Hi i'm tom
Today we are going to be taking a look at Gelato Print on demand. Gelato advertise themselves
as a global print on demand supply company. They have 34 locations around the world, they
mostly seem to be in Europe and from what I can see there's only around 9 of the 34
locations that print on clothing. What makes them different to Printify is that they don't
allow you to select which print locations you use, everything is done automatically.
Its not something you even need to think about.
Now Gelato offer a lot more than just clothing, I belive they first started out print posters
and have expanded into other products, which now includes clothing and thats what we will
be focusing on today.
A little disclaimer before we start the review, I'm based in the UK so my sample shirts will
be from their UK location and therefore only a small representation of their entire network.
However I'm assuming that Gelato have some form of standard that their print locations
work towards meaning that there shouldn't be too much variation between the print locations.
I'm gonna discuss the platform first, so if you're here just to see the print quality,
skip ahead to TIME.
I can't remember the exact timings, I think it was about a year or so ago, when Gelato
first started printing on clothing. I was invited to beta test the platform and product
offerings. Now of course, Gelato were new to clothing and clearly stated that the service
was in beta. Unfortunately I found the service then to be awful, I think I placed maybe about
10 test orders and most of them just never turned up. Credit to Gelato, the customer
service was (and still is) great, they did refund every order, but it didn't leave me
wanting to use them for my business. Not until they had all the issues sorted out anyway.
Fast forward about half a year and I decided to try them out again, to see if these issues
had been ironed out and it does seem like they've sorted most of these issues out, lets
get into the details.
Gelato have a very easy to use web app, pretty similar to Printify or Printful if you've
used those before. Offers all the usual marketplace connections, Shopify, Etsy, Woocommerce ect..
and everything you've expect from a POD supplier. An easy to use order management page, a mockup/product
creation flow. I don't really have any complaints with their website. I think its pretty simple
and easy to use.
If you've got a store connected then all your orders with connected products get automatically
imported, but you can also place manual orders if that suites your business better.
I'm not gonna go through everything they offer because they offer a lot, but I can give you
a quick overview. So using Gelato you'll be able to sell Clothing, Wall Art, Mugs, Photobooks,
Greeting cards, Calendars and general stationary. Regarding clothing, since this is what we're
focusing on today. The cheapest shirt they offer is around $8 and this is the Gildan
Softstyle shirt. The Bella Canvas 3001 shirt, which is the shirt I have here, is a little
more expensive being just under $11. Now compared to Printify where the same shirt would cost
you a tad over $8, gelato does seems to be slightly more expensive and this goes for
most of their products. However you are getting easy global fulfillment, so if this is important
for you, I think it might be worth the higher product costs.
While we're on the matter of pricing, I should mention one of Gelatos biggest downsides and
that is how they manage tax. Unless you're registered with all the US states and have
Resale Certificates, or EU/UK VAT numbers, then you will be charged sales tax or VAT
on all your orders. I say this is a negative, not because I think you should avoid paying
tax, but because it ends up with you getting doubled taxed. For example with Etsy, they
charge your customer sales tax and remit it automatically for you. Then when Printify
imports this order, it knows that sales tax has already been paid and doesn't then charge
you any tax. Whereas with Gelato, your customer pays the sales tax on Etsy, then you also
get charged sales tax on the order by Gelato. Which then eats into your profit margins.
I really wish they would handle it the way Printify does.
So, the shirts I ordered cost me $10.95 each with shipping coming to about $5. Just for
comparison the same shirts ordered from Monster Digital on Printify cost $8.05 with shipping
being $14. So this shows one advantage to global fulfillment. Greatly reduced shipping
costs and shipping time for you customers.
If we take a look at some example profit margins. With Gelato, if you sell a shirt for $23 to
someone in the US with free shipping, which is what I do. Then this would come to about
$14.38 with the bella canvas 3001 tee and shipping cost, leaving you with $8.62 profit.
Of course this doesn't take into account sales taxes or any marketplace fees.
Speaking of marketplace fees, I have created a Etsy Profit calculator on my site. Which
is completely free to use and allows you to estimate your profit for sales on Etsy more
accurately. Let me show you an example now. Lets take the Gildan Softsyle Shirt this time,
plus US shipping comes to a total of about $11.59. If we sell that on Etsy for $23.99 with
free shipping that gives us a profit, after Etsy fees of about $9. Link is in the description
if you're interested in using this calculator yourself.
Lets now go over the processing and shipping times. I placed my order on 1st of September
- yes I'm very late making this review! and my order was shipped on the 8th, so they definitely
don't have the fastest processing times. However delivery of my order only took 1 day, which
is insanely good. For what you lose with their processing times you defiantly make up with
the fast shipping times.
Just a note on their processing times, I have been using Gelato for the orders I get from
my EU customers and the processing time does vary quite a bit. For example orders placed
with a German address seems to ship out in a day or two. So there are defiantly some
differences with their print locations.
When the order did arrive, I was very glad to see that it was packaged in a paper bag,
I'm hoping all their print
locations use the same packaging.
Okay lets move onto arguably the most important part, the actual print quality.
The first thing I like to compare is how the print compares to the mockup the site, and
as you can see, it does seems to match pretty well. I do think they've been printed slightly
higher up the shirt than what the mockup shows you, but this isn't that noticeable. The print
size Gelato use is most similar to SwiftPOD on Printify, about 3700px x 4900px
So it is on the smaller side, but will work fine for most people.
Starting with the white shirt, everything has printed well. Nothing sticks out as being
bad or low quality. But it is noticeably less saturated than I'm used to, however this might
just be because I have the same design printed by other companies to directly compare it
to. Its sort of inbetween SwiftPOD and Monster digital in terms of saturation. If I was a
customer and had just received this shirt, I don't think I would notice this at all.
If we look at the dark print, this has printed mostly fine. It's only when you get close
up that you can see the white fabric showing through slightly. But this isn't noticeable
from a short distance away.
Looking at the white photo, again this has printed fine. All the detail from the original
photo is visible, even right down to the subtle shadows. I don't really have anything negative
to say, its a good print from my point of view!
Moving on to the alignment icons, you can see that everything has printed mostly well
and looks sharp enough. Everything does have a very slight blur to it, however this is
only noticeable on the text, but even then it's not that big of a deal until you get
down to the smallest text size, which you probably won't have in your designs anyway.
It does appear that they had some issues printing the thinest lines though, so something to
keep in mind if your designs are really detailed and contain fine lines.
Looking at the colors, everything looks accurate. However I can see that in the gradient that
some colors have been missed out. This is especially noticeable on the purple to blue
to green section, it seems that the in-between colors just haven't been printed. Maybe their
printers only has limited color range, I'm not sure.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with this print. There's nothing bad about it, and I'd feel
comfortable selling this quality to customers.
Moving on to the black shirt now. At first glance everything has printed well and nothing
jumps out as bad, just like with the white shirt. However on closer inspection, I can
see a few issues. But most of them are the same issues as with the white shirt.
Looking at the white print, while it is good overall I can see that the white is a little
patchy and a little chunky up close. However, I will say that this isn't a Gelato only problem,
this is just how DTG printing looks on dark fabrics. Looking at the different shades of
white, some people swear that using an off white results in a better print. However I'm
just not seeing that, every shade of white has just printed out white and they're all
the same quality.
I'm not gonna waste your time and go over everything again as the print quality is pretty
similar to the white shirt, so I'll give you a quick overview. The dark photo has printed
perfect. no complaints here. The white photo has printed well, just suffers with the black
fabric showing through a bit.
Looking at the alignments icons, everything has printed well even the thinest lines, a
contrast with the white shirt. However the black shirt does suffer from alignment issues,
but only slightly. As you can see here with the C and M squares are further down then
they should be revealing the white undercoat. This is the same with the gradient strip.
Speaking of the gradient strip, this also suffers the same issue as the white shirt,
with it seemingly missing out some colors. Overall none of these issues are massive,
and I think most customers wouldn't even notice these issues anyway.
After every review I like to give the shirts a wash, just to see how the print holds up.
And I'm happy to say that the prints look exactly the same as when they went in. Obviously
this is only one wash, but I will continue washing these shirts and report back in the
future.
Overall I've been pretty happy with Gelato, their service is pretty good. And a massive
improvement from when the apparel service was in beta. The website is easy to use and
they offer a large range of items for you to sell with the added advantage of having
global fulfillment.
I'm pretty happy with their print quality also, I've been using them for my EU customers
for a good 6 months now, it's not all perfect as I have had a few issues but they were all
quickly fixed by their customer service people.
I can happily recommend Gelato, even if they are a little more expensive then Printify.
The advantage of easy global fulfillment is worth the extra cost in my eyes.
Thank you for watching, if you want to learn more about print on demand, and selling online
please consider subscribing! see you next time.