How to Find Unsaturated Niches and Create Trademark-Free T-Shirt Designs
Are you looking to make money selling t-shirts? T-shirts are still one of the best-selling products, and with the right designs, you can make a lot of money. In this article, we will show you how to find unsaturated niches and create dozens of trademark-free designs in just a few minutes. We will cover four methods for creating designs, including handcrafted designs, AI-generated designs, buying pre-made designs, and a hybrid strategy. By using all of these methods, you can create a large, diverse catalog of product designs targeting each niche, giving you a great chance of actually getting sales.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Method 1: Handcrafted Designs
- Method 2: AI-Generated Designs
- Method 3: Buying Pre-Made Designs
- Method 4: Hybrid Strategy
- Double Niching
- Using Printify to Sell Your T-Shirts Online
- Mockup Script
- Conclusion
- FAQ
Method 1: Handcrafted Designs
Handcrafted designs are a great way to create unique designs that stand out. To create handcrafted designs, you need to take what someone else has already cooked up and add a little bit of sauce to it. Look at some of the ideas you have saved from successful shops and notice the elements inside the best-selling listings. Pick out the font, colors, or alignment that you like and put it all together in Figma over your creating mat. Type out your saying in the text box, change the font, resize the graphic, and position it so that it looks nice and has good proportions on a t-shirt.
Handcrafted designs don't have to be complicated to work. Some of the best-selling designs are simple text designs. Copy and paste the same design with the saying that you just made and create a second variation with different fonts and different styling. Do this over and over until you can't come up with any more styles. These handcrafted designs start to get really cool and even easier to make when you have some styles that look good. You can simply change out the sayings for other similar sayings that target completely different niches. These are the same designs just reused as a sort of template so that you're not starting over from complete scratch each time you want to go make designs.
Method 2: AI-Generated Designs
AI-generated designs are a great way to create designs that don't look AI-generated. With recent AI updates, the images that we can generate are completely insane. There are a bunch of free or cheap AIs that you can use like Leonardo AI, but we still use Mid-Journey to generate all of our designs. It's honestly the best one out right now as far as quality and control, and it's only about $10 a month.
The Mid-Journey setup is super easy. Head to their website and click on "Join the Beta." This will prompt you to join their free Discord server. From here, click on "Add a Server," create your own for you and your friends, and title it "T-Shirt Designs." Back in the Mid-Journey server, click on the Mid-Journey bot, hit "Add App," and then choose that T-Shirt Design server that you just made.
Before you go creating a bunch of designs, you have to tune your Mid-Journey settings so that you get the best possible images for t-shirts. Select Mid-Journey model version 6 and set the stylization to high. You can play around with other settings, but we found these to be the most effective for making t-shirts.
To create your own versions of some of these best-selling designs, start by trying to write your own prompt. For example, type out "/imag" followed by a description of the type of design that you want to make. If you're having trouble writing the perfect prompt, you can come to Mid-Journey's website and search for the word "capybara." If you find an image that you like, such as this yoga capybara, you can view the entire prompt that was used to generate it. Copy this prompt and use it to try and generate your own image.
Method 3: Buying Pre-Made Designs
Buying pre-made designs is a great strategy, especially after you've made a few sales and you're ready to start reinvesting. The reason that buying designs works so well is that we can buy the exact same best-selling designs that other shops are using and sell them in our own shop. There's no copyright infringement since the creator of the design is selling us the right to sell the image again. To find these best-selling designs, search for the name of the design and you can probably find the exact same source file. Double-check that it's print on demand approved and they haven't banned it. Then, buy it for a couple of bucks, save it, and use it in one of your own listings.
Method 4: Hybrid Strategy
The most efficient method to guarantee that you'll get sales on your t-shirts is to use a hybrid strategy. Instead of just focusing on one design method, why not use them all? Craft simple text designs, make some AI art, buy some pre-made designs online, and by doing this for each niche that you target, you'll have a great chance of actually getting sales because you'll have a large, diverse catalog of product designs targeting each niche.
Double Niching
Double niching means that we can target customers who like two completely unrelated things. For example, taco shirts and Valentine shirts are both highly competitive, but Valentine's Day taco shirts aren't, so maybe a customer is buying a gift for their spouse and their first search that they put in is a Valentine's Day shirt. If they don't find anything, they might then remember that their spouse loves tacos, so they'll search for a taco shirt. Etsy will remember both searches and then combine and curate the search results to show that customer relevant products.
Using Printify to Sell Your T-Shirts Online
To sell your t-shirts online, we recommend using Printify. They're the fastest, highest quality, and lowest cost print provider out there. Use our Printify product uploader to automatically upload all of those designs that you've created to the t-shirts that you're selling, pre-sized with all of your colors, descriptions, pricing details, and settings saved.
Mockup Script
To place your designs on bestselling mockups, use our mockup script to automatically generate hundreds of mockups without any user input. You can step away from your computer completely and even run the mockup script and the uploader at the same time, automating two of the most time-consuming tasks.
Conclusion
By using all of these methods, you can create a large, diverse catalog of product designs targeting each niche, giving you a great chance of actually getting sales. Remember to double niche, use Printify to sell your t-shirts online, and use our mockup script to place your designs on bestselling mockups. With these tips, you can make money selling t-shirts.
FAQ
Q: What is the best AI for generating t-shirt designs?
A: Mid-Journey is the best AI for generating t-shirt designs.
Q: How do I find unsaturated niches?
A: Use Etsy for your product research. Look for sub-niches that are working right now today that are low competition but still high demand.
Q: How do I create trademark-free designs?
A: Run a simple trademark check on the official trademark office website to see if there are any filings for the saying that you want to sell.
Q: What is double niching?
A: Double niching means that we can target customers who like two completely unrelated things.
Q: What is the best print provider for selling t-shirts online?
A: Printify is the best print provider for selling t-shirts online.
