Customer's Success Story | Aphago & Customily

Some brands find their path by accident. Aphago found it by refusing to give up on one.

In Brazil, print-on-demand is a business of niches. Sellers rarely try to be everything to everyone. Back in 2023, Leandro Pitelli ran exactly that kind of focused shop: a t-shirt store built around the maternity market. Personalization wasn't part of the plan yet.

Then an ad found him. A U.S. store selling a personalized product, its comments full of Portuguese - proof that Brazilian shoppers wanted this too, even if no one nearby was selling it to them yet. That ad was Leandro's first real look at product personalization. It was also his first introduction to Customily.

There was no grand strategy behind what happened next, just curiosity, and a hunch that this format could work for his audience too.

Discovering Customily

Leandro signed up for Customily shortly after seeing that ad, with a simple goal: recreate the product that had caught his eye. It was a personalized family t-shirt in the Mother's Day gift category: a cheerful, retro-colored family illustration with a message thanking mom, customized with the family's names. His plan was to model his own version of that print and adapt it for the Brazilian market.

He had no personalization experience, no template to follow, and no one nearby who had done it before, in a market this niche-driven, he was largely figuring it out on his own.

A Rough Start That Didn't Stick

Building that first product took about two months, a slow, trial-and-error process of learning how personalization actually worked.

And when it launched, it wasn't good. The product was, in his own words, poorly built, and it generated a handful of sales, nothing dramatic. It isn't on Aphago's site anymore: a problem in the store ended up deleting some products along the way, and that one went with them. For a lot of sellers, a rough first launch like that is where the personalization experiment quietly ends.

Leandro didn't stop there. Instead of abandoning the format after one weak result, he treated it as a starting point. He kept building new personalized products, testing different concepts to see what his audience actually responded to, without knowing yet which one, if any, would land.

Then one of them broke through.

The Product That Changed Everything

The breakthrough was a holding-hands t-shirt design: "De mãos dadas eu sempre protegerei você" ("Holding hands, I will always protect you"). Customers add a name, a photo or a phrase and see a preview before they pay, and the design comes in adult, women's, kids' and baby-bodysuit versions. It caught on and started selling fast. In Leandro's words, it is the design that took Aphago to another level of sales, and its product page now shows more than 2,000 reviews, 90% of them five stars.

That was enough to convince him this wasn't a side experiment anymore. Once he had a personalized product right, he made a decision: Aphago would sell only personalized products. He committed the brand fully to personalization, and even changed its name: what had been a maternity-focused label became Aphago.

The shift went deeper than the catalog. Leandro's original store wasn't even built on Shopify, he'd been running on Reserva INK. To test the personalized product, he spun up a separate, bare-bones Shopify store: no banner, no other products, nothing but the one item he was trying to validate. It was an experiment, not a relaunch.

Once that experiment proved itself, there was no reason to keep two platforms running. Leandro migrated fully to Shopify in June 2023, specifically to build his personalization business around Customily, and that migration marks the real starting point of Aphago as it exists today.

Betting Everything on Online, Personalized Retail

Before the pivot, Leandro's business looked nothing like it does today: he had run up to five physical stores in shopping centers in his region. In August 2023, he sold off his two main locations and turned his full focus to Aphago's online operation.

Of the original five stores, three were eventually sold and two closed. Today, Aphago has zero mall locations, the business lives entirely online.

That's not a small pivot. Retail leases, foot traffic, in-store staff - all of it gave way to a single online brand built around a personalized product line he had only started building months earlier. Looking back, Leandro credits Customily as an important part of that turning point.

"I don't know what would have happened if it weren't for the solution you provide," he says.

Because every product Aphago sells is personalized, the choice of platform wasn't a detail. It was the foundation of the whole business.

The Numbers Behind Aphago

In just under four years, Aphago has:

• Surpassed 120,000 orders
• Generated close to R$19 million in revenue (roughly $3.7M USD)

By Leandro's own account, he believes Aphago is the only print-on-demand brand in Brazil to have reached this scale - numbers he says would have been out of reach through his physical stores alone, no matter how many locations he'd opened.

It's a useful contrast: five physical stores versus one online, personalization-first brand built in just under four years. The difference isn't just channel, it's the product itself, and the ability to let customers shape it before it's ever made.

Aphago Today: A Brand Built Around Moments

Visit Aphago's storefront today and the first thing you notice is how far it has traveled from a maternity-only t-shirt shop. The brand's banner says it plainly: "Live the moment! The t-shirt is just a detail." Its tagline promises customization in about a minute, and the site calls Aphago the biggest custom brand in Brazil.

The catalog is organized the way people actually shop for gifts:

• By occasion: Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Children's Day, Christmas, New Year's Eve, baby showers, college life, and Teachers' Day
• By person: boyfriend or girlfriend, mom, dad, grandpa, pet parents, family, aunts and uncles, godparents, expecting moms, and teachers
• By product: classic, oversized, and Peruvian cotton t-shirts, plus tank tops, cropped tees, kids' sizes, baby bodysuits, and sweatshirts

T-shirts remain the core of the business by a wide margin. More recently, Aphago has expanded into mugs and framed posters, taking the same personalization approach beyond apparel.

What Sells Best

The design that started it all is still going strong. The holding-hands t-shirt continues to sell well today, mainly as a gift for dads.

After it came a second hit. Leandro jumped on the hype around bootleg-style t-shirts and was one of the first to launch them in Brazil. They were an enormous success and are still selling a lot. Products for Father's Day and Valentine's Day also move well, but the holding-hands design and the bootleg tees remain the brand's two flagships.

Look closely and the maternity roots are still there: baby showers, baby bodysuits, and a section for expecting moms sit right alongside the newer collections. The original niche didn't disappear; it became one chapter of a much bigger catalog.

Personalization That Goes Beyond a Name

Aphago's designs invite customers to put real people into the product. Depending on the item, shoppers can add names and text, upload photos (one design fits up to four children), create pet portraits in styles like watercolor and sketch, or upload their own finished artwork. A dedicated pet collection has grown into its own destination, with t-shirts, mugs, and framed posters built around the animals people consider family.

Making Customization Feel Easy

A personalized product only works if the customer trusts the process, and Aphago has built a lot of that trust into the experience:

• Every personalized order is reviewed by hand. If the team spots a typo or a low-resolution photo, they reach out to the customer on WhatsApp before anything is printed.
• The first exchange is free, even on a personalized product, with 30 days to request it.
• Orders usually ship quickly. Production can take up to five business days, but most orders are dispatched by the second business day outside peak dates like Father's Day.

Customers notice. Aphago's storefront shows an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 across thousands of reviews, and shoppers frequently describe the site as intuitive and easy to personalize.

Customily as the Engine of the Brand

Ask Leandro which Customily feature matters most and he doesn't name just one. But one change made a real difference: when Customily began offering background removal and face cutout inside the platform itself. Aphago uses both constantly. Before that, the team was paying for an external tool just to do the same job, so having everything in one place simplified the operation and cut costs.

Once he got his first personalized product right, he decided Aphago would sell only personalized products, which makes Customily practically the engine of the brand.

"Customily is more than a help to the operation. It's the reason the operation exists. Aphago simply wouldn't exist without Customily."‍

Built on the Right Partners

Behind the storefront, Aphago's textile products are produced by Reserva, part of the Arezzo group, through its Reserva INK integration. It's a full-circle detail: Reserva INK was the platform Leandro originally ran his store on before moving to Shopify. Today it's part of his production setup, with Customily powering the personalization experience on the front end.

The brand is also expanding how it grows. Aphago runs a creators and UGC program, offers wholesale pricing for orders of ten pieces or more, and has a dedicated mobile app.

What's Next for Aphago

Leandro's next goal is to widen the catalog without leaving Brazil. He wants to integrate more products that can be made on demand locally. Brazil's print-on-demand market is still very young, and today the t-shirt is practically the only product that sells well. His plan is to bring in more national suppliers and expand what Aphago can offer, and he believes the brand's path is to keep growing within the country.

Advice for New Entrepreneurs

Leandro's story is a reminder that the first version of an idea rarely works, and that's not a reason to stop.

"I kept creating more and more products, and at some point, one of them broke through and started selling a lot."

His path from a bad first launch, to a rebrand, to closing storefronts and going all-in online shows what's possible when a founder treats an early failure as information instead of a verdict.

For anyone starting out today, Leandro has more specific advice. Personalized products are becoming better known every year. For now they are still a selling point, but the trend is that they will become common across many online stores. So he recommends:

• Build your own identity, or choose a niche and speak directly to it. It makes the sale easier and the brand more authentic for that audience.
• Avoid products everyone is already selling. It's hard to scale something the market already knows.
• Focus on original products with potential to scale.

Why Aphago Chose Customily

Aphago's turning point wasn't a single big bet: it was Customily backing a founder who kept iterating until something clicked.

From a two-month setup and a product he later scrapped, to nearly R$19 million in revenue and a catalog spanning t-shirts, mugs, and framed posters, Aphago is proof that personalization can rebuild a business from the ground up.

Key Takeaways From Aphago's Story

• Your first product doesn't have to be good. Leandro's first personalized item was poorly built, and he still built a brand on what he learned from it.
• Test small before you commit. A bare-bones Shopify store with a single product was enough to validate the idea before he moved the whole business.
• Personalize around real moments. Occasions, relationships, and pets give shoppers a reason to buy that a plain t-shirt can't.
• Adapt what already works to your own market. Leandro's first product was a U.S. print he modeled and adapted for Brazilian shoppers.
• Be early on a trend. He was one of the first in Brazil to launch bootleg-style tees, and they are still selling.
• Stand out with originality. Pick a niche, build an identity, and avoid products everyone already sells.
• Back your customers up. Manual order checks, WhatsApp support, and a free first exchange make buying something personalized feel safe.

If your first personalized product doesn't work, that's not the end of the story, Customily is your perfect partner for the next one.

✨ Let's customize the world together!‍