So the more I use Spreadshirt, the more I see it's not a serious platform for merchandising. If you add a design for a mug, Spreadshirt requires you add the ENTIRE mug category, which contains any number of hidden (and hideous) products which you have no control over. I've confirmed this with Spreadshirt customer service: To add one white mug, you must add ALL mugs. To add one men's shirt, you must add all variations. This makes it impossible to control the quantity of products for a design, so the result is that the storefront gets flooded with a hundred variations of the very few things you set up, and the only way to remove them is to remove the whole category.
So, what to do? I see only a few options, and none of them are great:
1. We limit it to one or two generic designs for everything. This is really the only way that makes sense. Anything else is going to have the visitors wading through hundreds of badly auto-designed products that no one will buy.
2. We ditch Spreadshirt, and seek other options. I mean, surely there's better than this out there somewhere. :)
If we stay, we risk carefully thought out designs getting lost in auto-gen rubbish, which any online retailer will tell you is death for a product line. Too many options is no options, especially when most of the options look terrible anyway.
My 2p -C