How to Start a Print on Demand Shop from Scratch
Starting a print on demand shop can be overwhelming with all the different steps and strategies. It can be hard to know where to even start. In this article, we will share our exact strategy for how to start a print on demand shop completely from scratch. We have used this exact strategy to grow our own six and seven-figure print on demand businesses. If we had to start over today from absolute zero, this is the exact strategy that we would use.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. What is Print on Demand?
3. Components Needed to Get Started
4. Picking a Product
5. Making a Profit
6. Universal Products
7. Creating Winning Designs
8. Handcrafted Designs
9. Buying Pre-Made Designs
10. AI Generated Designs
11. Hybrid Designs
12. Choosing a Print Provider
13. Setting Up an Etsy Shop
14. Creating Trustworthy Shop Designs
15. Using Mockups to Build Trust
16. SEO Keywords for Listings
17. Conclusion
What is Print on Demand?
Print on demand is a business model that allows you to sell various products like t-shirts, mugs, and posters with unique artwork on them. The items are only printed and shipped when a customer orders, so you don't have to buy any inventory upfront. You can run the entire business from a laptop. The only time that you have to buy a product or spend any money is after you've already made a sale. This also means that if done correctly, this business can be mostly passive, allowing you to scale it when you have the time and keep earning income while you're traveling, sleeping, or watching more videos.
Components Needed to Get Started
There are four components that you need to get started: the product, the design to go on the product, a website to sell it on, and customers to buy it.
Picking a Product
Picking a product is the easy part, but if you get it wrong, it can ruin your business. There are three things that we look for in a winning product. First, make sure that the product you're selling has and will continue to be an evergreen product. We don't want to put a ton of work into or make a bunch of designs for a product that's going to become irrelevant. To find evergreen products, we have to look at what's already been working.
At the end of the day, nobody wants to buy a blank product, so we're primarily selling the design that goes on the product. If there's competition, it means there's demand. We've only ever sold long-time bestselling products like t-shirts, mugs, and posters because they've been proven to work for years.
Second, the product has to make a good profit. There's no point in doing this if you're not going to make good money. We always aim for around a 30% profit margin.
Third, the product has to be universal. We use the designs that are on the products to target different trends and niches. We'll only get good sales if our designs are good, but our product has to be versatile enough to upload all different kinds of designs to it.
Making a Profit
We always analyze successful shops to see how they're actually doing. When we look at their monthly stats, we can see that they're not doing too bad at all. If they're making a 30% profit margin or so, they're easily doing $110,000 a month.
Universal Products
If it's an evergreen product that can make a good profit and allows you to upload universal designs, you'll be set.
Creating Winning Designs
The reason that most sellers fail is that they don't understand customer psychology. Customers don't care about your products, but they do care about things that they're already passionate about. This could literally be anything: their career, their hobbies, their pets, their hometown. With print on demand, we can make products for all of those interests.
To make banger designs, we have to start with one of these ideas, which could be literally anything. We know where to start by doing some research to see what customers are buying. Our favorite platform to use is Etsy because all of the sales data is public.
Handcrafted Designs
One method for making designs is the traditional, good old-fashioned handcrafted design. Most of the top candle shops sell basic text designs just with creative fonts.
Buying Pre-Made Designs
Another method is buying pre-made designs. This seller has made thousands of dollars from this item, and they don't have any complex design skills because they just bought this exact design pre-made for $5.
AI Generated Designs
We can also use AI-generated designs. We personally use Mid Journey, but now there are a lot of different AI generators that you could use.
Hybrid Designs
By far, the best method to ensure success is to create hybrid designs. Going with this method allows you to take advantage of handmade, AI, and pre-made designs all in one shop, giving you the best chance of success.
Choosing a Print Provider
Even with the best product and the best designs, if your print provider sucks, you're almost guaranteed to fail. The print provider you choose will dictate how quickly your customers get their products, the level of customer service you get as the seller for orders with defects and shipments lost in the mail, and ultimately how much profit you get to keep from all of your sales.
Setting Up an Etsy Shop
As a beginner, the most beginner-friendly and easiest way to get started is to open a completely free shop on Etsy. We want to sell where the customers already are. Etsy has over 95 million active buyers, and they drive more than enough organic traffic to their website than you'd need to grow a six or seven-figure business.
Creating Trustworthy Shop Designs
Everything you do from the logo to the banner to the mockup images needs to build up this image of a premium brand. When you do this and you really focus on making your shop look professional and premium, it really helps with component number four: getting customers.
Using Mockups to Build Trust
The mockup images are the marketing for our print on demand products. Whenever you look at the top shops in any category selling any product, they've all figured out what mockups to use to get the most amount of sales. These mockups or similar ones to the best sellers are how we build trust and the first step to actually converting these random shoppers online into paying customers.
SEO Keywords for Listings
We have to get into the potential customer's head and have them imagine that they've already bought the product we're selling. All we have to do is put good SEO keywords in our listings. This will help get them to rank in the Etsy search engine.
Conclusion
By following this strategy, you should hopefully see that making artwork isn't too difficult after all, and you'll be left with a ton of designs. With all of our products ready to go on printify, we need a place to sell them online. Setting up an Etsy shop is super easy to do, and we've created a quick start guide that will walk you through everything that you need to get your shop open and started.
