Custom Print vs Free Customization: What Each Path Lets You Control

Labelix offers two ways to start a custom garment: the Customize Print button on a catalog product, and Free Customization built from your own product references. A companion article, Starting with a Product or a Custom Brief, helps you decide which route fits your project. This one goes a level deeper: once you are inside each path, what exactly can you control — and what is decided for you?

Knowing the boundaries in advance saves the most common frustration in custom work: designing something the path was never going to accept.

Custom print: a fixed garment, curated canvases

When you customize a catalog product, the garment is settled — the SKU you picked fixes the product, variant, fabric, and color. What you design on is a pair of prepared canvases: Front and Back surfaces, each backed by base images that the catalog team configured for that SKU.

Three consequences follow from that setup:

• Some products are not print-customizable. If a SKU has no configured print sides, the Customize Print path is simply not offered for it. This is deliberate: a garment photographed at angles that cannot carry accurate placement previews would produce misleading designs.
• You choose among candidates, not arbitrary photos. Where a side offers several base images, you can switch between them; you cannot upload your own garment photo here. The candidates exist so that every preview you generate matches the real product.
• Artwork is required. A custom print request must place at least one print, and every print must have a decoration craft assigned from the techniques enabled for that product. An empty garment has nothing to quote.

Because the product and its pricing inputs are fully known, a custom print request can often be priced automatically the moment you submit — and the consultation is free.

Free customization: your references, your structure

Free Customization inverts the model. There is no fixed SKU; you supply the product yourself:

• Up to five product images, each becoming a surface you can name, reorder, and design on — a front, a back, a sleeve detail, a lining, whatever your product needs.
• A structured brief: category, target quality grade, expected retail price, expected order quantity, desired features, and free-text requirements — for example, a reference product whose quality you want matched.
• Artwork is optional. A garment-only request is perfectly valid; you can ask for a plain product built to your specification without placing a single print.

The flexibility has a price shape of its own: free customization charges a consultation fee at submission, and every request is quoted manually — a human reviews your brief, contacts you through your login email if details need confirming, and publishes a quote you can accept or decline. There is no automatic price, because there is no pre-configured product to price against.

The same destination

Whichever path you take, submission creates a Custom Request you can track under My Custom Requests. A published quote — automatic or manual — is reviewed and accepted by you before anything becomes an Order, and only the order stage involves payment for the goods. The two paths differ in who defines the product; they share everything downstream: quoting, order creation, production and delivery.

A practical rule of thumb: reach for Customize Print when a catalog garment already matches your product vision and speed matters; reach for Free Customization when the product itself is part of the design. Browse the catalog first — knowing what exists makes the choice obvious.