Shirt.Woot

ProfHotpants wrote:Men's Small shirts used to have the smaller design on them, but people complained. Imagine that!

EDIT: We are considering changing up the print sizes on some of the larger women's sizes, depending on the design. We'll post the design size as it relates to the tee size on the site (like always).

How horribly terribly convoluted and impossible might it be to let us "build" the shirt, by selecting both the blank size AND the print size? Seems like that would address everybody's concerns: the men that want a big print on their smalls, the women that were forced to buy men's sizes because of the new blanks but don't want hideously oversized graphics, the people that just generally have a preference for a smaller or larger print for whatever reason...

Although I suppose we should let woot iron out the simple "getting the right prints on the right blanks" issue first before making it any more complicated. :P

One can dream, though...

ProfHotpants: Thank you for the update on the design-size issues! I'll have my fingers crossed that they cease - and that we see improvements in the other areas of the printing that have been problematic lately. We all know shirt.woot is capable of producing quality products; I wouldn't have taken as much as time as I have with this thread if I didn't believe in woot.

ProfHotpants wrote:Men's Small shirts used to have the smaller design on them, but people complained. Imagine that!

However, I have to say - this seems like the wrong thread to poke fun at wooters for complainting. Yeah, there's too much of it around woot in general, but this thread represents real problems with your product - problems that have been repeated over and over again, even after they were brought to your attention. I haven't seen one person in this thread complain about not receiving Bouquets of Chocolate: we just want the actual product that woot allowed us to pay money for!

So what was the cause of all the problems?

Inappropriate humor by Woot Staff. Take 3.

The problem is Attitude. As you can see some of the staff values their reputation as Waky Joksters over their repuation as respectible business people who honestly answer serious questions about the flaws in their business methodologies.

PemberDucky wrote:hormones. who knew?

You heard me, read my beak....HORMONES!

Received my COFFEE! mug today, and I was less than impressed. I was under the impression I was receiving a brown mug with a white handle, but instead I receive a white mug with the design poorly printed on it. The design was a bit blurry, but not enough to return it. The size of the mug was also disappointing. Yes, the ounces were correct, but was hoping to get a taller mug that would allow for creamer. Basically I paid $11 for $3 worth of mug. First time being disappoint by a W00T product. Sad panda.

vielleicht wrote:How horribly terribly convoluted and impossible might it be to let us "build" the shirt, by selecting both the blank size AND the print size? Seems like that would address everybody's concerns: the men that want a big print on their smalls, the women that were forced to buy men's sizes because of the new blanks but don't want hideously oversized graphics, the people that just generally have a preference for a smaller or larger print for whatever reason...

Although I suppose we should let woot iron out the simple "getting the right prints on the right blanks" issue first before making it any more complicated. :P

One can dream, though...

... I'd rather see an option to choose AA over Anvil, and even that's too complicated (or not worth it) for Woot. Print sizes wouldn't really need to be picked if the right design sizes were printed on the right shirt sizes.

spockzombie wrote:Received my COFFEE! mug today, and I was less than impressed.

Is it possible to get a picture? I was wondering about the mugs and whether or not to consider purchase in the future. Perhaps seeing what you got will help me?

spockzombie wrote:Received my COFFEE! mug today, and I was less than impressed. I was under the impression I was receiving a brown mug with a white handle, but instead I receive a white mug with the design poorly printed on it. The design was a bit blurry, but not enough to return it. The size of the mug was also disappointing. Yes, the ounces were correct, but was hoping to get a taller mug that would allow for creamer. Basically I paid $11 for $3 worth of mug. First time being disappoint by a W00T product. Sad panda.

Seems you are not alone, there is a full thread over in deals about it: http://deals.woot.com/questions/details/5b90039b-e672-4600-8477-ebe4ccde55eb/anyone-else-disappointed-with-their-coffee-mugs#29

Here is a response by staff member profhotpants on the mugs:

profhotpants wrote:The coffee mugs were a brand new product for us, and we worked with a new vendor to produce them. We cannot print mugs ourselves, since it takes completely different equipment than what we have in house. I worked very closely with this new vendor on the templates that we created for the sale images based on their specs. We did not have the mugs in hand till after the end of the sale, but we felt they looked pretty darn good.

I know the print is not identical to the sale image, but this is the nature of creating a product to order. We think they look nice, and were satisfied with the quality of the product. If you are truly disappointed with your ceramic mug, please contact customer service. They are prepared to help you with this issue.

profhotpants wrote:The coffee mugs were a brand new product for us, and we worked with a new vendor to produce them. We cannot print mugs ourselves, since it takes completely different equipment than what we have in house. I worked very closely with this new vendor on the templates that we created for the sale images based on their specs. We did not have the mugs in hand till after the end of the sale, but we felt they looked pretty darn good.

I know the print is not identical to the sale image, but this is the nature of creating a product to order. We think they look nice, and were satisfied with the quality of the product. If you are truly disappointed with your ceramic mug, please contact customer service. They are prepared to help you with this issue.

Sounds like the same kind of response as they have had to the new shirt blanks. They decided in the office that they are satisfied with the quality, and will turn a deaf ear to anyone who disagrees. With this type of response, the quality problems will continue around here. You can probably get a refund, but you can pretty much give up on getting a quality product.

I don't know if anyone else is still reading here, but I figured I might as well add my post to the list. I just now sent my Deallocated (Men's L) shirt through the wash for the first time. When I went to fold it, making sure all the seams were nice, I noticed it was sooo off-kilter.


*sigh* I sent in a service email. I would probably be fine with weird sized prints (the bigger the better, I say!), but this? this was disappointing.

thumperchick wrote:Is it possible to get a picture? I was wondering about the mugs and whether or not to consider purchase in the future. Perhaps seeing what you got will help me?

Here is an album I just threw together. Sorry the pictures aren't perfect. I can take some pictures of my "The Binge" mug I have at home if anyone wants.

http://imgur.com/a/y9MwR#0

Original sale page for reference - http://shirt.woot.com/offers/coffee-ceramic-mug

WinterNightz wrote:

That's shockingly unacceptable. Where is Shirt.Woot's pride... Even if they started offering AA blanks again, I'd be hesitant to order until they prove quality is back to normal. Really sad. :c

I posted this in the caffeine side-sale:

Slarti59 wrote:
On the actual topic of this thread, I'm really considering getting the zombie mug. But, I'm worried that it's going to look like someone put a brown sticker on a white mug. Why can't those be printed on brown (or black) mugs?

I guess I was (unfortunately) right.

Ordered Jurassic Parka from the side sale a few weeks back in WS. It arrived with the men's print on it, super huge. I sent images with measurement instruments to service, and was told I would receive a replacement with the correct print. It came via 2-day but had the same men's print on it. I notified service and received a refund. Not really a good outcome.

Wearing Stay Sharp reprint from 2011 today. Pretty sure it also has the men's print on it. Luckily not quite the disaster of Jurassic Parka.

TheHal85 wrote:pics n stuff[/url]

Thanks!

Here's a shirt I received that has a crooked design.







It's off by an entire inch. 6" from the top on the left side but 7" on the right.

By the way, is anyone else getting shirts that are incorrectly sized width wise? The mens large is supposed to be 22" wide but when measuring mine, I get 19.75, 21, and 21.25". They all fall short of the 22".

Then, after washing them, they all shrink horribly losing 10% of their size. So the 21" shirt shrinks to 19" and that's smaller than the medium size.

Wrong size and the image is off center. I won't spam everyone with the size pictures I sent to Woot (the design was nearly an inch too long and slightly too narrow), but here is a picture of how out of wack the art was.

cengland0 wrote:Here's a shirt I received that has a crooked design.







It's off by an entire inch. 6" from the top on the left side but 7" on the right.

Huh, Seeing this post made me want to check my "READ" shirt, and it turns out the print on my shirt is also not straight (on Anvils WM unworn/unwashed). 5" from the top on the left and 5.75" on the right.
And I bought my "READ" shirt on the first day its was up on Woot... dang it... I don't think I can bring it up with Woot now...

InfernoX wrote:

I was kicking myself for passing on this design because of the Anvil/QC issues, but now I'm glad I didn't buy it.

ThunderThighs wrote:Well, it's not supposed to look like that. That was the shirt before ProfHotPants posted that they think they had found the problem. I'm really hoping we'll see fewer problems as we get into the newer shirts. There will probably be a few lingering problems from existing stock though. Sigh.

This is the exact reason why I have been holding off on e-mail service with my un-ninja 3 misprint. The course of action has seemed to be they send a replacement which looks exactly the same since it is from the same printing run. When you contact again they offer a refund. While it is hard to complain against the logic or service, in the end you just end up with 2 products you frustratingly do not sunburn to wear rather then 1. It is now hitting the time that I have a feeling if I don't get on it I will run into problems so hopefully they have run thru the "old stock" of this shirt.

So...I have a possible new QC issue to throw in here...just wanted to see if anyone else agrees. My brother ordered for me one of the Rock, Paper, Dragon shirts and the first shirt that came had some double printing/shadowing errors. Customer service sent a replacement that looked over all better, but still had the most glaring issue that the original had...it seems the wrong blue dye/printing material was used. The website makes it seem the blue should be a sky blue, but the dye/printing material on the shirt looks closer to navy blue than sky blue. Did anyone else order Rock, Paper, Dragon from the side sale? And did anyone else feel/think that the blue is way off? I just think it looks wrong/kinda ugly. In my e-mail acknowledging receipt of the replacement, I asked for customer service to pass on my feedback to have dye colors double checked...figured I would post here just to make sure it got to people who can look into it. Oh, and while the shirt has issues, I honestly think Woot has one of the best customer service departments I have had to contact.

ThunderThighs wrote:Well, it's not supposed to look like that. That was the shirt before ProfHotPants posted that they think they had found the problem. I'm really hoping we'll see fewer problems as we get into the newer shirts. There will probably be a few lingering problems from existing stock though. Sigh.

ProfHotPants said that the problems with the incorrect design size has been identified and fixed; the post went on to say that problems with crooked prints or blurry prints should be caught as the shirts come off the machine.

ProfHotpants wrote:We think we have figured out the cause of the wrong print size ending up on shirts. We've addressed the issue, and hopefully it should no longer occur. [snip two sentences about customer service response time] Regarding off-center or off-register prints, and manufacturing flaws in the tees themselves - all shirts are individually checked at the end of the production run. We have humans checking the shirts, and sometimes they miss things. They try to catch as many issues as possible, but if something gets by them, please contact customer service and they'll be happy to help.

Obviously everyone is human and some errors are going to be missed. At the same time, we're seeing an awful lot of crooked prints - and it's kinda hard to imagine how something like this was missed:

nhes90 wrote:

ThunderThighs wrote:Well, it's not supposed to look like that. *snip* Sigh.

That's sort of the point :-/

I'm so sad. I went to wear my Cranes Nouveau shirt today and realized the neck is messed up. I thought it was creased from being in the mail bag or just folded funny, but it's twisted somehow. What makes it worse is that it is an AA shirt. I wish I would have inspected better before it was too late to replace it. Of course I have contacted service@woot.com, but I know this means I have an unwearable, irreplaceable shirt.



Upon further inspection, I just realized it printed crooked, as well. I really need to be more diligent to inspect shirts as I receive them, not that I'll be ordering many more unless they offer a different blank.

neuropsychosocial wrote:

Funny enough I sent them an email informing them of it, very politely saying while I wasnt going to ask for a new one because I wasnt going to be nitpicky(since the first time they sent me the wrong shirt) and was simply emailing them to let them know they messed it up incase so they know there was an issue.

But after reading this and seeing that it wasnt a small messup but in fact a trend.. I'm actually a little pissed. I don't really want to order any more shirts from woot until I stop seeing these things happening.

ThunderThighs wrote: But at the same time, you have to realize that there hundreds more that are receiving shirts that are just fine and not posting.

Don't forget those who's prints are not fine, and they are not posting, and those who's prints are just fine and are posting, and those who's prints are... I guess that covers it.
The only way to really know the extent of errors is to pull reports from the service side. Hopefully that's being done.

ThunderThighs wrote:I think we are seeing a few crooked prints. Shirts are placed on the printer whatever-it's-called by hand and checked by a human at the end. Periodically, one will slip through and we will take care of those. You are seeing a few people post about crooked prints but it has been an odd shirt here and there.

It's always the case that people will post when there are problems. AND WE APPRECIATE THAT! That's how we can move forward and improve. We want to know when there are problems. But at the same time, you have to realize that there hundreds more that are receiving shirts that are just fine and not posting.

Thanks! And keep posting. As always, if you have a problem with a shirt, email service@woot.com for assistance. Pictures really help because they can pass those on to the shirt department.

That might be true. On the other hand, I don't recall ANY posts about crooked shirts until recently, and there seems to be a flood of them lately. The impression, like it or not, is that there's a growing lack of quality control in the printing process. Could that be because there's a crush of printing going on, with the new shirt every day, plus all these side sales really amping up your print shop?

I'd guess that previously there weren't a lot, but once the first few got posted, people went back and looked at their shirts and discovered that they hadn't noticed what in retrospect looks terribly crooked.

In the first 4.5 years of shirt.woot, when I purchased most of my shirts, I believe I only had 2 shirts with issues. I've ordered less shirts in the past few months, but there have been more problems just in these few months than all the 4.5 years prior.

Used to be, on random shirt days, a random customer or 2 would receive a box of misprints. A lot of those misprints were crooked prints, along with other issues, of course. I haven't heard of a box of misprints being received in a very long time. In fact, it's been years. Is it because the misprints are just being sent with hopes that the customers won't complain? Of course not.

But I wonder what does happen to the misprints these days? Is there someone checking for these crooked prints that were definitely weeded out during the early days of SW? I know the volume of shirts printed has changed, but what has changed with the quality control process to allow for this many issues with just the relatively few wooters who frequent the forums?

Those of us who post here are just a small number, but are we disproportionately receiving more problematic shirts than the non-posting wooters? I doubt it.

<1% defect rate is pretty damned good. Take that, China!