If you’re starting a print on demand Etsy shop, you likely have many questions, but an important question to ask yourself early on is what general approach will you take with your designs? Do you chase trends? Do you only offer evergreen designs? Do you go with text-only designs? Do you try to establish a brand and theme to build a loyal customer base? Or do you sell any type of design that you think will sell and rely on your presence in search results? Believe it or not, all those questions are really about one decision: the general strategy for your shop. Stick around and let’s talk about how to go about making this important decision.
Why do I need a general strategy?
Your Etsy shop is a business, and planning & organization are your business’s best friends. Deciding on a general strategy or approach for your Etsy print on demand shop early on will help you stay on track and know where to focus your time during niche research and design creation. It’s also an important first step when considering the name for your shop and the visual theme for your logo and shop graphics. If you haven’t noticed, I recommend that this decision be one of the first you make, even before you decide which print on demand platform to use or other details like that.
For example, if you really want to create a memorable brand that customers recommend to their friends and family and come back to make repeat purchases, your strategy for developing that brand means you will have a totally different approach in the designs you create compared to a strategy where you focus more on simply finding low competition niches and target designs towards them. If you start creating a shop with a variety of different designs and then a few months later decide you really want to create a brand identity with a consistent theme, you either have to “start over” with a new shop or consider taking down your existing listings. This is why it’s important to decide on a strategy early.
Now, there is one disclaimer I want to put out there, and that is there is nothing wrong with having multiple Etsy shops. You can create a new Etsy account to open another shop any time you want. If you feel that you have the time to dedicate to multiple shops, you certainly could have one print on demand shop that offers all types of designs, and another that has a focused brand or theme. But even then, that’s a decision you make – your strategy is to have separate shops for different purposes. Ok, with that out of the way, let’s consider some important factors for each print on demand shop strategy.
There are two sort of “parent” strategies that you can start with and then adjust your approach within that general outline – creating a focused brand, or relying on search results.
Creating a Brand
When your strategy is to create a brand that is memorable and recognizable, it’s all about creating a consistent theme or message. You want customers to remember the look and feel of your shop, and your intent is to not only show up in search results, but generate real traffic to your shop’s homepage so that customers can browse all your products in one place and get that “complete” feeling that only comes when you see all of a shop’s products together with the overall appearance that carries a consistent theme. You’re hoping to generate a desire to come back to your shop page and look for new items or sales, much in the same way you would go to a separate website for a store that you like. In fact, you might even be using Etsy’s existing customer base to build a following for your brand with the intent of launching your own website and online store at some point, using a selling platform like Shopify.
This strategy requires a little bit more preparation and thought on the front-end when you’re setting it up. You need to be sure that the theme or image of your brand is something you can and will commit to for the long term because changing it mid-stream can be confusing to customers. Not that it can’t be done – re-branding is a term we all know for a reason – but that basically makes you hit the reset button and potentially lose some of your original customer base.
The main thing that your brand’s image or theme will impact is the type of designs you sell. For example, your brand could be called “Happy Thoughts” and your intended image is to promote positivity and self care. I’m sure that name is trademarked but it’s just an example. This is a niche that you can sell in no matter what your strategy is, but you can also chose to make it your brand. Making this choice would mean all your designs should generally stay within this theme of promoting positivity, self esteem, and self care. You would have lots of opportunity to create text-based designs with positive messages, but there are also graph-based designs in this niche as well. You can also “niche down” within your brand and offer more specific types of designs within sub-niches that are still relevant to the parent niche. An example of this would be body-positivity designs. You can have lots of these sub-niches in your store and still maintain the overall “Happy Thoughts” brand image. So creating a brand doesn’t have to mean you’re painting yourself into a corner with a very limited number of designs.
But one other thing to keep in mind is that your brand’s theme or image may also impact the type of products you sell, in addition to the type of designs. If your brand image is about being eco-friendly or sustainable, then you probably don’t want to sell your designs on mass-produced items that you cannot verify are made sustainably. This will limit your choices for print on demand products. However, there are print on demand products that would fit into this brand image, including apparel made from recycled materials and phone cases that are biodegradable. This will likely continue to expand but for now, the product options you would have are more limited if that’s the brand image you want to create, at least in the print on demand industry.
One last aspect about this strategy that I want to point out is that because you’re hoping to generate return customers who recognize your brand and focus less on casting a wide net in search results, you will need to put a considerable amount of effort into marketing and raising awareness of your brand. This means things like creating social media accounts for your brand (which you should do anyway), doing email marketing to a mailing list, and taking time to create content and interact with your customers through these channels. This is still valuable for other strategies, but it’s critical when trying to build a brand because you want to cultivate a following rather than waiting for customers to find your listings via search. If you plan to launch your own website for your brand at some point down the road, practicing these things while you’re selling on Etsy will serve you well because marketing becomes even more critical when you don’t have existing traffic and have to generate your own.
Relying on Search Results
With this strategy, you’re not concerned about consistency between your designs or even the products that you offer in your shop. This may sound like you have no real plan, but actually your plan is to take your designs wherever you see sales opportunities. So if one day you find some niche opportunities for say, mother’s day themed designs you may create several products related to that, and then the next day you may be creating designs for something totally unrelated. The assumption you’re making is that customers are primarily finding your listings through specific search results, not by knowing the name of your shop and browsing your whole catalog from your shop page. This approach is more focused on maximizing sales volume over the creative aspect of making designs. You can still make original artwork that looks great, but you need to be flexible about what you’re making and be willing to make designs that you may find boring if the sales opportunity is there. Of course, you may still avoid certain niches that you don’t want to get into because it’s 100% your decision. For example, if you prefer not to get into political designs, that is your choice and there’s nothing wrong with that.
One reason this type of strategy can work is that your print on demand shop will be viewed differently than some other shops on Etsy. There are many sellers on Etsy that make truly unique, handmade items that you simply cannot get from any other seller. For example, someone who does woodworking and makes custom furniture. If a friend or family member says “where did you get that table”, you would want to tell them the exact seller it came from because nobody else will make it exactly the same. However if your friend says “where did you get that t-shirt”, most people are just going to say “I got it on Etsy”, because the truth is there are thousands of other t-shirt sellers on Etsy and there can be several offering very similar designs. That’s not so great if you’re trying to generate a loyal customer base (unless you are truly making one of a kind designs), but you will still be making sales based on your search ranking regardless, and that’s the point. So with this strategy you need to be good at identifying niches with low to moderate competition, and be effective with your keyword research for title and tags so your listings are being presented to customers searching for exactly what you’re offering. If you can do that effectively, then customers don’t need to remember your shop name because you’ll always be there in the search results. At least, that’s your goal. It’s an added bonus if and when you do get organic referrals from past customers or repeat purchases, that’s just not the primary way you’re making sales.
You can still present a vague or general theme in your shop’s appearance. For example, your shop name could be something like “smile designs” because a lot of your designs are intended to make people laugh or generate positive thoughts. You don’t have to stay completely within the confines of that definition with all your designs, but it lets customers know what your general intent is and gives you a starting point for creating consistent shop graphics and promotional content.
This is my Etsy shop strategy for a couple of reasons. I have nothing against the strategy of building a brand, I just find the search-results based strategy a little easier to manage. For one, I’m not scrutinizing every design I make to try to keep it within a certain theme. I just target a niche and make designs that I think will sell without any more thought than that. Second, there are always new sales opportunities and if I’m having slowing sales, I can try targeting new niches to increase my sales without worrying about it changing the image or message of my brand. Third, I truly believe the way people shop online is only becoming more search-based vs. catalog-browsing based. Consumers used to frequently go to big-name brands like JCPenny or Sears and browse the whole catalog looking for things they like. But in the last couple of decades, consumers are realizing more and more that they can pop a few words into a search field and more quickly see things that may match what they’re looking for. I’m not saying that browsing a whole store or catalog is dead by any means, I just think that there is more of a growth opportunity by focusing on your search results placement rather than the consistency of your shop, at least when it comes to marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon.
If you do go with this strategy for your shop, you have a sort of “sub-strategy” decision to make as well. When you’re open to creating new or different types of designs, you can pursue creating designs that reflect certain trends, or the type of designs that have a longer lifecycle and could sell at any time of year, which we call “evergreen” designs.
Chasing Trends
Even within the sub-strategy of chasing trends, there are different ways to do it and different lifecycles with trends. Some trends are truly “trending” topics or things that come up in pop culture on social media, but they die out quickly and rarely sell again. Other trends are longer lasting and more like a theme that can be popular for a whole year. Let’s consider both of these and where they might fit into your overall strategy.
Trending topics for designs are things that pop up out of nowhere and may disappear quickly. For example, a couple of years ago a Major League Baseball player who was very popular with fans showed up to the first spring training game of the year wearing a t-shirt in the team’s color with a funny saying on it. It clearly was something he had custom-made as a joke because it wasn’t an official team design and it didn’t even have the team’s logo on it. Suddenly there were hundreds of fans tweeting pictures of the player wearing that shirt, all saying they had to have one. And because it didn’t feature the team’s logo or name on it, print on demand sellers could re-create the design without fear of copyright or trademark infringement. I happened to catch this on social media almost immediately and put a single listing in my Etsy shop and in my Merch by Amazon account that afternoon. The very next day, amazon and Etsy had hundreds of new listings featuring similar designs. But I had created my listing fast enough to be on page 1 of search results, and on the first day I sold about 100 t-shirts between the two, and the next day another 150. Then it started to die down a bit, and just seven days later I only sold 2 shirts. I think I’ve maybe sold a total of ten additional shirts with that design in the two years since it happened. It was a great feeling to make that many sales so quickly, but if you try to build your whole store around this strategy, you can see how it will quickly become kind of tiring to keep chasing trends every day in hopes of hitting a few that work out. Often times you’re not quite so lucky and you catch onto a trend a day too late, and the first page of search results is already filled with best-sellers. But that doesn’t mean you have to write off this strategy completely – we’ll come back to this in a few minutes.
Another type of trend are those that are more of a theme for what is “in favor” at a given point in time. This type of trend can range in lifecycle anywhere from a month to a few years. They are less specific to one exact design so there can be more room to create specific niches within the trend, so they can be terrific opportunities from a selling standpoint. A recent example of this type of trend would be in the US, the general public have started to embrace mental-health and positivity type messages more than ever in the last 2-3 years. You now will see people wearing t-shirts that have sayings on them like “it’s ok to not be ok” or “I am enough”. This trend of being more open about self care and mental health could continue for years, or become less popular in a few months. But there is a huge opportunity with this type of trend because you can come up with your own message that nobody has put on a shirt before and start a whole new sub-niche, or use an existing message with new and different graphic themes to get into an existing sub-niche. As I mentioned earlier, this niche has enough opportunity that you could choose to build a brand around it if you prefer that strategy.
Evergreen Designs
Evergreen designs are ones that can sell at any time of year and aren’t tied to a trend. This doesn’t mean they don’t have a lifecycle, because anything can “go out of style” at a certain point, but there’s definitely less of a risk of these types of design themes becoming unpopular overnight.
Evergreen designs usually are not one specific design, but rather categories. For example, designs about coffee lovers are an evergreen niche. There’s a wide variety of designs you can look into to check out competition levels, including funny coffee sayings, straightforward coffee graphic designs, text-based coffee designs, and more. These designs would appeal to buyers at any time of year for various reasons, whether it be buying for themselves or as a gift for someone. It’s not tied to a specific trend, time of year or holiday, so if you can create a coffee-themed design (or a few) in a lower competition sub-niche, you can expect to make at least a couple of sales per month. If you just heard me say “couple of sales per month” and you were like: hold on, how can I make real money on a couple sales per month? Well, you can’t if you stop after making those few coffee-themed designs. The point of creating evergreen products is that you build a whole catalog of items and each one (or most of them) sell a couple times per month. Once your catalog of 1-2 sales per month items is big enough, you have real sales volume that leads to consistent revenue and profits.
Let’s do some quick math. If you create 100 listings and even just a third of them sell 2 times per month, that’s 66 sales per month. If you create 300 listings with the same ratio of sales, that’s 99 sales per month. Now if you can improve your ratio to 50% of your listings selling 2 times per month, you’ll be up to 150 sales per month. And it keeps growing from there because the more listings you create, the more times you repeat the process of doing your niche research and keyword research, and practice making great designs and great mockups, the better your sales ratio will be because you’ll be making more effective listings. I don’t want anyone to misunderstand what I’m saying here, so let me just point out that getting to 100-200 sales per month is not going to make you a millionaire in the print on demand industry (at least not in a year or two). That’s because print on demand profit margins are not huge. We’re usually trying to get 30% profit margin, and we can occasionally get more than that for items like mugs, but to keep your prices competitive on high-volume items like t-shirts, you may only get 25%. So selling 100 t-shirts may only net you $400-500 in profit – that is, unless you can tap into a niche that supports higher prices. There are some instances where demand for a specific design is very high and you can get away with charging $20 plus shipping for a t-shirt once you make it onto page one of the search results which with the right print on demand platform can net you a profit of $8-9 per shirt instead of $4-5. The trouble is that for many niches, there are dozens or hundreds (or thousands) of other listings offering prices in the $16-18 dollar range with free shipping, so if you’re out there asking for a total price of $24+ for a similar design on the same quality shirt, you won’t be making many sales. That means on average having to accept a profit of $4-5 per shirt to stay competitive. The bottom line is that this approach is about building up your catalog of consistent lower-volume sellers over time, until you have regular revenue and profits coming in. Print on demand is not an instant-gratification business model no matter how you do it, but selling only evergreen designs is probably the tortoise in the race where chasing trends is the hare. Anyway we got off track here with a whole discussion of profit margins but it was somewhat relevant to point that out about this approach.
Another example of an evergreen design category is one that offers the opportunity to create many slight variations of the same design. This type of design is very popular in programs like Merch by Amazon because you can upload a lot of them quickly, but they can also work in marketplaces like Etsy. Take an existing general niche like retro-gaming. This would be designs that feature pixelated graphics or 80s/90s style gaming images like original Nintendo controllers (no characters since they are subject to copyright/trademark). Now apply some text that says something like “leveled up to” and then fill in the blank. You can literally just change the last word of that sentence and make lots of separate products with the same design, such as “Dad”, “Mom”, “Big Brother”, “Big Sister”. For someone looking to give a gift to a person who likes retro gaming and just hit one of those life milestones, this design would be perfect. These are a great example of multiple listings you can create quickly that will sell periodically throughout the year. They’re not going to sell hundreds in one month, but they can contribute to your overall monthly sales.
I mentioned we would come back to chasing trends, so let’s revisit that. There is nothing stopping you from combining the evergreen strategy with the chasing trends strategy. In fact, that’s exactly what I do in my Etsy shop. Under the umbrella of a search-results based strategy, I continually work on building a catalog of evergreen designs that can contribute a couple sales per month. But I also look for opportunities to jump into a trend early and make some higher volume sales. I just don’t spend all my time chasing trends – I only check Google Trends for daily or weekly trending related searches a couple times per week, and generally keep my eyes open on social media for something that might be applicable for selling on a t-shirt, a mug, or other product. But I also plan out time to sit down and work on my evergreen designs. This still involves niche and keyword research, because you want to give your evergreens the best chance of selling, but it’s a little less hectic than only focusing on trends.
Conclusion
So what’s the right strategy for your print on demand shop? I hope the information in this episode will help you make that very decision. If you’ve already started down one of these paths and want to change course, no worries. It’s always better to change directions if your new direction is something you will be more committed to. You don’t need to agonize over this decision, but I do believe it’s important because it can help you avoid having to re-do things later. Whatever you decide for your print on demand shop, there is a great opportunity waiting for you.
Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform to be notified of future episodes and don’t forget to check out the POD Insights YouTube channel for print on demand tutorials and tips as well, and if you want to read transcripts of each podcast episode with links to resources, head over to podinsights.net.
Thanks for reading.
