Transcripts
1. Welcome to Print on Demand!: Hey, I'm Liz. I'm a Food Illustrator and Farmer here in beautiful Northern New Mexico. I'm so excited to welcome you to this class today to learn all about print on demand artwork. As artists it can be really challenging to find avenues to share our work with the world in ways that are both sustainable and profitable. I wish I had known about print on demand printing when I started my creative business, because at the time I was creating everything by hand and selling in pop-up shops and on Etsy and losing quite a bit of money. If I had known about print on demand, I think it would have made my life a little easier and allowed me to try out new products without any upfront merge money commitment. That's why I'm sharing what I've learned with you today because I want you to be three steps ahead in order to get your artwork out into the world, share it with people and make it sustainable. This class is for you if you are an artist who is tired of carrying on the same boxes of inventory from three years ago, hello. This is for you if you are an artist who is looking to start your own creative business but doesn't have a whole lot of upfront cash. This is for you if you're an artist who is already in business but is looking for an additional income stream. This class is for you if you are an artist who is ready to reach a wider audience, maybe beyond your state or beyond your country. This class is for you if you're not calling yourself in artists just yet, but you're ready to be one. In this class today you are going to learn how to test multiple product ideas without upfront costs. You're going to learn how to ditch the hefty costs on storage of inventory to boost your creative business. You're going to learn how to integrate print on demand into your Etsy and, or Shopify stores. Lastly, you're going to learn which print on demand company to partner with and dive into my favorite. Your class project is to create your own custom product and upload a photo of it so that we can all see comment and cheer you on.
2. What is Print on Demand?: What the heck is print on demand? It's essentially you as an artist, partnering up with a company who will take your designs, print them on products that they stock, and then they will package and ship it, so it takes a lot of cost that takes out of your business. It takes out the cost of materials, other than maybe your watercolors or your pencil or whatever you're using to create that initial design. It takes out those costs. It takes out the cost of boxes and handling, and it takes out the cost of shipping, not to mention, it takes out the cost of all the time and labor and effort that you're putting into creating a design that may or may not sell. This is a really great low-risk way to test out your ideas, to test out your work, and to give yourself time back. To give you an idea of some of the products that are offered in print on demand, specifically through the company we're going to use as an example today, I've brought some printed product from Prints and Plants, my company here for you to see. Here's a pencil pouch. This is in a design I created, both with pencil and paper and then in Adobe Illustrator. But this pattern, I designed, is called "blush" and I created a whole summer line for 2019 featuring this pattern in four different colors. This is it printed on a pencil pouch from the company we're going to talk about today. But it could be an accessory bag, a makeup bag, a pencil pouch, it comes in two different sizes. People have been really happy with this. I also printed that design onto a bandana, which I find really cute. I love bandanas. You can see that they also offer clothing items and accessories, so very cute for the summer. Nice quality. One one my favorite items that was printed was this, whoa. This piece of luggage. This comes in the small and large size. You can just see the variety. These were three items that I printed for the summer line. But already, you can see that there's so many options for the ways that you can use your artwork and get it out into the world, not only for wall art, but also for everyday usable items.
3. Why Print on Demand?: In this section we're going to dive into the benefits of print on demand. But before we do that, I want to be real honest with you. I was very resistant to using print on demand when I was first learning about it, I wanted everything in my company to be handmade. I have a huge value of the handmade and I wanted to use that in my business. However, I was also facing the reality of losing a lot of money and keeping the same inventory that wasn't selling and wasn't moving because the products I was creating that I thought people would love. They didn't love them so much. Now, when I started opening up to print on demand, I started to see how it didn't have to be one or the other. It doesn't have to be handmade or print on demand. It can be both. It can be both together and that is one of the beauties of print on demand. It's something that you can use as an addition in your business to help fuel and sustain you. So that you can be making those handmade items and you can be selling those and you can have that balance. Now that I'm using print on demand, I love it, I absolutely love it. Print on demand, why start to incorporate this into your artistic practice? Well, as I mentioned, you can test ideas without an upfront cost. You could create a pattern or you could create a design, put it on a product, post it to your social media, post it to Facebook, post it to Instagram. Again, all of this part of the process is free and just say, hey, what do you think? Or show it to friends in person online, just show them the image and ask people what they think. Do they resonate? Would they buy it? Would you buy it? It's a really great way to test an idea before you fully commit to making a whole line. Also, print on demand allows you to reach a much wider audience. Rather than just selling in person. You can sell to people outside of your state, even across the world, which is really beautiful to be able to share artwork in that way. Because at the end of the day, artwork is all about connection, and the more people we can connect to with the work we create, the better. Also print on demand gives you so much more time. Because a company that you're working with is printing your imagery onto the products of days stock and shipping it, that gives you so much more time in your business to focus on other aspects. Like if you are doing custom design work, if you are teaching, if you are creating handmade goods, this just opens up a lot of time. Maybe it's not even time for your business, maybe it's time for your friends, time for yourself, time for your family. I mean, all of us are wanting more time. That's something a lot of people say there never is enough of, but this actually gives you an abundance of time and allows more of that balance to enter into your life. Again, as I mentioned, print on demand can be a great balance, a great counterpoint to the handmade items. It can actually fuel, perhaps buying the material to create and test those products by hand. It can help fuel market booth fees. It can help balance out the handmade qualities and the handmade items that you're creating for your business. Lastly, who doesn't want to make money while a sleep, right? right also print on demand, for example, I was taking a nap and I sold a journal and it was processed, printed, and shipped while I was resting, which is really quite beautiful to have that built into your business, but not only making money while you sleep and rest about making money while you play, making money while you again work on other aspects of your business, making money while you spend time with family, while you travel, while you take care of loved ones, all of the above, it can really again open up that space and time to allow more balance into your life.
4. Which Print on Demand Company to Choose?: There are many print on demand options nowadays. I encourage you to do a lot of your own research because all have their own pros and cons. I've done a lot of research and tried out many different companies and I'm going to show you my favorite today. But again, I encourage you to find which fits best for you in this season of your artistic life and perhaps business. Let's take a look at three options and dive in. There are many print on demand companies to choose from. I'm just going to go over three really briefly, but again, I encourage you to do your own research because every site is going to have its own pros and cons and will benefit you in different ways depending on where you are in your own artistic and business journey. The three we're going to look at briefly today are Redbubble, Society6,and Gooten. We're going to look at the pros and cons of each, and then dive into one of them to teach you how to use print on demand for your products. Let's just take a quick look at Redbubble. You can see this is the setup, it's great. They have a ton of products which is one of their pros. Right here is sell your art, that's where you would go if you want to use this site to begin your journey with print on demand, with your artwork. But you can see that it's very clean, it looks very easy to use. You can find other artists, which is really wonderful. It's a built in community. Lots of great products. You can see featured products. Let's hop over to some of the pros and cons of Redbubble right here. A pro is that when you dive in as an artist to create products through Red bubble, you get to set your own margin. What that means is that they have the base price of what it costs to create one of their products, let's say a sticker and then you get to set the markup. Basically what you're going to sell that for to a customer and then you get the difference. That's really great because then you have flexibility as the artist to set your margin and to decide what profit you're making on each product rather than just getting a percentage. Another pro is that it has a built-in audience. As you saw, there were all these featured artists, so you can find other artists. Consumers might come to Redbubble to purchase. Like if I were a consumer, I could just see what was up for sale right here. That's really handy too, because you're meeting people who are already there rather than starting from scratch. Another positive is that as you can see, there's a ton of products which is amazing. There's so much to choose from, from accessories, stationary, family kids, home decor. You name it. You could get lost in the whole rabbit hole of all of the abundance of product to choose from on this site, which is wonderful. What else is nice about Redbubble is that there's no need for a separate shops such as Etsy or Shopify. Again, people can come right here and buy directly from the artist's work, which is really handy, especially if you don't want to maintain your own shop, which again would mean driving traffic to that shop. That can be a really positive aspect of Redbubble. Not so great aspects comes with anything. The cons are that the margin I found is not as high and what that means is that even when you're setting your selling cost, what I found was that it was going to have to be a fairly high cost on some of the products for the consumer to make a margin that felt worthwhile for me as the artist. When I was doing research on other print on demand companies, I found that the margin could actually be a little bit higher with those companies. That's why I stayed away from Red bubble personally but I know a lot of artists who would have success with it and enjoy it. Another con is that even though there is this built in audience, there's built-in artists and people come there to shop. It can be hard to be seen, especially as a new artist on there because it is so saturated. I believe in collaboration and reaching out to other artists and supporting each other. However, it can also be really tough on this site to be found depending on your product, depending on how established you are. That can be tricky. The other thing is this goes across the board with most all print on demand sites that I've researched, but the limited branding. Because another site, this company is printing and packing and shipping your work, it's not as much of an opportunity for you to put in that handwritten note or to put in that little custom tag that says your business name or your artist's name and that is something I missed with print- on- demand. When I am shipping out handmade orders, that's always something I include and we'll talk about later in this class how to include that personalized element even while using print on demand. But that's something that I've found with Redbubble and other sites is that, that is a drawback. Let's move on to Society6. Let's hop to their website here. Another beautiful, clean, wonderful website. One of the reasons I actually love Society6 and started looking at them is I saw a catalog from around winter, Christmas time on my friend's table from Society6 that they had shipped out and it was featuring some of their artist who sell through their company. It just seems like they have a lot of support for the artists who are creating. It's this fun modern, playful layout. They have so many beautiful products. I just started using Society6 actually, it wasn't the first one I dove into, but I've heard really great things and I like that they're supportive of artists, not only through that magazine that goes out and highlights some of the products of the season but they also send out e-mails for competition so that you can enter and get your work seen more broadly. They're also offering just tips of the trade and I like that a lot when companies can offer tips to the artists who are participating. That's a positive thing about Society6. Another pro here you can see just how many products there are similar to Redbubble, just so many options. Again, you can come on here and just get lost in all the ideas of how you could use your art. Another pro, again is that built-in audience. I've had friends who don't sell on here, but who actually go to Society6 to find products. Again, people as a consumer can hop on to this website and search for something, potentially find your product and support you the artists. That's really cool because you're meeting an audience that's already there rather than building from scratch. Similarly because of that, there's no need for that separate shop, there's no need for an outside Etsy shop or Shopify shop, you can just sell through here if that's how you want to do it. Then lastly, you can set the margins just like Redbubble, but again, they're lower margins than what I found on other sites and it can be difficult visibility again, just because it is so saturated. Same thing with the limited branding and the other thing with Society6 is sometimes they run these, you saw this in the banner I'm sure, but these site-wide sales on certain products. When that happens, your products, which is great because then it's promoting customers to come there and get in on a sale, get a good deal, but it's also marking potentially your products down without you making that decision. Sometimes depending on your emerging action, that can actually be a hindrance. That was something that turned me off a little bit. But now I'm using it and learning more and more about it. I've added this into the places where I sell my artwork. Now we're going to dive into my favorite, the one that I decided to move forward with when I started really using print on demand. I'll tell you why and we'll dive into using it as an example today to get your artwork scene. But the company is called Gooten and I smile when I say it because I love this company and this is not an add. This is just based on my own research and experience using many different companies. But I love Gooten, let's hop to their website here. They're so intuitive, they're so easy to use, they have lots of products as well. One of the reasons I went with Gooten is that a lot of my products through my business prints and plants are specifically tailored to the kitchen and home and they had a lot of home and living products. You can hop through here and see all the products that they offer. They have a whole overview of how you can sell through multiple shops that you might have. They have great customer service. They have great tutorials, the customer service is stellar, which is also one of the reasons I chose them. I'll send them an e-mail and they'll respond within 24 hours and give me the answer that I'm looking for and it's just incredible. That's great. Another reason I love it is here you get to set your own margin, you get to decide after the base cost of what things cost you get to decide what you're selling them for. Gooten I found to be the best margin where I could sell still for an affordable price for the customer and still feel like I was making a good enough margin to sustain myself as an artist. That's one of the reasons I love Gooten too. Also, I've ordered a lot of their products that I've had my work printed on just as test runs and I use them. I love them, they're good quality, they always feel good and look good. Also I just loved that the name is a pun off of Gutenberg press. Gutenberg, like the first printing press and Gooten is a play on that because there's still printing, but in a modern way, which I think is really fun and playful. This might be a drawback for you. Again, there's a limited branding just like anything else, and I'll teach you a little work around with Gooten. But another con is that with Gooten, it's just a back-end support so you do need a separate shop Etsy or Shopify. Again, I already had an Etsy shop and I was looking for a new integration and at the time, Gooten wasn't automatically talking to Etsy, so I had to manually place any orders that came through my Etsy shop. But what's great is now there is a link. Any order that's placed through my Etsy shop on a Gooten item is automatically processed, printed, and shipped to the customer without me having to be the middleman at all. That's nice that that link is now happening with Etsy, which is great. Then you could also use Shopify, which I just started using as well this year and I would dive into both of those, the pros and cons of which you would want to use and how they can benefit your business in different ways. Take a look around Gooten because this is the example we'll be using today. But again, like I said, choose the one that feels best to you at this point in your artistic journey. In the next lesson, we'll dive into how to move forward with putting your artwork on these products.
5. Pick Your Product: Now you get to decide which product you want to start with with your artwork. We're going to walk through two different ways about doing this; one is if you have a single image that you want to use on a product, and another is if you have a repeating image that you would like to use on a product. The way you can find the products to search for, what you would like to print on, is this section right here, products and pricing. All of these is before you even sign up. You could log in if you already have an account, it's totally free to set up. You could sign up right here, or you can just browse to start. Let's go look at print products for a moment because the first example we're going to use is a folded greeting card. So Print Products, click there. Now you can see up here, there's categories, there's photo prints, calendars, and cards. I'll scroll down instead of clicking here, but you could do that instead. So you see just the options and I want to use a folded card. Now you can also notice that every product shows you this little bit right here that says, "Starting At." It shows you that number, and that's what it costs for Gooten to produce the product so you know that that's the baseline that you'll be marking up from. So for one folded card with an envelope, it's $0.37 for them to create, and you'll mark up from there. I'm going to click here. When I click on it, it'll take me to the overview page so you can read all about in the description. Down here, you can get all the product information which is really helpful. You can do single-sided or double-sided. There are different paper types to choose from. There are sizes to choose from. There're multiple packs to choose from, all the features, the type of paper. It goes into a lot of detail at every product so you can learn where it's produced, what it's made of, all of the good stuff. Then you can also look into pricing and shipping. So here you can see for each different variants. Whatever you're making, whether it's the dull cover or the silk cover, you can see how much that will cost over here. Also single-sided versus double-sided, also one card versus multiple, you can see those costs right there. Ships everywhere from the United States, and that shipping cost starts at $3.49. We'll talk about how to incorporate shipping into your costs later in this class. Then the print specs, this is how you will upload and we'll walk through the step-by-step together, but this gives you everything you need. For all the cards, the print area is given to you in pixels that you can make that canvas, I like to do that in Photoshop, and then the resolution that you need in order to upload and get it printed high-quality. All of that is given to you with each product, which is so helpful. So to start, you can look around, pick the product that you'd like, and then we'll get creating together.
6. Create Your Product: Single Image: As I mentioned, we're going to walk through two different ways to upload your artwork. The first is if you have a single image. For example, what that looks like for me today is this drawing I created of tomatoes in Procreate on my iPad. I'm going to be using this to create a greeting card to start. Then I'll be using this to create a repeating pattern on an apron in the next lesson. To start let's look at this greeting card, the folding card. I'm going to click ''Start Selling Folded Cards'' here. Now if you don't yet have an account, then it'll ask you to sign up. I do have an account with Gooten already. Again, it's completely free to sign up and free to start. It's taking me into my product hub because I already have an account, if you don't, then you'll just give them your email, a password, it'll get you setup. Once you're all set up, it'll carry you through to this backend where you get to decide what you're going to sell. For this example, I want to do single-sided. I'm going to do the dull cover because it's the least cost, and I've ordered those before and I actually really like them. I'm going to do the 4.25 by 5.5 inch, and for today I'm just going to do a pack of one, just one example. These packs, they are all of the same image, so they're not like a mix-and-match. One thing you could do is order a pack of different imagery. If I had one pack of tomatoes and another pack of broccoli, I could order both of those and then mix and match them and sell them in person. However, if you're just selling online here, it's going to be the same image in the pack. I'll continue with that one card. Now, we looked at the information earlier, but you can see here that it gives you the principle area again. Right there. I know that that's the pixel dimension I want to use in Photoshop in which to place my image. It's loading here, but once it does you'll see that there's a card front right there and a card back. We talked a little bit about branding, and how with print on demand it can be really tricky because you can't add in a custom note and you can't add in a custom tag, but you can add branding onto your image, onto your product. What I always like to do with a greeting card is add my name and my business with my logos, so I do the logo, prints and plants, and then my website. I'll show you all of that in a minute, but I have a template that I've saved that I can just upload from my card backs like that. Let's go over to Photoshop and we have again right here, 1,313 by 1,725 help me remember that. Usually go back and forth. I'm going to go new, width 1,313, what was it, 1,725? Double-check, yes. I entered in those pixel dimensions right here 1,313 by 1,725, keeping it at 300 that's the standard for that high-quality. Also, typically, CMYK is the color field that's used for printed goods. But Gooten recommends submitting all of your images under RGB. I'm going to leave that as RGB, background content is white, and I'm going to label this tomato card. Press ''Okay''. There's the bounds within which I have to place my artwork. Also, if you're curious about how to create the artwork, I'm going to be creating future classes about how to do illustration and drawing. But for now this is assuming that you already have a work of art created that you're ready to print on a product. I have that saved to my desktop, so I'm going to go to file in Photoshop, place, here's the image tomatoes, place, so there it is, and then place again. It's like that, it's a little funky because it's not an exact square, I could make a square greeting card for this instead. But what I might do is shrink this down a little bit so it's a little bit more centered, click right in there, and then align it. What I did just now I pressed command A on the Mac, and then that gives some alignment tools up here. I want to align it in the center here, and then also here, so you can see align vertical center, align horizontal center and that put it right in the middle. Though to me, it looks because of the tomato shapes, this is a little too small compared to this. I'm just going to nudge it to the left just a little bit. For the sake of example, we'll call this card good. I think what I would do actually is do an image that actually set the space a little bit better, or if this was a repeat. But this is just to give you an idea of the single image. Now I'm going to go up here to Save As already have tomato card, I don't want to know is the PSD. For Gooten, I always save it as a JPEG, which is going to automatically save this as a copy. For right now, I'm just saving it to my desktop. Save, press ''Okay''. I'm going to go back to Gooten and press ''Bulk Upload Artwork''. Then here I have the option to upload new artwork. You can see here all the old artwork I've uploaded for previous products, which I can filter or sort, and so we'll do that in a minute when I show you the back of the card. But for the front of the card, this is brand new, so I'm going to click, ''Upload From Device''. Go to my desktop, tomato card right here. Move this so I can see, open. It might take a minute here. Sometimes the files take a little bit to upload depending on your wireless speed, and the size of the file. You can see over here too that there's card front and card back, so that's indicating which area we're uploading this part of the artwork too, because there are two sections to do this. Now this tomato image is uploaded so I'm going to, the wrong image is uploaded in the front right here, so I have the front space highlighted going to select. You can see there and I'm going to highlight the backspace and I'm going to find my back card imagery, which I believe is this one right here. You can see the front and the back. I'm going to click ''Apply'', and let's see how this turns out on the preview. Right here you can see that the print area is highlighted and you can see this red dotted line, you want all of your imagery to be within that red dotted line. Because if it's past that, there's a chance it might get cut off when the cards are being cut. Card back. There's prints and plants, my business, and my website. It's all within the red line, I've ordered copies of these and they do fit within that. Now you can take a look at the product too. Let's highlight product and then it gives you a mockup of what that looks like, so that's the back, that's the front. Nice, clean, simple, ready to go. If I were to want to replace anything, you could click, ''Replace Artwork'' and change it right there. But I'm happy with this for the example. Let's move forward. I'm clicking, ''Next'', continue. Here again, you get some mockups, which is really fun to imagine what this will look like in person. This image might not load right now, but it gives you an overview of the size, the number of cards, what the paper type is, and this one is single-sided. Single-sided doesn't mean that there's no back of the card. It just means that on the flip side of this image, on that internal Left page of the card, there is no imagery. You can see that, and I'm going to click, ''Continue'' again. Now you'll get to this section and you see here there's storage, prints, plants, Shopify, that's my Shopify site. PrintandPlantsPress Etsy. We will talk about the benefits of Shopify or Etsy depending on which direction you choose to go, right now I use both. I'm actually going to select both of these because that means that this product will not only be stored in my library for later, but will also push through to my shops. I'm going to Click, ''Apply''. Then here is where you get to put in all the descriptions, that product name, so this is what you will search to find it in your own library, but also what will show up for customers. This is what will show up for customers on your website. You can see down here, prints plants, that's my Shopify handle shortcut and then this one is the Etsy shortcut, the PrintsandPlantsPress. If I click one and I scroll down, everything has been populated that was listed in the storage information right here. You can see here, this is already filled in, you can see, you can't change that, that little x. This is already filled in automatically by Gooten. But here product type, I can put in greeting cards. I can add a collection called greeting cards, and then I can put in tags. Again, all of that with title, description and tags is a whole other lesson on marketing around how to drive traffic to your listings on your site, which we're not going to cover right here, but this would be tag, so I might say greeting card, and tomatoes, and gardening, and farming, and summer food. You can go on and on. Then right here it shows the price. This is their price for producing this one card depending on what you chose, and this is your profit. You can fill in either your profit or your customer price to determine how much you want to sell for. I usually go for customer price, it helps me think about what they might buy it for. Here I'm going to list this as $3. It shows you that your profit is going to be $2.42. Now what's really handy is that I can apply everything I just edited up here to all stores, and so I don't have to enter it in again in the Etsy one down here if you are choosing multiple places to share your work. I'm going to click that. Then if we clicked down in Etsy, we can scroll down and see it all got populated, the same tags got populated, the customer price got populated, and it's good to go. Really simple. As soon as I click ''Save'', those listings will be pushed through to my Shopify site and my Etsy site. I will do that right now. Click ''Save'', and then I'll make sure you want to publish, and publish preview, so that means that you're publishing those images. I'm going to click, ''Okay''. One note about this is that the only images you currently have are the ones that are stocked by Gooten. It's really handy to also order samples so that you can create lifestyle photography, you can show it in action, you can show somebody using the product. You can show it in a setting instead of just on the white background. This is really nice for a clear picture of what the image and artwork is going to be for the customer. But it's nice to order the real thing and take those photos and then upload them separately to your Shopify and Etsy sites.
7. Create Your Product: Repeat Design: Now we're going to go over how to design a product with a repeat pattern. Again, this is assuming that you have a repeat pattern ready to go. There are so many great classes on how to create a repeat pattern. I highly recommend if you don't know how to do this and you'd like to learn, go into Bonnie Christine's Skillshare page. She's a surface pattern designer, a really great teacher and that's where I learned how to create my own surface pattern repeats. This is assuming you have that ready to go and I'll walk you through how to upload that to a product. Here I am on Gooten. This is in my library, my Product Hub. These are all the items I've created. I'm going to create a repeat pattern on an apron, which I have not done yet. Here is add a new product, I'm going to click that. I know exactly what I'm looking for. You can scroll through, you can search up here, but I know exactly what I'm looking for, which is the apron. There's only one. I'm going to pick this. Right here, when you're in your library, you can learn more about the product like we did earlier here, or if I know immediately that yes, I want to make this, I'll just click "PICK THIS". While this is loading, I want to show you something. I saved my repeat pattern as an Illustrator file. I wanted to create this mockup in Photoshop. In order to get that pattern as an option for a filler in Photoshop. Let's make a new document. Let's do that size for this example. I went to Open and here's my file of the repeat pattern. As I said, this is just for the example. When you see this pattern, there's a lot of space in between the tomatoes, which I actually, I'm not too fond of, but just since we're doing a mockup example, I'll show you here. But I'm going to click that here, Open it, Okay. Leave all that good. Now it's repeating. Then I select all on my Mac by doing Command A and then go to Edit, Define Pattern, and then I saved it as tomatoes and clicked "Okay". I have this new blank canvas because I have that pattern saved as fill. I can go to Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern. Pattern Fill 1. Then here I've selected, but I could go in and select a different one, but I do want this tomatoes, and here is the scale. I can come in here and play with, that's too big. I can come down here. It's a little goofy, but I like that. So I'm going to stick with that just for this example. But that's how you would play with this becoming its own pattern as the filler in Photoshop. Now here is the apron, so there's only one option for both. Those are already highlighted and I'll come down here and click "Continue". Now again, here's your principal area. I'm going to go back into Photoshop, 4,612 by 4,950, again, 300 RGB. I'm going to do Tomato Apron. Click "Okay". That's the space we're working with. Just like I showed you, I'm going to come to Layer, New Fill Layer, Pattern, Okay, 100. You see here, there's this line that's happening. That's not great because that means the repeat is broken. That would be a matter of going back into Adobe Illustrator and fixing that and I'm not going to do that right here on the screen and it's not part of this lesson. Instead, I'm going to adjust the size of this, so that's a little bigger. I actually like that better than being tiny like this for the apron, and I want to play with what it would look like if they were quite big. I like that. Let's stop there. That's 135. I'm going to press "Okay". There we go. That is what I will upload for the apron. Now I want to show you something about a product like this because we had talked about branding. On something like a greeting card, it's a little easier to just add your branding to the back, but this one's a little trickier because the print space versus the product space is going to be a little different. Let's save it as Tomato Apron, JPEG, to my desktop, Okay, BULK UPLOAD ARTWORK, UPLOAD NEW ARTWORK, UPLOAD FROM DEVICE. Our tomato apron is right here, Open, and then let it load. It loaded here, so I'm going to select this one, and you can see that it fills this square just the same dimensions as it did in Photoshop. But you see that the red cut lines for the product are actually much further inside of this square. When we click the product link, it shows you what was cut off. All of this is cut off. When you're thinking about branding, which is something we've talked about a bit in this class already with these print on demand companies. If I had put my brand name, my business name up here, it would be totally lost. Sometimes with products like this, it can be a little trickier of where to place that name. I'm going to show you a little trick that I do. Sometimes it takes a little give-and-take to figure it out. But let's leave this here for now. Back into Photoshop. Here's that base pattern. To our branding, I'm going to get this white color, a rounded rectangle, and I'm going to make that large enough just to start. It's white, but I actually want to decrease the opacity so you can still see the pattern through it. Then I'm going to play some text on top in this dark green, which matches my business brand. Then in my business font, type the name of the business, Prints & Plants, and put that within this large rectangle. Now, the rectangle is too big, so I'm going to come back and resize this a little bit so that it fits around. I don't want the brand name to overpower the image. I want it to be a reference point for whoever is using this product, but I don't want it to take over. I do make it small. Then I'm going to link these two together. You see rounded rectangle is highlighted. Going to press Command and highlight our first name. Press Enter to set that size. Command, highlight the text. Then I'm going to link the layers so I can move them together. I'm going to move them down into this bottom right corner. Now let me show you something because while the other image was loading, I did this just a moment ago and I made this too high. Let me show you what I mean by that. This is the one I uploaded with that branding and look at where it lands. It lands like on the hip. I don't want it that high. I want it down here. But I was playing with that spacing, so that was way too high. I'm going to come back in here. Now it's here much lower. I'm going to save this again has the same title just overriding each time. Now I come back to Gooten. Try it again. UPLOAD NEW ARTWORK, UPLOAD FROM DEVICE, Tomato Apron, Open. Then this one will load and we'll see if it's in the right place. What's nice about using the rectangle with opacity is it doesn't lose the complete pattern. If you look at this at full opacity, it feels a little choppy. You can play with how much opacity it has, so you can really still see the pattern, but also see the name of your business or your artist name if that's what you're using. But I really do think it's very important to include your branding, include the name of your business, include the name of you as an artist because you're spending time creating these works of art and it's important to share that with folks and to have that opportunity for connection. People to understand that this was made by somebody and that they're using something that's really beautiful that somebody created. Now I'm selecting that. Filling it in. It might be cut off. It's cut off a little bit down here, so you see that. Now I'm going to go back into Photoshop. I just moved that rectangle with the text up a little bit because I don't want it to flush against the bottom of the apron, so I'm just moving it up a little bit. Let me save that again as the JPEG, overwrite what is already there. Then come in here and bulk upload, again upload the new one. Then what I like to do is once I have the one I want, I come back and delete the ones that I'm not using, just so there's no confusion if I'm altering anything in the future. That should upload and hopefully that'll work. But you get the idea that it takes a little give and take to figure out where that branding can fit in, how it can fit in both with your design and then make sure that it's on the product. Here's the most recent one we just looked at in Photoshop. I'm going to select that. It looks like it's still a little too low, which I don't like too much. But you get the idea of putting this in a place that's just off to the side. So I'll probably go back in and I nudge that up some more until I like to where it was. But for the sake of example, let's leave it there. All of this is good to go. I'm going to click "Continue" and product mockup as we saw with the greeting card. I'm going to click "Continue" again. Same thing. This is the same process. We have: storage, the Shopify shop, and the Etsy shop. I'm going to click all three. I'm going to title this Tomato Apron. Cook in style with this vibrant tomato apron. I want do something a little more detailed than that. But you get the idea. Then here, again, we have our price, that's Gooten's price for production, and then also your profit and customer price. What do you think? Let's say this is 22. If that was the case, you should be making $5. Then sizes and materials or product options. But I never mess with this because it's automated from Gooten and I've found that when I do change anything right here, it gets funky once it's in the shop, so I leave that. Product type, you could do clothing or accessories collection. Here in my shop if I have an option for kitchen, so I'm going to select that. Tags, let's say, apron, tomato, cooking, cookware, kitchen. You could do whatever tags you like. That's all up here in the product name and description. Then storage, Prints & Plants it populated down into my Shopify shop here. Then it should have done the same in Etsy. There we go. There you have it. I'm going to click "Continue". It's going to ask me to publish the products. I'm going to say, Okay. I'll take these down after teaching this class because I haven't ordered this and I would want to make sure it's to a standard I want to solve, but just for example, let's published them. Then in the next part of the lesson we'll talk about Etsy and Shopify, the pros and cons of each, and then how to edit your listings once you've created them in Gooten and push them through to both of those platforms.
8. Share Your Products: As I mentioned earlier, one of the benefits of print on demand is that there's no upfront cost to test out ideas, to try things out. Once you've uploaded your artwork and you've seen it on the product that you chose, you can start to share that image with your social media following. You can share it on Instagram. You can share it on Facebook. You could share it in your email list, if you have that. You could share even in person just with a friend. Just pull up your phone, show them a picture, just to gauge the audience response or people into it. Do they want to buy it? Would they use it? Would you use it? That's a good question to ask yourself. Do you like it enough to use it? Start to gauge how people respond. This is great because instead of hand printing or hand illustrating 20 cards, 20 aprons, you can just create this visual mock-up and see if people like it before you commit to selling it.
9. Order a Sample: Also another tip and word of advice is to always order a sample. When you're using a new company, you may not know the quality of their products and you may not know if your print is the correct color, it's what you want, things are in the right place, so I always recommend that you order a test sample. You really want to be sure that you're happy with the product before you're selling it to people and getting it into their lives. As I mentioned earlier, I showed you some of the products that I ordered. When I launched my summer line, I ordered these products before doing so to make sure that I was happy with it, and fortunately I was. For example, with the pencil pouch. I mentioned branding earlier and how it's really important to put your name as the artist or your business name somewhere on your product. However, that's the part that can sometimes get cut off because if you're putting it in the bottom corner, if you're putting it near a seam, then sometimes that printing can get a little iffy. That's exactly what happened with this pencil pouch. On one side, it's blank and on the back I had written prints and plants, but you can see here it got cut off in the seam. When I noticed that, I went back into my uploaded design and I edited where I put the branding. I moved it up so that it wouldn't to get cutoff. It's really important that you do this. It's always a learning process, but just order a sample so that you can be sure that you're happy with it.
10. Etsy or Shopify?: Let's look at the pros and cons of using Etsy or Shopify as two options for your online shops. What's great about both of these, is that they're integrated with gooten. This wasn't always the case with Etsy last fall I started using gooten, and it wasn't yet automated to Etsy, so any orders that I had placed in Etsy I had to manually place and enter into gooten. But now it's automated, which is great. What that means, is that anytime on my Etsy shop somebody orders a product, then it automatically talks to gooten, and gooten prints the product and then packages and ships it. I'm not the middle person anymore. But let's walk through because there are different platforms for selling your work online. Let's talk about which might be best for you right now at your journey. Etsy is awesome. I love Etsy, I think it's a really incredible business, it's an incredible platform. They're a business that's really supportive of artists and they're looking for ways to always improve the artist experience for those of us selling on this site. When I started out my business, I've been on Etsy for I think three or four years and it's always been a great place to start meeting other artists and to start selling work in a really low cost way. The only cost is about $0.20 to upload a listing, then from there you're selling your work. Which is incredible. A lot of other sites, which we'll talk about, have a monthly fee. This is one of the pros about Etsy, is that it is very low cost. It's a great way to start. Similar to some of the other things we talked about like Redbubble and Society6, Etsy has this built in audience. You can get on there; the way I describe it, it's like Google for art. If somebody is looking for a poster and they want it to be made by an artist, then they can hop onto Etsy and search posters of veggies and find tons of artist making posters of veggies. People go there already to search for artwork. So that's incredible. You can reach a lot more people that way than, perhaps, especially when you're starting out, than just hosting your artwork on your own site. I tried that alongside Etsy when I first started and Etsy was a way smarter move. What else is great, is that there's a ton of customer support. They have so many wonderful articles, they're always sending out videos on how to make your shot better. Even in your shop manager section, if you are using Etsy, there's always tips and tricks for the trade. It's really incredible, similar to gooten, really great customer service and support. As I mentioned, now Etsy is automated with gooten, so it talks to each other and takes out you as the middle person. What else is great with Etsy, is that you can list your handmade items and your items that you make with gooten. Now, some drawbacks to Etsy, are that there's less customization of your storefront. It's not a customized personal website where people know it's just your work and just you and you get to have your certain unique flare on how you set things up, it's really set up to the standard of how Etsy runs the website. So there is that drawback if you're really looking to build that specific brand. It can be difficult to be found, similar. There's a lot that goes into SEO searches, tags, titles, descriptions to be found. It can be tricky because there are so many people, which is a plus, it's also difficult for folks to potentially find your artwork. Something else with the personalization and talking to the customer who does purchase your work, there's no branded automated emails from you. You can set up in Etsy how to say thank you so that your customer gets that little thank you note. I always like to shoot them an extra message right after they order. I actually have a Google Doc where I have responses for people who place an order, responses for people whose order has shipped. I have those ready to go so I can copy them over and then tailor them to the person I'm talking to, and send them an individual message as a thank you, because I really do appreciate the customers who shop with me and I want them to know that they're very much appreciated. That's one idea of how to add an even more personal note to Etsy. Then of course, there are some fees that Etsy takes out of every purchase that happens, not only the listing fee, which is $0.20, but they also take a percentage if a credit card is used, and then they take a percentage because they are a business too. That does take out of your profit margin, which is something to consider when you're setting your prices on gooten. Now, let's talk about Shopify, Shopify is another option that speaks directly to gooten, and this is something I've just recently started exploring this year. I've been using Etsy up until this point. Now with Shopify, a few of the pros are reasons I actually added it in, but I didn't quit Etsy, I'm doing both. As I mentioned, I also started doing Society6. I think as an artist, it's great to get on multiple platforms and to share your work in multiple ways because you never know who you can reach and who is using which platform. However, if you're just starting out, I highly recommend sticking with Etsy and making the most of that until you feel comfortable stepping into your own shop insight. Some of the reasons I added Shopify into the places I sell, is that, there is that opportunity for customization. I'll show you that right here. There's an opportunity for customization, so you can actually create a really branded experience. This is my shop right now, so you can add a story, you can add photos of your work. You can see here that I have a specific summer collection, you can just really make it the way that you would like it, then just design it in a way that feels really good to your business and your art. Talk about the story of your arts and then you can go into different tabs and search all the products. It just gives a more customized experience, which can be really nice if you're looking to grow your business. Then, also customer support again is really great, they're incredibly helpful. I've had no issues and they always respond and give me solutions to what I'm looking for. It is a bit more complex, which is both good and tricky. But it gives those opportunities to add in specific apps, it gives opportunities to add in, like I said, more customization and get more levels into your shop than might be possible in Etsy store. There's an opportunity to create automated emails that are branded, which is really incredible, so that when people place an order, when they leave something in their cart, when they have their order shipped to them, all of those can create or can receive a branded email from you that you can go in and customize. Again, it's linked to gooten, so everything's automated. Now, some cons are that there is a monthly fees, so I pay $31.45 each month. Then from there, that's the basic fee, it goes up. There's two more tiers, but that's where I am for the moment and that feels good. But that is much more than $0.20 per listing, so that's something to consider in your business and your art. Alternatively, it's difficult to be found on Etsy because there's so many people, but it can be difficult to be found on your own site because if people don't know that's where they need to go, then they might not find you. If they don't know that you exist, they don't know about your art, and they might not be searching for the name of your business, and they might just be searching on Etsy or Society6. That's why I think it's really valuable to have your artwork and your products and multiple places, so there are multiple avenues for people to contact you and get to know you and your work. The shipping cost is tricky. We're going to go over this, but something with the Shopify and gooten partnership. With gooten shipping speaking to Shopify, sometimes it doesn't translate, and it can be a risk to actually make a negative on products that sell. I'm going to walk you through that because that was a lesson I learned very quickly when I was selling products, and we'll talk about how to side skirt that issue. Then Shopify also does take its own fees, so anywhere you go, the business will likely take a percentage, and that is just part of selling your work online. Those are a few of the overviews and you can think about which shop best suits your needs at this moment in your creative career and your creative life. But I use both currently and have enjoyed learning about both and think gets good at this moment in my own life and my experience to operate them at the same time.
11. Listings & Shipping: Etsy: All right, so now we're in the Etsy shop because I want to talk to you about once your listings pushed through, how to edit them, update them once you're actually in your shop store front. I'm in the back-end in my listings under my shop manager, and you can see that both the tomato greeting card and the tomato apron got pushed through to Etsy from Gooten, which is awesome. Let's start by looking at the tomato greeting card. There's the opportunity to add a whole lot more photos here, which is where those lifestyle shots come in. It's really good if you can order a sample and then take more photos of it in use or in context, then that can be really great to give your customers an idea of how they might use it in their own lives. That's where I would add that in. But you see that the name populated, and then about this listing, I did finish product, made to order. Then you can choose primary and secondary colors. So you can come in and add these details, but the description got populated, and then I'm going to say that Gooten helped because they are production partner. I want my customers to know that I had assistance with this product. I always add that. Section, I'm going put this in greeting cards. If I can add more tags, there's eight left, I can put materials looking back at what was involved from Gooten's page about the cards, and then I have taxes setup. You can enter the quantity. This just basically means it's unlimited because it is made to order. But all of this was populated, the size, the SKU, the price, all of that, and then shipping. Let's talk about shipping for a minute, because this can be tricky with product, especially when you're not weighing them at home and then if people were to order multiple products, it can be tricky. You look here, it populated Gooten shipping template 4.99 domestic. But when we look back at the information on the cards on Gooten site, it says 3.49. For some reason this happens where it doesn't automatically populate with the correct shipping amount, so you would want to go in and either create a new template or this one I have right here, 3.49, I would select that. Now Etsy lets me know that 3.49, it's too much because this is a single card. What I would usually do is actually sell these as packs instead of just one card. It'd be a pack of cards or I might wrap some of that shipping costs into the cost of the product so that this is actually lower. Sometimes there are products where I just take the hit on some other shipping. It's really a matter of choice for you and a matter of experimentation to find what works best and it always depends on which product you're talking about. That is an example there, and then you can see the preview here, and there you go. I'm going to go back because I want to show you another listing where shipping was handled differently. I'm going to discard these changes. In my active listings with the luggage, I wrapped the shipping completely into the price of the product so that the free shipping is advertised to customers because if it's just straight up shipping, it was like $13. I just wrapped that into the total price of $69.95 and $89.95, and that means that both of these have free shipping. That's another way to do it. That's another way to think about it if you don't want those high shipping prices on there. Let's look at the shipping with the tomato apron. So again, I would add lifestyle photos, this actually in use, and I would come down here and add in all of these details and also select Gooten as my production partner. Select kitchen. Price is $22, so $4.99 is what it's listed as again. Let's go back here and find out. You can either go to Gooten's website and go straight to the products like we've been doing, which would be right here. Or you can go to their shipping calculator. I'm going to remove the card, I'm going to add a SKU. The way you do this is, I usually just Google Gooten shipping calculator and it comes up and then I search apron, and then that'll give me the products. I select it and click Continue with one SKU. You can do this either way, but this is estimating for New Mexico as the destination. Standard is $4.99, so that one actually works here, $4.99 standard, so that one's good to go.
12. Listings & Shipping: Shopify: I'm in the back-end of Shopify and we're going to look at listings and shipping here just like we did with Etsy. You can see already this is a bit more to take in at the moment, but this is just an overview of the back-end of the dashboard. You can see right here Gooten, print on demand created a new product, tomato greeting card, tomato apron, that got pushed through. These are recent orders and then nobody is live right now. You can see all these things. But let's hop over to Products and then Find. These are all the products I have in my shop right now, but let's find that tomato card. Here it is, I am going to click this. You have the title, you have the description, and then you have down here, all the information got populated and even here is the search engine listing preview. If somebody found this on Google, they would see this, and you can come in and edit that directly right there. Then here, product type, vendor, so all of that. Collections, let's see if this shows up sometimes, there we go. You could add that there, and great. But then here is where you would add images. Again, that's where these lifestyle images would come in at. Images here could upload them from your computer, and that would just give a more robust listing. Then if we go to online store, there's this I and you can click "Preview", and let's go straight to greeting cards and see if it populated, there it is. It makes it really streamlined to get right into your shop. What's nice about the stock photos from Gooten is that when they're all showed together, it's really consistent and has that white background. People are just looking at the imagery and the product. Once they click into the listing, they could see more lifestyle shots. Let's look at shipping with Shopify. This one was a little trickier, for example, when I released my summer line, I had an order of the luggage and one of the pencil purchase. What happened was that my shipping on Shopify was set up so that it was like 3.99 standard and because weights from the products and Gooten, those don't push through. There was no talk about how much those would weigh and how much shipping would be accordingly. So because there was no weights attached to the products, the shipping was way low and I ended up making, after fees and after that shipping error, about $2 on the whole order, so lesson learned, and I want to teach that to you right now so that you don't run into that same problem. There are a couple approaches to this. Because I'm on the basic Shopify plan, there's not a lot of customization with shipping with the products, which is quite unfortunate. But there are a few options to maneuver this. You see all of these options because we're working with Gooten, we're going to focus on these areas, those are shipping zones here. Right now I have this in tiers, so I'm going to go here to Edit and here is where you can choose. You can select how you want to go about this. I ended up going about this by price tiers. You could also do it by weight, you could look at the weight of each product and what I ended up doing was weighing the products that I ordered once I had them in person. But then it was a lot of complication around making that work. Instead, I decided to use a price tier. You can see here that if the order is between $0 and $10, the shipping amount is 2.99 and then 2.99 for 10-20, but 7.99 for 20-30 and it goes up. I might alter these as I see orders continue to come in and see how that's balancing out. But this did solve the issue because when I got further orders, it wasn't as high of a cut because there was this buffer. Now, something to think about when you're calculating this is imagining what products your customer is going to buy. If they're buying that single card, then that would be under $10, that would be the 2.99 range, which might be high for them. You might adjust that if you don't feel that's appropriate. If it's in the 10-20 range, I sold the bandana for 12, that's again 2.99 based on the fact that the bandana ships for 2.99 from Gooten, so that would be covered. Now, if somebody orders two products and they're both in this 10-20 range, then that would probably be more than 2.99 shipping. It is a puzzle, sometimes you'll get a hit of the shipping costs because sometimes with the different products on Gooten, they're being shipped from different spaces and that means that they're different shipping costs. That's another drawback that is frustrating, that they're not all shipping from the same place and so it is a bit of a puzzle to make that work. But I've found that this tiered system, which I'll leave up for you for a minute to take a look at, has worked well so far. When it overcharges somebody on shipping, I refund them those couple of dollars and then when it under-charges, then I take the cut and I adjust as I need to as I go. Again, it's a puzzle with shipping with this print on demand. If you have any suggestions or if you've found anything to work differently, I'm always open to talking about it. This is the area that I've had the most problem-solving come into play. That's a little look at how to handle this on Shopify.
13. Say Thanks!: Let's chat about how to add that personalization. Because, again, with print on demand, you can't add that handwritten note into the box that goes out to your customer, but you can add a really nice thank you. There are a couple automated ways to do that, and then I'll tell you what else I do specifically with Etsy. On the Etsy page, to create an automated thank you, you go to Settings and then Info & Appearance. Down here, there's Shop Announcement, but there's also message to buyers of physical items, message to buyers for digital items. I just have a really simple message that will automatically send to them when they purchase from my shop which says, "Hey, thank you for supporting working artists and the beauty of fresh food. Enjoy your prints." You can add that in there and they'll automatically get that. But what I do as well is I directly message them with a personalized thank you for the specific product that they're buying. As I mentioned, I have a Google Doc where I have the template for each of those Thank you's. I have a thank you for the order, and I have a shipping notification that says thank you again and asks for feedback on the shop page. I have those templates and then I customize them with the person's name and the specific product, and I message those to them directly through Etsy, through these conversations right here. That's really nice just to add that personal touch. It's nice as a customer to be seen and valued, and it's nice as an artist to be able to share your appreciation. With the Shopify settings, you can customize the automated e-mails, and there's a lot more e-mails with Shopify to update your customer every step along the way, which is actually quite nice. Down here is Settings, and then you can go to Notifications. These are the customers notification. You can see there's a lot, they're not going to get all of these with every order. It depends on which actions are taken. Order confirmation, that's when they actually place the order. If they cancel their order or refunds, you can see, or if they abandon something in their cart. All of those get e-mailed automatically. Shipping gets e-mailed when something's fulfilled, when it's shipped, when it's delivered. Customer's really in the know about what is happening with the product that they've ordered. Which is great when you're purchasing from a business you want to know that you're being taken care of. A way to customize this is to click on the e-mail that you want to edit. Then you can see it'll auto populate, I don't mess with this because that's auto population of what they ordered and auto populate in there. Thank you, your order is confirmed. Thank you for your purchase. It'll say their personal name. Then in here is the little description. This is where I went in and edited my own content, so it doesn't sound just too robotic. Hi, customer-first_name, that'll populate. Thanks so much for your order. Everything is currently in production. I'll notify you when it has been sent. Enjoy your product. Best, Liz. Then all of this information is showing them what they actually ordered. Let's save that. Go back to Notifications, and let's go to this button "Customize". You'll see a preview. "Hi John. Thanks so much for your order. Everything is currently in production." Then you can view your order or visit the store. Then here it tells, this is an example about what he bought. That's really great. Then it shows where it's shipping, where it's billed, what he paid with. Really thorough, which is really nice. That's a way to make that a little more custom for your customers when they shop through your personal Shopify site, if that is what you're using.
14. Track Your Orders: Now that you have your products created, the orders are going to come flying in, and you're going to want to track these orders and make sure that everything is going according to plan and running smoothly. In Etsy, you can go over to your Shop Manager on the left-hand side, click Orders & Shipping, nothing's in queue right now, you can see Completed. But if there were, then I would have a notification that, let's say, somebody ordered the greeting card, and so I would want to make sure that that was speaking to Gooten directly. On Gooten's website, over here on the left, you can click Orders, and you can see the item that's ordered, the person who ordered it, and the amount that it costs. Then once it's shipped, you can actually go over here and track it and give your customer that tracking number if you'd like. But this is a really good way to make sure that everything that's ordered is speaking directly to your Gooten company, that print on demand, so that it's processing correctly. Similarly, here with Shopify, orders is over on the left-hand side and you can see the orders that came in and that it was paid and fulfilled, gets marked off once Gooten ships it and it's moving on towards your customer. But again, it's smart to just make sure that that's speaking directly over. Sometimes, there might be a hiccup and it's important to catch that right away so that there's no delay in your customer getting the item. That is a look at how to keep track of your orders. Then now that you know how to create one product, you can create many and you can start to add those into your listings on Etsy or Shopify and really build out that beautiful shop and get your artwork out into the world.
15. Time to Create!: All right. There you have it, all about print on demand. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you're taking away many skills that you can use to be a thriving, sustainable artist. Go ahead and upload your chosen product here to the class so that we can cheer you on, give you feedback, and support you as you get your creativity out there. Have a great day. Check back here for future classes from me, Liz, at Prints & Plants.
Liz Brindley, Illustrator & Creative Biz Coach
