I’m not impressed with the care and feeding of customers very often. Usually, the opposite is true. On Sunday, I ordered a custom screen-printed T-shirt, from Zazzle, as a present for my girlfriend. The website said it would take 3-5 days to make, and I ordered 2-day shipping. I received a shipping notice on Tuesday night, and they upgraded the shipping to overnight. I had the shirt Wednesday morning! A very nice job of underpromise and over-deliver.

I looked through their selection of shirts for a graphic I could modify. My one complaint is you can’t search with categories like shirts for men, women, or children. I couldn’t find one I liked, so I opened up an image editor and found the zebra I was looking for in my clip art. I added text and wanted to import the image, but the graphic had a white background, which would show up on the shirt.

On a whim, I uploaded the image to Zazzle, picked the shirt I wanted, which was black, and added the image. They have a toggle you can select to make the background transparent, and they had better fonts than I had on my PC. A few more clicks and I’d saved time and bought the shirt. Thanks to Zazzle for helping me score some birthday thoughtfulness points. Oh, and once you create a shirt, others can buy it. There is a long, hopelessly cute, inappropriate story about how the shirt came about!

Some final thoughts. All their current coupons/discounts are on the site, so you don’t have to look elsewhere for them: http://bit.ly/hpyXU2. They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, even on custom items.