How The Print Bar Turned Its Editor Into Its Best Salesperson
The Print Bar helps people turn an idea into custom-printed apparel and merchandise. Founded in a garage in 2011, the company now runs production campuses in Brisbane and Melbourne, decorating garments with multiple print methods and offering same-day printing on orders placed before 10 a.m.
The thing standing between its customers and that finished product was its own design tool. Here’s how The Print Bar rebuilt that experience on IMG.LY’s CE.SDK, and what changed once it did.
The Challenge: A Decade-Old Editor Bleeding Orders
The Print Bar’s customers are, overwhelmingly, not designers. They are people ordering shirts for a birthday, a work event, or a one-off occasion, and they have no interest in learning what DPI means or which file format a printer needs. They just want the thing they pictured.
The platform standing in their way had been built in 2012 and barely touched since. Simple actions fought the user: resizing text meant digging into a settings panel instead of just dragging a handle. That friction landed at the worst possible moment, the creative step that was supposed to be the reward, and customers were walking away mid-design and mid-checkout.
Bouncing during the fun bit, what should be the fun bit of making the thing, that says a lot about the experience.
The gap between how the brand looked and how the product felt was measurable.
Our brand didn’t match our experience. You could see it in our bounce rates.
The Print Bar had put off rebuilding the editor for years, because the business needed operational streamlining first. Once a rebuild was unavoidable, the team made one decision early: the editor wasn’t going to be an add-on this time. It would be foundational.
Why They Chose CE.SDK
Tom Rowe came to the evaluation with a sharp set of requirements, born from the pain of the old platform. He wasn’t shopping for a feature list. He was shopping for control.
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.
He looked hard at the alternatives. Print-focused tools came with dated, uncustomizable interfaces, the same trap The Print Bar was trying to escape. Canva’s offering didn’t fit apparel at all: it produced white-box mockups with no way to show the design on an actual garment.
CE.SDK cleared every bar. It was self-hosted, deeply configurable, and could be styled to disappear into The Print Bar’s own branding rather than announcing itself as a third-party widget. For Tom, that last point wasn’t cosmetic, it was the whole tell.
You can tell when competitors are using the old platform just by looking at it.
How They Implemented CE.SDK
The Print Bar made a counterintuitive choice with the new editor: it deliberately took options away. For a customer base of non-designers, fewer controls meant less to get wrong. The editor’s real job was to translate a customer’s intent into a production-ready file without ever making the customer aware of the production requirements behind it.
That’s where CE.SDK did its quietest, most valuable work. It enforced the print constraints, the resolutions, the formats, the bleed, in the background, so a first-time buyer could design something printable without knowing any of the rules they were satisfying.
The build itself moved fast, in large part because of how closely the two teams worked. The Print Bar’s developers kept a direct line to IMG.LY’s engineers over Slack, raising blockers and testing features as they shipped.
Being able to raise roadblocks, have them picked up and implemented, and then fed back for testing was really good.
That cadence stood in stark contrast to the multi-day response times Tom had come to expect from larger vendors. The collaboration ran both ways: feedback from The Print Bar’s apparel use case fed directly into IMG.LY’s own apparel editor UI.
The Results
The new platform went live roughly four weeks before peak Christmas season, the single most demanding window on the calendar for a custom-merch business. It was the kind of timing that usually invites disaster. Instead, the launch went so smoothly the company had to pull back marketing spend because it was running into capacity limits.
Pretty much nothing went wrong for our launch. We demolished our expectations.
The clearest proof came from a single order. A customer placed a five-figure order, tens of thousands of dollars of custom merchandise, entirely through the new editor. No phone call. No quote. No back-and-forth. They designed it, trusted it, and bought it.
That order is the whole thesis of the rebuild in one transaction: an experience confident enough that a stranger would commit five figures to it without speaking to anyone. The shift in customer sentiment backed it up, with feedback moving from complaints about the old editor to praise for how the design process now felt.
Overall Impact
The most visible win is the revenue the editor now closes on its own. The less obvious one is what it freed up. The Print Bar runs a two-person development team, and the old editor was a perpetual maintenance liability sitting on top of everything else they needed to build. Handing the heaviest, most specialized piece of the platform to CE.SDK took that weight off entirely and let a small team focus on the business instead of babysitting a creative engine.
The editor stopped being the thing customers fought through on the way to checkout and became the thing that closed the sale.
It just makes life so much easier for everybody.
