Cannot Recommend
I researched this company and found great reviews, but that was not our experience. What went wrong? Pretty much everything - and neither the sales person nor the "production manager" seemed to care enough to take ownership and fix anything once we realized we had problems. Our order was on the wrong bag with a smaller imprint area (we had 9 sponsor logos -- this was critical), used about 70% of the smaller imprint area so the logos were maybe half the size intended). We had gone back and forth with art past our initial deadline and were threatening to miss even our extended deadline and our event. That would have meant refunding all our sponsorship money and having no funds to go towards teacher grants or scholarships. This is where we were before Helene hit -- and the "production manager" told me he "didn't know" the artist who was supposed to be revising the art was in SC. I find it incredible that the "production manager" doesn't know where his people are located or wouldn't check when we discussed a hurricane in the gulf and their location on the east coast of Florida, printing facility in Arizona being safe from hurricane delays -- the only reason we were talking about continuing with an extended deadline. While my heart goes out to the artist in SC who had no power and all those impacted by Helene (I had no interaction with her), we should never have gotten to this point, and the test that separates companies that want to earn your business and provide service from those who just want to make fast, easy bucks is not only avoiding problems but especially how they deal with them. The two people I dealt with dodged phone calls and as far as I could tell did nothing to try to fix any of the problems, before or after Helene. It wasn't nearly as hard as they were making it. How do I know? I have Adobe Illustrator. I am novice with Illustrator and a retired person volunteering on several fronts. This was more than I was willing to take on or had time for. However, when we had nothing and only a weekend to try to salvage the project with a lot riding on it, I decided to clear the deck and try. I had 3 artboards for 3 different imprint areas and most of the artwork cleaned up by Monday morning. If a novice can do 3 templates in a day and a half, a pro should have done it in hours and been well ahead of a hurricane -and they should have been given the right product and template to work with. A company of their size surely has more than one artist or could find someone who could have done the art over the weekend, even starting from scratch (that is what I did) -- that is their entire business. We got nothing. Monday morning was our agreed new art or cancel and refund date, but neither the sales person nor the "production manager" answered my calls or called me back. Instead, late that morning, without comment, I received an email purporting to be our proof -- the same wrong template, wrong bag, and 15 red circles that would not print properly I had seen a week earlier. An email they next day asked if I had gotten the proof. It was insulting that they thought I wouldn't know or care and would approve that 15 red circle proof, but what if I had? Were they willing to send something to print that had no chance of being usable? Did they think we wouldn't demand a refund after the cost of printing and shipping had been incurred? Were they willing to risk that rather than call and say sorry -- we can't do it? I immediately called another company. In roughly 24 hours, we had all the artwork cleaned up, on the correct bag with the correct imprint area, had an art team and a production lead check the art work, sent the project to production and got a clean proof back -- we were actually to print at the same facility in Arizona that Custom Earth would have used the next day. The bags arrived before our event and with time for us to prep them. That's service. That's hustle -- that's what I never saw with Custom Earth. If you have a simple, single logo project that can be popped in place with the push of a button on a program and no actual human effort, you might save a few dollars here and get the same printing houses as other companies. But if you want or need a specific product with human effort and ownership of the project to see it through, I cannot recommend Custom Earth. I wanted to -- I had a bag concept in mind for next year and had another business I was about to refer to them, but we expect a team that will take ownership and work with us to avoid problems and hustle to resolve issues when necessary. We got neither with Custom Earth. To be fair, Custom Earth did two things right: They sent a nice assortment of samples with their logo and they didn't argue about the cancelled order or refund. The payment was in two parts - one refund came through very quickly, the other took a little longer, but both came through.
By Beth