Amazon launched a feature in Alexa for Shopping that lets shoppers in the U.S. create custom merchandise by describing an idea in plain language and letting AI generate the artwork. Shoppers can type a prompt, refine the result by typing changes or tapping suggestions, and put the design on apparel like T-shirts and hoodies or drinkware like tumblers and water bottles, with more product types coming over time. They can also share the designs with friends and family who can order the same merch.
Amazon is pitching the service for family reunions, personalized gifts for birthdays and anniversaries, team outings, and group inside jokes. Ooh man, I can imagine some of the t-shirts that are about to come out of Alexa! The service is free to use, and customers only pay for the merch they order, with finished products shipping Prime-eligible.
The design tool connects to Amazon's Merch on Demand service, which originally launched in 2015 with a designer/seller upload model, not a customer-facing custom-print service. I've sold my Travel is Life t-shirts via Amazon Merch for years, and the service works great. However, as of a few years ago, customers have been able to upload their own designs, and now they can use AI to create them on the spot.
It's a fantastic evolution of the Merch service. At this point, most Merch designers are using AI to make their designs anyway, and with the new service, Amazon is bypassing the middleman, which it is known to do. “Your margin is my opportunity” was the famous Jeff Bezos quote, which now seems to include margin that Amazon at one point created itself.
The official statement from Zazzle and CafePress was: “Fuuuuuck!”
If you're unfamiliar, those are two of the original “design your own t-shirt” services that pre-date Amazon Merch by a decade or more. For comparison purposes, a one-off t-shirt design from Amazon currently sells for $13.49, whereas the same shirt runs about $17-25 on Zazzle or CafePress, plus shipping in many cases.
Price aside though, both of those services offer one big thing that Amazon Merch doesn't have — a robust online drag-and-drop design editor. I tried using Alexa to create my own t-shirt designs with AI, and the results were dismal. Additionally, there was no way to manually edit the designs after output. You had to use text-prompts through Alexa, which didn't get me too far. Designing with Alexa is the equivalent of asking ChatGPT for a small edit and getting served up an entirely new image. All that could change, but for now, Alexa likely isn't going to take over the “design your own t-shirt” market overnight.
