A Merchant's Guide to Multi-Side Printing

Front-only printing is the default a lot of stores start with, and it's the first one worth outgrowing. A shirt isn't one printable surface — it's several — and every side a shopper can't customize is a side that never enters the price at all. Left as the default, that's not caution, it's revenue a store never had the chance to earn.

Every printable side

Custy supports a full set of print locations per product: front, back, left sleeve, right sleeve, and neck tag. Each side gets its own print area and its own mockup, configured per product in the Design Lab, so a shopper designing a back print sees an accurate back-of-garment preview rather than a stretched guess based on the front. That accuracy matters as much as the extra revenue — a shopper who can see exactly what a sleeve mark or a neck tag will look like is a shopper who trusts what they're about to buy, and trust is most of what closes a personalized order.

A merchant doesn't have to enable every side on every product. A plain crewneck might only ever need a front and a back; a team jersey might make real use of all five. The point isn't to maximize sides for their own sake — it's to match the sides you turn on to what shoppers on that specific product actually want to personalize, and price and mock up only those.

Sides are priced — and gated — by plan

Every side a merchant enables carries its own price, configured the same way front prints are: as part of the dynamic pricing rules on that product. How many sides a store can turn on depends on its plan — the Free plan supports a single print side, Starter supports up to six, and Pro removes the cap entirely. Full plan details live on pricing. That structure gives a store room to grow into multi-side selling deliberately: start with a front print, prove out demand, add a back print, and keep expanding sides as the plan allows rather than needing every side priced and ready on day one.

Designing for each side

Not every side should carry the same kind of design. A front print is the one shoppers and everyone around them see first, so it earns the boldest, largest artwork — a full chest graphic, a big logo, a name across the chest. A back print has more room and less immediate scrutiny, which makes it the natural place for detail: taglines, dates, a full roster of names, anything that rewards a second look. Sleeves and the neck tag are small, glanced-at real estate — a monogram, a small mark, or a single line of text reads clean there, while a busy design just looks cramped in the space. Matching design advice to each side's real size and attention isn't a rule Custy enforces on shoppers; it's the difference between a multi-side product that looks considered and one that looks like the same design pasted across four locations.

Production stays clean

None of this adds chaos on the production side. Each side a shopper designs exports as its own print-ready file, so a five-color front print and a one-color neck tag arrive as two separate, correctly sized files rather than one file a production team has to cut apart by hand. Whoever runs the press — an in-house team or an outside print partner — gets exactly what they need for each location, per order, without extra prep work standing between a finished design and a finished shirt. That per-side file separation is what makes scaling to five sides no harder to fulfill than scaling to two — the work per order grows with the sides a shopper actually used, not with how many locations the product theoretically supports.

Multi-side printing is one of the more direct paths a merchant with an already-customizable product has toward more revenue per order: no new products to source, no new merchandising to plan, just more of the shirt shoppers already want to make their own. Merchants building out team and event orders in particular — see who sells with Custy — tend to lean on multi-side setups the hardest, since a name on the back and a number on the sleeve is often the entire point of the order. Turning on a second or third side, pricing it, and letting shoppers design it is a small setup step that opens up demand a front-only product never gets the chance to capture.