Can i make money selling t shirts

One day in March, I came across someone selling a course about how to make money selling your own t-shirts online. This seller was your typical internet marketer. He said how easy it was. He made it seem like anyone could do it. He knew how to sell.

So my eyes got big and I dreamt about the money I could earn if I sold my own designs. Selling t-shirts had been on my mind for many years. I just never thought I could make that much money from it. I bought the course, which was really cheap. The course was just okay, but I knew nothing, so anything was a step up.

Soon I had my first t-shirt design uploaded and ready to sell. I created it myself with basic Photoshop skills. I created an ad and started running a Facebook ad campaign. It was a way to test out the design and buyers. Still, I was interested in this. I liked the process. I joined a couple Facebook groups to talk and learn from other people. Some were just beginning, some were having success, and some were still struggling.

The next 20 designs and ad campaigns failed. The highest I got was three shirts. I thought I had an amazing design and was targeting the right audience. The reason I needed ten orders is because the website I was using to print and ship these shirts is Teespring. They make it easy for anyone to sell shirts. Just upload a design, set your price, and if at least 10 shirts are ordered, then the shirts get printed and shipped. They handle that. They just send you money. Twenty-one failures proved that.

I tried selling shirts to dog lovers, coffee lovers, hot sauce lovers, lawyers and more. It would have been easy to quit after so many failures. Finally on the 22nd campaign I had a winning design. It was stupidly simple. It was just a cute message I found on Instagram and targeted toward pediatric nurses. It took less than five minutes to create it in Photoshop. After the campaign ended seven days later, I had sold 17 shirts.

It took a few more failures before I had another successful design — it sold 32 shirts. Seeing success made me even more obsessed about this. I stayed up late to research ideas and work on new campaigns. I learned through trial and error. I carried a Moleskin notebook around all day and wrote down t-shirt ideas. First thing in the morning I would check how the overnight sales.

After my first full month, I just about broke even. Some people might be discouraged, but I was glad I broke even. In the month of May, I kept working hard. I was flat out obsessed with it. All my free time was spent on this. Because I was trying to find the right audience and sell them the right design, I had more failed campaigns than winning ones. But the winning campaigns were massive. The month of May I was finally profitable. I was selling designs that my customers wanted.

All the struggling I had before was finally turning around. All the hard work I put in was now starting to show me massive results. And then in September, my Halloween shirts started selling again and I was reported most likely by a competitor for copyright infringement. The takedown led to the termination of my Merch account. In retrospect, I was playing too close to the edge of intellectual property. And when my competitors had a shred of something they could report me for, they took advantage of it.

While this was all going down my story was featured in Time Magazine. Someone at Amazon apparently read the article because my account was restored the next day. But none of my shirts were. Still, to this day after emails have fallen on deaf ears, my Merch account sits there alive but mostly dead.

Short answer: yes. Selling shirts is not hard and while everyone and their grandma is doing it now, not everyone is doing it right. If you take the extra time to do the small things, you can get started and profit from T-shirts in It takes time to build a profitable passive business. For quick money, I recommend starting with these 10 Easy Side Businesses I know are profitable in But I still recommend you get on that first.

The things that qualify you are uncertain, as you will see is everything regarding Amazon, which leaves us to just guessing at what they want. It took 3 months for me and I applied in early When setting up a store on Etsy , leave no blank unfilled. Etsy gives search preference to the stores and products with the most information so set yourself up right by giving them everything they want.

Then set up your Printful account and integrate it with your Etsy store, this is super easy and can be done very quickly. This is the most time-consuming step in the process but completely worth taking the time. Head over to Etsy or Amazon and click the search bar. So if you want, your first shirt design could be a safari-themed shirt for a new grandma. Yeah, people will buy that. Always look at the top results to see what the context of the search is.

Now, the year-old has his own four-bedroom house in El Paso, Texas. He pulls in thousands of dollars a month from a creatively fulfilling gig where he sets his own schedule and doesn't have to worry about overhead. He even co-hosts a weekly podcast where he tells listeners all about how he turned his finances around. Zubia is a master of passive income through print on demand , a system in which designers link up with sites like Amazon, Teespring and Redbubble to sell shirts and other items.

Companies handle the production and customer service while paying out royalties, meaning people like Zubia can earn big without much investment or upkeep. It's getting so much easier to make money online," Zubia says.

Zubia is no stranger to making money off of the internet. While he was in college, he sold custom action figures on eBay; while trying to pay off credit cards, he tried writing books through Kindle Direct Publishing. You can a purchase custom domain name for your store directly from BigCommerce. This is the fastest method for applying a domain name to your store and requires the least amount of setup. If you want to launch your online t-shirt store fast and without investing extra money, consider adding products to your store using print-on-demand drop shippers like Printful.

Select a t-shirt that you like, upload the designs, select product variants, push them to your store, and voila! So, when trying to define the retail price for your t-shirts, consider:. There, select all the locations to which you want to sell and choose specific shipping methods for each area. Are the checkout steps clear and intuitive?

Can you accept the payments? What happens once the order is complete? Today ecommerce is stronger than ever , which also means the competition is stiff. As a new online t-shirt business owner, you need to seek authenticity to be one step ahead of other merchants.

The easiest way to do that is to create designs that speak your truth and resonate with other people too. Finally, be resilient. The only failure is failing to try. And those who made hundreds of thousands selling t-shirts online can only confirm that. Giedre is a Content Marketer at Printful. Murakami novels or packing up a suitcase for another weekend getaway.

Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Get The Print Version Tired of scrolling? Table of Contents. Targeting everyone under the sun is like tilting at windmills. Let them decide what products and designs are most attractive to them. Want more insights like this?

Just make sure it resonates with your personal and business values. Your ultimate goal is making sure that the two compliment each other. Pro Tip If you want your design to look the best it can when printed, carefully follow basic graphics requirements provided by the printer of your choice.

Besides, you can customize the packages by adding a personal touch to each order that comes in. Pro Tip Base your partnership around the creation of useful content instead of ads.

In other words, be where other people and preferably where your target audience is. Before launching your online store, carefully check if everything is in place and functioning. Giedre Kronberga. View all posts by Giedre Kronberga. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.

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