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Greetings,
been lurking for some time here now and decided to finally contribute something myself, especially because I am about to leave this side hustle of mine behind me.
Generally speaking there are three ways in which you can become active with PoD:
Began teaching myself how to create t-shirt designs with Affinity Designer which in practice meant that I've set myself the goal of creating at least X designs per day. This was my first touchpoint with entrepreneurship (I was a student back then), so I was very motivated. It quickly became clear that I have no talent whatsoever for graphics design, but learning the ropes would show useful down the road.
With all of those new designs in place, however, a new problem arose, namely the limit on designs you can upload on MbA. Those upload limits are dependent on your Tier, which in turn depends on how many sales you have generated. You start at Tier 10, which allows you to upload 10 designs.
Thats nothing.
For comparison, right now I have about 15k designs.
The usual approach to come out of this hole is to either wait some months/years till you've generated 10 sales organically and get uptiered to T25 (Congrats, you can now upload 25 designs wow) or buy some of your own items yourself, as those sales count too.
It is very advantageous to get out of the early Tiers as quickly as possible as they offer almost no potential with their low upload limits. You probably want to be somewhere around T500 to T1000 at the very least to have enough designs up to make some noticeable sales. Getting there organically will take years (years of lost revenue) so I've decided to buy myself out of there.
The cheapest item back then were Popsockets (about 8€ per piece). So to get to T1000 I'd have to buy about 500 of those --> Spend ~4000€ upfront. Not exactly a nice prospect as a student, though I've had the money. But still kinda expensive, especially not knowing if it will be even worth it.
To minimize my risk I set-up an eBay shop, bought Amazon Prime for about 8€ to save on shipping, and started dropshipping those things at price/slightly under price to customers. As I was totally undercutting the competition in terms of price, sales came flocking in and in about two months I have sold about 500 units at an average loss of abut 2€ per piece, thus reducing my expenses to reach my desired Tier level massively.
All of this had a very unexpected, but pleasant side effect: Amazon noticed that my popsockets were selling like hotcakes (the popsockets I was dropshipping through them on eBay) and this increased the ranking of them on Amazon too, leading to hundreds of organic sales. In the end, those organic sales alone far outweighted the loss I incured from dropshipping them at a loss.
Now that I was at a comfortable Tier level (T2000, exceeded my initial goal through the organic sales), I hired a designer from the Philipines to do the graphics work for me for about 1.5USD per design.
From this point forward it was all mostly the same: Do some research on niches, keep the designer busy, get to a higher Tier level, rinse ands repeat. Changed designers a few times and worked on it sometimes a bit more sometimes a bit less.
After I've reached that goal, I wil not invest any more time in it except for checking on the Ad campaigns every once in a while
The reason is control. I have ZERO control over my business. I could wake up tomorrow and suddenly my account is closed because Amazon felt like I am violating their ToS or whatever.
Every time I am uploading a new design I am running a gauntlet where a rejection of said design (Amazon has a bot that checks every submission) could leads to my account being closed. My account is already generating a nice sum of money and I expect it to rise even a bit higher after I am done uploading the remainig 5k designs. At this point, it will simply not be worth it to risk this. Instead I'll just lean back and collect my royalties.
Furthermore, the whole thing is becoming a bit of a shitshow. Amazon was never transparent towards us but now even more than back then, which results in unclear policies and frustration.
I just don't want to sit in a boat with them anymore and focus on other things. Other PoD platforms do exist but are not worth investing your time into in 99% of the cases.
Teepublic for example worked really decently some time for me. My sales there were growing constantly and I managed to average at about 500€/month till one day they just got some brainfart and stopped showing my designs, reducing my sales to maybe sth like 15€ per month from one moment to another. Apparently my design quality was not what they were expecting lol. Surely not related to the fact that Redbubble (who owns Teepublic) is a penny stock and is bleeding money, needing to extract as much money out of the artist at the expense of the longevity of their platform.
I wrote this with a broken arm so pray excuse any spelling mistakes.
PS: No intelligence at all was involved in the creation of this text
been lurking for some time here now and decided to finally contribute something myself, especially because I am about to leave this side hustle of mine behind me.
Preclaimer
I don't think that the business model is worth pursuing anymore in the way I did, so if you're looking for your next thing, this thread isn't for you. I am just going to share my experiences.Background
Print on demand (POD) is a fulfillment model where products (such as t-shirts, mugs, or posters) are only printed and produced after a customer places an order, eliminating the need to hold inventory upfront.Generally speaking there are three ways in which you can become active with PoD:
- Do everything yourself, from customer acquisition, design creation, to printing
- Focus on customer acquisition and designing and leave printing and shipping to a supplier like Printify
- Use established PoD platforms like Amazon, Redbubble, Teepublic etc to limit the scope of your work to only the design part
The Journey
Started out by creating an account with most big PoD platforms. The biggest driver here was for sure being accepted into the Merch by Amazon (MbA) program which was and is (today even more so than back then) the most profitable platform of them all.Began teaching myself how to create t-shirt designs with Affinity Designer which in practice meant that I've set myself the goal of creating at least X designs per day. This was my first touchpoint with entrepreneurship (I was a student back then), so I was very motivated. It quickly became clear that I have no talent whatsoever for graphics design, but learning the ropes would show useful down the road.
With all of those new designs in place, however, a new problem arose, namely the limit on designs you can upload on MbA. Those upload limits are dependent on your Tier, which in turn depends on how many sales you have generated. You start at Tier 10, which allows you to upload 10 designs.
Thats nothing.
For comparison, right now I have about 15k designs.
The usual approach to come out of this hole is to either wait some months/years till you've generated 10 sales organically and get uptiered to T25 (Congrats, you can now upload 25 designs wow) or buy some of your own items yourself, as those sales count too.
It is very advantageous to get out of the early Tiers as quickly as possible as they offer almost no potential with their low upload limits. You probably want to be somewhere around T500 to T1000 at the very least to have enough designs up to make some noticeable sales. Getting there organically will take years (years of lost revenue) so I've decided to buy myself out of there.
The cheapest item back then were Popsockets (about 8€ per piece). So to get to T1000 I'd have to buy about 500 of those --> Spend ~4000€ upfront. Not exactly a nice prospect as a student, though I've had the money. But still kinda expensive, especially not knowing if it will be even worth it.
To minimize my risk I set-up an eBay shop, bought Amazon Prime for about 8€ to save on shipping, and started dropshipping those things at price/slightly under price to customers. As I was totally undercutting the competition in terms of price, sales came flocking in and in about two months I have sold about 500 units at an average loss of abut 2€ per piece, thus reducing my expenses to reach my desired Tier level massively.
All of this had a very unexpected, but pleasant side effect: Amazon noticed that my popsockets were selling like hotcakes (the popsockets I was dropshipping through them on eBay) and this increased the ranking of them on Amazon too, leading to hundreds of organic sales. In the end, those organic sales alone far outweighted the loss I incured from dropshipping them at a loss.
Now that I was at a comfortable Tier level (T2000, exceeded my initial goal through the organic sales), I hired a designer from the Philipines to do the graphics work for me for about 1.5USD per design.
From this point forward it was all mostly the same: Do some research on niches, keep the designer busy, get to a higher Tier level, rinse ands repeat. Changed designers a few times and worked on it sometimes a bit more sometimes a bit less.
Today
I am currently at Tier 20.000 with about 15k designs and 600k+ products online. Haven't really worked on it for months and have also let go of my designers some time ago as image generation with AI just became too good and cheap. To bring this chapter behind me (more on this in the next paragraph) I am currently pushing out about 200 designs per day to quickly fill the remaining design slots I have. For this, I wrote a script that automates essentially the whole creation process. With it, I am paying about 0.05€ per design (compare it to the old 1.5USD, which was already very much on the low side). At such low costs it is pretty much granted to turn out profitable.After I've reached that goal, I wil not invest any more time in it except for checking on the Ad campaigns every once in a while
Numbers
I've sold a bit over 20.000 units all time. Most months right now are at about 300-400 units, which is more or less 1500€ per month. Merch is a very seasonal industry, with Q4 being by far the most profitable quarter. Last December was my most profitable month of all time. Made about 7000€ across all platforms. A bit of a timeline can be seen in the pictures below. The best thing about it is that by now it is genuinely passive. I get a royalty payment independent of me putting any work into this. Anything I do for it right now is only to increase future payments.Why I am stopping
So why stop if it is going pretty decent?The reason is control. I have ZERO control over my business. I could wake up tomorrow and suddenly my account is closed because Amazon felt like I am violating their ToS or whatever.
Every time I am uploading a new design I am running a gauntlet where a rejection of said design (Amazon has a bot that checks every submission) could leads to my account being closed. My account is already generating a nice sum of money and I expect it to rise even a bit higher after I am done uploading the remainig 5k designs. At this point, it will simply not be worth it to risk this. Instead I'll just lean back and collect my royalties.
Furthermore, the whole thing is becoming a bit of a shitshow. Amazon was never transparent towards us but now even more than back then, which results in unclear policies and frustration.
I just don't want to sit in a boat with them anymore and focus on other things. Other PoD platforms do exist but are not worth investing your time into in 99% of the cases.
Teepublic for example worked really decently some time for me. My sales there were growing constantly and I managed to average at about 500€/month till one day they just got some brainfart and stopped showing my designs, reducing my sales to maybe sth like 15€ per month from one moment to another. Apparently my design quality was not what they were expecting lol. Surely not related to the fact that Redbubble (who owns Teepublic) is a penny stock and is bleeding money, needing to extract as much money out of the artist at the expense of the longevity of their platform.
Final thoughts
I am happy for the experiences (and the money) this adventure brought me, especially the easy introduction to entrepreneurship it offered. Not everything needs to be fully CENTS in the beginning. But now its time to move on. The passive income dream here is real, but the platform dependency that comes with it is a trade-off I'd think harder about if I were starting today. Hope it was at least an entertaining read, even if it doesn't change anything about what you're working on.I wrote this with a broken arm so pray excuse any spelling mistakes.
PS: No intelligence at all was involved in the creation of this text
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