A customer came in thursday to pick up her order. When she looked at the shirts she was disappointed. She said the print was supposed to be bigger. I grabbed her file and pulled out the artwork she signed for approval. Asked her if this is not what she approved. She said yes but she thought it was going to be different. I asked what were you expecting and her reply was, the print should be bigger. I explained to her that we scaled the artwork up to fit the shirt (final art was 13" x 8"). She still felt that the print would be taller. Trying to explain to her that when we scaled the art that if we made it taller it would stretch the art and it would not look right. Still unhappy I asked her what would you like for me to do? I could not turn around a new order in the time she needed it so I dropped the printing charges ($230). She left, still unhappy with her shirts. Now the thing is we covered our bases, sign art that matched her shirt to a "T". She approved the art but expected something different than what she signed. I gave her a large discount and she was still unhappy.
So friday comes along and I get a phone call from her (I thinking what now?). She said she got the shirts home and everyone else loved the shirts and she was going to bring the $230 back because she was wrong, and it was the right thing to do. Go figure. Just have to love the public. By the way this is the second customer I have had like this in a month. The other one want me to print basically and all over print when his signed art work said 13"x15". He was unhappy so we gave him the shirts and asked him not to ever come back. He did not understand why we were doing this and we told him that no matter what we did he always complained about our work and we were tired of trying to please him. (this was not our first encounter with him and we are not his first printer)
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Mike
If you dig ditches be the best ditch digger you can be.
Happens at least once a week. I don't make people sign artwork, but I do ask for a go ahead through an email proof. What I've found is that people dont have a clue about measurements and they don't realize that a 8x11 piece of white paper or a computer screen viewed at 72dpi is not the same as a printed shirt.
The only sure way to get people exactly what they want is to do samples- which is nearly impossible for a screenprinter.
A customer came in thursday to pick up her order. When she looked at the shirts she was disappointed. She said the print was supposed to be bigger. I grabbed her file and pulled out the artwork she signed for approval. Asked her if this is not what she approved. She said yes but she thought it was going to be different. I asked what were you expecting and her reply was, the print should be bigger. I explained to her that we scaled the artwork up to fit the shirt (final art was 13" x 8"). She still felt that the print would be taller. Trying to explain to her that when we scaled the art that if we made it taller it would stretch the art and it would not look right. Still unhappy I asked her what would you like for me to do? I could not turn around a new order in the time she needed it so I dropped the printing charges ($230). She left, still unhappy with her shirts. Now the thing is we covered our bases, sign art that matched her shirt to a "T". She approved the art but expected something different than what she signed. I gave her a large discount and she was still unhappy.
So friday comes along and I get a phone call from her (I thinking what now?). She said she got the shirts home and everyone else loved the shirts and she was going to bring the $230 back because she was wrong, and it was the right thing to do. Go figure. Just have to love the public. By the way this is the second customer I have had like this in a month. The other one want me to print basically and all over print when his signed art work said 13"x15". He was unhappy so we gave him the shirts and asked him not to ever come back. He did not understand why we were doing this and we told him that no matter what we did he always complained about our work and we were tired of trying to please him. (this was not our first encounter with him and we are not his first printer)
Something similar has happened to us and we had a really good laugh at the end of the day.
A very nice lady who spoke really well called us one morning asking if she could get shirts printed with special effects and glitter, etc. Sure! She orders.
She comes in and picks it up and she is THRILLED! The next morning which turns up to be a Saturday morning on our day off, I get an angry voicemail about 10 minutes long. She says all of her shirts are off center and crooked!
I had to deal with her quick cause I found out her father is always on the local news and he is a local celebrity here. I call her back and she keeps complaining although I offer her a solution where we will reprint the shirts after I can see the shirts. Because I told her my samples that I had were all straight. She insists she tried all of them on and they are all wrong. She says I would have to come get them because she wants to spend time with her husband on a Saturday. I roll my eyes and say okay. As I head to the office to pick up some paperwork, she calls asking for a refund plus a reprint. I gave up bc I was so tired of her, and offered a reprint and a discount on the print price.
She calls me back 30 minutes later and apologizes like no other telling me that her husband used to work at a screen print shop and the prints were SPECTACULAR! She was also reminded that the reason her shirts looked crooked was because she had shoulder surgery 5 years ago which made her shoulders uneven. She wrote us a sincere letter apologizing for her mistake and thanked us for our great work.
My fiance and I had the best laugh ever.
Edit: We also have people sign off on artwork, but it seems most people cannot comprehend measurements of artwork. But I don't really know why they sign it if they don't know. This would avoid a lot of headachs.
We decided to be very specific about everything on our invoices as well as our artwork proofs so we have proof of everything.
I'll share a quick story which relates more to your situation. Guy orders dozens of polos which cost us $20 wholesale. I was very careful of this order becuase we could lose big time money if we made a slight mistake. He signs off on art proofs showing both a front and back print. He comes picks up and says the back was not supposed to be printed. I asked why he approved the artwork that we had sent showing a front and back print. He calls his business partner and he says he approved it but he must not have known. Well I asked if that was our fault or his (in a nicest way possible). And he went on talking to his partner on the phone making remarks like "well I thought this was going to be a long term printer" "well I thought they were going to be good too," "well we wont come here again." I was soo annoyed that I literally tapped my toes on the floor. I bit my tongue.
He called back the next day asking for more polos because everyone else liked them with the back print...mmmmmmm okay?
Last edited by TshirtGuru; July 18th, 2009 at 09:34 AM.
I do a thumbnail proof, much like above. Clients love it when I email that to them.
I also include this in my miscellaneous notes at the bottom of the quotes:
"Imprint Area will be left to our discretion unless otherwise specified when order is placed." Haven't had a problem with it yet. (Cross fingers!)
I always send a copy of the artwork to scale along with an image like this to show approximate size and location
This is exactly what i do, buuutttt customers always have there own pictures on there mind of how is going to look like (sometimes different).
I had 1 customer that ask me to print some shirts for a property management company. I asked what kind of ink would he like.. he said i didn't matter as long as it's black ink. Soooo i used plastisol ink.
He comes in for the pick up and says the ink has a heavy hand feel, and that he would give me $25 bucks if i printed them with waterbased instead.
I just started LMAO and told him that i would charge him the same thing, because i asked him what ink he wanted and he said as long as it is black ink.
Long story short, he was unhappy and said that i shouldn't be in buisness. I asked why... and he said that because i don't know how to treat and please customers. LMAO. Anyways some customers are just a pain in the behind.
Wow, those are some great stories. Remember always the lessons attached with them. Years ago when we were in our first year of business, we had a job which was for a local fund raiser for a woman who had lost her son to a car accident months before. She had created a memorial fund in her sons name for scholarships. 3 color full back, one color heart print, 250 pieces, white shirts. She came in and looked at what I had sketched out for her, and said OK, Loved it! I was feeling rather cocky so I re-did the art for film, and embellished a bit, thinking, " I am going to make this design sing." Well, we ran the shirts, she came in to pick them up, and I proudly snapped one up out of the box and held the back print up on my chest proudly so she could see all of the extra effort I had put into the design for her. Her mouth just dropped ... and then she said "well that's not what I ordered", I could feel the blood rush from my face, "Oh my goodness that is not it at all ...". And then she started to cry. So I started to cry. Fortunately one of my partners was nearby, and straightened things out with her. She agreed to take the "misprint" shirts on a consignment basis, so long as we reprinted what she had ordered in the first place. She then took all 500, and sold all of the original design, and around 220 of the altered design, so we were sitting pretty as well. She had made more money than she could have imagined.
I learned to never alter approved artwork without a customers permission, and re-approval.
We learned never to trust anyone, even little old ladies who don't pay a 50% deposit ...
... that's right, this old lady sucked, cause she never paid us one dime for any of the shirts. We ended up writing it off as bad or noncollectable debt.
Signed proofs/ Artworked are a great way to cover your @ss, but it all comes down making your customer happy. Its their word of mouth that's going to make or break you. Do a great job and they wont tell a sole but if you give them a high price or God forbid give them Flawed shirts- They'll go out of their way to tell everyone and even people that they dont know. You are the "SCREEN PRINTER" and YOU KNOW what size everything should be & only you can see if you've made a mistake or not.Would you go into a restaurant and tell a cook that their portions are too small or go into a gas station and tell them their gas is too high ( wait I do that all the time & they always tell me the same thing dont like it go somewhere else.) Stand by your guns if you know your right, if your wrong make it right because There's 10 screen printers that will under cut your prices every day.
Nope never happened to me (knock on wood). However, I am not issuing any refunds of any kind on customized artwork once the customer signs my contract. Only if their is an error in the finished product or damage that I did not see after I inspected it (I did an exchange for a shirt for a customer who found a hole I didn't see. It was about 2 cm on the back of the sleeve.)
"All of these stories are why I never went into the custom business and just stuck with selling my own designs."
How's that working for you?
It WAS working great. I had built a pretty successfull business. But it got to be too much work for me...trying to do it and keep my job in I.T. so I shut it down. I.T. paid WAY more than selling shirts online.
This ever happen to you! 
