allllllllll the other improvements and strategic features we have in our backlog.

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Hey @zerodayclothing,

also please check out https://www.spreadshirt.com/blog/2018/09/11/design-products-faster-with-templates/ to learn about todays release that will hopefully help you.

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Ahhh… You’re using the legacy product :confused: Sorry. Then of course it’s even more work.

Are you using the old or the new partner area?

LOVE the templates! Thank the team for this wonderful feature! SS is quickly becoming my favorite POD!

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We’re here to please, here to please :wink:

As this #AMA topic is solved, I’m closing this :slight_smile: