How To Get Started With Print On Demand – A True Passive Income
Our profit hack for today is a fantastic option to make extra income. The idea of starting a new own business is completely impossible to make a loss with Print On Demand (POD).
One of the many big obstacles for new businesses has historically been warehouse space. If you wanted to sell a physical product like a T-shirt with a funky design, you needed somewhere to store the excess stock. POD removes that requirement, as well as the need for staff and shipping. All you need to handle is the funky design.
TL;DR
- Free – there is absolutely no cost to running a POD business
- Risk Free – as there is no cost, there is no chance of making a loss
- Passive Income – once established, your business can run entirely independently
- Competitive – it’s a popular and competitive market, but you can still break through in the right niche and with great designs
- Ever-changing – as fashion trends move on, you may need to update your product line
What Is Print On Demand (POD) and How Do You Make Money?
POD is exactly what it sounds like – you print a new T-shirt with your custom design only when it’s required, rather than printing off hundreds in advance and then needing to store them. While T-shirts are by far the most common medium for POD, thanks to their large blank surfaces that make them effectively a wearable canvas, you could also use cushion covers, mugs, tote bags, baseball caps, books, phone cases, posters and more.
Working effectively like dropshipping, using POD means there’s no risk of overbuying a product that proves to be unpopular. It removes the risk of making a big loss, though it also cuts down on your chances of making a big profit since each individual item is a bit more expensive than it would be if you bought in bulk. You can keep the profit margins high by increasing the prices of your products, but T-shirts have a finite value, so you can only go so high.
POD is a particularly popular strategy for those with an established audience to make money today – especially YouTubers and social media influencers. While direct profits from these platforms tend to be very low to nonexistent, the personal brand they help to create can be monetised through POD.
It’s not just for social media celebrities, though. If you’ve got an eye for design but lack the up-front capital to build your own fashion house from scratch, POD can be a good low-impact side hustle. It’s not entirely hands-off, so the income generated isn’t entirely passive, but you can still earn a five-figure annual income for very little work. You’ll need to handle marketing and maybe customer service, but neither of these are especially complex.
POD isn’t even just for creatives. Nobody said you had to make the shirt designs yourself. You can hire a freelancer to come up with them, leaving just the marketing in your hands. Everything else – sales, printing and shipping – can be handled by the POD company.
You could also sell your product through platforms like Etsy, eBay or Amazon (or even from your own website), though these approaches take a little more work on your part since they put more of the process into your hands. It’s worth mentioning, at this point, that you would not be the first person to think that this sounds like a good hustle – very far from it. The most popular POD platforms
like Printful, CafePress, Teespring, Zazzle and Redbubble are all heavily saturated with other budding designers. A half-hearted approach to this business is therefore going to get less-than-stellar results. If you want to generate a good and steady income, finding the right niche, creating outstanding designs and putting more effort into your marketing are essential.
How To Get Started With Print On Demand Products
The first and most important step in selling POD T-shirts is choosing the right niche then the right designs to suit that niche. It’s not easy to predict what will and will not be a success. Take the Supreme brand, for example – one of the most successful clothing brands in the world and their design consists exclusively of the name written in white Futura Heavy Oblique font on a red background. It’s a little galling to think that you could put days into designing a work of art for a T-shirt and be outsold by that!
While you could try building your own brand along these lines, it’s a lot easier to target a pre-existing and well-established community. Your shirt can’t infringe on trademarks and copyright, so don’t think you can start printing Marvel and Disney shirts, but there are still plenty of options available.
You should invest some time into market research. Look around the internet for passionate communities and interest groups. Reliable hits include funny shirts, memes, fitness, gaming and pets, but these topics are already well-served by other POD designers. Try to find a niche that’s up-and-coming – something that is gaining momentum but has yet to become mainstream.
Once you’ve found your community, you need to know what is popular within that community. Again, this is down to time spent in research – there’s really no shortcut to this, but hard work now will make you more money later.
Finally, you need to look at what else is already selling in your chosen niche. This will give you a guide both to what sorts of design are popular and what is already over-done. You obviously shouldn’t directly duplicate other designs, but you can certainly take inspiration from them. For example, if your chosen niche tends to favour simple designs containing only text, spending time on complex designs and artistic graphics will probably be fruitless.
Where you take your ideas is entirely up to you, the options really are limitless. You can focus on evergreen ideas that will hopefully be popular for a long time, or if you’re planning to to produce lots of designs you can aim to be topical and target popular culture – like this guy:
To a degree, this is all the work you need to do. You could now send the design to a POD platform, ensure the retail price is higher than the cost of fulfilment and then just wait. Your chosen platform will add the design to their marketplace, will handle sales and shipping and will then send you any profits. However, the chances if actually making any sales are comparatively low since your design will be one among millions on the marketplace.
To increase your income, you should market your shirt to the niche you are targeting. Put links to the POD product page on appropriate Facebook groups and subreddits, maybe make your own Facebook page to promote your products and potentially even put a little money into sponsored posts. Anything you can do to increase the reach and awareness of your products will increase your chances of making sales.
The wonderful thing about POD as a business is that there are no running costs. If your first design is a flop, it doesn’t matter in the slightest since you haven’t made a loss. Just try again with a new design and keep trying until you find a formula that works.
If you wanted to up your game and turn this into a fully-fledged business, you could add listings to other internet marketplaces like Etsy and eBay or even build your own eCommerce platform, but neither of these are essential and they both add complexity, risks and expenses to one degree or another.
Things to Consider with Print On Demand
There is no chance of making a loss from POD, but there is also a very small chance of making a fortune. With good research, finding the right niche, making good designs and hitting the right level of price mark-up, you can make a modest passive income, but it’s virtually impossible to make enough from POD alone to live on.
Of the above-listed factors, the market research is undoubtedly the most important. In order to find the right group to target and the right design to appeal to them, you will need to pour a lot of time into research. This will go a lot quicker if you choose a niche that you are also interested in and it will also make your marketing a lot easier as you’ll already be in most of the right groups on social media.
Fashion trends are extremely volatile, transient and inconsistent. Designs that are wildly successful today may be deeply unpopular tomorrow. That being the case, finding exactly the right design can be challenging and it might only be right for a year (or a lot less) before you see sales drop to zero. While the income from POD is mostly passive, you may occasionally have to update your product line to maintain your income.
– Printful – My favourite Print On Demand platform
Printful is easily my favourite platform for creating high quality print on demand merchandise.
- Wide range of printable merchandise
- Easy to use platform
- Huge integration list – quickly and easily sell your products on Shopify, eBay, Etsy, WooCommerce, Gumroad, and more
- Super easy to create and test designs
- Warehouse and fulfilment – covering the US, Europe and Asia
- High Quality And Affordable materials
- Can host your store or push your products to your own store (E.g. Shopify)
- Excellent customer service
If I was starting out with Print on Demand today, I’d start with Printful
>> Learn more about Printful here
How Much Does It Cost To Get Started With Print On Demand?
In its simplest form, there is absolutely no cost to POD whatsoever. Uploading designs to a manufacturer’s marketplace is free and you are not charged anything for sales or shipping. If you are not a good graphic designer, you may need to hire one to turn your vision into a digital file and you may also choose to spend money on marketing to increase your sales, but neither of these are essential costs.
Although there are no costs to getting started with Print On Demand, you may wish to consider purchasing Merch Informer, particularly if you are unsure on what designs you want to make initially.
Learn – 9 part video course which explains the exact process to launching and making sales
Research – helps you find profitable niches – quickly!
Design – create beautiful designs with their bulk design builder Scale – scale your business quickly, including automating your listings
Protect – Merch Informer provides trademark protection for all your designs
>> Get started with a free trial here
Learn more about creating a Print On Demand (POD) product line
If you are interested in learning more about Print On Demand and how it can create you a passive income, check out these links:
Recommended:
Printful – number one marketplace for Print On Demand. Low costs, wide product range and quick delivery in Europe and the US
Merch Informer – A great tool to help you find untapped, profitable niches, stay ahead of your competitors and scale your Merch like a brand
Other options:
TeePublic – a popular marketplace, with a particular focus on Indie Designers
Zazzle – the ‘Make Engine’. Zazzle has the widest range of potential Print on Demand Merchandise
CafePress – another popular marketplace for print on demand merchandise
Teespring – create your designs and Teespring takes care of everything else – including marketing your merchandise
Redbubble – 700,000 creatives worldwide – another marketplace focused on artistic talent