AI-Driven Print-on-Demand Automation
Outcome
Automated pipeline from niche research to live product listings, with AI-generated designs that meet DTG print specifications.
Build an automated system that handles the full print-on-demand lifecycle: niche research, design generation, mockup creation, and publishing to e-commerce platforms — reducing the per-product creation time from hours to minutes.
DTG (direct-to-garment) printing has strict requirements: 4494×5097px print area, true PNG transparency (not fake alpha), and designs that survive the printing process. AI image generators often produce artifacts that look fine on screen but print poorly. Budget constraint: minimize per-design cost while maintaining quality.
Built a CLI pipeline: niche analysis → prompt engineering → AI image generation → background removal → Printify API upload → Etsy listing. Tested multiple AI models for design quality. Discovered that prompting for solid white backgrounds and then using dedicated background removal produces far cleaner transparency than asking AI models for transparent backgrounds directly (they generate fake checkerboard patterns baked into RGB pixels).
AI transparency is a solved-looking but actually nuanced problem. Gemini produces visually cleaner designs than DALL-E for product art, but neither generates true alpha channels. Built a post-processing pipeline with dedicated background removal. Printify API integration required handling product blueprints, print providers, and variant management programmatically. Etsy listing optimization (titles, tags, descriptions) was automated with AI-generated SEO-optimized copy.
Expanding into additional product types (mugs, hoodies, posters) and exploring KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) for coloring books using the same AI generation pipeline. Building a review queue for batch design approval before publishing.