About
Six people. One print shop. Zero patience for clunky software.
ShirtWheel started on the production floor of BudgetPrint, a working print shop — we are the customer.
Our story
It started with a mockup email
ShirtWheel did not start in a pitch deck. It started at BudgetPrint, our shop in Costa Mesa, where every custom order kicked off the same ritual: a customer emails a logo, we build a mockup in Photoshop, they reply “can you make it a little bigger?” — and three days and nine emails later we finally press a shirt. The printing took twelve minutes. The mockups took the week.
So we built a fix for ourselves: a designer customers could open on their phone, drop a logo onto a real 3D shirt, and approve their own placement. Orders started arriving print-ready and paid, with no email thread attached. Then the shop down the street asked what we were using. Then a shop in Texas asked. Then a DTF Facebook group found it, and the question stopped being whether to share it.
That is when we brought on four people we trusted and turned the tool into ShirtWheel. We still run BudgetPrint, and every release still has to survive a real Friday rush before it ships to you. We are not a software company guessing at print problems — we are a print shop that got tired of them.
— Pavel Bieda, founder
How we work
Three rules we actually follow
Written on a whiteboard next to the heat press, not in an employee handbook.
Ship the afternoon version
If a feature can help a shop today, it goes out today and gets polished tomorrow. Same promise for your setup: live in an afternoon, not after a sales cycle.
The floor is the roadmap
Nothing gets built from a brainstorm. Features come from a real order going sideways at BudgetPrint — then we fix it once, for every shop at the same time.
Look expensive, cost fair
A six-person shop deserves a designer that looks like a national brand built it. Big-brand polish, small-shop pricing, and no sales call standing in between.
The team
The six of us
Small on purpose. Everyone here has either pressed a shirt or shipped the code that gets one pressed.
Pavel Bieda
Founder & CEO
Runs BudgetPrint, a working print shop. Built ShirtWheel because he was tired of mockup email chains — every feature ships only if it survives his own production floor.
Marcus Tran
Co-founder & CTO
Previously built e-commerce infrastructure for two YC startups. Owns the 3D engine, exports and the "it just loads fast" promise.
Sofia Reyes
Head of Design
Product designer from Long Beach. Obsessive about the customer-facing designer feeling like a toy and working like a tool.
Daniel Park
Senior Engineer
WordPress & WooCommerce specialist. Wrote the plugin three times until installs took minutes, not afternoons.
Amara Collins
Customer Success
Onboards every shop personally. If your designer is not live in week one, Amara considers that her bug.
Jake Morrison
Growth
Came from the DTF community itself. Runs our YouTube, the demo library and the Facebook groups where print shops actually live.
Costa Mesa, California
We work a few miles from the blanks warehouses, DTF suppliers and trade shows of Orange County — near the heart of US apparel decoration. When you email us, a real person in California answers.
Want to see what we built?
Open the live demo and design a shirt in thirty seconds — or see what it costs to put one on your own site.