It’s not uncommon when you’re starting a print on demand online store to publish your designs on the basic types of products like t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies and mugs, and then start considering some additional, more speciality products. These would be things like additional styles of drinkware, maybe beach towels or other home accessories. But have you considered expanding your t-shirt offerings? There is more than one style of t-shirt, and I don’t just mean offering women’s fit or youth fit either. Stick around and let’s talk about some additional more specialized t-shirt styles you can offer in your print on demand shop. 

If you’re looking for ways to make your product listings stand out or perhaps offer items that the competition may not be, the first thing you might do is start exploring the catalog of your print on demand platform for new or more specialized items. I’ve considered getting more into household items like pillows, towels, blankets, or stationary in my Etsy print on demand shop. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these products, but there is a good opportunity to expand your offerings for a product that you’re already familiar with: t-shirts. Recently on the YouTube channel I did a review of 3 styles of specialty t-shirts that are more unique than your standard print on demand tee like a Bella+Canvas 3001 or Gildan 64000 soft style. I’ll run down my review summary of these three styles and also mention a couple others in this episode.

T-Shirt Review

I received 3 samples from Printify, including a garment-dyed t-shirt made by Comfort Colors, a tie-dyed Gildan 5000 tee, and a tie-dyed women’s crop top made by ColorTone. In the video I reviewed the quality of the shirts and the print so let’s start with that. 

My favorite of the 3 styles was the Comfort Colors garment-dyed t-shirt which was printed by Drive Fulfillment. They are also available on Printify from Swift POD and they offer a larger color variety but a slightly higher price. Drive Fulfillment had the lowest pricing on the platform so I went with them for the sample. Why did I like it so much? Mainly because of the quality and softness of the shirt itself. It was just a better quality shirt than your typical mass-produced blanks like the Gildan 5000 or even the higher-quality Bella+Canvas 3001. Nothing against those shirts, I they are great volume-sellers due to their competitive prices. But when you want to offer something that isn’t available from thousands of other sellers, the Comfort Colors garment-dyed tee is a great option. It really is very soft and comfortable. It has that “already broken in” feel right away. One reason for this is the dye process. Garment-dyed clothing is not dyed until after being cut & sewn, instead of having the large raw fabric swatches dyed first. The process allows for a softer feel to the fabric. The weight is slightly heavier but not overly thick or too warm. The best thing about it besides the quality is the unique colors that it is available in. The garment-dye process offers the ability to have a wide variety of subtle colors – what I like to call “in between colors” – that are not your standard options like black, white, navy, and heather gray. Take a look at all the shades of blue available from SwiftPOD for this shirt and you’ll see what I mean. Offering these less-common colors is an easy way for your offerings to stand out from the competition. Another great aspect is that they are not significantly more expensive than most print on demand t-shirts. As I mentioned, Drive Fulfillment offers the lowest pricing on Printify, and with a premium account your total cost will be $15.56 including shipping. If you go with SwiftPOD the total price would be between $16 an $20 depending on the size. A retail price of $24.99 with free shipping or $19.99 with $5 shipping would yield a profit margin around 25%. I think you could get away with slightly higher pricing as well because they are great quality. The regular Printify pricing is $3-4 higher so you’d be looking into the high 20s for retail prices if you don’t have a premium account. The print from Drive Fulfillment came out great and I’ve had good experience with SwiftPOD in the past as well. When creating listings for these t-shirts, you could create separate listings for them or integrate them into your existing listings with your standard t-shirts. I myself am considering adding the more unique color options to some of my existing listings as additional product variants. If you’re curious how to do this with Printify and still have your orders automate, I have a video on the YouTube channel that walks through how to do this. Check out the blog post for this episode on podinsights.net for the link to the video. 

The second shirt I reviewed was the tie-dyed Gildan 5000 from SwiftPOD in the Hazy Rainbow color option. There are a few different tie-dye unisex t-shirt options on Printify and not all of them are the Gildan 5000, but there are a few color options for this one and it’s a familiar shirt so I thought it would be a good one to review. The tie-dye color was really nice looking and light enough in color for my design to stand out well. The print quality was very good, typical of SwiftPOD in my experience. Tie-dye can be a great option for certain types of niches or designs but I had two concerns with this particular one. Neither of which are deal-breakers in my opinion but they are concerns to be aware of. The first concern was the rough feeling of the shirt. The Gildan 5000 shirt is not a t-shirt known for being super-soft to begin with. If you’ve gotten samples of any for your print on demand shop you may have noticed this. I also think the tie-dye process may have added a little bit more stiffness, so right out of the package it feels pretty rough especially when compared to that Comfort Colors t-shirt. However, I can happily report that after the first wash, it was significantly softer and more what you would expect from a typical print on demand t-shirt. Still not as soft as say a B+C 3001, but soft enough. My other concern was the pricing. Knowing that this is a Gildan 5000 “run of the mill” t-shirt and not what you would call a “premium” t-shirt, the retail price can’t be super higher. Of course you can charge a higher price because it is tie-dyed, but it still has to be reasonable. The Printify premium price on this one from SwiftPOD is $17.93 with shipping included. The regular price is $22.09 with shipping included. The premium price would push your retail price up to $27.99 for a 25% profit margin. I don’t think you could expect to go much higher than that, even though it is a tie-dye t-shirt. You have to remember the customer is going to get something they might think feels a bit rough or stiff at least until they wash it, so you don’t want them feeling like they paid too much. However, I do think these are marketable in the right niche. More on that later. 

The third type of t-shirt I reviewed was the ColorTone tie-dyed women’s crop top. This one is more of a specialty item that won’t have the same broad appeal as a unisex t-shirt, but it can certainly still be a popular item. Printify has regular and AOP crop tops available as well, but I thought we’d stay with the tie-dyed theme for the samples. The softness was very nice on this one, much softer than the Gildan 5000 tie-dye but not quite as soft as the Comfort Colors. I’d say it was on-par with a B+C 3001 for softness. The tie-dye color was very nice and there are a few options available through JAMS Designs. The print quality was above-average in my experience, with nice sharp lines and bright colors, but less of a rough-feeling to it. It’s still the kind of print that sits on top of the fabric, but not as thick feeling as the Gildan. 

Niche Ideas

Now I referenced niches and marketing a little bit earlier so let’s talk some more about that. When it comes to marketing or targeting these types of specialty shirts, the thing that I feel will yield the most success is not to target your listings and your keywords and your SEO towards the actual product, but more towards the niche. In other words, don’t do anything different than you always would be doing in terms of coming up with your SEO, your title, your tags, the keywords, your description, just focus all of that on what’s the niche. What’s the audience looking for? Just like you would for any other product listing.

And then of course, look to weave in the keywords that describe the product. So if you’re weaving in the words tie-dye into your keyword tags and things like that, that’s totally fine. But don’t try to target your product towards basically just what the product is. So what I mean by that is if you are listing a tie dyed shirt with a design on it, don’t lead with tie dyed shirt, or don’t use the search phrase “tie-dye shirt” as like the beginning of your title or in all of your tags. When you search for something like that, if you just search for “tie-dye shirt” on Etsy, first of all, you’re going to find over 140,000 search results, so it’s a very saturated search and it’s way too general. But second of all, you’re not going to find specific designs within that search. Since Etsy is a big marketplace for handmade items, you’re going to find a lot of custom handmade tie dye shirts that are just a tie dye shirt that are sort of one of a kind and don’t even have a design printed on them. So you’re competing with those listings as well if you’re targeting your SEO towards what the product is. I don’t think that’s the recipe for success with these specialized shirts. I think that you still do the same type of research and the same type of targeting with your keywords as if you were creating any other print on demand shirt, but then you choose to offer on one of these specialized shirts, whether it’s the garment dyed t-shirt or one of the tie dye ones based on what the niche is or what the design is, if it’s a good fit.

Let me give you one example. While I was searching for some examples that might be good for one of these t-shirts, I came across the phrase Groovy Mama and Groovy Dad. So basically these are text-based designs that have like a 1960s hippy kind of a theme to them that just say groovy mom or groovy dad in one of those retro sixties fonts, maybe a little bit of graphic elements around the font. But what I noticed in the search results is they were all plain t-shirts. Every single listing on page one of the search results was just a plain print on demand t-shirt. And what’s a popular clothing style from the 1960s? Tie dye. So if you want to stand out from the competition in this particular niche and offer groovy mama, groovy dad t-shirt designs, why not offer them on a tie-dye shirt? And yes, your price is going to be a little higher than the competition, but that’s okay because you’re offering a different product than the competition and one that’s a good fit for the niche. So that’s the kind of thing that I’m talking about when I say target the product towards the niche, not the other way around. It’ll help you stand out from the competition. In my opinion, that’s going to be the best way to be successful with these more specialty t-shirts. Now one thing I didn’t get to talk about in the YouTube video, because it was getting a little bit lengthy, is the mock-up situation with these specialty t-shirts.

Mockups

Now with the garment dyed t-shirts you can still use third party mock-ups like from a website like Placeit. If you have a Placeit account, and if you don’t, I highly recommend you at least get a free Placeit account and and get some of those more professional looking mock-ups. You can still use those third-party mock-ups with the garment dyed t-shirts, you just need to be careful about representing the colors correctly so that they’re at least a somewhat accurate representation of what the final product looks like. So just do your best to color match. Otherwise it’s still just a regular cut style of shirt. And you should be able to use third-party mock-ups for those, but when it comes to tie dye t-shirts or any other t-shirt, that’s got an all over print type of pattern to it, one of the things you have to watch out for is, is using mock-ups that are not an accurate representation of the product. So if you are wanting to use those third-party mock-ups, you have to be really careful that if let’s say that you have an all over print mock-up where you can actually color the entire mock-up, you’re going to have to be real careful that the tie dye colors and the exact way that it looks is, is a really close representation to what the default mock-ups from print file look like. And of course there’s some natural variation from shirt to shirt with tie dye because these are not mass produced like stamped on or, or something like, that’s not like a decal, they are tie dyed in batches. So each one can be slightly different from the next, but the pattern of the tie dye should be fairly consistent and the base colors will be the same every time. So they’re about as consistent as a tie dye shirt can be, and so you want your mock-up to represent that. You don’t want a mock up that just looks totally off from what the customer would receive.

So in my opinion, you’re probably best off with the tie dye options, just using the default mock-ups and adding a background to them. So use your photo editing software, like Photoshop or go to Canva if you have a Canva pro account, they’ve got the background remover tool built right in. You can just add backgrounds to the default mock-ups to make them look a little bit nicer, and then you don’t have to worry about color matching to the tie dye. So that’s just one extra consideration with the specialty t-shirts you want to make sure that you’ve got good, accurate mock-ups and you’re not misrepresenting any of the details and that’ll do it for this episode.

I hope I’ve opened your mind to the possibility of expanding your t-shirt lineups and offering some more specialized types. If you’re interested in seeing the samples that I received, check out the YouTube channel and look for the specialty t-shirt review video, I will link to it or embed it right in the blog post article for this episode on pod insights.net so check us out over on our website as well if you’re interested in that. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform to be notified of future episodes.

Thanks for reading.