Software built for apparel and merchandise print shops.
A decorated apparel order is much more than a single product line. It has products, colours, sizes, quantities, print locations, artwork and often several production methods at once.
PrintBlocks was built in an apparel shop around exactly that, so the size and colour matrix is the shape everything else is built on rather than something bolted to the side of it.
Sizes and colours are built into every product
Quantities are entered as a grid of sizes against colours, on the counter form and in the store alike.
Stock, prices and quantities are held per variant rather than per product, so six sizes in two colours is one product and twelve real numbers.
Give every print method its own rules
Screen printing, DTF, DTG, embroidery, sublimation and whatever else you run are records you create.
Each carries its own price, its own setup fee charged once for the whole job, the sides it can be placed on, the department that runs it and which products offer it at all.
Multiple prints become separate production jobs
One order might be a screen print on the front, individual DTF names on the back and embroidery on the caps.
Each becomes its own production job with its own files, quantities, assignee, status and deadline, so embroidery can finish while the screen print is still drying without either losing the order it belongs to.
Nothing ships until every part is in
As each production job reaches a status you count as finished, it joins its order's bin on the packing board, which shows how many of the order's jobs have arrived.
Only once the last one is in does the order turn green and read as ready, so the shirts do not get packed while the caps are still at the embroidery machine.
Online or manual, one process
Customers can order from your store, design the product in the customizer, or send what they want over WhatsApp.
Your team enters the phone, email and counter orders on the same form. Whichever door it came through, it continues into the same production workflow.
Let customers enter the complicated part themselves
They pick the product, the colour, the size run and the quantities, then upload artwork or lay it out in the customizer.
For a team order they can also fill in the names and numbers through a link, one row per piece, priced by the row and printed from what they typed.
Your blanks and the ones the customer brings
A line can be a catalog product with stock behind it, or free text with its own price. So a job can be printing alone on goods that arrived from the customer, without inventing a catalog entry for somebody else's garments.
The reorder is the hard part
Last season's order duplicates into this season's with the products, the sizes, the prints and the artwork already on it, so the same order for the same team is not rebuilt every year.
A shop like Jaco Shirts
Jaco Shirts sells a broad range of tees, caps, hoodies, workwear and other textiles, decorated by screen printing, DTF, DTG, embroidery and more.
Customers order through the site or reach the shop on WhatsApp, choose from a large catalog, and ask for anything from one customised piece to a large order that has to go out this week.
A shop shaped like that is the one this was written for, because every part of it has to reach the same floor:
- A catalog of colours, sizes and variants
- Store and WhatsApp orders on one list
- Quantity breaks and per-method pricing
- Artwork and mockups attached to the job
- One order split across four methods
- Each job tracked on the production floor
- Every part gathered before it is packed
- Labels, shipping and the customer kept updated
Instead of the website, the sales desk, the artwork and the production floor each being managed on their own, the order takes one route from the moment somebody picks a shirt to the moment the box leaves.
Questions shops ask
Can we manage products with many colours and sizes?
Yes. A product holds as many colours and sizes as it needs, and stock, quantities and prices are kept for every variant separately rather than for the product as a whole.
Can pricing change according to quantity?
Yes. Quantity breaks can be set on products and on printing methods, alongside the one-off setup fee a method charges for the whole job.
Can one order contain several print methods?
Yes, and each one becomes its own production job with its own status, files, assignee and date, so they can be worked in any order and finish at different times.
Can we stop an order being packed before every job is done?
PrintBlocks does not lock the packing step, because a shop sometimes has a good reason to send part of an order. What it does is make an incomplete one impossible to pack by accident: the bin is not marked ready, and it names the jobs still in production.
Can customers enter quantities by size themselves?
Yes. The store can show the same colour and size matrix your team uses, and the customer fills in the quantity against each variant.
Can we collect individual names and numbers?
Yes. Send the customer a link to fill in the variable list, one row per piece, and what they enter is what gets printed.
We do both blanks we stock and blanks the customer brings.
Both work. A line can be a catalog product with stock behind it or free text with its own price, and a job can be printing alone on goods that arrived from the customer.
Can we manage both online and manual orders?
Yes. Store, WhatsApp, phone, email and counter orders all land on the same list, in the same statuses, and follow the same workflow.
Manage every apparel order from screen to shipment.
Sizes, colours, decorations, files and production jobs, all connected to one order.