Case Study · Print Production

Three tools. One portal. Zero bottlenecks.

A custom-apparel printing business ran its two most important motions — pricing a job and producing the artwork — on manual effort. DBAI built three tools into the shop's own portal: an Image Studio that generates print-ready DTF artwork with production QC built in, a set of Pricing Calculators that turn size and quantity into a quotable number instantly, and a Price Sheet builder that exports ready-to-send retail price sheets.

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Project: DTF Tools
Industry: DTF apparel printing
Context: A custom-apparel print shop whose design and sales team use the toolkit daily; pricing and artwork no longer wait on one person's attention.

The challenge

Quoting was haphazard at best, and artwork was a queue. The shop was busy — but its two core motions each ran through a single human bottleneck.

Five spreadsheets deep: Every quote was assembled from five different spreadsheets — each updated by hand, or not updated at all. Nobody could be sure a number was current.
Play-it-safe pricing: Without trusted numbers, quotes were padded to be safe and lost the job, or sharpened to win it and risked losing money on it.
The CEO as checkpoint: The only guard against a money-losing quote was the CEO personally reviewing every one. Pricing couldn't scale past one person's attention.
An art backlog: Every design was hand-built in Illustrator by one overworked staff designer — expensive, slow, and deep in queue.

Before

Pricing a job: Five hand-updated spreadsheets, maybe current.
Quote confidence: Padded to play it safe, or sharp and risky.
The CEO's role: Personally reviewed every quote.
Artwork: Hand-built in Illustrator, deep in queue.
Change requests: Slow to turn around.

What we built

Three tools, one portal: each takes a motion that ran on one person's effort and turns it into something the whole team can do in seconds, inside the portal they already use every day.

How it's built

01
Image Studio
Print-ready artwork, generated. The team iterates cheaply at a preview tier, then promotes to production resolution when the look is locked. Every result runs an automated DTF QC — dimensions, effective DPI, transparency, color mode, edge bleed, file size — with chroma-keying enforced server-side so artwork keys out cleanly on any garment.
02
Pricing Calculators
Four quoting modes — individual transfers, gang sheets, press service, and full-service custom apparel — priced from logo area with automatic volume tiers. The full breakdown, from base rate to discounted order total, is on screen as the numbers are typed.
03
Price Sheets
The last step of a quote, automated: configure style, type, capacity and quantity, and export a clean, branded retail price sheet — line items, tiers and totals composed automatically, ready to send as a PDF.

Agents & automation

Automated DTF QC: Every generated image runs dimension, DPI, transparency, color-mode and edge-bleed checks automatically, with chroma-keying enforced server-side.
Pricing engine: Quotes run on rules instead of spreadsheets — a lookup, not an investigation.
Price sheet generation: Line items, tiers and totals composed automatically into a ready-to-send branded PDF.

The stack

CLAUDE: Development engine behind all three tools
AI IMAGE GENERATION: Two-tier pipeline: fast preview, production resolution
DTF QC PIPELINE: Server-side checks on every result
CLIENT PORTAL: Pricing engine and price sheets, in the team's daily workspace

Built with Claude

All three tools were designed, built and shipped by DBAI working with Claude — from the first pricing rule to the production QC pipeline — delivered inside the portal the team already uses every day.

The result

With pricing running on rules instead of spreadsheets and artwork generated instead of queued, the two bottlenecks came down together. The team moves faster, the quotes protect their own margin, and the CEO's attention went back to running the business.

Pricing a job: One calculator with a live breakdown to an order total.
Quote confidence: Priced from real rules, margin-safe before it's sent.
The CEO's role: Out of the pricing loop, by design.
Artwork: Generated, QC'd and upscaled in the studio.
Change requests: Faster to turn around.

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