I Spent $1,000 on a Print-on-Demand Shop - Realistic Results!
In this video, I attempt opening a print-on-demand shop for a second time! I really had higher hopes for this one!
One of my first videos on this channel was trying to start a t-shirt company utilizing print-on-demand. I put a lot of time into creating the designs, building the website, and putting together ads, but by the time the experiment was finished, it wasn’t close to being profitable.
I got some great feedback from all of you, ranging from the way the website looked, the designs, and the pricing.
This time around, I’m going to do things a little differently. I’m going to create a more simple and clean website, change my print-on-demand provider to try and get my prices down, and hire graphic designers on Fiverr to help me create the shirt designs.
I’m hoping that with these changes, my shop can see some success.
Getting Started
You may have noticed that I’ve been spending a lot of time watching the stock market lately and keeping an eye on what traders on Reddit have been up to. Since WallStreetBets really took off since the whole Gamestop short squeeze, I decided that this shop is going to cater to that community.
The reasons for this are:
I’ve spent a lot of time in the community, so I’m familiar with the phrases, sense of humor, etc.
I think it should be fairly easy to target the right people with advertising
I couldn’t really think of another niche I wanted to do this with
Now, here are the potential downsides that I see:
I don’t think this community really appreciates being sold to
I feel like I may be a little late since I’ve already seen some other stonk-related merch shops pop up in ads and over on Redbubble
Again, with an experiment like this, there are a lot of variables, so sometimes it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what you’re doing wrong – especially when you’re pretty inexperienced, like I am.
With all of that being said, I went ahead and got the domain thetendietown.com. A lot of better names I thought of had already been taken in the last few months, but I really wanted a dot com address, so that was the best I could come up with. I think it’s brandable and if you know what a tendie is, you’ll get an idea of what to expect with the site.
I also came up with a few concepts and started looking through graphic designers on Fiverr. I was able to get a few different artists started on my concepts, but I think it will take them a couple of weeks to get them finished and sent back to me, so I will work on building out my website and maybe even working on a few simpler designs that I can handle.
The Designs
Okay, so it’s been quite awhile since I started this project, as evidenced by my mustache, so it’s time for an update. It took about two weeks for both Fiverr sellers I ordered from to deliver the graphics, but before we take a look, let me show you my concepts.
The first one is pretty simple and a classic depiction of WallStreetBets lingo, so I knew it’s been done many times before. I found this sticker design from Redbubble, but I wanted him to be wearing a suit… and to also have diamond hands.
The second concept is riffing off the fact that many Reddit GameStop stockholders refer to each other as apes. So I thought it’d be fun to take an image of Donkey Kong and turn it into Stonkey Kong with the WallStreetBets boy’s face. I found a Donkey Kong inspired font and sent the creator of it $10 so I could use it for commercial purposes.
So let’s see what I got from Fiverr.
I actually really love this one – it’s exactly what I wanted and he did a great job making it happen. This design cost about $79 and well worth it. He also included this version of the graphic which should work nicely as a banner on my Shopify store.
This other turned out pretty nicely too. I’m not sure I like the design as a whole that much, but that’s 100% my fault since the seller executed my idea perfectly. And if you’re a Donkey Kong fan and a GameStop fan, this design might speak to you. This one cost $147, so a bit pricier than the other one.
And then here are the designs I made…
This first one is quite simple… I re-created the GameStop logo, changed stop to Stonk and created an upward arrow with the K.
Then I created a buy the dip shirt, and put the f-bomb in black, so that part willl be black on black.
Then a simple I like the stock shirt. That one was my wife’s idea.
And one more that says HODL and has a bandana hanging off of the L as an ode to Roaring Kitty’s notorious red bandana.
So those are my designs. Next, I created products with the designs on Printify which is the print on demand platform I’m using for this project.
PRINTIFY
So last time I tried print-on-demand, I used Printful as my provider… and it was kind of expensive. This time, I’m trying out Printify. For the products, I really want to keep it simple. Last time, I tried making pants and socks and I think I just had too many products for just starting out. For this shop, let’s just start with t-shirts. One thing I already like better than Printful is that you have a list of providers for each article of clothing, and you can see how much each one charges for the product, for shipping, and their production time. So you can figure out which provider will work best for what you want and then start designing from there.
The only non-shirt product I’ll add is a simple coffee mug. It’s relatively low-cost and could be a nice add-on to an order or just appeals to someone who likes the designs but doesn’t want another t-shirt.
This design is my favorite, and I think it works best in a mug format, so we’ll go with that.
The other thing I did was I ordered a sample of this shirt. I like to see 1) how long it took from the time I ordered to delivery and 2) the quality of the shirt and print.
Next, I’m once again going to use PlaceIt to create some mockup images I can use for advertising.
Alright, let’s take a look at my site. I kept it clean and simple and tried to create fun descriptions for each design. I’m offering free shipping to the US and then $10 flat international, which is the rate I got from Monster Digital who is the actual shop fulfilling my orders here in the US. I’m keeping the t-shirts priced at $20 and the mug at $12, which still should give me enough profit margin depending on how the ads convert. So next up, I made some ads.
ADS
So the obvious route to go with ads is through Reddit. You can target specific communities with your ads, which is perfect for this print on demand store because Reddit is exactly where my target demographic is spending time. I’ve never advertised on Reddit, but the setup was pretty similar to other platforms like Facebook, just a little more simplified.
Now for ads on social media, I think meme ads can work better than traditional ads, since it will look more like the normal content users are used to seeing on the platform. So I created some ads with the Reddit GameStop Shareholder in mind. Let’s take a look.
I mean, it’s kind of dumb, but it might just be dumb enough to work. Here are a few others I made. So, let’s move on to targeting the ads.
The one thing I was shocked to find out was they don’t allow you to target the WallStreetBets community with ads… and I have no idea why. It seems like even before the sub blew up, it wasn’t allowed and now with almost 10 million members, it’s still not – which is a huge disappointment because this is exactly where I wanted to advertise.
The other subreddit I wanted to go after was r/GME which is devoted to GameStop. Luckily, there’s over 250,000 members here which makes it a great option. I also chose AMC’s subreddit since there is likely some crossover there and also Personal FInance – not the subreddit, but just as some who is interested in personal finance topics.
Unfortunately, my ads were not getting approved. After emailing support, they said if I removed the WallStreetBets Boy from my website, I should be fine… which kind of sucks. Both of my Fiverr designs feature that character, so that means I’m limited to just the designs I made. As far as I know, Reddit and WallStreetBets don’t own rights to that character anyways. So while contemplating what to do next, I ran ads on Facebook and Instagram.
I targeted people ages 18-45 living in Canada, Germany, and the US with interests in GameStop, Reddit, or Stocks. I spent $127 and got 545 link clicks and a total of… zero dollars in sales.
After that ran, I did decide to take down all designs and graphics with the WallStreetBets boy in them so that Reddit will approve the ads. I think this definitely has a pretty negative impact on how the store looks overall and how people perceive the designs. I think designs with custom graphics as opposed to text-based designs just show a little more thought and effort.
The ads were finally approved and I did get one sale for an I Like the Stock shirt design.
I don’t think I had Paypal setup correctly when this order came in, so it’s still pending and I still have to figure that out.
I honestly had a lot of issues with Reddit Ads. My ads would get approved, and then a day or two later, they would be marked as not approved. I went back and forth with customer support for quite awhile. I tried adding in the WallStreetBets designs after the ads approved, but they caught on to that and stopped running my ads. I tried again, with just my own designs and found another spin-off subreddit for GameStop stock holders called SuperStonk that I also added into the rotation to advertise to.
Now let’s see what one of these shirts actually looks like in person.
I ordered my sample the evening of March 27th and 6 days later it arrived, which I was quite impressed with. Let’s see how it looks. Oh - one detail I like is that they put my store name as the sender on the package, which is a really nice detail for a print on demand.
The print looks good, the shirt fit and material is comfortable, so overall I’m happy with the provider I chose for my shop.
End Results
So at this point, I’ve spent $127 on Facebook ads and $578 on Reddit ads, so let’s check the sales.
Unfortunately I only made 3 sales. 1 I like the stock shirt, 1 Gamestonk shirt, and 1 HODL shirt for a total of $70.
To fulfill the orders, I spent $40.13. So the gross profit there is $29.87.
Now let’s add up the rest of the expenses to find out how much I actually lost on this experiment.
Since this experiment has been going on since March, I passed my free trial on Shopify and have been billed twice at $29 per month for a total of $58.
I spent $78.75 on this rocketman design, $147 for this donkey kong design… and $10 for the font for a total of $235.75.
Adding everything up, I spent almost $1,000 ($998.75) on this project to make $29.87.
So again, another spectacular failure.
But this time around, I liked that I kept things pretty simple for the most part. My store and store design was all very simple – I kept the designs and products to a minimum, and the prices were also pretty reasonable.
As far as using Printify – I think this platform was a lot better than Printful. For one, you can choose who is actually printing and fulfilling the orders and where they’re located. This made it easy for me to know what my hard costs were, and I felt comfortable setting up international shipping as well, since my supplier had a flat $10 rate for that.
Now for what I could do better next time… for one staying away from anything the ad approval people may deem as copyright or trademark infringement would help.
Of course with projects like this, you have several variables, and you really have to nail each one to be successful. First, my niche – the GameStop stock community – I think I ran into two main issues with this.
For one, a lot of the hype and excitement overall has kind of died down. I was a little late with this – January or February would’ve been better. Second of all, I don’t really think they are very receptive to this kind of marketing. I think they’re skeptical of something like this which I totally understand.
As far as the designs – I think I was pretty hindered when I couldn’t keep the Wallstreetbets themed designs in the shop, and I know I’m not a graphic designer, so I think this could have been improved.
The website is fine – nothing special. Hopefully it didn’t deter anyone from placing an order, but with a .22% conversion rate, it’s got to be either the website or the designs themselves, because that’s pretty abysmal.
The ads – I mean, I’m not an ad expert by any stretch of the imagination. I think I would benefit by hiring someone to help me in this department next time, since it’s not really an area I enjoy or have deep insights in.
So while this wasn’t successful, I did genuinely try to do my best. I’m sure someone more skilled in graphic design and advertising could have success with something like this, but for me, I’m on to the next project.
Thanks so much for watching, if you would do me a favor and hit the thumbs up button on this video – that would really help this channel out – and consider subscribing if you haven’t already, and I’ll see you in the next one.