I print with ooshirts on average about 3 times a month. I have a t-shirt business that makes a good profit and while they are not perfect, I found for that they are a necessary evil of what has made my business successful. Here's some info:
BAD:
ALMOST NO CUSTOMER SUPPORT: In an emergency there are work arounds to get a hold of someone, but generally speaking from the time an order is placed to the time I receive it I speak to no one. Not great if you are new screen printing or require live person to guide you through the process.
QUALITY IS HIT OR MISS: By that I mean literally it can be really bad, but it can also be just as good as any other screen printer. I go through each piece carefully after receiving the order to make sure everything is perfect.
GOOD:
PRICE: The price is not only low, their price the only reason I have a business period. I tried to start a t-shirt business several times and I couldn't get my costs of goods low enough to make it work for me. Then I found ooshirts and my business took off. I was able to do low runs with a healthy margin and then reinvest the profit into doing more runs.
QUALITY: When they aren't making mistakes the quality is actually really good. Its a screen printed shirt of course, so prints hold up well in the wash and it basically looks as good as any other screen printed shirt I've got from anyone
FAST TURN AROUND: They've been a slow over the holiday, but during the middle of the year I often place orders on Monday and receive them on Thursday or Friday. That is very valuable to me because the depending a day or two of low or no stock can end up costing a lot of money so its nice be able to swipe my credit card and then start seeing income come back in a short amount of time.
ACCOUNTABILITY: While their customer service is pretty bad, they have never completely screwed me. Their claims department that is actually their most responsive department. I've dealt with everything from late orders to completely horrible quality prints and they've always done reprinted or given me a credit. Most recently I had an order arrive 4 days late and they gave me a 50% credit, the order was $1200 so I was able to let it go (and I still received the shirts). It may sound like they make a lot of mistakes and while they make more than other printers I use (who generally make none) keep in mind that I print 3 orders or sometimes more every month. If I had to estimate I would say about 5-10% of what I order has flaws. Not 5% of each shipment, but 5% overall.
I've found that the mistakes come from having almost no Quality Control whatsoever and employees who work way too fast. The mistakes are often associated with particular designs so if they make the same mistake on the same design twice then I will stop sending them that design. I have some designs that they've printed 5000+ shirts with without making a single mistake. Why so many mistakes and why so fast? They get A LOT of orders. I sometimes I have to place to orders in one sitting and I noticed that if my first order number is 8775632 my next order number (placed 10 mins later) will be 8775746. I know that not all ecommerce order numbers are sequential, but even half that would insane amount of orders for such a short period. Not make excuses, but wow.
The most important thing about ooshirts for my business is testing new designs with low runs. With ooshirts I can do a short run of like 30 shirts for anywhere between $150 and $200 depending on the design. I can test the market and if it sells well I can choose to continue with ooshirts or switch it over to one of my other pritners and do a large run. The key part is if the shirt sucks and no one likes it then it doesn't really effect me. I can discount them until I sell a few and still make my money back. With those low run price I can now afford to test out 1-2 new designs a month to see what my customers like.
Necessary Evil: I hate their slow support and I hate when they make mistakes, but if they ever shut down I literally might go out of business.
I placed an order with ooshirts and there is some very important info consumers should know - even if you sent high quality vector artwork they only use your artwork as a "reference" (their words, not mine). In my case they took vector artwork and retyped all the text with a random font that was close, but different. When I received the proof (which I was looking at on my phone, not the size of the back of a t-shirt) I was looking for things like parts of the graphic missing - not in my wildest dreams did I think I needed to get out my magnifying glass to check that the letters (which had been converted to outlines in the EPS I sent) had not been replaced with a different font! They state that the mere fact that they send a proof should indicate that they altered the art. Don't most places try to keep the art as close as possible to the way it is sent instead of making unnecessary changes? They told me they don't usually get artwork that's high quality. I'm thinking it would be a relief to get a piece of high quality art so they don't have to mess with it, but I guess they felt compelled to mess with it anyway.
