Customize your gifts or showcase your artistic creations with Printcious

logo Printcious is an e-commerce website and web application that allows people to customize the design, color, and print of personalized gifts such as t-shirts, mugs, phone cases, hats, purses, and bags. You can select from thousands of customizable, pre-made designs or start from scratch and create the perfect gift. The process is designed to be intuitive: simply browse the website’s templates, select and customize your gift, and Printcious will print and ship within 3 business days.

What makes Printcious truly unique is that it also provides an online marketplace for designers and graphic artists to promote their work. This allows people to select high-quality items from professional and amateur artists, and gives local artists a chance to showcase their craft and increase their visibility. Plus, artists that feature their work with Printcious receive a portion of every sale the website makes on their behalf – helping them quickly turn a profit without having to worry about creating expensive marketplaces or time consuming printing and shipping operations.

While workshopping the idea that eventually became Printcious, founders and twins Vincent and Henry Tong knew they needed software that would produce a website that could handle thousands of design options without sacrificing performance. After evaluating several cloud platforms they turned to Azure because it provided the flexibility and resiliency that they needed to scale. Printcious is hosted in the Azure cloud and leverages Azure VM’s and SVN because they enable customers and artists to upload their designs from a variety of locations without sacrificing quality or operating speed. The website also uses Azure SQL to configure its enormous database and Azure CDN to improve its overall performance.

“Azure was key for our website and web application, and has helped us to grow our business in a short amount of time,” says Vincent Tong, “As we continue to expand, we are exploring machine learning and business intelligence to evolve the entire experience.”

Check out Printcious today!

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Microsoft is helping these startups succeed through its BizSpark program. To join or see other startup stories, visit us at our website here. To listen to our startups, check out these podcasts on devradio here

About BizSpark:  Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps startups succeed by giving free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, software and support. BizSpark members receive up to $750 per month of free Microsoft Azure cloud services for 3 years: that’s $150 per month each for up to 5 developers. Azure works with Linux and open-source technologies such as Linux, Ruby, Python, Java and PHP. BizSpark is available to startups that are privately held, less than 5-years-old and earn less than $1M in annual revenue.