Dropshipped POD: Printful Hat Embroidery Multi-Color Designs

Printful Hat Embroidery Multi-Color Designs

By Ryan Hogue on March 20, 2019

Creating multi colored custom embroidered hats in Printful is so easy! It can be confusing at first, so check out this article on how to assign thread colors.

When I started selling hats using the Printful + Etsy / Amazon integrations, I was uploading simple single color text-based designs, and assigning a single thread color (usually white).

Sometimes I would experiment with matching the thread color to a two-tone snapback hat, but for the most part I kept it simple and just used white thread of dark colored caps.

hat with yellow embroidery and yellow flat bill

After my massive initial success selling hats (over $10,000 in my first month on Etsy alone), the sales from my initial trend were waning, so I expanded my offerings & ultimately began oferrings more and more multi-colored hat designs.

Unfortunately (for me) I didn't know there was a quick & easy way to create multi-colored embroidery designs in Printful... So I would take the time to create designs in Photoshop, then save & upload them as individual layers.

It made sense in my head that 1 layer = 1 thread color, up to a maximum of 4 thread colors per design.

The downside of this method meant that each time I added a different layer to the design, Printful's auto-fill feature (which for the record I am a fan of) would automatically expand the layer to fill as much space as possible, and I'd have to manually re-size it how I wanted it.

The entire process sucked.

Eventually I learned the EASY way of adding multi-colored embroidered hat designs, and I'm happy to share it with you!

How to Create Multi-Color Embroidered Designs In Printful

Without further ado, here's the right way to set up embroidery for your print on demand designs with multiple colors:

Open your Printful store & click the "Add Product" button
Choose an embroidery product, such as hats & then pick a hat type. My favorite is the Yupong 6007
Upload your single-file multi color design that you want embroidered onto your hat. I'm going to use this 3-color smiley face emoji PNG
Select the flat thread colors that most closely match your design (maximum 4). I always use flat embroidery
Following each click you should see the design (overlaid on the hat) reflect that thread color. Printful will automatically match each thread color you pick to your uploaded design. The design below uses 1800 Black / 1951 Gold / 1784 Maroon
You're limited to choosing from the 15 thread colors that are currently available (as of March 2019). Fortunately their software matches the threads to the closest colors in your designs. When you're done, click "Proceed to Mockups"

The main concession you make when you use embroidered designs instead of print is that you pay an embroidery digitization fee..

You pay this because, according to Printful:

"all embroidery files need to be digitized to a format the embroidery machines support"

As of writing this, the digitization fee is $6.50 per file. This may sound like a lot, but just last month they reduced the cost from $8.95 to $6.50, a 28% saving!

The second concession you have to make is being limited in your color choices to the 15 thread colors available: