I have been wanting to write about this for a long time as I have been testing out Spreadshirt for quite a while.
I have written about merchandise on demand before and also pointed to audiolife as a service that focus on, on demand goods for bands. Spreadshirt is an European on demand merchandise alternative and it is a good one. Sign up for your own store and make t-shirts, hoodies etc for your own band. It is free and you make money whenever they are sold.
Imagine if my page was the home of one of your favorite bands: You are looking to buy some merchandise and obviously you click “merch” on the menubar. Voila: You are being redirected to all the cool merchandise “your favorite band” has to offer:
The quality of the fabric is good and the print looks good after wash (you get instructions with purchase). It is easy to design and custom shirts (yes, you can upload your own design). There are a couple of drawbacks though. First, when uploading a design you can’t use the whole shirt as canvas. For some reason, uploaded designs needs to be shaped as a quadrate. Second, I think prices are a little high, as some band merchandise has to be fairly priced (after all, not all of you are Justin Timberlake).
But all in all this is a good alternative for EU bands to make merchandise stores and sell shitloads of merch online without having to pay for production. I suggest you use spreadshirt as your online store, but whenever you go on tour you make limited edition tour merch for fans to buy (just to make sure: it is probably a bad idea to have Spreadshirt do this. One option for tour merch might be http://merchworld.se/).
PS: When living outside the EU (In Norway for instance) customers may have to pay customs on orders above 200 NOK. If you customize your store design and have it in Norwegian and with Norwegian currency, customers might not know orders are shipped from Germany. That is therefore something you have to make people aware of in order to make it legal.
PPS: Shirt elitists might want silkscreening, but as mentioned Spreadshirt is still a good web based option. So far I am happy with the stuff I have made through Spreadshirt (have only tested a t-shirt and the hoodie), and keep in mind that you can please the shirt elitists by selling silkscreening shirts while on tour.
