10 Lessons Learned Losing Money Selling Shirts on CafePress, Redbubble, and TeeSpring!

If you're considering selling merchandise like T-shirts online or you have already started, I hope this will be really helpful for you to learn from my experience creating over 200 designs while having spent thousands more dollars than I earned in sales. You have a chance in reading this to skip trying to sell on on CafePress, Redbubble, Amazon, and TeeSpring altogether as a probable waste of time or to build on my mistakes without having to make them! I will present this as busting 10 myths all of which I did the hard way!

Top 10 Myths in Selling T Shirts Online

This "Top 10" list is presented as a summary of my course on the University of Jerry Banfield, called "I Love Designing Shirts on Canva and PhotoShop to Sell on RedBubble + CafePress + TeeSpring!"

The course currently has 31 videos and is nearly two hours long with an in-depth video tutorial look at starting a business from nothing selling shirts, going straightforward and successfully making a business online.

You can enroll in the course for free using this link:
https://u.jerrybanfield.com/courses/designshirts?coupon=steem

Now, let's get started with the Top 10 T-shirt selling myths!

Myth number ten

Myth: You need money to start. You either need money to buy the shirts or print the designs or whatever it is.

That is simply false!

You can start making your own shirts online with zero dollars. I thought when I started trying to sell T-shirts that I needed to invest thousands of dollars to get all the designs printed on my shirts and have inventory of them at home, and then sell them.

The truth is, you can make beautiful shirt designs online today with no money at all or with very little money. You can spend $40 on thenounproject.com for example, and then you can have the ability to make all the shirts you want to.

I've got hundreds of thousands of different icons I can get on here.

I then use canva.com to do a completely free design right online. I don't even have to buy a program or anything.

You don't need any money at all to start if you just want to do text design or use freely available graphics, but if you would invest just a tiny bit of money, you can then do your own custom designs.

Look at all these different designs that I've got in my store here that you can make for pretty close to free.

Myth number nine

Myth: It requires printing at home or locally, or ordering online and having someone print for you, and then selling from there.

The awesome thing is that it does not.

The designs I just showed are available online and they've never been printed anywhere. I'm going to be the first to buy them, but I've noticed that people think in order for me to get the shirt I'm wearing, I must have printed it at home.

No, I just put the design up and it's printed on demand. It's printed whenever someone wants to order one and the beautiful thing is, when you're printing on demand, then you can print on mugs, dresses, shower curtains, bed covers, clocks, there's all kind of things you can print on.

You don't need to be able to print at home. You don't need to go somewhere local. You don't need to buy anything and actually press things on your shirts. Now, if you want to, feel free to do that. That can be a lot cheaper than printing on demand and if you are able to make the designs then go for it. However, you don't have to print at home or go anywhere to print locally in order to have an awesome business online selling shirts and merchandise.

Myth number eight

Myth: Inventory is necessary.

When I first started selling my shirts, I thought I had to just buy them or print them myself, and then sell them out of my home. You don't need any inventory to have an amazing business selling merchandise online.

There are all kinds of options to do it today no matter what product you're selling.

Print on demand shirts and merchandise is beautiful because you can put all your designs up, and then the only time they get printed is when they are actually sold. This is an absolute ideal scenario because you can do all the designs you want. You can plant all seeds in farming term, and then when you actually make a sale, that's the only time they're printed.

You don't need to have hundreds of shirts in your closet like I had. You don't need to mail them out to customers, and in fact this is a big pain, and for making a little less profit, it's very well worth it to skip the inventory, skip all of the dealing with the customers and just put the designs up there, and let them be printed on demand.

In order to print them on demand, you need a website to do that for you more than likely. I use RedBubble right now. However, I've used CafePress and TeeSpring in the past.

If you have a website where you can put all your designs up, you don't need any inventory.

Myth number seven

Myth: There is no money in it.

Now, this myth will actually be the opposite of a different myth, and yet there are people who believe it.

I believed it myself for quite a while in the middle of my T-shirt business. I actually started out and spent thousands of dollars to buy T-shirts and have them at home. After I failed to sell them, then I tried using print on demand websites, then I just said, "You know what, forget it. There's no money to be made selling T-shirts. I'm not going to waste my time with it anymore."

The fact is, if you love doing the designs, if you love doing the creative work to get the shirts out there, you can make a full-time living. You can make a full-time living online doing nothing except designing your shirts, and then promoting them. That is a miracle to be able to do something you love in the comfort of your home!

There is a lot of money available in working online generally and especially if you're able to make merchandise that you like to wear. You can even get your friends and family to be some of your first customers, and then with the ripple effect from there you can continue to get more and more new customers steadily over time.

What starts out as a hobby can become a full-time work, and if you love doing it, how awesome is that?

I love having my own business, it challenges me, and I grow.

There's a lot of money in having your own business online, especially if you're selling products, merchandise like shirts and mugs, that are printed on demand.

Myth number six

Myth: You've got to sell to the niche.

I've seen many stories of people who've made thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars selling shirts online and they consistently are recommending that you've got to make these niche sales.

A niche is for example a group of people who like a certain baseball team or people with a certain name. Basically, you've got to sell to the niche and that's where the money is.

I'm going to say the exact opposite. At least to start and build your business, the niche needs to be making shirts you love to wear instead of thinking about the niche. I've tried so many different angles on selling to this group of people or that group of people, and it doesn't work very well most of the time. That means it takes a lot of energy, effort and aggravation to find a niche.

The easiest thing to do is just to make shirts you love wearing and that you are proud of. The biggest difference in selling shirts and merchandise is zero purchases to one. That's the biggest difference, and the most effective way to promote your shirts for the very lowest cost and enjoy the rewards of them is as follows, "Look, I've got my own shirt on."

That is the very easiest and most effective way.

If you won't buy your own shirts, then why even bother designing them?

You've got to be able to at least buy your own shirts.

I'm grateful today that as I design shirts, I'm not trying to sell to a niche. I'm essentially trying to sell to myself.

I'm making shirts for me!

You could say that making shirts for yourself is the ultimate niche. I'm making shirts that I want to wear, that I want other people to love and enjoy.

I'm making shirts for me, so that takes out the need to try to manipulate and say, "Well, I'm going to make shirts for people named Jerry. I'm going to make shirts for this team or that team."

Almost all the things I've done in trying to sell to a niche have either got me in trouble for breaking rules and making unofficial merchandise, or they've been a complete waste of time. I've made a bunch of shirts like "Honey badgers don't care" that I never wore and I've wasted a ton of time selling to the niche.

One of the biggest myths I can bust is that selling to the niche is a good idea. Let other people go try and work all the niches. What I try to do is just sell to myself. If I can make a design that I'm willing to shell out 20 bucks for to have printed and that I'm willing to wear around, then I've made something that maybe other people will want to wear.

Then, I'm not limited to fans of a certain team. I'm not limited to certain type of people. I can sell to anyone then who might like a similar design.

That's what you really want. You want to make something that the masses will be capable of buying.

I made some of these little heart pants on my most recent designs. You could say, "Well, these are a niche. They are for a very certain person."

I don't know who exactly would want to buy these leggings, but from my point of view, these are mass market. These are things that potentially anyone who speaks English anywhere in the world would buy.

In my opinion, that is way better than trying to do something like selling to a specific niche, because there's probably a hundred million people who could buy them. I think they are awesome.

I'm going to try to sell my wife and see if she wants to get a pair. If I can't sell to my wife on it, then it's probably not that great of a product.

Myth number Five

Myth: If I just make a great design, it will sell. That all I need to do is do a great job, make a design that's fabulous, and then people will have to have it.

That is a myth.

I imagine millions, if not tens of millions, of beautiful products and designs out there that I've never seen and I will never buy.

Designing is simply the first half of the work. The other half is actually selling. It is showing people your product even if it is pitching it. You've got to have some plan if you want to be able to make a business out of selling T-shirts. If you want to be able to earn some money on it, you've got to have a way that you're going to sell it as well as the desire to do the designs.

So I hope you can see that just making a design itself is not likely to make any sales. No matter how good it is, no matter how creative it is, there are millions of people out there who are creative, who've already got their designs up in the top spots that are selling.

If you make your design the best design, even if it is as good as other people's, you have to start from the bottom in most places in order to get any recognition.

The sellers who've already sold the most designs are going to be featured the most in most websites you want to sell on. Just to even have a design that's as good as another one doesn't mean you'll even make one sale.

I'm grateful today, I make shirts I love to wear. That is my foundation for selling them.

I wear my own shirts, I love my own shirts and that's how I sell them too.

Myth number Four

Myth: I'll just use Facebook ads to make sales. That will do it.

I have seen a bunch of posts and videos online of people saying, "Look, here is how I've made the X amount of dollars with TeeSpring. Look how easy it is. All I do, I design the shirt, I make some Facebook Ads and bam, they sell."

Do you know how many unsuccessful T-shirt ads I've seen in my Facebook newsfeed?

Ads that don't even have one like on them and advertising highly niched personalized products, shirts saying, "Jerry."

Literally, people are trying to advertise having a match to my name correctly somehow. I'm not buying that. I've never bought anyone's T-shirt that I've seen in an ad before, ever.

I've bought hundreds of shirts in my life. In the last year alone, I've bought probably a hundred. Now, I'm only buying my own.

Facebook ads do not work very well to make sales. The average person who's running their business and describing their model from what I've seen, they do about 10 different designs, test all of them on Facebook ads, and out of those, maybe two will even come close to breaking even or make a little profit.

Realistically, it looks like if you get a hundred designs, you try all of them in Facebook ads, then two of them might be really profitable. Two of them will sell well for a time until you saturate the market that you can reach with Facebook ads. At which point, you will have a hard time continuing to expand from there.

Facebook ads can work. Yes, they have the potential to work, but most of the time, the average person wanting to sell shirts will be better off to just forget about Facebook ads. I know from experience, I've spent thousands of dollars trying to advertise and sell shirts that were already selling.

I got my shirts up into the top search rankings on things that were selling like "Call of Duty." If you search for Call of Duty in 2012, or on Christmas time, you were likely to find one of my Call of Duty knock-offs brand shirts. I'm sure not all those got removed.

I tried to advertise things to the exact right audience that were already selling. I already knew they were selling. They were already doing great making lots of sale. The Facebook ads didn't do anything. I don't buy stuff I see on Facebook ads. I've viewed probably tens of thousands of advertiser dollars of Facebook ads over the 11 years I've been a Facebook user. I don't buy stuff I see on Facebook ads.

I've spent over a hundred thousand dollars on Facebook ads and my experience is that it's mostly a losing game. The best I've done is promoting some of my gaming videos. I had a lot of people following me, after advertising my gaming videos, which went out to millions of people for a few hundred dollars in the US.

I've gotten great results with Facebook ads, they have helped my business. Facebook ads are reserved for once you've already got consistent sales, once you are already wearing off your shirts. Facebook ads are quite a while along in the business, not something you just want to look at, that Facebook ads will make all of your sales.

Why do I share this with you?

I share this with you to give you the choice to avoid spending thousands of dollars on ads that won't make you any sales more than likely. You can avoid doing the same thing I did. Now, if you want to go for it, do it. I encourage you give it a try. You might prove me wrong.

However, I prefer to be wise today. I prefer to learn from other people's mistakes if possible instead of having to make them myself and learn from them.

Thank you for experiencing this with me.

I hope this is helpful for you.

Myth number Three

Myth: You can only have a T-shirt design or merchandise design business if you're a graphic designer.

This is a complete myth.

You don't need a graphic designer. You don't need to be a graphic designer either! I am no graphic designer and I've sold hundreds, if not thousands of products online with my images and my graphics on them.

The nice thing is that there's room in making merchandise to just make raw, original and fresh from the heart merchandise. This shirt I have on for example, you don't need a graphic designer to put a little bit of text on a shirt and print it. That's so easy a cave man could do it according to some ads on TV.

The point is that you don't have to have any other skills besides what you have now and what you can learn on your own. If you think it'd be fun to wear your own T-shirt and you can say, "Look, if Jerry can make some crappy shirt like this that doesn't even make sense, if he can make that, I can make one much better."

That's what I hope when you see what I do, you can look at me and say, "You know what? I bet I can do better than that, and I've no design experience. I bet I can make some cool shirts."

Good. That's what I want!

Go make some shirts. Wear some things that express your creativity, even if they're just simple one word.

Like this shirt I have on, it's just one word, and then it has my website on it. It's crazy simple.

People today look at it and say, "Plannin G. What does that mean?"

I don't know what it means, but I like it.

I like it.

You can be just how you are today and have a great design to at least make stuff you enjoy wearing, and then if other people see it, it might be a great conversation starter. It might be a great way to even make a business out of it.

So it's great news.

This is not limited to graphic designers.

Anything you need to learn, you can learn.

Photoshop is not that hard to get started with. It is a little challenging, it's got a little bit of a learning curve, but you are up to it.

Myth number Two

Myth: Hiring a graphic designer is best.

So if you didn't get caught up specifically on number three, in number two you might believe that hiring a graphic designer is best.

In fact in the case studies that people have posted they've consistently showed in those cases that they hired a graphic designer.

Basically, the graphic designer makes the designs, and then their function that they showed in the case study was to put them into Facebook ads and try to make sales. If you think that you need a graphic designer to do it, or if you think that a graphic designer would do a better job the problem is a graphic designer often defeats the entire point of doing this.

This makes a great opportunity having shirts on to express my unique creativity even if it is just comparable to a child, like my daughter who's a year and a half old, coloring on her white canvas paper, then just pretty much scribbling all over it, even if it's a completely raw and only quality it has good about it is that it's original, but even this shirt is a knock off of a different idea.

Hiring a graphic designer is not the way to go, unless you have a friend and you two partner. The friend will do the graphics and you can do the business, I’m sure that might work.

I've seen in the case studies that they’re trying to hire graphic designers on Upwork or Fiverr, but if you can't do the graphics at all I would suggest that this is not worth doing.

If you can't do your own graphics there's no point to trying to make a business out of this because what I've learned the hard way is that it can't be profitable to work together with other people.

Sure, I paid a freelancer to make a course that made me hundreds of thousands of dollars online on a website I taught on with millions of dollars in sales. It might be profitable for you to hire a graphic designer and you might be able to make a business out of it.

The point is what do you really want to do?

What are you really going to contribute and make a difference doing in this life?

I've found that there's no substitute for doing my own work.

Now, if your own work is to be partners with your best friend and do a business together then that's great, but if you're trying to hire a graphic designer to get out of doing the core, which in a T-shirt or merchandise business is the design, this might not work well.

I believe that it's better to build a business around the core work you want to do. If I hire other people that make video tutorials for me it's not the same as if I do them myself.

When I make video tutorials where I'm not the main person narrating, isn't that pointless? Couldn't someone else just put that up on their own website, or YouTube channel, or third party course hosting, why am I even involved?

What I've learned is to do my own work today, to do my creative work and to build my business around me doing my creative work.

So I'm grateful today that as a part of designing shirts, I'm able to teach that in my business. The big motivation for me to do this in the first place is to be able to teach it, it all fits together in my own work.

Hiring a graphic designer to make something that I want to wear then defeats the entire purpose. I might as well just buy someone else's shirts because there are so many other beautiful clothes out there that other people have designed.

Why would I try to go in and get a piece of the game just trying to essentially use someone else to do designs they don't care about personally? You've got to have that love for the work.

I would say usually any hiring of a graphic designer for this is not the way to go. If you've got a friend who will do the designs for free, who loves doing them, then you do the business part, I think that can be great.

I hope this is extremely useful for you.

Myth number one

Myth: Making some T-shirt or merchandise business is an easy way to make money online.

It absolutely is not, how do I know?

I've made money online more than a hundred different ways. In the five plus years I've had my business online I've made money in about every way you can imagine: investing, affiliate marketing, trading, clients, selling products including lots of shirts and merchandise, online courses. I've made money in a ton of different ways on lots of different websites.

You know what?

Selling shirts and merchandise is one of the hardest.

It's one of the most difficult because people already have a world filled with all the shirts and merchandise they need, there's all great things to buy. There are advertisers who work really hard to program people to buy their brand and their product. That’s not easy to compete with, that is an uphill battle. There’re a lot easier ways to make money online than trying to set up a T-shirt selling business.

That's why I've put all these top 10 myths together like this, while there is a potential to make a great business doing this, it's not an easy way to make money online.

"Well, Jerry, what's an easy way?"

An easy way to make money online is serving clients. Clients are relatively easy to get online compared to offline, at least for me. Serving clients is one of the easiest ways to get started. Most of my friends, who are now working full time online, started off making money by serving me as their client, then they found other ways to make money online, or they found other clients.

The easy way to make money online is simply to learn skills that are valuable and serve a client doing them, that is how I got my start. I tried to do all these things selling T-shirts and it made nothing compared to serving clients.

I had clients pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, all of which I could keep, then all I had to do is do some work for them.

When you have to do a ton of work up front to even get the product prepared to go out, that's very difficult and I'm grateful today that I don't need money out of selling any of my shirts or merchandise. That allows me to just do it for fun, because I love it, because I enjoy it, because I want to wear the stuff that I've designed.

That's why there's no pressure and it can be a great hobby if you enjoy doing it. This could be great as something to build into your existing business and to learn about, if you're a teacher I think this is a great subject to teach on.

It is not an easy way to make money online and anyone I would imagine who is trying to make it look easy is trying to make money off of you.

Now, sure there are harder ways to make money online than having a business like this.

I would say that if you want to make money online easily, just learn skills and serve clients. If you want to have a T-shirt or merchandise business do it because you love doing it, do it because you have a passion for doing it, and do all the most important work in the business.

Final words

Thank you very much for reading this post which was originally filmed as the video below!

If you would like one of my shirts all of my original deisgns are mostly on CafePress with the next series on TeeSpring. Then, I made more on RedBubble and finally the newest on Amazon.

If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?

Love,

Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript by GoTranscript

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