Today I decided to share my journey about my newly created side hustle which is selling clothing and other items based on a print-on-demand type of business. I will explain this business type, how I set it up, show some results, what I am planning to do in the future, and much more.
I am also planning to keep stuff updated by writing diary-like posts about my journey so that you can see what’s happening.
Print-On-Demand Business
What is a Print-On-Demand Business?
Print-on-demand business is very simple. The idea behind it is that whenever someone buys a product, for example t-shirt, sweatshirt, mug, etc. from your shop they will pay the price, and that product is printed for them.
The product that people would buy contains your design on that specific item. So for example, if you have a Halloween event, you could design a sweatshirt or t-shirt that contains some Halloween-themed design on them. Here’s an example:
How Print-On-Demand Works?
The way how print-on-demand business model works is that you would first need to make a design for your item. Once you have done that you can go to print-on-demand sites like Printify or Teespring and then set your item design there. You would need first to choose what item you want to sell so that you can put your design on it.
Once it’s done then it’s time to create your listing (a page where your product is shown with all details). For example, if you are planning to use Printify, you need to connect your shop to them. You have plenty of options of shops you can connect Printify to connect to, for example, Etsy.com or Shopify.com and many else. With Printify once you have created your listing, connected to your shop then you need to sync it (keep it updated) with your shop. What I mean is that for example if you change a title in the Printify listing you need to save it in order for your Etsy or Shopify shop to stay updated.
Once you have created your listing then it’s available for everyone to buy. The next step is that you need to get people to your listing. You can do this at least two ways, either by promoting or/and optimizing your listing. I highly recommend doing both. I don’t go into detail on how to do it otherwise this post is going to bloat like a huge bubble that will bore you. Instead, I am planning to create a video series on how to do this once I have created my YouTube channel.
How to Do Designs?
In order to do designs you have at least three ways:
- Design yourself
- Hire someone to do the design for you
- Use AI to do the design for you
Design Yourself
If you are capable of doing design yourself you will definitely save some money. In this case, all you need to do is that you have done some research about what people are willing to buy and you just design it yourself.
Hire Someone to Do the Design for You
If you are not capable of doing the design yourself one way of doing it is by hiring a designer to do this. You can use in this case for example a site called Fiverr or Upwork. You need to search on that specific site for a designer. For example, if I am looking for a t-shirt designer, I would type “t-shirt design”. Here’s an example:
Then you would select one with a high rating and great handiwork and hire him/her to do the design for you. You need to tell them what kind of design you are looking for. Remember to read their gig descriptions.
Usually, it takes a few days to a week to get your design ready depending on the designer’s current workload.
Use AI to Do the Design for You
If you don’t want to spend much money on designing then you can always use AI, because there are free and paid versions of the tools. I am currently testing with a free AI tool that is called Ideogram. You need to sign up by using your Google account. That AI tool is super cool.
Basically, all you need to do is give it a prompt so that it knows what kind of image you want to do. Here’s an example:
As you can see it can generate high-quality pictures and the awesome thing about this tool is that it’s free.
The prompt I used in Ideogram for the design of the girl in the first picture of this blog post was the following:
vector t-shirt design, minimalistic ink drawing style, vanishing point on white paper, halloween, watercolor splash, with yellow and red ,art incorporated as complimentary elements with text “HALLOWEEN”
I selected the following tags for it, poster, illustration, 3D render, and cinematic.
How to Create a Listing in Printify?
Creating a listing is very simple. I will not give very detailed instructions here because it’s quite trivial.
Basically what you have to do is select the clothing type you want to add your design to from the menu on the left side:
As you can see above they have been categorized. So you need first to select the category and then you will eventually end up on this kind of page:
From here you simply need to choose the cloth type you want to add your design to. Select one and you will end up on the following page:
Here you need to select the provider. Provider is the company that will eventually print your design on those products. You want to select someone with at least 8.5 stars, provide as many colors as possible, and price and shipping price as low as possible. Once you have found one, click “Start designing“. Once you click that you will end up in the following page:
Sorry for the size of the picture, but here you need to select the design that you have saved on your computer by selecting “My device“. Once you click that you will see that the right-side menu will show you different options, like colors, variations you can select, or even add more design.
Once you are done, click “Save product“, and you will end up on the following page:
Here you must finish your listing. On this page, you can do the following things:
- Select images you want to add to your listing
- Add a title, descriptions
- Edit shipping details
- Edit variants details
- Set up prices for various sizes of clothing
- Edit publishing settings
Once you are done, click “Publish“. This will then publish the listing to the site you have connected to. For example, if you have connected your Etsy shop then it will publish it there.
The next thing you need to do is simply drive traffic to your listing. However, before you do that I highly recommend checking up your Etsy listing, tweak it a little bit, add more pictures related to your listing, etc.
The Results After Running FB Ads
The results I am about to show you next are when I run my FB ads with one of my designs for 4 days. Let’s analyze it a bit:
As you can see I got 4,669 impressions, from which I got 110 clicks, and CPC (cost-per-click) cost €0.11. The link-click cost is extremely cheap, providing that I would make in profit of $10-$15. It means I can cover at least all expenses and in order to get that CPC even lower I could optimize it.
However, this kind of result is not good. Why? Because I didn’t get any sales during that period :D. Thus I can make the following conclusions:
- I need to run the ad campaign more to get more statistics OR
- My design sucks OR
- The price is too high
What Next?
As you might guess. Next, I will keep running my FB ads for a few days. If no sales are coming then I will create new kinds of designs.
I have found one potential profitable way of finding designs that could potentially sell. Currently, I am testing this method. If this works, then I might write some kind of guide or something. I will keep things updated on my side hustle journey.
If you have any comments please write them down or if you have any personal feedback, you can always contact me via the Contact page.
