Design By Humans – First Impressions
July 21, 2007 by Mike
Filed under Design By Humans, Threadless
My Design By Humans order arrived wwwaaayyy ahead of schedule. Someone at DBH must like me since they upgraded my shipping. Check out the slick DBH packaging.
And you thought that Threadless gave out a lot of stickers? My Design By Humans bag was filled with stickers, pencils and a few DBH cards.
Here is my favorite of the tees that I ordered, Black Market. Which according to its designer, 83grapik, is a collection of sketches. This shirt is covered with pretty much everything you can imagine. Below is just a small thumbnail, click it for a HUGE picture of the tee. It’s really really cool, trust me. 
One of the big differences between Design By Humans and Threadless is that DBH allows for a much wider range of printing techniques. One of the tees I received, Addition, has + signs embroidered onto it.
The shirts that DBH are using are definitely very nice. They fit fairly tight and are very soft, they feel thicker than AA tees. They have printed tags and a woven label.
Overall I’m very impressed with DBH and will be ordering from them again – probably very soon. Their shirts fit me well and the designs are great. I received one more tee from them that I don’t have up here, but will post up pictures next week as soon as I get a chance. These new comers have definitely won me over.
If you plan on ordering, you might as well save some money! I have this promo code for 15% off your order, it’s valid until July 27th. U0J8K8
It looks like they’re not skimping on anything! I wonder if they have some venture capital to be able to afford all of these goodies and such slick packaging/website and that huge first prize?
I love their designs, but I don’t get why they have such ridiculous shipping charges. No matter how much I like the design, I’m not paying $8.50 to ship one shirt.
great review Mike
— but unfortunately, shipping charge is way too much
Yeah, the shipping is definitely a problem. I got the inside info on that one. According to DBH their shipping prices are high because of location, California (rather than Threadless in Chicago). They are trying to negotiate with the shipping companies but must have a lot of volume before they are able to do that.
Shipping for 4 shirts or more is free and they are giving discount codes out to everyone that orders.
Joe, they must have a ton of VC… pretty much every detail of my order was perfect. They put a lot of money into all of this.
Still, even from California, shipping within the US should never be that high. I could ship a t-shirt for much less than $8.50 while doing no volume. I think the standard price for priority mail on a t-shirt is like $4.65, and that’s pretty fast shipping.
USPS Priority mail from anywhere to anywhere in the continental U.S. is $4.60 for a single t-shirt (unless it weighs A LOT), and usually doesn’t increase until 3 tees. A flat-rate Priority box is $8.95.
They shipped your tee using FedEx, though, which is more expensive. Their slowest service (slower than USPS Priority) is $6.96 for a tee from California to New York; $15.15 for ‘Express Saver’ (3 days), $17.59 for 2nd day, $40-$70 for next day (depending on how early you want it delivered next day). So… FedEx might not be the best choice for shipping for them, although I would guess that the prices are lower if you have a FedEx account (which I don’t).
I don’t know about UPS
USPS is definitely pretty quick, DBH does have some things to work out… the biggest being shipping.
Having to pay 50% of the cost of the shirt to have it shipped is tooooo much.
You know… I bet if they raised the price of their tees $1 dollar, and lowered the shipping… they’d get more orders. Then the shipping price would be less frightening.
Hey guys, Jason here from DBH. Thanks for the discussion. We are working to get the shipping situation resolved. In the meantime, I would be interested to know how important it is to you guys to have your order shipped using a service that is trackable. The Priority Mail service offered by the USPS is not trackable, but it is significantly less expensive. They do offer some type of “delivery confirmation” with Priority Mail but this does not amount to any type of tracking as it only tells you that the package was delivered after it has already arrived safely at its destination. So basically with US Priority Mail you can find out that your package did in fact arrive, but if it does not arrive when and where it is supposed to, there is no tracking information available.
With that said, would you prefer to pay a lower shipping cost and go without the tracking?
We are probably going to end up offering a trackable service as well as a non-trackable service and let you, the customer, decide which option to go with.
Thanks for all the feedback!
I’d much rather have $ than know where my package is. For tees I always choose the least expensive shipping, they are only t-shirts after all! USPS has always been very quick when I’ve used it, you should definitely consider providing it as an option.
Awesome post Mike – I am heading over there right now. That 15% discount ought to about cover the shipping costs. Really these shirts look excellent! Woohoo!
Hi everyone, Jason here again from Design By Humans. Quick update – just wanted to let you all know the USPS Priority Mail option has been added to our shopping cart. So you can now have a shirt shipped to anywhere in the U.S. for $4.65 and two shirts for $4.90. Also, we have some new tees coming to the shop section soon so stay tuned.
awesome!
Yeah, it’s great to see such a quick response from DBH on this issue: under a week!
Love the quality looks and incredible artists on DBH… looks like I’ll have to place an order soon.