Print on Demand and Our Mission to Leave it Behind

While perusing our wares - you may notice the following bold text in some of the product descriptions: 

*This shirt is POD (Print on Demand) - read about why we use Print on Demand services and our mission to eventually print everything we possibly can in-house here.

For those not in the know, Print on Demand is a process folks can use via various companies to put their designs on products without actually having to stock said products. Your customer places an order, its sent to whatever company is doing the printing, and then that company handles the printing, shipping, etc. 

This is pretty fantastic for small indie artists! It’s prohibitively expensive and risky for someone starting out to purchase a ton of stock up front and hope they can sell it all. Plus, when it comes to apparel, it means you can have practically every size available for your chosen item! 

But… there’s a lot of downsides too. You don’t have as much control over the final product as if you were doing it yourself, there’s environmental and ethical concerns, and while it doesn’t cost a lot of money on the artist’s part, their actual cut of the profit is often minuscule. 

We would never hold the fact that an artist chose to do POD against them - we have used it and continue to! There simply isn’t really a better way for a small team with very little funds like us to operate at the moment. 

However, we’ve always believed in making small changes where we can! Our eventual goal is to either be printing everything in house or contracting with other small local companies to print our items. Joe has been hard at work experimenting with small in-house block and screen printing setups in the Late Night Hot Dog Club studio. 

For now, most of our in-house printed items will be small limited runs or pre-orders until we are able to sustainably grow enough to invest in some serious big kid printing equipment. 

Until that day comes, we’ll continue to use POD services while taking every small step we can towards a more environmentally and ethically friendly production chain. 

You can help us get there! Buying stuff from us helps us grow and reinvest in ourselves and our artist friends. Contributing even just $1 a month on the MTGJoeD Patreon goes a long way towards helping our cause. 

Even if you’re not in a place to be buying human-made art right now (we totally get it - it’s ROUGH out there) one of the most impactful things you can do for us (and any artist in your life!) is to tell a friend about what we’re doing. Word of mouth is the most powerful force for keeping artists afloat, and we’re eternally grateful to everyone out there who is spreading the word about our artists and our mission!