At the end of 2025, I was producing four finished vector graphics per hour with a 40% buy-through rate for a chase business with a global retailer using AI. That number represented the full cycle, concepting, generating, refining, and exporting production-ready artwork for garment printing.
Every step was manual. I would open Ideogram, Recraft, or DALL·E, create a prompt, wait for results, tweak the prompt, regenerate, download the ones worth keeping, clean them up, and move on to the next design. It worked and was so much faster than not using AI, yet every minute spent clicking through web interfaces was a minute not spent on creative decisions.
Over the course of a few months, that number climbed to about seven graphics per hour. The improvement came from several directions at once. The AI models themselves got significantly better at prompt adherence, which meant fewer regeneration cycles per design. I got sharper at prompting, learning what worked for each platform, how to structure descriptions for consistent results, and when to use style references versus pure text prompts.
I also streamlined my file management, developed naming conventions, and built Photoshop JSX scripts that automated the mockup placement process and separations, including perspective transforms and alpha channel masking for complex garment features like hoodie drawstrings.
That progression from four to seven felt significant at the time. A 75% improvement in throughput over a year is real. But it was still fundamentally a manual workflow: me sitting in front of a screen, clicking, typing, downloading, one graphic at a time. The ceiling was always going to be limited by how fast my hands could move through interfaces.
Read the rest of this story on Apparelist, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
