Can i make money selling t shirts online

Three years ago, Glen Zubia was stuck under a mountain of student loan debt, living with his parents and struggling to scrape together car payments. Now, the year-old has his own four-bedroom house in El Paso, Texas. He even co-hosts a weekly podcast where he tells listeners all about how he turned his finances. Zubia is a master of passive income through print on demanda 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. 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. But in his fourth month, he got a check. He used Adobe Illustrator on his iMac to crank out a catalogue of 2, designs — a process that involved seemingly endless brainstorming, researching, designing and saving. No way would it happen if I were messing. When the cash started coming in, he put it aside. Plus, he gets to set his own hours.

Why Try To Make Money Selling T-Shirts Online?

So, spend some time brainstorming and coming up with cute design ideas, clever puns, or laugh-out-loud jokes that you think people would enjoy wearing in their day-to-day. You can riff off popular TV and movies but make sure you steer clear of copyright infringement , capture cultural moments or movements, or take advantage of local pride with community-specific designs. If you have a talent for art, developing the actual visual design for the t-shirt is all part of the fun. You can still have the t-shirt business of your dreams. You might even learn how to use clipart or word shapes to enhance your images. You can take advantage of some of the new apps like Over and Wordswag. You can pick up some great design tips on Udemy. If your shirt idea still requires more artistic skill than you possess, you might look for an artist to work with for a share in the profits.

Is selling t-shirts online profitable?

Or, if you have a little money to invest, you might commission an artist through Upwork to create the graphics for your shirt. Whatever you do while designing your shirt, make sure the words, fonts, clipart, and other images are free for you to use commercially and do not infringe on anyone else’s copyright. Now, how are you going to get your shirts to the public so they can buy them? If you wanted to be REALLY hands-on, of course, you could either learn to silkscreen shirts yourself or order them from a large vendor, store the shirts in your home, and ship them yourself to each customer when selling your shirts through a personal website or Etsy. Spreadshop is brought to you by the folks behind Spreadshirt who’ve been in the custom print-on-demand merchandise game online for over 15 years. You can start your own free Spreadshop quickly and easily — and they offer simple ways to brand your storefront and even integrate your new shop with your website, too.

The all-in-one design team for your business

Nearly every night after dinner for eight straight months, Glen Zubia brewed a cup of coffee, turned on heavy metal music, and made T-shirts. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays he designed in Adobe Illustrator. It was grueling, but it paid off. Eventually, Zubia had a 2,item catalog of designs, slogans, and illustrations online that people could purchase on T-shirts and hoodies. Also called print on demand, this method of passive income works differently than, say, renting out real estate or playing the stock market.

I had my tipping point

Market And now for the marketing. The tool is subscription based and has a free, limited version. The training that T-Shirt Titan offers does work well and includes practical ways to create sflling that are going to sell and to market your designs online. Just make sure the new products go well with the entire concept of the store. And now for the marketing. Of course fidget spinners shirrts not be a ripe topic or niche for t-shirt ideas, but the example was just to illustrate that some niches could have been super trendy at some point but then died down later. Threadless is interesting, as it is one of the few t-shirt sites selliny there that has a strong reputation and is well-known. So the more colors your design has, the longer it will take to print it, and the more expensive the whole thing will be. So how does it work exactly? So before you get to designing and setting up your store, you need to answer one question: who is going to shirte your t-shirts?

How to Create a T-shirt Design

According to Shopifyglobal retail e-commerce sales will reach 4. So, selling t-shirts online to make money, is that a viable business model that can help you capitalize on this e-commerce craze? The barrier to entry has also been significantly reduced in the past few years. The t-shirt selling model is no exception. Let me tell you more about the challenges of starting such a business online and how modern solutions were able to solve these challenges.

This question is like asking: would wearing clothes keep you warm? But if your question is: can YOU do it? Well, with the right mindset, tools and hard work, yes, absolutely.

Alright so the idea of shirtx t-shirts online or virtually any physical product might be a little intimidating. Can i make money selling t shirts online is, none of that is really needed to get started. So we basically need to:. These 9 steps may seem complicated, but in reality, modern solutions ma,e us to practically do only a few of those steps ourselves while having all makw complicated stuff outsourced to third-party partners.

This makes the business o much more accessible to anyone looking to get started with it, requiring only a few shits dollars of budget and just a single person to run things in the beginning. So the first step is research. You might already have something in mind if a certain design or niche was the initial inspiration that encouraged you to pursue this business model in the first place.

This is the easiest way to get started. While I did not really play the game myself, my brother was addicted for quite a bit. This is invaluable.

It could be sports, hobbies, an occupation…etc. These are some of the niches that have a history of doing really well on printed t-shirts:. Probably the price, not much. You want that t-shirt, because it represents who you are or conveys a message you want the world to get loud and clear. This approach is advantageous for several reasons:. Google Trends is a free ohline by Google that helps us do omline.

Remember the fidget spinner craze? You can play around with these attributes as you. By Mayit had reached its peak everyone and their mothers were shifts fidget spinners at that time if you recall. The popularity curve went down as fast as it went up. Of course fidget spinners might not be a ripe topic or niche for t-shirt ideas, but the example was just to illustrate that some oonline could have been super trendy at some point but then died down later.

Google Trends allows you to identify this with a glance, before actually deciding to commit to that niche and risking the potential loss of a lot of time and money. Google trends can really help me answer this as. Just to satisfy my curiosity, I already knew that one of the most prestigious tennis tournaments in the world, Wimbledon, is hosted in the UK every year.

Lo and behold:. Simple information acquired from Google Trends can really make or break your business. Even worse, you could get sued by the original designer or copyright holder. You can see several interesting designs right away. Best of all, you can see if specific websites seem to be dominating the results and you can go ahead and explore those websites individually.

This works in a very similar fashion with Google images:. If you have some money to spare, you can also explore tools like TeeSpy.

This feature can be invaluable and is not available when searching Pinterest directly. The tool is subscription based and has a free, limited cann. The design phase. You can either create the t-shirt design yourself or hire a professional designer to do it for you. Canva is a popular graphic design software that you can use directly from your browser. Ask them for the cold-hard truth with no sugar coating.

I personally like to hire people for design, you can get really good quality designs at very affordable prices these days. Here are some suggestions. You either:. Printing is the toughest one to do it.

Storing and delivering the t-shirts yourself is less of a hassle but can quickly become one when you start getting a lot of orders. The first approach could become very hectic quickly. You can buy wholesale in bulk then store and deliver the t-shirts. But then again you risk deadstock. You can buy wholesale, send yout t-shirts to a third-party fulfillment warehouse, and let them handle inventory and fulfillment for you. This removes most of the headache but adds a lot of additional costs that eat into your margins.

This solution allows you to outsource your printing, stock management and fulfilment at the same time. It lets you focus on designing and selling while the legwork is gets handled by. The POD company handles things from. They print the design and ship it directly to the customer. No stock to keep and no worrying about shipping.

This level of automation gives you a lot of freedom and limits your risk. It also allows your business to be run by a single individual, at least at the beginning.

Their model is simple: You give them the design and they print and ship for you. No need to have your own website or handle any payment processing. One of the most popular ones out there in this space is Printful. Printful has expanded and now offers not only printing on t-shirts, but also hats, mugs, pillows, posters and. Other companies like them include TeeScape and CustomCat. Where and how are people going to see and purchase your t-shirts?

There are three main approaches here, each with their own pros and cons. Customers would manually pay you through PayPal or Stripe, for instance. The main advantage here is that all you need to get started is a Facebook page and a PayPal account.

The main disadvantage is because the process is very manual, you could face some issues tracking orders and keeping your customers up to date.

Things can also get confusing as the number of orders grow, and you may need to hire employees early on to help you out because of how labor intensive the work is. You just create the design and market it. This approach is good because it saves you a ton of headache and allows you to scale fast.

You can also get started in a jiffy, just create an account with the platform and upload your design. The first major drawback is that POD platforms can heavily eat into your margins. The second drawback is branding. This means you lose out on building your own brand acn people admire, follow and buy more and more. This is my recommended approach and is the best of all worlds in my opinion.

With your own store, you can sell your t-shirts on yourbrandname. You can easily get your online store up and running using a platform such as Shopify. Shopify gets sihrts up and running with your own store in just a few minutes. You can customize the whole look and feel of your store, add and edit products, integrate with payments processors and more using an intuitive drag and drop interface.

The Shopify route helps you build a professional looking brand and create loyalty that prompts customers to return and buy again and. You can also run loyalty and referral programs, mke with other brands or influencers…etc.

Most importantly, your store and brand will be an asset that you can sell later or hire people to run things on your behalf for a passive, long term income maje. You need to keep your website and content updated with clear shipping policies, refund policies…etc. You on,ine to make sure you comply with local and international laws depending on the countries you serve.

Setting up your own store is also slightly more complicated than selling directly through, say, TeeSpring. TeeSpring takes no money from you upfront as well, while Shopify charges you a monthly fee.

And now for the marketing. There are a lot of different approaches you can take. The right influencers are a goldmine on Instagram. In a nutshell, the way this works is that you find accounts related to your niche on Instagram and evaluate the engagement on their content.

You can use tools such as Hype Auditor to check the authenticity of followers and engagement. Could be a great starting point to finding influencers you can partner. Facebook Ads can really help drive engagement and sales to your t-shirts. Disruptive Advertising has an excellent Facebook Ads guide that can help you quickly get started.

How to Start Selling T-shirts Online

N ot too long ago, I knew nothing about running a Facebook ad to sell a product. Okay, maybe I just tried it. I ran an ad for an iPhone app I had get more users.

Taking advantage of the resources available to me

I was probably doing it all wrong. Still… I tried. 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. He shkrts 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, mwke was really cheap. The course was just okay, but Whirts 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 selliny.