Print-on-demand and fashion design software

From design to print and garment, ordering custom cards, banners and clothes online

You open a small bakery in Kochi. You design your business cards and a banner in a browser, and order 500 cards online. A week later, they arrive at your door. For the opening day, you also order a few mugs printed with the bakery's logo. None of these existed before you ordered them.

This Market Segment covers the software that turns a design into a physical product. That includes business cards and flyers, a mug or a T-shirt made to order, and clothes designed in three dimensions on a screen before they are sewn. The buyers are small businesses and shoppers who order printed products, and the fashion brands that design clothes.

This is the last Market Segment in this Industry Vertical. It is a small one, with three companies.

Every company named here has posted software engineering jobs in India. Famous companies that don't actively hire software engineers in India are left out.

The software for making the design itself is covered in Market Segment 13.5, Creative tools, event platforms and creator marketing (in Industry Vertical 13, Martech).

Keep reading, free

One more section is on this page: What this section holds. Sign in to read it here, in full.

Continue with Google

What this section holds

What this section holds

Back to the bakery in Kochi from the start of this Market Segment.

Cimpress

is the company behind Vistaprint. Vistaprint prints business cards, marketing materials, packaging and branded clothing for small businesses, in small quantities. It turns a design made online into a product, in its own factories. Printing a few hundred cards is normally expensive, but a company like this combines many small orders into one big print run. The industry calls this mass customisation. Cimpress posts jobs under two names, Cimpress and Cimpress India. It has engineers in Bengaluru and Mumbai, and the most job postings in this Market Segment.

The Customization Group

sells print-on-demand: a personalised product, such as the bakery's mugs, made and shipped only when someone orders it. It has engineers in Bengaluru.

CLO Virtual Fashion

makes CLO 3D. In this software, fashion designers make a garment and fit it on a digital body before any fabric is cut.

Mass customisation: many small orders, such as the bakery's business cards, are combined into one big print run, then cut and shipped to each customer, so printing a few hundred cards stays cheap.

Canva, Printful and Printify are not covered in this Market Segment.

The product that exists only after it is ordered.

Print-on-demand and digital garment design remove the need to hold stock. The product is designed, shown and sold before it is made. Now AI models can create the design itself from a written description. That raises a new question for these companies: who owns a design that a customer asked a model to make?

The usual way, a product is designed, made, held in stock and then sold. On demand, it is designed, shown and sold first, and made and shipped only once someone orders it.

That is how the bakery's cards and mugs got made. A design made on a screen became a product only once it was ordered.

Who they hire

Who these companies hire, and for what, is on What retail tech companies hire for.

← Previous in Retail tech

Brand protection and product authentication

Next in Retail tech →

none, this is the last