Designing great products is indisputably one of the most purely creative experiences around and it's easy to get lost in the creative pursuit.  However, as the owner of your your fashion brand, it's important to ground your designs to ensure they are not only appealing to your end customers, but they also serve your new business as well by generating  strong profits.

The good news is that the Apliiq platform is setup for fashion brands to be able to tap into services that mass produced fashion brands utilize to keep their designs professional and their profits strong.  With this backdrop in mind, we want nothing more than to be your indispensable partner to help you create amazingly profitable products and we hope the following tips and tricks will broaden your vision for how you can create products while at the same time giving you some great tips to keep profits strong.

Each service (print, embroidery, etc) you add to a product design increases the overall cost to produce the item and it will reduce your overall profits if you cannot charge more for that design.  You have to factor that into your design considerations.  For example, a t shirt with a front print and a back print costs more than a t shirt with just a front print. 

Wait a second, does that mean you should never create a shirt with front and back artwork?  Well, no not exactly.  However, you should certainly be conscious of designing products that use 3 or 4 different design elements as the design will quickly become cost prohibitive.  As we mentioned before there are  different ways to create "rich designs" which we will elaborate on further in this article.

Having a solid handle on how much different services cost can help you make good design decisions upfront in your product design process.  For example, printing and embroidery don't cost the same price, embroidery is more expensive by $3.01 per product.  Services costs for dropshipping are listed as followed from least expensive to most expensive:

Now, those are the service costs at the free Apliiq account level.  Our VIP members enjoy a 20% discount off the dropship product price.  Now, woven labels and embroidered patches are inclusive annual subscriptions that do not increase the dropship product price when used so the 20% discount doesn't apply to numbers 1 and 2 above.  

But the VIP service costs for digital and transfer prints are $5.99 per print, embroidery is $8 per design and private labels and neck prints only cost $2.00.

Apliiq's unique approach to labeling and relabeling products allows us to work with garments that a lot of other dropshipping providers don't touch.  From lightweight waterproof jackets, to denim jackets, to camo hoodies and tie dye shirts these products can all be relabeled as your brand.  These highly specialized unique products invoke strong consumer sentiments without much embellishment at all.  Most can be cost effectively relabeled and resold with minimal additional branding required to create a highly desirable well branded consumer product.