I get asked a lot of questions, and one that comes up very often is this:
“Can I See Your Designs / Store?”
The answer, I’m afraid, is no.
It’s not because I don’t like you, or because I’m rude.
It’s for these 2 simple reasons.
Woah, we’re halfway there.
Yes friends, 50% of the year is up and that means it’s time for my Q2 Review.
Here’s how things have been looking for the past 3 months…
Are you looking at using a Print-On-Demand T-Shirt fulfillment company like Printful, CustomCat or Teelaunch to do the printing and shipping for your clothing brand or business?
If so, I have some advice for you.
I’ve been using Print-On-Demand T-Shirt Fulfillment companies (or T-Shirt Dropshippers) for over 3 years now – and in that time I’ve dealt with pretty much every issue you could ever expect.
In this article I’m going to explain the difference between T-Shirt fulfillment companies like Printful and sites like Redbubbble, Merch By Amazon and TeeSpring – and delve into some of the nitty gritty with some helpful tips and tricks for YOU – the budding brand owner.
When you get your Merch By Amazon account approval, you get just 10 design ‘slots’ to fill.
In order to increase your total number of slots (or ‘tier up’) – you need to make at least 10 sales.
Note: Amazon actually says that tiering up is not based solely on sales. And I quote: “Admission to these tiers are based not only on sales, but the quality of the products being sold by the content creator as well.” Worth knowing!
Anyway – as you climb through the tiers you should find it gets easier to make sales, because – generally speaking – the more designs you have live, the greater your chances of generating sales.
There are already lots of great suggestions out there to help you tier up – and if you haven’t checked out Daniel Caudill’s video chats on the subject you should really do so here.
But in this article I want to share some different – an perhaps slightly unconventional – ideas about how you could tier up in as short a time as possible – getting those initial 10 sales, to your next 25, and then beyond.
Yes, the first quarter of 2017 is over already! yikes!
So it’s time for a review post.
Hold on to your hats.
Here’s my month on month from Q4 2016 to Q1 2017:
As you can see I experienced a big drop from December to January.
Of course that was not unexpected – December is always going to be the biggest month in retail.
But that drop was a little harder than I had hoped, and I’ll get into why later.
With the increasing growth in the Print-On-Demand T-Shirt industry – and platforms like Merch By Amazon – demand has increased for cheap and easy T-Shirt designs.
This has flooded the market with designers offering T-Shirt artwork at very low prices (eg. from $5 per design through sites like Fiverr) – which can appear very tempting for newcomers looking to get a lot of designs for as low a price as possible.
And although what constitutes a ‘quality’ design is subjective, there are a lot of ways in which cheap designs can be a liability, rather than an asset.
In this article I’m going to give a few tips on finding a good designer, what to beware of, and how to approach the outsourcing of your designs to help build a long-term and sustainable business.
December 2016 was my best month ever for T-Shirt sales and income.
It blew everything up to that point out of the water.
But – if I’m honest – I was somehow a little disappointed, and felt it could have been better.
Why?
Because the total number of design available on my single biggest sales channel (Merch By Amazon) was significantly diminished throughout November and December (through a combination of Amazon’s introduction of the new 60-day-rule, plus a crackdown on designs that violated Amazon’s design policies).
(I explain a little more about that in my 2016 T-Shirt Income Review article.)
In other words, a lot of potential sales were lost because the number of designs I had available (on Amazon at least) dropped significantly.
Now, there’s little I could have done to protect myself against the 60-day-rule (any design that doesn’t sell in the first 60 days gets removed). Some designs sell, others don’t – and it’s very hard to predict this accurately ahead of time.
And there’s somewhat more I could have done to protect myself from the clean-up on potentially policy-violating designs – for example: staying away from controversial topics and potentially offensive jokes.
But the single biggest reason that I didn’t make more in December is this:
I didn’t have enough designs!
Last week we took a look at how to sell T-Shirts on Amazon Seller Central.
If you aren’t familiar with Seller Central – or the difference between Seller Central and a platform like Merch By Amazon – then go back and read last week’s blog for a detailed run through.
In short though: Seller Central has some distinct advantages over a platform like Merch – and thanks to the new Shopify integration with Amazon, we can effectively sell T-Shirts on auto-pilot.
But – the whole Shopify -> Amazon integration is still pretty buggy, and we ran into some annoying obstacles.
The good news is that I’ve (pretty much) figured out the issues, and now have a system in place that works as intended.
Read on for the nitty gritty…
Update! A lot of the issues discussed in this post have since been resolved, please see this blog post for an updated version.
Let’s talk about Amazon!
When it comes to selling T-Shirts on Amazon, you have a couple of options.
1) Merch By Amazon. You upload artwork – and Amazon prints and ships the T-Shirts for you – paying you a percentage of each sale made.
2) Amazon Seller Central. You sell Shirts directly to customers via Amazon, and are responsible for the printing and shipping. You can use a T-Shirt Fulfillment company to handle this for you, and you simply manage the process. You receive the gross value of each sale (minus fees), so your profit is the difference between your sale price (plus shipping) and the cost of printing and shipping that shirt to the customer.
If you’ve been reading my blog for anytime at all, then you’ll know my main source of income – and what I write about most often – is selling T-Shirts through print-on-demand platforms like Merch By Amazon and Redbubble.
Almost all of those sales come organically.
That means I don’t do much ‘direct’ marketing of my own, and I do almost no paid-marketing (i.e. Advertising).
Well, that is beginning to change.
I’ve been playing around with Shopify for a few months now, and am beginning to see some success using paid traffic via Instagram – specifically by reaching out to popular, relevant accounts and paying them for sponsored posts.
The income from my Shopify store is not about to replace that from my print-on-demand sites (it’s only brought in about $2k/month for the past 3 months), but it’s been a nice additional income stream, and it comes with the added bonus of a direct relationship with my customers, and the chance to re-market to them over and over again in the future.
This post is by no means comprehensive – and I’m no expert in this area – but I have picked up few tips that I think will help anyone who is looking to take things in a similar direction (ie. – your own brand store + paid traffic or direct marketing).
But beware – you will need to drop some cash to make this work.
