If you’re new to the print-on-demand industry or you haven’t heard the term before, it’s not too late for you. It’s a type of business set up that allows you to make and sell products such as t-shirts, hoodie, stickers, or socks only at the time there is demand. So, what’s the big hype about the print-on-demand business?
Against the traditional commercial approach
Print-on-demand companies are not supermarkets devoted to catering for the overconsumption of t-shirts. While they seem to offer various products, they don’t hold inventory and rarely have a storefront. You can think of these companies as service providers rather than sellers of particular products.
By printing on-demand depending on the orders, you can get create custom t-shirts on Shopify print on demand service Printify.com, and then sell them online. This production model allows you (artist), and the company can offer an unlimited variety of designs as the printing process takes place after the customer has paid for the product. You can avail a broad range of designs covering different social themes to represent the struggles and social causes even ones that aren’t popular.
Unlike these print-on-demand companies, conventional clothing shops use classic screen-printing. The major downside of this option is that it requires huge investments to print batches of hundreds if not thousands of t-shirts. This significantly limits the designs available and color options. Thus, batch screen-printing puts forces shops to focus only on the best-selling t-shirt designs to reduce the investment risk. Fortunately, print-on-demand eliminates this mainstream capitalist logic.
It’s easy to get started
Explore the market
Focus on creating what your customers desire. If you come up with the greatest t-shirt designs, just go for it and probably you will be discovered sooner. When starting out, you may have limited ideas, but as you scale the heights of print-on-demand t-shirt business, you should become more creative and bring in more ideas to your business. Otherwise, you will run out of t-shirt design ideas.
Make sure that your ideas are worth designing
Perhaps you have over 50 t-shirt design ideas. Are all these ideas worth the design effort? List down all your design ideas then conduct intensive market research to group all your design ideas into specific niches. Opt for ideas that have less competition and a larger number of potential customers.
Creating the designs
If you’re a great designer with a great art background, you will be killing industry as soon as you release your artwork. However, if you’re not well-versed with design, it’s time to seek professional help. You can easily get great designers on various freelance markets such as Upwork, People Per Hour, and Fiverr.
Protect your designs from copycats
If you have great designs and you got a reliable print-on-demand company, the chances are that your t-shirt business will make some noise and begin generating revenue. Some people will want to copy your designs and usually use unethical tactics to drain the life out of your brand.
Shopify print-on-demand service and its integration with various platforms such as Printify are empowering designer to charge over their creative ventures. It also presents an effective way of avoiding the limitations associated with the traditional t-shirt printing business.
