Michael Essek

How To Outsource T-Shirt Designs The Right Way (+ Mistakes To Avoid)

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.

Read More

Selling T-Shirts on Seller Central with Shopify: Part 2 (Overcoming Headaches)

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…

Read More

Selling T-Shirts On Amazon Merch vs. Seller Central – Pros & Cons (& Headaches)

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.

Read More

Selling T-Shirts On Instagram: 3 Marketing Tips

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.

Read More