Decoration and “Accidents Happen”
While the example provided by Solid Gold Bomb is stark, it does illustrate an important point: If you’re not closely attentive to your decorations, you could be putting your business at risk.
“We had an issue one time where we put a shirt in for a competition, and it won an award,” said Steven Kanney, president and owner of Target Decorated Apparel, Naperville, Ill. “We had it on our website, and it happened to be from iStock, or one of these stock photo sites,” he explained. Since iStock and other stock photo sites strictly limit and monitor the use of their photos, and Kanney was unaware of the photo’s origin, putting the shirt up on Target Decorated Apparel’s website ended up putting the company into a legally risky situation.
Issues of offensive content may be similarly veiled. “A client of ours had a bit of an edgy design,” said Kanney. “We actually thought it was pretty funny. We were doing a ‘T-shirt of the month’ kind of thing, giving awards out to our clients for doing cool stuff. We blasted it out because it was the winner, and we got some people chomping at us saying, ‘I can’t believe you would support this, I can’t believe you thought this was good,'” he said. “It had something to do with Uncle Sam or whatever, I can’t even recall it now, but I was just like ‘Man! We’re looking at something that’s kind of cool, and we’re not reading between the lines,’ and things like that.”
Could It Happen To Your Screen Printer?
After reading the original story, some may have questions about what, if any, is Amazon’s role in the promotional industry. Are your decorators as dependent on the platform as Solid Gold Bomb was?
Kanney doesn’t think so, and explained the difference between Solid Gold Bomb and industry decorators. “I would say [these guys] are the direct-to-garment guys,” he said, comparing them to an extremely small-scale version of Zazzle or CafePress. “You can literally go out and buy, for 30 or 40 grand, a direct-to-garment printer. You can have a website, you can have people send you anything they want to send you, and start putting everything out. These direct-to-garment printers, their business model is literally, an order comes in, you grab a shirt off the shelf, and you make one,” he said. “This guy was doing 400 orders a day, that was people probably picking one or two designs, ordering a few shirts, then he went ahead and printed them.” For comparison, B2B printers and decorators might get around 500 orders a month instead of a day, but each order would be for a few hundred or thousand shirts.
This difference leads B2B printers to value each order more, since there’s more money at stake per order, rather than a direct-to-garment printer who depends more on printing as many different orders as possible (and is therefore more likely to take risks on offensive or otherwise questionable orders). Amazon and other mass-consumer e-commerce platforms are of little interest to B2B printers, since chasing a high volume of super-small orders doesn’t really play to their strengths or fit their business models.
While Solid Gold Bomb may not have been in the promotional industry, the lessons from its closing are relevant nevertheless. Computerized automation can be a powerful tool for any business, and sometimes an incredibly effective equalizer between large and small companies in a given market, but it should be used and monitored with the utmost care. Apparel decoration is already an inherently risky business, since so much of it hinges on judging what is and isn’t okay to print. Turning that judgment over to a computer, even partially, can drastically increase the risk of something going wrong. When it comes to morality, computers are a poor substitute for the human eye.
