Making Money w/ Trending Shirt Designs on Redbubble

Here are my updated sales numbers as of 11/20: https://bit.ly/3938GB2

Here's my Redbubble store: http://printskeep.redbubble.com

In this video, I’m gonna hop on an internet trend and create some print-on-demand designs to try and make some money. Here we go.

My first foray into print-on-demand for this channel was an interesting experience. While I didn’t end up making money, I did learn quite a bit. This time, I’m going to keep things simple by only creating designs and uploading them to RedBubble, instead of creating an entire Shopify store and a brand around it.

By just uploading to an existing platform with an existing customer base, I won’t have to worry about all of the overhead costs like advertising, Shopify fees, etc. There won’t be as large of profit margins, but that’s okay.

What I’ve been wanting to do for a long time is find a trending topic on the internet and be one of the first to create and upload a design to be one of the first to market to capitalize on the trend. Usually, by the time I think of it, it’s too late. There are a lot of people who probably do this as a full-time job beating me to the punch. However, earlier today, this happened.

And then I saw this tweet from Ken Jennings.

After that, I knew this was the perfect opportunity to try out this tactic. And it’s the perfect opportunity for you to do me a favor and hit that thumbs up button on this video. *wink*

So tonight, I’m going to create one or two designs parodying the Four Seasons Total Landscaping mishap and we’ll see if I sell any shirts!

As I mentioned in my first print-on-demand video, I’m not much of a graphic designer. Since I don’t have a lot of time, I’m going to look for some templates that I can use for commercial use to see if I can turn them into a design.

I like to start by seeing what designs are selling well on Redbubble. This gives me an idea of the direction I should take the design.

Next, I’ll head to Creative Market. I’ve used this for years for graphic assets and there’s some really great stuff on here for reasonable prices. Since it is a landscape company, I’m going to search through some outdoor logo templates and see if I find anything that seems trendy enough to turn into a shirt design.

I feel like a lot of these designs are a little 2000-late with the style… like it was probably pretty trendy 3-5 years ago and maybe less so now. But, if this trend is popular enough, a solid design may work well even if it isn’t 2020 trendy.

Okay, so I found some vintage logos that I think could work. I’m going to buy a commercial license, since I will be using these designs to sell products to customers.

I’m going to look through all of them and see what would work best for a landscaping company logo.

Okay, I like this one. I’m going to take it into Photoshop and see what I can come up with.

Alright, so I just finished my first design, and I’m pretty happy with it. Once I typed Philadelphia into the logo, I realized the entire design wasn’t very Philadelphia-looking, which I’m not sure is a big deal for this type of design since it’s just a humorous shirt design, but I think I might want to make one other style.

For the colors, I want to keep it simple. I’ll make one with the design all white so it will work well on darker color clothing and I’ll make one inverted, where the design will be all black and work well on lighter color clothing.

Alright, so now I’m going to upload them to Redbubble. The title I’ll keep straight-forward and the tags I’ll keep simple and just try to cover my bases. Then onto design sizing and positioning…

I also want to keep the product offering simple. I’m not sure if it’s the best strategy or if it makes a big difference or not, but I think Standard Print Clothing and Stickers & Magnets are going to be the only two categories I’ll enable for this.

Then I’ll just repeat the process for the white design.

Okay, so now I want to create one more design that feels a little bit more Philadelphia-ish since the other one feels more Pacific Northwest.

Back on Creative Market, I’ll just browse around until I see something I like. I like this state map set here. I think that looks pretty nice. I’ll go ahead and download this.

In Illustrator, I’m going to remove the text and just grab the state shape. And I’m just going to take it into Photoshop because I’m not super comfortable working in Illustrator. I really want to try to combine some outdoor elements with the state shape and the text so I’ll play around for awhile and see what I come up with.

Well, I’m sure a real designer could do something cool, but I just put the text elements inside the state shape. And then I added a grunge texture over the whole thing to give it a semi-distressed look.

I got it saved, uploaded to Redbubble, sized and positioned… and then I thought part of the joke I’m missing with this design is the location of the landscaping company. It’s next to a sex shop and a crematorium, which adds to the bizarreness and hilarity of the whole debacle, so I decided to change my “not the hotel” tagline. That way, I have two completely different designs with different taglines, so if the customer thinks one is funnier than the other, I got ‘em covered.

Okay, so I have one design with two variations and one other completely different design.

I spent about an hour and a half total working on these and a total of $59 on the designs – but I do have 79 other logo designs from this collection that I can use for other things as well.

Also, I did a search on Redbubble and there was like only one other design of Four Seasons Total Landscaping on there, so I’m hoping being early will pay off.

I’ll check back in later to see if I get any sales.

LATER

Alright, I uploaded the designs on Saturday night and now it’s Thursday afternoon, so let’s see what went down.

So Sunday, I sold $84.29. I honestly was super surprised because I had email notifications turned off and just wasn’t expecting much considering I didn’t do any promotion at all with these designs. And there really isn’t much profit margin. I left everything at the default amounts that Redbubble suggests, which for clothing is 20%.

Real quick, I’m in middle of editing this video and Redbubble updated my sales numbers today so I wanted to give an update. Yesterday, I thought I sold a total of $199, but today those numbers were different, so here they are.

Sunday, I sold $96.43. Monday was almost identical with $96.91 in sales. Tuesday was down to $60.84. On Wednesday, I sold $24.76 and yesterday I sold $6.64.

I think Redbubble’s numbers are a bit delayed, so I do expect the numbers to be more accurate by next week, but I think this is pretty close to where they will end up.

Altogether, I had $285.58 in sales. I spent $59 on designs, netting me $226.58 in profit, which is really good considering I just spent an hour and a half on a Saturday night making a few designs when I might otherwise just be watching trash reality shows on TV.

Breaking down the sales of each design, the first one was my most popular, with 53 sales, with the large majority being their essential t-shirt.

The Pennsylvania state design had 22 sales, with a lot of shirts, but 7 sticker sales. I think the design lended itself better to a sticker than the others.

The black variation had 15 sales, again, mostly variations of t-shirts. So I’m glad I took the time to create the variation and the state design because it paid off well.

You can really see why getting the designs published so quickly was super important. Not only does the buzz of the trend start to wear off, but now there are countless other designs, with many of them looking a lot better than mine.

You can find mine on the first page, but you have to scroll a little bit… and it’s not one of the trending designs. Those sellers probably earned quite a bit more.

Another interesting analytic is the traffic source. Once again, I did zero promotion of this myself and relied completely on Redbubble and for the week I had over 2,400 unique visitors, which I think is pretty inspiring for people.

But this was an interesting experiment and I’m glad it ended up making it worth my while.

If you want to see me try things in print-on-demand, let me know in the comments. Also, if you’ve tried creating trendy shirts for sites like Redbubble, let me know how that went for you below.

That’s it for this video, see ya in the next one.