Straight away
Three findings on screen — the joins where information is getting re-typed from one tool into another.
Screen print · Embroidery · DTF
Your prints look better than the system you run them through.
This is the trade I actually work in. I run Alpine Apparel Co in Castle Rock, which means none of what follows is research — it is a list of things that have gone wrong in my own shop and been fixed.
Decoration has a problem the other trades do not: a single order can be three decoration methods, thirty sizes, two locations and an artwork approval, and every one of those is a place it can stall.
- Turnaround
- 5 days
- Live products
- Three
- I run
- A shop
- Built for
- 2–15 people
01 / The road
Every job travels the same road
Between somebody deciding they need shirts and you being paid for them, there are six places the job stalls.
01
They look for you
Page four for the search your customers actually type, and a listing that disagrees with your site.
City-targeted structure and a Google listing that matches it.
Website 02
They decide whether you are real
A site that looks like 2011, slow on a phone, against a competitor with a decent one.
Your actual work, sharp, under two seconds, in one hand.
Website 03
They ask for a price
Three fields, then "do you do shirts? how much?" — and half of them are below your minimum.
A quote request that answers the four standing questions and filters small jobs before you see them.
Website 04
You quote it
Setup, colours, quantity breaks, garment cost and margin, done differently depending on the day.
Your numbers, one calculation, the same answer every time.
Airtable 05
Art, sizes and approvals
Thirty players, thirty sizes, and a proof somebody may or may not have approved by email.
Sizes collected once by the customer, and an approval with a timestamp against it.
Airtable 06
It ships
Press schedule in your head, and the customer updated only when they chase you.
What is shippable Friday, visible without asking, and the customer told automatically.
AirtableThe reprint argument is the one to design against. Which proof went out, who approved it, and when — that is the difference between an awkward conversation and eating three hundred shirts. It is also the single easiest thing on this list to fix.
02 / What I'd build
Two services, and you probably need one of them
Which one depends entirely on where your road is leaking. Nobody needs them all at once, and starting with everything is how a project stops halfway.
Website
A website that does a job
Found in the towns you serve, credible in four seconds on a phone, and a request form that asks what you would have asked. Five business days, and you write none of the copy.
See how it works →Airtable
An Airtable system
Quoting, jobs, scheduling and reporting in one place, built around how you already work. Start with the single piece costing you the most. Your account, your data.
See how it works →
None of the six leaks above needs a custom application, which is usually the honest
answer. Where one does get built is when your customers need to do something
themselves — book, reorder, or check status without emailing you.
That's a custom app, and it's a conversation for after the base
exists, not before.
03 / The obvious question
Why not just buy Printavo?
Printavo is a good product and plenty of shops should just buy it. It stops fitting when your pricing has rules it cannot express — contract tiers, blended methods on one order, odd garments — or when the side of your business it has never heard of starts mattering. Its Lite tier also caps you at twenty quotes a month, which any real shop clears in a fortnight.
The full comparison →04 / Fit
Worth a conversation, or not
Worth talking if
- Quotes arrive by phone, text, email and Facebook, and get re-typed into something else.
- You spend real time on jobs that were never going to be worth taking.
- An approval has gone wrong and it cost you a print run.
- You are paying for a shop tool and still running a spreadsheet beside it.
Don't bother if
- You want an online store or a team store. Different build, and I am not the right person.
- You are happy with how work comes in. Genuinely — keep your afternoon.
Before you commit to anything
Not sure whether it is the system or the front door?
The assessment reads the whole path a job takes — how it reaches you, how it gets captured, and where it lands once it does. Those last two are exactly what a base or a custom tool fixes, so the answers tell us whether a build is worth doing and which piece is worth building first.
Within two working days
My read on which of it is a systems problem, which is a front-door problem, and which is neither. Written by me, not generated.
Before you spend anything
A fair number of these end with "your existing tool already does that." Cheaper to find out here than after a quote.
Q3 2026 · finish it and you are entered to win a website built free · closes September 30
The prize is a website build, which may well not be what you came here for — take the assessment for the read on your operation and ignore the giveaway if it is not relevant to you.
The newsletter
Systems that actually support the work
Short, practical notes for people running a shop: what to automate, what to leave alone, and what your software is quietly costing you in time. Written from inside a working print shop, not from a product roadmap.
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Find out where the shop is leaking work
Fourteen questions on how work reaches you, and I open your site myself. Free, and this quarter it enters you to win a website built free.
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