The Great T-Shirt Design Side Hustle

5 T-Shirts that made over $100,000

Free to design – You get paid when they sell

How to do it right… Well, I'm still learning...

This is one that I really debated whether to show it to you or not.?The reason??There are a whole lot of other components to do this successfully, like building a social media following, finding a niche that you like, learning to use some design software, loading these up to these cool free sites, and then finding plenty of funny content to feed that niche audience's appetite.?

But after going back through some of the things that I had already done, and finding simpler tools to use than Photoshop, I decided to show it to you. The really great thing about this side hustle is that it's completely free to start up if you follow the tips that I show you.

But to begin, let me show you this YouTube video by a young woman from New Zealand who does this for a living and tells you why 5 t-shirts topped the earnings chart. And her instincts are on the mark, including finding a niche, to begin the process. She also describes the process of building the shirts on Teespring 'pretty' well, so that will save you reading through all of those instructions. But there are 'bumps' along the way. And those are what I'll be telling you about - and how to get around them - after you watch the video.

The Importance of a Niche When Launching a Business

Being able to identify with a smaller market is how most successful businesses grow. And as you get better at understanding their dreams and language, you'll be able to compete against larger competitors.

Let's say you want to teach a class on negotiations. There's a course on Udemy called "Negotiating for Master Negotiators" that you can buy for $14.99. It's designed for all audiences. But let's talk about how you can change the pricing by focusing on the needs of smaller and smaller segments of the market. Let's say that you changed the name to "Negotiation for New Sales Reps," that starts to narrow it a bit, and suddenly, your price can change to $99. Narrow the focus even more by calling it "Negotiation for Account Executives" - a job role that's pretty prevalent - and people in that job role will start to take notice. Now your price can jump to $499. But change the course's name to "Negotiation for Account Executives in the Telecom Industry" and you're going to "ping the limbic" for a really narrow market niche. Now suddenly, your course is going to be worth $2500.

Granted, there are basic elements of negotiation that will be covered across all of these courses. But as you now start to focus on the particular niche you have chosen, you start to change the language that you're using in the course to match that industry's jargon, and then you start to provide case studies and class exercises from that industry that helps drive those points home. That's where the value comes in. The same is true for making t-shirts.

Think about finding that niche you want to focus on as your first step. Then make a list of phrases that might make sense to those individuals in that niche. That starts you down the right path.

Some Tools for Designing Your First T-Shirt

Some of you are going to be experts at using Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator or other sophisticated design tools. But if you don't have any design knowledge, you can start with Canva. Below is a screenshot of some already designed elements that you can just drag and drop. I select 'Dogs' as the elements I wanted to start with. This looked like something I might use for the front of a shirt as a pocket emblem for dog lovers:

The next step would be to download that as a picture that you can use in Teespring. You simply click on the 'Share' button and find 'Download' in the menu. At this point in the instructions, you are going to be required to download the free 30-day trial of Canva Pro. If you do that, your life will be easy, and the price is about the cost of an hour or two of a top graphic design person - about $120/hour. Otherwise, you can download your image in the free version, but someone who knows a tool like Photoshop will have to remove the background and increase the image pixel density to make the design usable for printing the t-shirt.

Assuming you took advantage of Canva's 30-day free trial, after you've hit the download button you will want to remove the background by clicking the box next to "Transparent background." To get the picture to print quality, you will want to move the slider towards the right end of the size range to get more density. That will make your image usable for Teespring or other on-demand print shops.

The result will be like the image shown below, and the next step will be to upload that image to Teespring:

Basically, I used a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Canva Pro to create the t-shirt below. The link to see how it appears on Teespring is HERE. And you can see all of my 'misfires' and the breadth of products that can be created HERE at this store that Teespring created for me.

Basically, all I had to do was upload the designs to the store, and I just went with the pricing that was recommended. Then I clicked publish and added what Teespring calls a "hero banner" that I made with PlaceIt.net. PlaceIt is another great tool that puts your designs on pictures of people and even on a video ad for use in making your ads for social media. That's a real big "thumbs up" for that product. Here's an example of a group of young people modeling a shirt that BCI made for it's team when they were selected as a leader in a Forrester study:

Teespring's Editor is Not Fun

But the caution here is that Teespring is pretty hard to work with when it comes to a couple of things that I consider needlessly cumbersome:

• You cannot put a logo on anything, even though trademark signs accompany it. The shirt in the header for this article used the registered trademark for YouTube and they took it down within minutes. That means you could never do any custom shirt making for a company.
• Editing what you have already created is pretty difficult. Here's a video on how to do that if you ended up putting up a whole slew of t-shirts without knowing how to print on both sides. That's the toggle button that I didn't notice the first time I hit step 2. (Note that the video tells you to hit an edit button, but there are two edit icons. You want to use the "Edit design" icon):

• If you're new to the platform, and you make a listing mistake, you can't use their search engine to find your products until you achieve a "trust score" from them. That isn't that difficult to do. It's a matter of selling your items and ensuring that you've set up your payment methods correctly. But it's a bit frustrating for new users.

What Other Free Platforms Are There?

Amazon Merch should be the next platform that you try, once you have a store to point to on Teespring.com. They go through a screening process to get in and they don't like anything off-color or controversial. Make sure you thoroughly read their content policy before you upload anything. There are no second chances with them. But once you have your designs laid out, their program operates in much the same way. All you have to do is upload your artwork, choose a product type and color, and add a product description. Amazon Merch will then create a product page on Amazon, and when customers buy your product, they'll handle production, shipping, and customer service — all with no upfront costs. And in the end, they'll pay you a royalty for every product you sell.

Printify.com offers a free platform for up to 5 different stores. You can have unlimited products in each store. You end up needing to integrate it with another platform to make your products visible, but that's not overly difficult. The nice thing about Printify is that you only have to load up your designs once. They store them and as you build new products, you simply click on the designs you've already uploaded. Their editor is also very stable to use, and it's much easier to place designs accurately. They also have chat support. Basically, they are a 'middleman' in the process between you and the print-on-demand provider. Most people connect the platform to Shopify.com, which is a great seamless connection. Where things get more difficult is when you want to connect to marketplaces like Walmart.com, Etsy.com, or eBay.com. But once you've made the connection, it's relatively smooth sailing after that.

Viralstyle.com also offers a free platform and works much like Teespring. It's a little more difficult to use and seems to be campaign-based. It was easy to build a product, but you really don't know where those products were going. It goes from an individual product design to starting a campaign. They have a collections feature, but I've been waiting on an answer on how to add products to a collection. As far as I can tell, you don't seem to get a store like you do with Teespring.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing...

I cannot over-emphasize the importance of narrowing your focus to a specific market segment. The more closely you can identify with that segment the more you will sell. You should spend some time finding that market niche, and then you will know what designs will make the most sense to them.

Take the dog example that we started earlier. Lots of people have dogs. There are lots of t-shirt companies that target them. But think of how to narrow that down a bit more. Maybe a breed of dog will narrow it down. Maybe it's people who 'show' their dogs, and they cater to a very specific breed. That continues the narrow the scope.

Once you've gone through that exercise, define the category for yourself so that you know what you're targeting. In the above example, it would be "Dog owners who own, show, and breed Australian Shepherds." I just happen to know someone who does that. That's your target market. Now your ideas are what are going to throw things over the top. Maybe you upload a photo of 3 young puppies, and one who has its head lowered. And the caption is, "Okay. Which one of you did that?" That's something that they would buy or someone would gift to them.

The next part is finding them to let them know you have t-shirts that are targeted at them. Believe it or not, you can find groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram that are devoted to them. Go to your search bar on Facebook and start typing "Australian Shepard" and you'll see plenty of groups to join to grow your following organically.

Maybe you run a contest on your website like the Red Dress Boutique made famous on Shark Tank when they told the Sharks how they got nearly 10 million hits on their website each month running contests. They brought models with them when they went to buy the dresses in bulk and then asked their followers to upvote their top 5 outfits and accessories for inclusion in their collection. Their motto was no outfit would sell for more than $50. The top 5 designs would then make it to their next spring, summer, fall, or winter collection. The same with accessories.

Sidebar: You could be able to do the same thing because you will quickly see that there are hundreds of companion products to the t-shirts.

Basically, the outfits with the most likes made it to the next collection or release. Although it was probably an honor system for voting, to make sure the votes weren't artificially inflated, visitors had to register their emails. Then the visitors got to vote by 'liking' a design in each category. Now isn't that a clever way to get emails? And also, the people who really wanted to see a particular design make it into the next collection got all their breed-owner friends to vote along with them. That starts to grow your brand's following even more.

That's one way. Then you can always create a Facebook/Instagram ad that shows each new item in your collection. With that narrow target audience, you can probably get away with far less money for ads. And of course, you will need a Facebook page. And you need to post 2 entries per day as the gentleman did for the engineering shirts shown in the video.

Summary

In my mind, this is just as difficult to build as any business. If you think you just can design a t-shirt and someone is off to the races on your behalf - well it's not quite there yet. Teespring seems to be more advanced in that area, once you achieve their trusted status. And it's for that reason that I spent the time to help you get to know the platform a bit more. But there's no replacement for playing with it yourself. After several tries, you should be able to make it work pretty well, and you can probably search YouTube for a specific answer to a specific question.

To me, this is more complicated than it would seem to the average onlooker. Can these tips put you closer? Absolutely. But you need to spend the same amount of time putting together your go-to-market plan for this one as any of the other 6-figure side hustles that I've shown you previously.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on each of these income opportunities. But most of all, I'm hoping to start you on your way to your first 6-figure income side hustle.

? Joe DiDonato, Side Hustles Newsletter #13