Shopify t-shirt designer for apparel brands

Some of your customers want their name on the back, their club on the chest or their dog on a hoodie. Today that's a no, or an email thread: a mockup, a payment link, a file made by hand.

Pixel Wrangler puts the job on your product page instead. The customer designs it on the garment and pays at checkout, and the print file is on the order when you open it.

It's built by the team behind Threadheads, an apparel brand that prints its own.

Add custom apparel to the range you sell now#

Your fixed graphics stay as they are. Custom sits beside them, on the blanks you already stock, and your customers do the design work.

You set it up once: where the print goes, which fonts and colors are allowed, and what the customer may change. Link that template to every tee with the same print area and it sells on every color. The garment color follows the variant the customer picks, once you add a photo of each color.

Adding a color doesn't change your plan. Plans count templates and custom orders, not products.

Customers see it on the garment before they pay#

No mockup to email, no "is this what you meant?" The customer designs on a photo of your blank, in the color they picked (one photo per color), and the preview updates as they type.

Text goes in the fonts and colors you allow, up to the character limit you set, and a locked field stays where you put it. A photo or logo drops into the print area you drew.

Front and back are tabs on the same product. It works on a phone as well as a laptop, and they add to cart like any other product.

A customer's photo usually comes with a background. Switch on AI background removal and the team lands on the tee without the parking lot behind them. It bills per use on your Shopify invoice.

AI image generation and Word Art sit beside it. All three stay off until you turn them on.

Every paid order arrives with its print file#

You don't make the file. When the order is paid, each side renders to its own print file and attaches to the Shopify order.

It's a transparent PNG with the artwork only, at the width, height and DPI you set once for the template. 300 DPI is the default, which suits DTG and DTF. If your printer asks for PDF or JPEG, choose it; both come out on white.

You can tell which file goes on which shirt without opening it. Each is named from your prefix, one variant code (size or color) and the output file's name, plus a short id: TEE-XL-Back-a1b2c3d4.png.

The files sit on the order behind Download Artwork, the order gets the px-artwork-ready tag, and the file links sit in an order metafield. On Growth and Scale, the Artwork Export API pulls them by order number or date range. The spec sheet is Print-ready files, and the settings live in Sides and output files.

Print it yourself, or send it to your printer#

Either way, you start from the same file on the order.

Print in-house? Download it and print, or have a script on the Export API or the order tag drop files in the folder your RIP reads.

If Printful, Printify or Gelato prints for you, the file is waiting on the Shopify order. Open the supplier's order, upload the PNG to the print area and approve it. If their app syncs the order, the custom artwork is still the part you add.

Pixel Wrangler doesn't send orders to Printful, Printify or Gelato. There's no native integration, and we won't pretend there is.

At volume, an automation can watch the px-artwork-ready tag, fetch the file from the metafield or the Export API, and pass it to the supplier. We give you the file, the tag and the link; the automation is yours to build. The steps are in Print-ready files.

What it costs#

Every plan puts the print files on every paid order. Plans start at $99 a month with a 7-day free trial, billed through Shopify, and differ by custom orders a month and by templates. See pricing.

The subscription takes no cut of what you sell. The AI tools bill per use on the same Shopify invoice, and they stay off unless you switch them on.

Made by a brand that prints its own#

Threadheads is an eight-figure Shopify apparel brand. It prints in-house and sells its custom range through Pixel Wrangler. We built the customizer for it because nothing else cut it, then put it on the Shopify App Store.

Heaps Good, a packaging business, came next and sells custom merch tees through it with zero manual print files. Across the two stores, that's hundreds of thousands of custom items sold and millions in revenue.

Your first template in about five minutes#

Have a blank image of your tee? Then the first template takes about five minutes (Quickstart). Install on Shopify, build it, link a product and place a test order.

Upgrading from another customizer? Switching from another customizer is the checklist, or book a demo and we'll look at your range with you.

Own the press and print for clubs and businesses too? See the customizer for print shops.