The evaluation checklist for jersey personalization vendors

Tuesday afternoon, a meeting room at the stadium. On the screen a shirt rotates, the custom name clean across the back, the number centered, the color changing on request. Martin runs merchandising for the club and has to pick a vendor before the new season. This is his third demo.

Martin barely looks at the shirt. He looks at his list, because what does not come up in this hour decides the project later. A shirt with the wrong name is not repaired. It is replaced, and it is paid for twice.

We made Martin up, not the list. It holds 28 questions in six blocks, each with its reason: three for what the demo hour buries, three for the bills that follow. Agencies can use it from the other side; without it, a club asks these six months after go-live.

To be fair, the demo itself is not the problem.

The demo shows the surface

A demo shows the surface, and the surface is the smaller part. Rotating a shirt smoothly and setting the name at the right angle is real work. The route behind it has held for years, too: requests arrive, somebody reads them, the decorator gets a printout.

The day-to-day, though, turns on three questions that rarely reach an agenda. What does the decorator receive? Who decides an uncertain name? And what do you maintain twice?

A real name goes on a real shirt, and the return is usually excluded: printed shirt returns. What the demo leaves out shows up later, in three bills.

Three bills after the meeting

The first arrives weeks later, when a customer gets in touch. Then the question is not how the preview looked, but who released what and when.

The second arrives in July. The most expensive surprise is rarely a missing feature, but one that exists twice. Then somebody enters seasons, shirts and sizes twice.

The third arrives in launch week. Kickflip's pricing page lists 59 US dollars a month plus "1.95% to 0% per custom product sold". That is a range, not a number. Ask which rate starts at which volume, and whether it covers all sales or only the part above the step. The pricing comparison puts the orders of magnitude beside it.

All three bills are written in the hour when nobody asks. Martin's first three blocks ask in exactly that hour. Weigh the boundary in an answer, not the answer.

Catalog: where the data comes from

The configurator is the visible part. What counts is where its data comes from, so Martin starts with the catalog behind it.

1. Does the interface build itself from the catalog: shirt, colorway, permitted prints?
2. Are shirt sizes true variants with their own measurements, or just a label?
3. Who enters squads, shirt versions and print rules: the vendor or you?
4. Can a player pick be told from typed text after the fact?

Question 4 is not technical. A fan picks "Smith, 9" from the list, or types the same pair. In a complaint, that counts.

The loudest question comes next: what leaves the system on its way to the press?

Handover: what the decorator gets

Three questions about the handover.

1. Does the decorator get a file, a printout or a screenshot? If a file: which format and measurement?
2. How does the vendor confirm name and number in the layout before anything is pressed?
3. Is the version the decorator works from fixed at purchase?

At the top of the market the answer surprises. For official Premier League product, one licensed supplier provides shirt names, numbers and sleeve badges to all 20 clubs, as the league itself states. That covers retail and the pitch.

Outside such chains it changes. The decoration supplier Stahls' prefers PDF on its ordering page, accepts seven further formats and requires every font converted to outlines. ShopWorks sells customer proof approval as a separate product beside its shop software.

Print-ready is not a format. It is a claim. The next question is not settled by a format.

Uncertain names: who decides

Many clubs already check by hand. Five questions about the promise to take it over.

1. Does the system read text only, or the lettering on the shirt?
2. Which languages does the check itself run in?
3. Does an uncertain case pass, get rejected, or wait for a person?
4. Who may create, change or retire a rule: club or vendor?
5. Does a new rule reach orders that already wait?

Question 1 carries the highest stakes: text screening cannot see a printed shape. See where text screening ends and checked, not blocked.

That makes twelve questions from the demo hour. An example shows what a useful answer sounds like.

Boundaries, not smooth answers

A vendor can answer all of these. What counts is who says where the answer stops, and that is what Martin writes down.

The same holds for this list. Where kit.ink has no mechanism, no answer stands here. Ask those questions here as anywhere.

On the catalog. The frozen record in kit.ink states what is paid for: a player print when name and number match a squad person, otherwise a free print. Beside it sits who matched and whether the picker was used. The boundary: a typed pair that matches is a player print too.

On the handover. At release kit.ink produces a package: print artwork at true size per decorated view, a dimensioned drawing in millimeters, a print instruction in the club's language, a checksum sidecar. A production system may read it only once the order's state allows. The boundary: there is no ready-made connection to one named print partner.

On uncertain names. The check in kit.ink reads text: names, numbers, free input, forbidden characters, emoji. Printed shapes it does not read. kit.ink writes and switches on the rules; a club proposes a word and sees what applies.

A clean shirt goes through without a person. An uncertain name is held, not rejected, and while it waits, no production system reads it. A new rule first runs quietly and shows what it would flag. A person at kit.ink decides on that count. A rule change re-checks designs that are finished but not ordered; an ordered shirt is never re-judged.

Three bills remain, and the first measures exactly that boundary.

Bill one: the dispute

Weeks after launch a customer gets in touch, and then the record decides. Martin's four questions:

1. Can every state of an order be reconstructed, refused attempts included?
2. Does the log keep the readable name for good, or is there a deletion period?
3. Who sees this timeline: the vendor only, or the club too?
4. Has a club ever read this timeline?

On question 2: Germany's data protection authorities keep a joint guidance index, and it lists nothing on keeping a printed name. State indexes were not reviewed. Swiss law differs: the processor relationship sits in Art. 9 of the Federal Act on Data Protection. This describes statutes, not legal advice.

kit.ink's answer to questions 1 and 3: one timeline per personalization shows every state change, every refused attempt and every read. It is for the club and kit.ink, not the fan.

The boundary sits in question 2. The permanent trail carries no cleartext, only rule identity and severity. The readable text sits apart and can be deleted; kit.ink promises no period for it. That is data hygiene, not a statement about compliance with data protection law.

The second bill arrives every July.

Bill two: July

Six questions draw the line between your side and the vendor's.

1. Checkout, payment and refunds: do they stay inside your shop?
2. Does the shop order stay the leading one, or does a second appear?
3. Does your print partner stay yours, and your press your own?
4. Where do you maintain seasons, shirts, sizes and prices in July, and which twice?
5. Is there a working link to the commerce platform you run?
6. On a switch, what do you take: which data, format, deadline?

Where one provider runs shop and decoration, the line sits outside the club: who runs your club shop.

In kit.ink, checkout, payment, refunds, customer mail and the print partner stay put. Club staff set up seasons, shirts, colorways, sizes, prints and squads, in German, English and French. kit.ink sets up the three-dimensional shirt model, the cutting-sheet settings, the club-wide text rules, the refused-numbers list and the shop link.

For Shopify there is a connection: product page, cart, checkout, order intake, mail blocks. For other commerce systems there is no ready-made connector, only the block and the open interface: the Shopware gap.

The third bill arrives in the very week everything goes well.

Bill three: launch day

The quiet phase says little. Martin asks about the two loud days, launch day and the Monday after:

1. What happens to an order in progress when the catalog turns over?
2. What happens to the squad list when a player leaves mid-season?
3. Is there a real number for how many personalizations ran at once?
4. Which outages were there, and how long did they last?
5. What does the pricing model do at hundreds of orders in a few hours?
6. Is the software running at a club, with evidence rather than a promise?

Questions 1 and 2 are one event from two sides: season rollover.

On questions 3 and 4: a vendor who says "we have not shown that under real load" gives an answer a club can work with. An invented number is not.

kit.ink's answer to questions 1 and 2: adding to the cart pins the shirt version, elements, size and images, and the record does not drift. Creating a season copies the squad lists of the last season created. The boundary: shirts do not travel with it, nor does the per-shirt choice of lists.

That settles the three bills. What is left is the hour they are written.

Same shirt, different hour

In the next vendor meeting a shirt rotates on screen again, just as cleanly. As before, Martin barely looks at it. He asks the questions that hour usually skips and writes down each answer's boundary.

Vendor or your own build: buy or build. What clubs publish about personalization: the audit of 66 club shops.

A smooth answer is worth nothing on launch day. An answer holds until July when it names its own boundary. Martin's list wants no more: it makes a missing boundary audible.

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The answers from kit.ink stand above, each with its boundary. To run your own vendor search against this list, start with a short conversation.

Most cited pages were accessed on August 6, 2026; the Kickflip and ShopWorks pages on September 22, 2026.