From Chaos to Clicks: How I Transformed a Clothing Brand’s Shopify Fulfillment in Under a Week

It started the same way every time. Every single morning, I’d log into Shopify, open an order, scroll down, download the designs from their link. Then again. Then again. Each time the tab reset, the page blinked, my brain had to remember what I’d just done. And I wasn’t even in Photoshop yet.

That part had its own rhythm, equally exhausting. Open the file. Contract the design. Add a spot channel. Label it with the customer’s name and order number. Save it. Close it. Repeat. And don’t get me wrong; I love Photoshop; but after a while, doing the same thing over and over again becomes a blatant waste of time.

On top of that, I’d import it over to Maintop, where I’d drag the file in, resize it, export it to TIFF, and save it again. One wrong click, and the whole step felt like it unraveled. It wasn’t that the process was complicated; it was that it never stopped. You’d get through ten orders, look up, and still have twenty left. By the time you hit the last file, your head was buzzing and your hands were moving like you’d aged a decade. One thing I hate; inefficiency. If there’s a better way to do something, especially if it’s consistent and reliable, why not do that?

It didn’t feel like work. It felt like erosion.

You kept telling yourself this was just part of the job. That when a brand is growing, you have to “grind.” That one day you’d hire help or switch to a better system, but until then, this was just how it went. Manual. Tedious. Every order is its own little mountain.

One morning, I’d had it. I knew this could be automated, at least for the most part. I was just so set on procrastinating until something better came alone. But why not just make it now?

So instead of going through the next batch, I opened a Google Sheet. Not out of strategy, but out of stubbornness. Typed in some headers: Order Number, Customer Name, Download Link. Opened Zapier like a bartender reaching for a bottle they hadn’t touched in a while. And, within fifteen minutes, I had it pulling new orders straight from Shopify into the sheet. All the info, lined up. No clicks. No tabs. No guesswork.

That was the first exhale.

Shopify Shirt Design

Then came Photoshop. I recorded an action that replicated everything I did, one that ran through the whole gauntlet in one go. Contracted the design. Added the spot channel. Dropped the customer’s name and order number as a label. Batch-ran it across every file in the folder. Suddenly, instead of babysitting each layer, I was just pressing play. 

It wasn’t magic. It was logical. And it worked.

Maintop still required manual handling, but now it was simple. No more checking which order matched which name. Everything was already labeled. Already clean. You could import, resize, and export without once stopping to think. What used to take five to ten minutes per order now took fifteen minutes total, for the whole batch.

The emotion I found? Frustration at first. I could’ve done this so long ago if I’d just gotten out of my own way of doing it, we’d have saved so much time, money, and energy. But it didn’t matter, no point in dwelling on it now. Now was the time to click play on that every morning and figure out what else I’d been putting off. The chaos hadn’t been necessary. It had just gone unchallenged. And now? It runs. Quietly. Consistently. I get my time back every morning.

What do you think is in your way? What’s siphoning your energy away that’s a bit of tweaking away from being a one click button (or even better, a no click process)?