The company helps globally-known brands but SMEs are at the core of its business. Printful’s business partners can sell merchandise, expand revenue streams, or start a business from scratch. It’s the best way to stand out from the crowd!

During design creation, vendors can access advanced tools and choose from a catalog of over 300 products. These include apparel, accessories, home and living, and many more. Customization options include direct-to-garment, direct-to-film, and all-over prints to premium embroidery.

One of the most important parts of creating products for designs is removing backgrounds.

“This process allows customers to combine many designs at once or reimagine them in a new composition,” says Printful Head of Design, Agnese Bite. “Removing backgrounds is an integral part of the design process for our customers.”

However, users had to remove their own backgrounds with external tools. As a result, parts of the background sometimes remained in the design image.

“If you are printing onto something like a dark t-shirt, you immediately see that some parts of your image are not supposed to be there. You realize that with just one click, you could generate hundreds or thousands of products that don't match your desired appearance.”

In this case, customers would have to stop the product design flow, upload the image to another platform, try to adjust the design and remove the unwanted artifacts. Then they would have to save, download and upload the adjusted design onto Printful once more. “Dealing with multiple platforms and correcting images to reach their goal took a huge amount of time,” says Bite.

In some cases, customers hadn’t realized they needed to do extra work.

“Customer support sometimes received emails from companies saying they had no idea their company logo even had a background to remove,” Bite says.

They only noticed it when the design was placed on a t-shirt or mug.

“The experience could be disappointing because a regular customer might not visualize the outcome before seeing it. If you upload your logo with a background, you realize, ‘This is not what I wanted!’ because you have, say, your yellow logo with a square around it on your navy t-shirt.

“They would think, ‘This is ugly and not what I wanted my team to wear for a special occasion. I feel friction, I don’t know how to solve this, I don’t have any extra design software.’

“Then they got stuck.”

Sometimes, customers would even abandon their shopping carts.

Around three years ago, Printful decided it was time to relieve this background removal pain point.

Executives evaluated several tools that provided that functionality and explored image removal on the remove.bg platform.

“Remove.bg clearly stood out through its quality,” says Bite. “That’s very, very important for us.”

Once Printful agreed to partner with remove.bg, it quickly moved to implementation.

With background removal as part of Printful’s design tool, the design process becomes quick, smooth and trouble-free.

“Remove.bg means customers are good to go through the product creation flow immediately,” says Bite.

It reduces the time vendors need to spend creating their designs.

“Once you unlock those features, people can create far better outcomes than they imagined. They are positively surprised, more engaged, and want to add something extra to make designs even better.”

Removing backgrounds is now one of the most used of Printful’s design tools.

Printful is overall extremely happy with remove.bg. But there is one small issue that is gradually being eliminated.

“On very, very rare occasions, there’s a difference between the preview and the final outcome.” Bite says. “But we see remove.bg investing more and more into technical capabilities and it’s happening less and less often.”

She adds that working with the background removal service has been a breeze.

“Communication with remove.bg has been great, helpful, and demonstrated a high level of understanding in the unusual case of us having an issue.

“Without remove.bg, our design tool wouldn’t be as competitive as it is today. Background removal functionality is a must-have feature for all online digital design tools.

“Overall, I would give remove.bg a nine out of ten, and if the preview was always exactly the same as the outcome, I would give it a perfect score!”