Reviews (85)

Overall rating
3.8
Counts per rating level
  • 45% of ratings are 5 stars
  • 11% of ratings are 4 stars
  • 14% of ratings are 3 stars
  • 15% of ratings are 2 stars
  • 15% of ratings are 1 stars
September 16, 2020

There’s definitely room for improvement. I normally use printful and printify, so my expectations are high. I checked out this POD app due to the windbreakers, joggers, etc. The samples that came in were nice, but the biker shorts are a little see through. Also the colors come out way darker than what you load for mock ups. I was looking for a gold and deep red, but ended up getting something that looks a bit orange in certain light and maroon. Luckily my customers haven’t complained yet. *fingers crossed* I emailed the customer care about it and they basically said they can’t control how its printed. I even sent them a picture for them to see the difference. Thats rather disappointing. I feel like using the mock ups are a bit misleading now since the color doesn’t come out exactly how you upload the design. I’ll be ordering samples going forward and taking pictures on my own. This is rather expensive, so I’m not sure how long I’ll be using them due to that aspect. Probably will find a wholesale vendor in the near future since streetwear is really popular. I do love the custom branding! Also I’d prefer if the custom branding option was something you could permanently turn on without having to select it every time you process orders. There’s also no option for your to add the feature should you forget while checking out. That would be great to add since they give you the option to update the address or shipping method on orders after they are placed. Either that or we need the option to cancel orders! At least within the first hour of creation. Especially since you can’t make order modifications to anything but the address after its submitted, we need to be able to cancel to correct mistakes. I currently have an order I forgot to add my custom branding to, an inquiry was submitted, and hopefully customer service reaches out before the garments are made or its a waste. I do not want product going out without my logo. Customer Care definitely needs some work ASAP. The response time needs to improve (Going on 2 days with no response), and we need more than just an inquiry submission form. Some type of live chat, or phone number would be better. A lot of ppl are small business owners and customer retention is important. We need to be able to resolve issues immediately to ensure that our customers return. The customer service efficiency we receive trickles down to the level of customer care we provide as sellers. Also my coupon code for the first 30 days did not work on the last day. I wonder if this is due to timezone differences. If so, they will need to make the necessary adjustments for US customers. Hopefully this helps anyone looking into adding them to their store.

Donecia’s Crafts
United States
About 3 years using the app
Kin Custom replied September 22, 2020

Hello Donecia!

Thank you for taking the time to share detailed information about our services. Your feedback is very helpful with improving our customer experience. Each shop owner who registers with us becomes a part of our Kin Custom community, and your success is our number one priority!

We sincerely apologize for any confusion or lack of visibility around our printing process. We always want to be transparent with our customers, and our print guide is a great resource to know what to expect from us for print quality, including color matching and how to create your files using an RGB color scale for color accuracy. You can find more information on that here: https://knowledge.kincustom.com/knowledge/print-guide.

Our business hours are M-F 9am-5pm Eastern Standard Time. Our Customer Experience Team does their best to get back to you within 24 hours or by the next business day if you have reached out on Friday or over the weekend. Sometimes our emails land in spam or promotions folders so white listing us in your email is highly recommended. You can find more information on that here: https://knowledge.kincustom.com/knowledge/whitelist-domain

Our promo codes are marketed by our team located in Columbus, Ohio, for EST, so if it is after 11:59pm EST, the promo code will be invalid. If you've tried to use the promo code during this time, please let us know and we'll make sure to look into this further for you.

We thank you so much for your business and are sorry that your experience has been less than perfect. Please submit a new Contact Us form if there are any unresolved issues and we will be happy to investigate further to come to a resolution. We look forward to the opportunity to be able to continue to support your creations and provide a great customer experience going forward.

- Kin Custom

Edited April 26, 2021

Sizing does not consistently align to the sizing charts that they share for the products. Would recommend only for accessories or items where sizing doesn't matter. From my experience, mens tees [mens tee / mens graphic tee] and swim trunks are one to two sizes off. Outside of that, the custom branding is a great option. Shipping is consistently good. Several product choices.

Freedom BLVD
United States
About 3 years using the app
Kin Custom replied April 27, 2021

Hello Freedom BLVD,

We greatly appreciate your business and feedback as a valued customer! We love to hear that you enjoy the custom branding sets and that shipping has consistently been good for you!

We sincerely apologize for any frustration caused by our size charts and want you to know that we are passing this along to our Product Development Team to investigate. It is unusual for our size charts to be off up to two sizes, so we will urgently look into this matter and make necessary corrections ASAP. In the meantime, we recommend ensuring your customers are going by their true body measurements as outlined in the How to Measure graphic within our Size Chart page (https://www.kincustom.com/page/size-charts) and being mindful of the size allowance and fit mentioned in each product description in the size/fit section. Ordering samples is another way you can help guide your customers to ensure they get the desired look and feel from your custom designed and branded merchandise.

We thank you again for your business and look forward to the opportunity to continue to serve your business!

-Kin Custom

Edited February 14, 2021

Update: I was contacted by Kin Custom following my review. I have adjusted my review slightly but cannot do anything more until they have a working customer service; again, the products and printing are incredible. But this holds no merit if you can't reach your vendor immediately. There is absolutely no excuse for that in today's day and age. None. I am willing to change my review if Kin Custom ever gets back to me after the three inquiries I have sent them WEEKS ago. I have no phone number, no email address, and no chat box to try because they don't offer them. I NEED them to contact me or I will be forced to go elsewhere, which is HORRIBLE because their products, their branding sets...all awesome. I have never had a print issue, but you HAVE to be in contact with your customers. If I ran my business this way I'd be out of work in an instant.

doublesolid
United States
Almost 2 years using the app
Kin Custom replied February 10, 2021

Hi doublesolid-

We sincerely apologize for your frustration with our wait times and want to thank you your business. We are excited that you are growing. At Kin Custom, we strive to deliver on-demand merchandise with timely shipping that best represent your brand. We apologize that our Customer Experience Inquiries are taking longer than expected to respond. We are working diligently to correct this for valued customers like yourself.

With this said, we are excited that you love our merchandise, we pride ourselves on our quality apparel, shoes, and accessories and we like your style! We sent you an email directly to better understand and resolve your questions. Please make sure that we are not going into your spam folder in your email account to make sure that you are getting the quicker responses you deserve.

Again, we cannot thank you enough for your business and we are excited to see what you design next.

-Kin Custom

June 14, 2021

I've been using Kin Custom for just over a year, and I waited until now to write a review because I wanted to give time for COVID-related issues to be ironed out. They are the perfect example of a company being so close to the best in their industry but stumbling right as they get to the finish line. To start, my ENTIRE company was built around Kin Custom products for all of 2020. However, in 2021, we migrated to a different supplier for clothing because we desired to produce products with polyester & cotton blends, which Kin Custom doesn't offer. That's actually part of the reason for the 3 stars instead of 5, but I'll speak on that in a moment. When it comes to the quality of their products, Kin Custom really does a stellar job. Stitching and construction are very consistent, I can count on one hand how many times we've had a customer complaint about quality, and that's out of over 500 orders over the past year. Additionally, colors are vibrant and VERY accurate to their source artwork, which is a godsend in POD. I don't have to wait for samples typically, I can push products to our store with confidence which saves us a lot of money in production costs for new products. While we don't use them for clothing anymore, we still use Kin Custom for shoes as they remain the BEST place for shoes on-demand. No one even comes close in terms of quality, cost, presentation (the shoe box really does make it an amazingly well-branded product). Those last two are actually Kin Custom's biggest selling points: Cost & Presentation. Because they offer discounts based on order value, it means we can let orders build-up for a few days, then order in chunks to get a 20-30% discount on products. NO ONE else in the POD industry operates this way, and honestly, I wish more of them would. It's lead to major savings for big sales like Black Friday, where we got a 45% (!!!) discount on all our Black Friday orders, which led to us making even more money than usual, despite our entire store being on sale. This does mean it's more hands-on, and we have to place orders every few days manually. But in my opinion, that's well worth it for the savings. The added feature of full white-label branding for only $1.99 per product is also incredible. Not just that, but all the packaging is 100% recyclable *and* made of recycled materials. Major kudos to them for coming right out the gate with environmentally friendly packaging. Now on to the negatives and why I did not rate them 5 stars. It mainly comes down to 3 main issues: 1. Inconsistent & inaccurate size charts In my opinion, this is the biggest reason why Kin Custom is and will remain under 4 stars on the app store (with point number 2 below being a close second), despite their product quality being so outstanding. Their sizing makes no goddamn sense. A small t-shirt fits like a small, but the moment you get to a medium, their sizes are a mess. Mediums fit like a large, but 3XLs fit like a 2XL. It makes it near impossible to give customers an accurate idea of how their shirts will fit. And while the shirts run big, the pants run true-to-size/slightly small. So when we released track pants, we had many customers who were upset because they were used to our shirts being oversized, and therefore they ordered a size down. Only for them to arrive and be too small. Until this is fixed, Kin Custom will NEVER get a good rating on the app store or be able to truly contend with companies like Printful. We can't rely on our sizes being accurate and therefore provide customers with the right expectations. 2. Lack of product templates This, combined with the previous issue, is why I had to stop using them for clothing entirely. The fact they've been in operation for nearly 3 years at this point and STILL, TO THIS DAY, have no templates is beyond me. If you want to design products with a specific vision in mind (like, for example, placing your logo on the shoes in a similar manner to Converse), you have to play this back and forth with the mockup generator to make sure it looks right. And even then, it can be hard to know if you set things up how you wanted. Without templates, it's hard to ensure your artwork will show in the right places or what even the safe print area is when building out a design. The lack of PSD templates, or even just flat PNG transparent templates, as a POD company is unacceptable in the year 2021. With so much competition in POD, it's like Kin Custom said "fuck it" to actual functionality and focused entirely on their product quality. Which is a mistake. At the end of the day, POD apps are a SaaS solution mixed with manufacturing. If your software platform lacks core features, it doesn't matter how great the end product is because the experience of producing that product isn't worth it. 3. Exclusively polyester product catalog This is the final nail in the coffin of why we moved away from Kin Custom for clothing. As our customer base grew, we heard the same complaint more and more: "This looks amazing, but I wish it felt more like cotton and less synthetic." Kin Custom's clothing is 100% polyester across the board. Their shirts and hoodies feel closer to an athletic water-resistant fabric than cotton. Over the past year, they've introduced some more options, like the heavyweight sleeveless hoodies, which are a knitted polyester. Or their belted tapered pants, which are lightweight and closer to chiffon. But at the end of the day, it's still all 100& polyester, which does not meet the feel and comfort of cotton. As a result, we were forced to find a different supplier since our customers wanted hoodies that felt like regular hoodies, not track jackets or workout sweats. Now that we have found a supplier who does polyester jersey for tees (which feels closer to cotton) and 80% polyester/20% cotton for hoodies and joggers (which feels nearly exactly like 100% cotton), I can't make any excuses for producing clothing with Kin Custom, despite their amazing quality and white label branding. Ultimately the product has to be liked by customers, and ours don't like how Kin Custom clothing feels. If they improve these issues, I will be first in line to come back. But as it stands, I feel the only products someone should use Kin Custom for are shoes and accessories. I would not recommend them for clothing. I hope others find this review helpful, and I will be sure to update this if Kin Custom makes any major updates in the future to fix the issues I outlined.

PlayTyme
United States
Over 1 year using the app
Kin Custom replied June 15, 2021

Hello PlayTyme,

First, we want to thank you for taking the time to leave this detailed review of our Shopify app. We take customer feedback very seriously and want to reassure you that we have read and made note of all points mentioned in this review. We love hearing that we are meeting your expectations and have earned your recommendation as a supplier of shoes in the POD community! Thank you so much for sharing your great experience with our print quality, construction consistency, custom branding, and shipping. While we love hearing all the great things we are doing, we know there is always room for improvement and greatly appreciate the points you outlined regarding size charts, design templates, and our predominantly polyester apparel catalog. We believe there is always an opportunity to do better and we are absolutely open to exploring how we can set more clear expectations for customers and shop owners to achieve a higher level of satisfaction across the board. Our team would love to communicate with you directly regarding all your suggestions for improvement , so we will be reaching out very soon! Thank you again for your loyalty to Kin Custom and we greatly appreciate the opportunity to continue to be your preferred print and dropship supplier!

-Kin Custom

August 21, 2020

Shopify Integration App Review: The Shopify integration is complete crap - please fix your app! None of the app buttons work, including the orders button, so i always just have to go to the full website to get ANYTHING done. Seriously, they are like dummy buttons.

Kin Custom Review: The product selection is just okay, though I really appreciate more trendy styles that other companies don't have - still, have to source products from other POD companies to round out my catalog (i.e. no hats, etc). Prices are VERY high compared to competitors like Printful and Printify, i'd understand this if branding was included and customer service was strong. Neither is true. You pay an additional 1.99 PER PRODUCT for custom branding. I'm actually not too upset about that and i think it's worth it if you are building a brand. The quality of the branding sets are top notch! BUT it definitely hurts the margins, unless you want to charge $40 for a basic tee with free shipping... (shirt base price + shop fees + shipping + branding + taxes + your markup...yikes) - not even accounting for marketing and returns. They should revise their pricing model to be more competitive, as I can only reasonably source trendier items like joggers, track pants, and a few more niche items that i can't get elsewhere.

TLDR: Crap app. Decent selection, best for more trendy attire. Very expensive. Great branding sets (at an additional cost).

Urban Letter
United States
About 1 year using the app
Kin Custom replied August 24, 2020

Hi Urban Letter!

We know time is of the essence and apologize the app is not functioning properly for you. Thank you for bringing this information to our attention! Be on the lookout, our Customer Experience will be connecting with you to get more insights about the button issues you're having. We'll be in touch soon!

- Kin Custom

September 15, 2019

I’ve been using kin custom before they had a app on Shopify for my store and never had any issues. Now my orders never import over. I keep getting told to set up a API and download the app in the app section when the app is downloaded. Then I’m prompted to login in all over again and when I do that I get “system is busy try again” . This has been going on for almost two months. I’ve reached out to customer service and it took forever to respond & the one that did just sent a basic answer and never responded back.

Revenge of the Weirdo
United States
9 months using the app
Kin Custom replied September 18, 2019

Hi Revenge of the Weirdo,

Thank you for being a long standing customers of ours!

We appreciate your patience as we work through these issues and apologize for the time spent trying to import your orders. After reviewing your ticket history, our Customer Experience team expedited this to our tech support to schedule a call with you to see where the issues are occurring. We will continue to follow up to ensure this gets resolved for you.

- Kin Custom

March 9, 2021

I ordered 23 products to view before listing on my store. They arrived yesterday for a total of 14 days which I feel is great for international shipping. All of my white-base products came out great and I am pleased with those But I am concerned about doing garments with a black base because the color did not seem to absorb very well. I did a design with the men's black track jacket but it looks somewhat "faded". In natural and indoor light it sort of has a dark blueish-green hue to it. You can tell its not a solid dark black. Its a stark difference because the trim and cuffs ARE solid dark black and by contrast you can really tell the black jacket color is off a little. Perhaps the color did not transfer well and this is a one-time defect? If this jacket were to get washed and fade just slightly, it would look horrible.
Based on the reviews of others below, it would seem frustrating to appeal this to customer service and it seems safer to just pull the item from my store.

Heroes Twerk Here
United States
8 months using the app
Kin Custom replied March 11, 2021

Hello Heroes Twerk Here,

We want to thank you for your business and loyalty to Kin Custom!

We are so sorry to hear that you were not fully satisfied with your merchandise! If you haven't yet, please be sure to check out our Print Guide, which contains all the information you need to create designs that will print beautifully on all of our products. You can find the Print Guide here: https://knowledge.kincustom.com/knowledge/print-guide

We would love the opportunity to turn this experience around for you! Please reach out to our dedicated Customer Experience Team by opening a ticket here: https://www.kincustom.com/page/contact-us

We are standing by and ready to assist!

Kin Custom

October 5, 2020

As a pod platform is just awesome from the interface to the price all good but my gosh the team support is just non profesional , i ordered something in august ... 6 octomber still waiting for my order or an answer xD

ZYVEV
Germany
3 months using the app
Kin Custom replied October 14, 2020

Hi ZYVEV-

First, we want to thank you for using Kin Custom, for your print on demand, custom design needs for your apparel, shoes, and accessories. We are excited that you like our styles, and we are always looking to add to our assortment. We are also excited that you find our app easy to use.

We also want to apologize for your engagement with our Customer Experience Team. We strive to provide prompt and clear responses for all our inquires.

With your order, there are rare times where our orders get held in customs due to inspections. We gladly offer expeditated shipping if the hold is not a fault of the receiver. Please learn more in our Help Center.

https://knowledge.kincustom.com/knowledge/why-is-my-package-held-in-customs

We will be contacting you via email upon hearing the order status via our shipping provider.

As always, we want you to continue your successful business and are glad you choose Kin Custom for your custom design needs.

-Kin Custom

November 9, 2020

Is it possible if you guys could create more of a variety for kids like more shoes and more clothing there are really only a few options to choose from

B.U.R.G.U.N.D.Y
United States
About 2 months using the app
Kin Custom replied November 10, 2020

Hi B.U.R.G.U.N.D.Y,

Thank you for your feedback! We are happy that you have considered Kin Custom for your all-over print-on-demand & drop ship services.

We have an expert Product Development Team that is working to find new fashion trends and we are always looking to add styles to our assortment. We will take your feedback back to the team. In the meantime, take a look at our latest styles for women and men.

See link: https://www.kincustom.com/product-selection/all/new-arrivals

Again, we cannot thank you enough for your consideration and business. We are excited to see your creativity on our apparel, shoes, and accessories. If you need further assistance, please contact our Customer Experience Team.

-Kin Custom

October 7, 2019

Products are good but almost 0 customer service. They take days to reply and only reply to easy questions (and not even fully). Also most of the time their answers are copied and not related to the questions at all. Very disappointing!

Undergrad Society
United States
About 2 months using the app
Kin Custom replied October 8, 2019

Hi Undergrad Society,

We are thrilled to hear our products are great and sincerely apologize regarding the level of service you have received up until this point. One area we dedicate our efforts to is listening and committing to our customers. Although it has caused you frustration, which we apologize for, we appreciate you bringing this to our attention.

Our Customer Experience team operates Monday-Friday 9AM-5PM EST. If you have reached us outside of business hours, you may submit a ticket through our automated ticketing system which we reply within 24 hours or by the next business day. A member of our Customer Experience team will be in contact with you to investigate your issues further.

- Kin Custom