Contract decorators run on execution: screen printing, embroidery, heat transfer, and DTG. But between a work order landing in your inbox and the garment hitting the press, there is still a layer of manual admin work that slows everything down: reading the order, entering specs into Printavo or ShopWorks, confirming receipt, and chasing approvals.
This is where decorated apparel order processing breaks down for most shops. Not on the production floor. In the inbox.
Where Manual Entry Goes Wrong
A distributor sends a work order. Someone on your team reads it, parses the decoration specs, size breaks, quantities, and due date, then types it into your shop management system by hand.
Every manual entry creates another chance for manual order entry errors. A wrong size run means you print the wrong quantities. A wrong color code means a reprint. A missed spec means a garment you cannot ship. These are not careless mistakes. They are the predictable result of repetitive data entry done at volume.
For a shop running 30 to 50 orders a week, that's 10 to 15 hours of admin time, and a steady trickle of entry errors that show up later as reprints, credits, and frustrated distributors.
How Trelium Fixes Decorated Apparel Order Processing
Trelium is an AI agent platform built for the print and promo industry. It connects to Printavo, ShopWorks, or YoPrint, reads incoming work order emails in whatever format they arrive, and enters the job automatically: decoration specs, garment details, size breaks, quantities, PO number, and due date.
It is not a template matcher. Trelium uses LLM reasoning to read unstructured emails the way a person would, which means it still works when a distributor changes a PO format or sends plain text instead of a clean PDF.
The result is straightforward: order processing time per job drops from 20 to 30 minutes to under 2 minutes, and manual order entry errors drop to near zero because the agent validates fields before entry and flags anything ambiguous for human review instead of guessing.
What This Looks Like Day to Day
Work orders land in your system within minutes of arriving, correctly entered, with no backlog sitting in someone's inbox. Production schedulers get accurate information sooner. Reprints caused by miskeyed specs become rare instead of routine.
Your team is not being replaced. The data entry layer is. Your people handle exceptions, art, and client relationships. Trelium handles the typing.
See It With Your Workflow
Bring one real work order email and your actual Printavo or ShopWorks setup. We'll automate it live in 30 minutes. You decide if it's worth keeping.
Further Reading
Trelium is a Y Combinator backed AI agent platform for contract decorators and print shops. It automates decorated apparel order processing inside Printavo, ShopWorks, and YoPrint.
Sayandeep Das
Member of GTM Staff
Get started
Ready to see Trelium in action?
Book a 30-minute POC. We'll build an agent for your specific workflow, live.
Book a POC →
