Starting a print on demand store is a easy way to make merchandise without loads of upfront costs. You basically place your designs on products and another company makes them and sends them directly to the customers and you get a percent of the profit. You don't get as much profit as you would if you brought merch wholesale to start with but to do that that would mean spending loads before you even start selling and of course they will need to be stored too so these print on demand services are handy for start ups or someone who doesn't have the time or space to personally deal with the orders.
There are many companies who offer this service offering different products, commission percentage and locations so you will need you have a browse to find one that meet your needs.
I went with TeeMill. They are UK based and have the same values as me. They use organic cotton and send out their items plastic free. Even their factory is run on renewable energy. There are other companies that offer a wider range of products but their ethics really was the point that made me choose them. With them I also know where the product are coming from where others aren't as clear. Some of the larger names use different places for their printing all over the world and even though they say the mostly print in the same country the order comes from it also says some product can only be made in certain countries but are quite vague about which product so you might end up ordering and end up with surprise import charges if it comes from somewhere else.
The signing up and designing products is pretty much the same no matter what company you use but customisations to how your shop looks varies, some you can't change at all.
TeeMill is one that allows you to customise. Depending on how much effort you want to put in you can end up with a full website and a blog. You get your shop where you can group your products in different sections and you can add other pages like a home page, about page and what ever you can think of. They even have templates if you want to use them and you just need to add your own text and pictures. You can create a unique shop that fits your style.
Another thing they offer is marketing tools. There's your stats where you can see where traffic is coming from and things like that. The drive is where you can download the mock up pictures of your products to use on your socials or where ever you want to show off your designs. Posta is a great little tool where you can make your own marketing pictured by combining your pictures with wording which is great to show off new products or special weekends. Those special weekend can be found in the events section, another awesome tool, it's basically a calendar showing you when special weekend events are so you can advertise them in your shop and hopefully get a few more sales.
These special events are "buy 1 get 1 tree" where for every order placed in that weekend a tree will be planted.
Then there's the "1 tee 1kg" where every order in that weekend will fund the removal of 1kg of ocean bound plastic.
Finally there's "free post" self explanatory it's free postage.
These weekends don't effect you at all, you don't need to do anything and it doesn't effect your profits. It's just an incentive for people to buy from your store, TeeMill funds the trees and plastic clean up with their share.
The designing of products is really simple you can make your own or use their designs they have available. I recommend designing your own to be more unique as many other people will be selling the same ones if you use theirs. If you want to have t-shirts with slogans you can design them straight on the t-shirt, just select one of the many fonts available and add your text.
TeeMill offer 2 plans, A free shop and a subscription shop that's £10/month. The free one is really good, you get most of the features including building your own pages and there's a good range of products but you are limited to 30 products per shop. The subscription one you can have more products in your shop and there's a few more products available. There's also a larger section of models to choose from for the product mock up pictures as well as a couple of extra marketing tools.
With a free shop you only get about £2 for each t-shirt, other product vary but considering you aren't doing any of the hard work it's not bad. You can also buy the t-shirts and stuff yourself at a discounted price if you wanted to sell a few in person at a comic-con or market, you would get a bit more profit from each one then especially if you ordered on a free post weekend though orders over £50 are free anyway.
This is a really simple way of getting your designs on to products but it's no get rich quick scheme, if you want to make a decent amount you have to put a lot of work into it, for me it's more of a hobby, I just like designing.
In short you design, they print and post out the orders and you get paid.
I just wanted to add one more thing about TeeMill because they use 100% organic cotton they can recycle their t-shirts so if you buy one from any TeeMill store when its worn out or you grow out of it or your style has changed you can send it back and they can recycle it, you also get a £5 voucher in return. Just another reason why I chose them.
If you wanted to have a look at my shop (it's a free one by the way) just to get an idea of the type of site you can create, bearing in mind I didn't spent that much time setting it up so if you did put more effort in it could look amazing, then check out the link below
I hope this helped if you were looking to use a print-on-demand service, sorry I waffled on a bit but I tried to cut it down as much as possible so if you made it this far thank you for reading.
Happy Crafting!
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