SEATTLE – Always wanted a hoodie with your dog dressed as a cartoon astronaut? Amazon now makes that a three-minute exercise. The company has launched a new AI-powered custom merchandise feature inside its Shopping app, letting anyone design and order personalised products without a single design skill to their name.
Alexa for Shopping has a new feature that lets customers create custom designs for merch like T-shirts, sweatshirts, and water bottles by describing an idea in the Amazon Shopping app or on Amazon.com. The feature provides inspiration throughout the design process, and Amazon handles the rest from production through Merch on Demand to Prime-eligible delivery.
How It Works
The process is deliberately simple. Getting started takes just a few clicks: open the Amazon Shopping app and tap the Alexa icon in the bottom right corner, or search “customize” in the search bar and select the drop-down option to begin designing. From there, describe your idea Amazon suggests prompts as creative as “make a design of a golden retriever as a 90s corporate lawyer at a disco.” The feature generates the design in seconds, and users can then edit it by clicking suggested actions in Alexa for Shopping or by simply typing changes.
When the design is finalised, it can be shared with friends and family via group text, social media, or anywhere a link can be posted and everyone in the group can add the same item to their own cart and check out like any standard Amazon purchase.
The feature is designed to guide users through the process with helpful tips along the way, handling the technical details to ensure vibrant colours and crisp resolution even for those with no graphic design background.
What Can You Put It On?
Available products span a wide range of apparel T-shirts, V-neck T-shirts, long-sleeve shirts, polo shirts, raglan shirts, jerseys, hoodies, sweatshirts, and tank tops as well as drinkware including tumblers and water bottles. Amazon says it plans to expand the product catalogue over time.
The kinds of use cases Amazon is pitching include a group chat’s funniest inside joke printed on a tumbler, coordinating shirts for an upcoming family reunion, and a beloved pet reimagined as a cartoon astronaut on a sweatshirt.
Free to Use, Prime to Ship
Using the feature is free customers only pay for the products themselves. After a user provides a prompt, Amazon takes care of manufacturing and shipping the goods through Prime. The feature is currently available to US customers only, through both the Amazon Shopping app on iOS and Android and on Amazon.com on desktop.
A Direct Challenge to Print-on-Demand Platforms
The move puts AI-generated merchandise directly inside Amazon’s Shopping app, lowering the barrier for consumers who want to turn ideas into physical products but lack traditional design skills. While print-on-demand businesses have typically catered to creators and various organisations, Amazon’s new feature could make AI-designed merchandise just another routine shopping option.
Amazon’s integration directly challenges established print-on-demand platforms such as Redbubble, Bonfire, Spring, and Fourthwall, which have long catered to creators and organisations looking to sell custom merchandise. By embedding AI-powered design directly into its shopping app, Amazon lowers the barrier for consumers who lack traditional design skills.
The launch is also the latest step in Amazon’s broader strategy of weaving generative AI into every corner of its retail experience. Earlier this month, Amazon announced it was licensing the underlying technology behind Alexa for Shopping to other retailers, packaging its AI shopping architecture for third-party storefronts. The custom merch feature demonstrates what that technology can do when pointed squarely at consumer creativity and it arrives at a moment when AI-generated imagery is increasingly woven into the fabric, quite literally, of everyday commerce.
The integration does raise questions about the use of AI-generated artwork, as artists whose work has been used to train AI models may view the development with concern, given that it further commercialises AI-generated imagery without clear attribution or compensation to original creators. Those questions are unlikely to slow consumer adoption but they’re part of a broader conversation the industry has yet to resolve.
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