Almost every complaint about a logo is really a complaint about a manufacturing process, and the processes are not interchangeable. A screen print, a heat transfer and a run of satin-stitch embroidery fail in completely different ways, at different points in the item's life, and only one of them can be fixed after the fact.
Knowing which one is in front of you changes the question you ask. It also changes whether requesting an exchange is worth five weeks of your life.
Identify the process first
- Screen print. Ink pushed through a mesh, one screen per colour. Flat, slightly raised at the edges, and the colours are laid down in sequence — so misregistration shows as a coloured halo where one layer sits off the one under it.
- Puff print. Screen print with an expanding additive, so the graphic stands proud of the fabric. It reads as soft and rubbery, and it distorts if it is pressed hard while warm.
- Heat transfer and vinyl. A film pressed on. You can usually see a faint rectangular carrier edge around the artwork under raking light, and the hand feel is plasticky and sealed rather than absorbed.
- Direct-to-garment. Inkjet onto fabric. Soft, photographic, and visibly weaker on dark cotton unless a white underbase was printed first.
- Embroidery. Thread. The variables are stitch density, direction, the backing behind it, and whether letters are stitched in satin or fill.
- Woven and rubber patches. Made separately and attached, so the failure is usually placement or a lifting edge rather than the patch itself.
What to check, by process
For anything printed, the checks are placement, registration and edge quality. Measure placement rather than eyeballing it — distance from the collar seam, distance from the centre front — because a graphic two centimetres low looks wrong to everyone and reads as nothing in particular to you. Then look at the edge of the smallest letter in the artwork. That is where a screen with too coarse a mesh gives itself away.
For embroidery, work from the back of the panel where you can. Density is the whole game: thin coverage lets the base fabric show between stitches, and over-dense coverage puckers the cloth around the logo. Check that a curved letter is actually curved rather than polygonal, that satin edges are clean rather than fluffed, and that the backing has been trimmed instead of left as a stiff card behind the design.
One flaw is worth naming separately because it is invisible until it moves: straight lines that are not straight. A buyer describing a jersey put both the durability failure and the geometry failure in the same comment:
ordered one barcelona jersey and it was really off… spotify logo came off the shirt after couple washes. in the middle, there were two lines (blue and red), which were curved as hell.
u/Classic_Ad_1118, r/FashionReps, 16 April 2026
That is one comment from one buyer, quoted in full on the evidence page it came from, and it is not a rating of anybody. It is useful because it names two separate defects that a single QC photo of a folded shirt would have hidden.
The bit people learn the expensive way
Print and embroidery faults are almost always run-level, not unit-level.
A screen is positioned once and then used for the whole production run. An embroidery machine is programmed once. If the artwork sits too low on your unit, it sits too low on every unit that came off the same setup, and the exchange you are about to request will arrive with the identical fault. That mechanism is not theoretical — it is visible in the record:
I ordered a pair from sixgods using allchinabuy and had it exchange because the print on the heel is too low. The exchange pair has arrived but the issue is still the same.
u/kenspotifs, r/FashionReps, 31 October 2024
Two shipments, five weeks, and the same millimetres — one buyer's account, held with the rest on their evidence page, and not a rating of the seller. What a batch is explains why the run, not the unit, is the thing you are actually buying, and the batch pages list known per-run flaws for common silhouettes.
The practical consequence is a decision rule. If the fault is placement, geometry, colour separation or stitch programming, it belongs to the run and an exchange is a waste of a month. If the fault is a smear, a scorch mark, a snagged thread or an obviously misfired unit, it belongs to that item and an exchange has something to fix.
What survives, and what does not
Durability is the axis a QC photo cannot reach at all, and it separates the processes hard. Heat transfers and vinyl lift at the edges and then peel. Screen prints crack along fold lines and thin out with each wash. Puff print flattens permanently under an iron. Embroidery essentially does not fail, but it can pull the fabric it sits on out of shape over time.
None of that shows up on a warehouse table. It shows up on wash three, which is why washing cold and inside out does more for a graphic than any inspection you can run on arrival.
Asking for the right photograph
Warehouse QC gives you what somebody with a phone had time to shoot. If a graphic is the reason you are buying the item, say so at order time and ask for it specifically: the logo filling the frame, the reverse of the embroidered panel, and the artwork photographed flat rather than on a hanger. How to read QC photos covers the order to inspect in once those images arrive, and the link decoder will get you to the listing in the first place.
One last framing, because it decides how much of this matters. Judging a print is judging manufacturing, not authenticity. These are replicas, nothing here makes an item anything other than a replica, and the only sane question is whether the object in the photo is made the way you were told it was made.