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The Print Bar helps people turn ideas into custom-printed apparel and merchandise. The challenge: most of their customers aren't designers. They're ordering shirts for a friend's birthday, a work event, or a one-off party. The Print Bar still needs to receive technically correct, print-ready files that meet real production constraints.
We spoke with Tom Rowe (Product & Engineering), Kelsie McArthur, and Bronwyn Waterhouse from The Print Bar about how they tackled this problem while rebuilding their platform from scratch, and why IMG.LY's SDK became central to that effort.
From a Garage to Two Campuses
The Print Bar was founded in 2011 in one of the owner's mum's garage. Since then, they've grown into a large-scale operation with campuses in Brisbane and Melbourne, producing custom apparel using multiple decoration methods.
Their edge? Speed. If you order before 10 a.m., they'll print it the same day. That attracts a particular kind of customer: someone who just realized they need shirts for tomorrow's event and doesn't have time to learn Photoshop.
"A shocking number of our customers are just making one-off products for silly things," Tom said. "Spur of the moment tees, hoodies, it's rampant. They just want to put funny words on a t-shirt for their friend's birthday."
These customers know what they want on the shirt. What they don't know and don't want to learn is anything about DPI, file formats, or print limitations.
The Problem: Customers Were Bouncing at the Fun Part
For years, The Print Bar ran on an out-of-the-box platform built for merchandise printing. It was fine in 2012. By 2024, it hadn't seen any major changes in over a decade.
Tom described it as "clunky" things didn't work smoothly, there were lumps and bumps in the experience. If you wanted to resize text, you couldn't just pinch and drag. You had to click into the text editor, find the font size setting, and manually adjust it. "It technically worked," he said, "but it just wasn't intuitive."
The result was that customers were dropping off at exactly the wrong moment. "Bouncing at checkout when you see how much it costs is common," Tom explained. "Bouncing during the fun bit what should be the fun bit of making the thing that says a lot about the experience."
The brand The Print Bar projected, i.e. modern, friendly, personable didn't match the experience on the website.
"Our brand didn't match our experience. You could see it in our bounce rates. No matter how great our marketing was, it didn't matter, because if we're targeting younger audiences, they can tell when a site sucks."
Why They Couldn't Just Bolt On a New Editor
When Tom joined five years ago, fixing the editor was obvious. But the business wasn't ready. They were running at full capacity every day not because they had too many orders, but because everything was manual, everything was spreadsheets, nothing was automated.
"The first three years was streamlining the underlying business before upgrading the customer-facing experience," Tom said. They opened a new warehouse, built APIs for business customers, launched a Shopify integration. Only then could they turn to the public site.
And when they did, the editor wasn't an afterthought. "We picked it right at the start. It would have been early 2023. This was always meant to be foundational, not something we bolted on later."
Finding the Right Tool
Tom had clear requirements from day one.
"It needed to be self-hosted, a package solution that integrated directly, not another cloud service. It needed to be developer-first, so we could configure it ourselves. And not locked into a big, fixed, non-configurable design tool. We wanted freedom and configurability."
He looked at several options. Most print-focused tools came with fixed UI patterns that looked dated and couldn't be customized beyond changing panel colors. He spent time talking to Canva, but their solution turned out to be for paper printing only. "I said, you need to see the shirt with the print on it. They said, no, it's actually just a white box. I said, well, then it doesn't work at all."
What Tom wanted was software that would look like The Print Bar had built it themselves. IMG.LY's SDK fit. It was self-hosted, deeply configurable, and exposed the internals he needed to make it match their brand.
"It blends in so seamlessly. You can tell when competitors are using the old platform just by looking at it. It doesn't matter what they've done to customize it, it looks the same. You can only do so much. Changing the color of a panel doesn't make it fit in."
Designing for People Who Aren't Designers
The Print Bar's actual designers; the businesses, the brands and those with Adobe subscriptions who already have their files ready. They simply upload, position, and go. They don't need much from the editor.
The people who actually use the editor are the ones who aren't creative professionals. They don't have Photoshop and they certainly don’t have the time or money to hire a designer just to get a t-shirt for a once-off event.
For these customers, The Print Bar deliberately limited options. "There's technically less options, but we've narrowed the field of what is available," Tom explained. "It keeps people focused. Photoshop has a thousand buttons that do a thousand things, but 99.99% of the time you only need one."
The editor acts as a middleman translating what customers want into what The Print Bar's production system needs. "So they still get the right thing without knowing anything about DPI."
The philosophy is simple:
"We never want them to be limited by their skill set. We just want it to make sense, be easy, and have no blockers. It just makes life so much easier for everybody."
Working With IMG.LY
The Print Bar's relationship with IMG.LY was unusually direct. From the start, Tom and his team were in Slack with the development team, raising roadblocks, suggesting features, and testing implementations as they came back.
"We would talk quite frequently and find improvements, bugs, features to implement. Being able to raise roadblocks, have them picked up and implemented by the IMG.LY team and then fed back for testing was really good."
That responsiveness solved a real anxiety. With larger vendors, Tom had experienced multi-day response times. With IMG.LY, feedback often turned into concrete product updates within weeks. The Print Bar's implementation even influenced IMG.LY's apparel editor UI something the team was proud to have contributed.
"It's like how our customers feel with our print-on-demand platform. Because we're so direct and small and agile, if they hit a roadblock, they let us know, we change it to suit, send it back out. That cycle happens within a couple weeks. IMG.LY was very similar."
What Changed After Launch
The new site launched four weeks before the second interview right before their busiest Christmas to date. They actually had to scale back marketing because they were at capacity.
"Pretty much nothing went wrong for our launch. We demolished our expectations."
Customer feedback shifted noticeably. Before, the editor generated complaints. Now, people comment on how smooth the whole process feels. "Customers being able to design easier, find garments easier it's really the process people have been loving. It's primarily the process that people have been loving. The fact that the editor has been able to enable the process."
One metric stood out: someone placed a tens-of-thousands-dollar order without talking to a single person. No call, no quote request, no back-and-forth. They just trusted the site.
"That suggests a high level of trust, right? To be willing to just put that through, trust that it's going to come out exactly how they want. I don't believe many would have trusted the old site with that size of order without ringing up first."
For the The Print Bar team, just two developers the editor became one less thing to maintain. "Having so much custom software that there already is for us to manage, being able to take one of those big things off the plate has been so helpful. Your resources outweigh ours tenfold because you're dedicated to your product. The result is a better tested, better designed solution than we ever would have come up with ourselves."
Conclusion
The Print Bar's challenge wasn't to teach customers how to design. It was to remove the barriers between an idea and a finished product.
By embedding IMG.LY's SDK into their platform, they built an experience where non-designers can express themselves confidently and the business gets production-ready files without support overhead.
The editor does its job quietly: translating customer intent into something the production system can use, enforcing constraints without the customer noticing, and fitting so seamlessly into the brand that it looks like The Print Bar built it themselves.
"It just makes life so much easier for everybody."