My Apparel Shop is Shutting Down: Goodbye, Spring

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For those who have shopped my online apparel store in the past, I have some bad news.

My store is shutting down.

This what not a choice I made myself. Spring, the company that hosted the website and produced the products, suddenly folded with hardly any warning.

At this time, my store is still live, but it won’t be for much longer. The shutdown will be happening in phases with most stores being completely shut down by mid to late October. In this post, I’ll address what this means for my apparel designs and customers.

QUICK REMINDER: My primary website is still live where you can purchase autographed copies of my sci-fi fantasy novels, handmade bookish merch, and my art prints on a variety of products.

What Happened to Spring?

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To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what led to Spring’s demise. I was completely blindsided by the announcement of my shop closing.

I knew that TeeSpring had rebranded to Spring (Spri.ng) in 2021, shortly after I had started using them. What I didn’t realize was that Spring was acquired by Amaze Software Inc. in late 2022. That transition stayed in the background without any noticeable changes to creators. The two companies maintained separate websites while executives from Spring quietly transitioned to new leadership roles with Amaze.

I’ve had some problems with Spring over the past couple of years. Payouts took months to reach my bank account. Customers received hoodies that were supposed to have text on the sleeves but didn’t, and when they contacted Spring, they received replacements that were missing the text again.

And yet, Spring continued to roll out new products and improve the clothing quality (even if the print quality was hit or miss). Nothing seemed suspicious.

I don’t know what prompted the decision to fold Spring into Amaze. On September 13th, 2026, I received this email:

I’m Elian, the Support Lead at Amaze.

I wanted to personally let you know that your outstanding PayPal payout has now been processed. It should arrive within 24 hours, although it may reach your account in as little as two hours.

I’m sorry you had to wait longer than expected. You’ve generated $█████ in sales through Spring, and you should have received the money you earned on time.

Spring is shutting down on September 15. If you want to continue selling, we’ll migrate your store to Amaze Commerce at no cost—including recreating up to five of your best-selling products and moving eligible artwork and brand assets.

Amaze Commerce isn’t simply a new name for Spring. It gives you new tools to understand your audience, discover what to create next, and turn those insights into products.

If you’d like us to migrate your store, just reply “yes” to this email and I’ll get the process started.

This email raised some red flags for me. I wasn’t sure if it was a scam or not, for many reasons:

• I’d already received my payout, so although the transaction had been recent (and slow, of course, but I’d expected that), it was strange to be getting an apology and personal message from a Support Lead about it.
• This message gave me two days notice that my store was shutting down. TWO DAYS? That’s it??
• The simple “just reply ‘yes'” to migrate my store felt shady.

I reached out to an author friend who had just launched his Spring store only a few weeks ago. He hadn’t received any correspondence from Spring or seen any warnings about the change when he set up his storefront. He also suspected that the email I’d received was a scam.

And yet, when I logged into my dashboard, this message was prominently displayed across the top:

I had two days.

My friend never got any notice from Spring at all.

The abruptness of the situation with little to no time for creators on the platform to prepare makes me suspect that there’s a lot more happening behind the scenes. What that is… I can only guess. The public will probably never know what drama unfolded.

All I know is Amaze Commerce has taken over, and Spring creators were given the option to migrate some (not all) of our designs over the new platform.

Why I Am NOT Switching to the Alternative: Amaze Commerce

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I’ll be honest—I don’t know much about Amaze. All it took was a preliminary glance at their website to see that they are very heavy into generative AI to create new apparel designs. Here’s a screenshot from their website:

I’ve taken a very firm stance about generative AI in creative spaces. As both an author and an artist, I can tell you that AI is hurting my profession and sowing distrust among consumers. More than half of the ebooks published on Amazon this year were AI-generated. The slop is flooding the market and drowning out human authors by sheer volume, not quality. It’s no secret that artists, illustrators, and graphic designers are also being forced out of their professions while AI scrapes their intellectual property to replace them even faster.

I’ve been very clear about my position, starting with the simple act of hanging a sign in my booth at events early this year to let visitors know that I don’t use AI in my writing, art, website, social media, etc. I’ve taken that anti-AI design and made buttons, stickers, and jewelry, along with an “I Support Human Art” design on a sticker and button. (You can shop for these on my website.)

I also registered all of the books in my award-winning fantasy series Chronicles of Avilésor: War of the Realms with the human-authored program through the Author’s Guild to certify that they were written by a real person.

Needless to say, I’m not interested in partnering with a print-on-demand company that leans so heavily into the pro-AI propaganda. That goes against everything I’ve built around my brand.

Will CoA Apparel Be Available Anywhere?

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The short answer is TBD. I have several apparel few designs centered around the Chronicles of Avilésor, and I’d like to see the shop resurrected. But I don’t want to jump into a replacement without careful consideration.

Over the winter during my slow season when I have a break from events, I’ll take a closer look at a few options:

Option 1: RedBubble

I’ve used RedBubble before for an old website I used to run called Green Witch Lunar Witch. Back in 2021, I wrote a blog post comparing my experiences between Spring and RedBubble. Both print-on-demand companies had their pros and cons. There were parts of RedBubble that I liked… and parts that I didn’t.

Although my storefront on RedBubble was never deactivated, I haven’t touched it in years. RedBubble has always been focused around artists, and from a quick search, it looks like they still are. They do allow AI-generated designs to be uploaded, but they don’t seem to be promoting them as much as Amaze. I’ll have to dig a little deeper into how the company has changed since I was active on it to decide if they will be a suitable replacement. Specifically, I need to know their AI policies since that wasn’t an issue back in 2021 when I was testing them out.

Option 2: Another POD Source

There are other print-on-demand apparel companies out there besides RedBubble and Spring/Amaze. If RedBubble isn’t the best choice for me, then another one might be a better fit.

Option 3: Local Printing

Second, I don’t know how difficult it would be to customize my existing website to accommodate color/size choices since I’m on Square’s free plan. None of my existing products have that many variant options. People simply choose the type of book (hardcover/paperback) or a specific art print. If I’m able to pull it off… it will be a time-consuming project to build all of those listings on my site.

Third, staying local means I’d be taking over all coordination with the printing, customer service, and packing/shipping, which Spring always handled for me. That’s more time and work for me, and during book launches and peak event season, I really don’t have any extra time to spare processing orders like this.

Ultimately, it would be much easier for me to find an alternative print-on-demand service that could offer customers a lot more options, including styles, colors, and sizes, plus handle the production, fulfillment, and customer service.

But outsourcing is always a risk. There’s no telling if another company would go under or be absorbed like Spring was (although RedBubble is very well established and has been around for a while). Any content posted on a platform you don’t own carries that same risk.

(That’s exactly why I own the domain for my website—I have control of this space, unlike Substack, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, YouTube, Amazon, etc. When a platform you don’t own shuts down, there’s really nothing you can do. If any of those collapse, I’d lose all of those followers and that content.)

I’ll have to make sure that if I choose to go with another POD company, their values will align with mine. Clearly, that isn’t the case with Amaze Commerce.

So, for now, my store is temporarily down until I can figure out my next direction.