Picture this: You have a dozen custom apparel orders waiting in your queue, each one needing a fresh mockup. Between juggling client emails, waiting on design revisions, and dealing with unexpected color or sizing changes, your day slips by—and before you know it, 10+ hours are gone every week just making proofs. Sound familiar?
If you’re like most custom apparel decorators, you’re constantly looking for ways to reduce mockup time and streamline approvals. Yet the majority of promo products distributors, print shops, and apparel decorators still struggle with manual processes that eat up hours of staff time. Why? Because they’re often stuck using generic, non-specialized design tools (like Canva, Photoshop, or Illustrator) or emailing JPEGs back-and-forth with their clients.
In this blog, we’ll uncover why mockups take so long, how it’s harming your bottom line, and the best strategies to eliminate time drains—so you can increase sales, improve client satisfaction, and get your evenings back. We’ll also explore the best mockup software for apparel decorators, 3D mockups for custom printing, and tackle how mockup process improvement can be a game-changer for the branded apparel space. Let’s dig in.
How 10+ Hours of Mockup Work Hurts Your Business
Increased Labor Costs
If a designer or sales rep is spending 10-15 hours a week on mockup creation, that’s almost two full workdays. Over a month, you’re looking at 40-60 hours purely dedicated to tasks that could potentially be automated.
Think About the Bottom Line:
- Hourly wage × number of hours spent on mockups = Lost profit margin.
- Could that staff time be used more effectively elsewhere, such as marketing or new client acquisition to increase sales?
Slower Sales Cycles & Missed Deadlines
Longer approval cycles can choke your pipeline. If it takes 2 extra days to finalize a proof, it takes 2 extra days before your production team can print. With competitors touting same-day mockups or 24-hour turnarounds, slow response times can cost you a sale. Using a solution to create high quality mockups faster saves time by speeding up the approval process and ensuring quicker turnarounds.
A Stat to Remember: A typical sales cycle in custom apparel is about 11 days from inquiry to close. Cutting that down by even 20% means more orders and faster fulfillment.
Lower Client Satisfaction
When clients have to wade through multiple revisions and delayed proofs, frustration sets in. Traditional design software can be complicated, requiring a significant amount of time and effort to produce a decent mockup. Prospects might:
- Seek out a competitor with a faster or more polished process.
- Feel less confident about your ability to meet deadlines (especially for bulk or rush orders).
- Leave behind mediocre word-of-mouth referrals.
Customer Experience Matters: In an industry driven by referrals, losing a customer over poor proofing processes is entirely avoidable.
Opportunity Cost: Stifled Growth & Innovation
Every hour spent tweaking mockups is an hour not spent marketing your company, generating new leads, taking care of existing customers, or exploring new revenue streams (e.g., upselling embroidery on caps). Over time, the cumulative effect stunts growth. Imagine if you could pour those 10 weekly hours into areas of your role or business that impact your revenue instead?
Custom Apparel Mockup Software: The Solution to the Biggest Time Wasters in Mockup Creation
Understanding the Importance of Quality Mockups
Quality mockups are essential for branded apparel companies to showcase their designs and products in the best possible light. A high-quality mockup can align customers’ expectations to the true final products, leading to increased customer satisfaction, trust, and ultimately, driving more repeat sales. A good mockup should provide realistic and accurate representations of the product, allowing customers to make informed purchasing decisions. By investing in a quality product configurator, PPDs, distributors, and decorators can streamline their approval process, reduce manual work, and increase efficiency. This not only enhances the overall customer experience but also elevates the decorator’s reputation for delivering top-notch products.
Eliminating Endless Revisions and Back-and-Forth Emails
One of the biggest challenges garment decorators face is the endless cycle of revisions and back-and-forth emails with clients. This can be time-consuming and frustrating, leading to delays in the production process. The typical custom apparel order involves multiple stakeholders (clients, designers, production managers) each weighing in on color changes, logo placements, and text edits. According to industry surveys, businesses can go through an average of 7 revisions per order.
Why It Happens:
- Clients aren’t sure what they want
- Lack of clarity on design specs (color, font, print area)
- Non-centralized communication (emails, phone calls, Slack messages, etc.)
How It Impacts You:
- Time & Labor Costs: Each revision is another round of design edits.
- Delayed Production: Waiting for final client approval pushes back printing schedules.
- Frustration & Burnout: Designers and sales reps get swamped in repetitive tasks, leaving little room for creative or strategic work.
A user-friendly mockup generator or product configurator like SEDDI Decorator, for instance, can help alleviate this issue by providing a clear visual representation of the design, easy real-time editing tools, and in-app commenting, reducing the need for multiple revisions and emails. With a quality mockup generator such as Decorator, branded apparel companies can showcase their products in true-to-life, interactive 3D, making it easier for clients to visualize the final product and provide feedback. This streamlined communication process not only saves time but also ensures that the final product aligns perfectly with the client’s vision.
Over-Reliance on Generic Design Tools
Many people in the printed apparel industry rely on generic design tools that lack the customization options and features needed to quickly create high-quality mockups. These tools can be complicated to use, requiring a significant amount of time and effort to produce a decent mockup. A mockup solution built for the branded apparel space, on the other hand, takes into account how this industry works, and what their needs are. In Decorator, users can upload graphic files and easily place them onto digital replicas of real apparel styles that have been turned into 3D objects from the pattern files of the blank apparel suppliers. Artwork and graphics applications reflect the true physical drape of apparel, and placement dimensions are automatically calculated. Graphics placements can be viewed across a garment’s entire size range, and printing techpacks can be automatically exported to pass along to the team who will be decorating the apparel. These are just a few of the considerations software that is customized for the branded apparel industry takes into account.
Multiple Styles, Sizes, and Colorways
In an order, sales people at PPDs, distributors, and decorators often need to include multiple styles, as well as create multiple sizes and colorways of products, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. A quality mockup generator can help speed up and improve this process, providing the ability to create a collection of blank apparel across brands and styles, to then decorate and visualize that collection, and automatically scale designs across size ranges. This not only saves time but also ensures consistency across different product variations. By using a product configurator like Decorator, users can efficiently manage the complexity of multi-product orders, while delivering high-quality mockups that meet diverse client needs.
Fragmented Workflows and Lack of Automation
Many custom apparel companies rely on manual processes and fragmented workflows, which can lead to inefficiencies and delays in the production process. Print shop workflow automation is rarely top-of-mind for busy decorators and PPDs. They’re too caught up in day-to-day firefighting to think about how to integrate their entire process. But the reality is:
- Without the ability to create good mockups faster, you’re left manually placing logos, fiddling with design software to try to “make it look good enough”, and endlessly re-exporting files.
- You can’t easily share or co-edit designs with your clients, so you keep emailing updated PDFs.
- There’s no direct link from design software to your production queue, leaving room for manual data entry errors.
According to many custom apparel pros, this is where the greatest time drain happens—and it’s also the area with the biggest opportunity for improvement.
A professional-grade product configurator can help automate many of these processes, providing a streamlined and efficient workflow that saves time and reduces manual work. Accurate graphic placement is fast and easy and production specifications are accurately automated, so industry professionals can focus on creating high-quality products and providing excellent customer service, rather than getting bogged down in manual work. Automation not only enhances productivity but also reduces the likelihood of errors, increasing the likelihood of a smooth, reliable production process.
Conclusion
Stop letting mockups devour hours of your work week. By embracing 3D mockups, you can drastically reduce the time you spend on design approvals. Imagine what you could do with an extra 5-10 hours freed up each week.
Ready to Cut Your Mockup Time in Half?
Join the waitlist to try SEDDI Decorator when it launches publicly, and see how accurate-to-reality 3D mockup generation can transform your workflow. Jumpstart faster approvals, happier clients, and bigger profits—all from one streamlined platform.
Remember: The fastest way to improve your bottom line is to start. Whether you adopt a new mockup software today or gradually phase in new tools, any step toward making your proofing process easier will pay dividends in satisfied clients and saved time.
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