Most Australian fashion brands still worry more about Zara on the high street than about a designer with a laptop in another time zone. That may not last.
A smorgasbord of research firms are betting that Australia’s print‑on‑demand (POD) market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 25 per cent by 2030, pretty much similar to global trajectories. Apparel makes up a decent chunk of the global print-on-demand market, with some firms claiming this contribution is as high as 40 per cent. The rest covers lifestyle, including accessories, kitchenware and more.
This overall growth in print-on-demand is set to collide directly with the wardrobes Australian labels currently compete for, and forms part of the marketplace model which has been gaining traction in recent years since online shopping boomed.
Instead of seasonal ranges locked in months ahead, digital designs are uploaded continuously by millions of creators around the world and only manufactured when a customer clicks “buy”.
For Australian brands already juggling rising costs, discount‑driven consumers and constant pressure to refresh product, a fast‑scaling print-on-demand ecosystem threatens to undercut them on both agility and assortment.
All this spells tailwinds for Articore, the ASX‑listed owner of Australian-born marketplace Redbubble and TeePublic in the United States, which is quietly positioning itself at the centre of this shift.
The group has snapped up Indian print‑on‑demand marketplace Frankly Wearing in a deal that looks small on paper but looms large strategically. The group spent just under one million US dollars to buy up the Indian marketplace, equivalent to about $1.3 million AUD.
The acquisition gives Articore its first real foothold in India’s fragmented, billion‑dollar‑plus print‑on‑demand market and a way to plug its three million creators globally into one of the fastest‑growing consumer economies in the world.
It also gives Articore another market to scale in, outside its core US market which makes up nearly three-quarters of total revenue from contracts with customers. For comparison, Australian revenue contributes around 7 per cent now, with the company also having a decent slice in Europe.
But Articore’s spending splash in India points to a wider trend that could upend the way we make and sell clothes. Market analysis firms are betting that the global print-on-demand market will surge by over 20 per cent CAGR in the next few years from around US$13 billion in 2026 to somewhere between US$57 and US$100 billion by 2033-2034.
Precedence Research thinks this number could surge to $118 billion. For comparison, the global fashion market is valued at somewhere between $1 trillion to $1.7 trillion.
In India, Straits Research thinks the print-on-demand market there will grow at a CAGR of 27.8 per cent, hitting nearly US$6 billion.
Australia’s print-on-demand market is also tipped to boom, with Grand View Research reporting the local market could grow by around 25 per cent, hitting US$1.7 billion.
Articore group CEO and managing director Vivek Kumar says the Indian print-on-demand market is very fragmented, meaning that there is no major player. This bodes well for the group’s next phase in the market, starting with the acceleration of technology platform consolidation, and moving to the full launch of a Global Capability Centre (GCC) to drive future operating efficiencies.
Across Articore’s marketplace channels, more than 75 million designs are currently listed, predominantly in the apparel space, with around 10,000 new designs uploaded every day.
“What that gives us is a fresh supply of design,” Kumar says. “Anything that happens in pop culture or anything that is happening in the socio-political space, we get very relevant content very quickly on the platform, because we are plugged into the creator ecosystem, who are plugged into their communities and sub-communities and sub-sub-communities.
“That's the advantage we have over even fast fashion, like Uniqlo or Zara, where the speed at which we get content, the relevant content, is a huge advantage.”
In a bid to hit the growth wave that is being projected, Articore is setting five key pathways for value creation. The first is content differentiation. This means making sure the best quality content is featured across its marketplaces.
The second is personalisation and discovery, which means boosting search across its platforms.
The third is customer acquisition.
“Over the last twelve months, we have made a lot of progress on paid marketing on RedBubble,” Kumar says. “TeePublic was already quite strong, and we have started to build our retention infrastructure.
“How do we retain customers better, have them come back for the second order, and for the third order? By really, truly personalising the experiences for them.”
The last two pathways involve leveraging Frankly Wearing and its newly launched creator storefront platform Dashery to drive future growth, and finally technology consolidation.
Kumar says the business has been talking about tech consolidation in terms of cost savings, but he believes that the true quality of this is driving innovation faster.
“Currently, if we are building a feature, we have to build it twice – once on the Redbubble site and then on the TeePublic site. Once you build a common technology platform, you only do it once.
“Your speed to market is faster because you're just doing it once. So that unlocks a lot of opportunities for us. For example, TeePublic doesn't have all the product breadth that Redbubble has. Once we are on the same platform, we can extend the same products to TeePublic.”
Despite the global nature of Articore, Kumar says Australia remains a key market for the group, both from a customer standpoint and from an investor standpoint. The business is listed on the ASX, with a third of its team based here.
According to Kumar, very few companies in the US actually take a global approach when at the current size of Articore. The company’s first half sales for FY26 were $253.7 million.
“Since TeePublic was acquired by Redbubble, they both continue to thrive in this globally distributed environment. This gives us a very unique advantage of continuing to leverage the capabilities that we have already built.
“We have very solid ways of working across different time zones, async processes of how teams collaborate, whether it's through slack or Zoom.”
Looking ahead, Articore shareholders will likely be looking for market returns. The business’s share price remains stubbornly low, currently trading at just over $0.30 per share. That is down from a peak in December 2020 when it hit $7 per share.
Kumar says that since he took the reins early last year, he helped merge the Redbubble and TeePublic teams to work together, which led to significant cost savings. He says there were also multiple executives between Redbubble and TeePublic, with all this duplication being removed.
“What this combination has done is it has given us a lot of strategic leverage with our suppliers,” Kumar says. “When we merged the supply chain team, we were able to go back and renegotiate a lot of our contracts, driving gross margin improvements.”
Articore’s gross margin over the last year has improved by more than 400 basis points. This comes despite its marketplace revenue (MPR) continuing to decline, albeit at a slower and slower pace. In the first half of FY26, its MPR dropped by 4.5 per cent. In the second quarter, this was down 3.2 per cent.
In the first half of FY25, Articore’s MPR was down 12 per cent.
Kumar says that as soon as the ship turns around on MPR, the boost from ongoing structural improvements that help margins and OpEx “is going to be huge”.
“That's what we are focused on: How do you start to get the top-line back to growth? We have a clear growth strategy and a growth plan to get to that outcome. Once that happens, it's going to be exciting.”