Start an Online T-Shirt Business at Zero Cost

1. Class Introduction & Assignment: Hello. My name is Sir Douglas. Fresh in this course, we're going to look at a unique way that we can launch a T shirt brand without ordering any inventory or printing any shirts. Ourself. I will show you how to launch a line of T shirts without any operating costs or overhead expenses. To do this, we're gonna use a completely online business model using merchant vendor sites. These sites accept designs from designers all around the world. What they do is create digital image previews of what your design would look like on a product. Then, whenever somebody orders it, they print the design on the product, ship it out and you get a portion of the sales. We'll look at temple brandy, a method to collect all of your ideas about your brand and keep him in a document that you could refer to later. Well, look at what goes into a great brand name, as well as creating a logo that is simple, beautiful and represents our brand. We'll also look at techniques to keep our ideas and information organized throughout this journey will go over free and premium software to create our art as well as where to find free resource is like fonts and vector graphics. We'll talk about creating and saving out our images in the right format, as well as converting the size and type of the image to use on different merchant vendor sites. We will create a new Google and PayPal account to keep our business separate from our personal endeavors. We will look at the various merchant vendor sites, what products they allow us to sell on, as well as the differences and similarities between them. We will learn how to upload our art quickly and efficiently. Various sites using prepared descriptions and tags once we have our products will go over promoting them on different social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, instagram when you low Pinterest and Mawr. Finally, we'll talk about bringing everything together to create lasting success. I look forward to seeing what you can create when you apply your artistic skill towards intelligent products, shops and marketing techniques. I hope that this course empowers you to be a better person through self expression. Don't forget to have fun when you're creating your T shirt brand, and if you get stuck or have any questions, feel free to ask for your class project. Follow along with me as we take your idea and turn it into a brand will create some designs for your brand and then open up at least one storefront from the vendor sites that we talk about. Once your stores air looking good, take a screenshot and post it in the project section. I look forward to seeing what you come up with, and we'll give you feedback as to what I think you can do to improve your sales and make your overall brand even better. 2. Taking This Course: This course is designed to guide your process of creating a T shirt brand. Each video corresponds to an action you can take on your road to becoming a successful T shirt designer. One way to complete this course is to simply watch each video in order and complete each action for that video actions Air listed in the description for each lesson. Another option is to watch all the videos at one time, then go back and complete each action while re watching the video. Another great idea is to read all the lesson descriptions before actually watching any of the videos. This way you'll know exactly what actions you'll need to take along the way to be successful. This will help you become familiar with what we'll be doing throughout the course and prepare your brain for learning. Whatever you decide to dio, remember to enjoy yourself happy learning 3. Coming Up With a Concept: our guys. Now, before we launch our T shirt company, we need to come up with a concept of what our company is and to figure this out, you've really gotta find out within you what you want to design, but also taking a consideration what other people are doing, what's been successful. Things like this will help guide your decision. So, um, it's important to decide how your business will be different from similar T shirt businesses on the Internet. The market is currently saturated with shirts as well a designers. Some of the designers designed shirts about many completely different things. Similarly, cover one topic, and some designers designed shirts that reflect current trends. Popular topics such a sayings, music lyrics and everything in pop culture often end up on T shirts. Other designers, they just make what they're interested in. There's many different T shirts and designers out there, so just take some time to take a look at Ah, what you can find on the Internet. Uh, here's some gamer shirts of nerdy shirt's funny shirts. Shirts about animals, I think was supposed to be about and with some of them are bro shirts. This is Ah, big company, actually, that they just used Helvetica and put names on shirts. I guess that works, um, or artsy shirts. This is Ah, Guy Mike Kubu on Red Bubble Society six again more arty type shirts and then screamed just some girlie type shirts about drinking wine and stuff like that. The most successful T shirt designers carve out their own niche that they can feel better than any other designer or company on the Web. When deciding what niche you want a target. Forget about the money picking nits that you're familiar with passionate about. We'll be able to come up with plenty of material for whatever you decide to make a company about. You should already have plenty of knowledge. Don't make it something that you think you're interested in, but you don't really know anything about pick. You know what? What you've been into your whole life, you know, if it's a specific genre of music, you know some television shows that you really like the ideas and type of comedy on things like that. So what you know and love what your concept is. This will ensure that you have fun with your T shirt business, and it doesn't turn into actual work 4. Deciding on a Name: It may seem weird that we've waited this long to talk about her name, but hear me out. You may have had an idea for a name already, but there's a few things to consider. Look back at the brand statements that we wrote and think about. If your brand name is aligned with what that you hope to achieve and that's you communicated with these brand statements, the shorter and more emotionally evoking your brand name is the better it should be simple yet complete, like our logo. You may want to stay away from using something like your last name or first name as a brand name, as this doesn't tell consumers anything about your brand. Unless you have a really, really cool name, then forget the rules. Just go with it before you wholeheartedly decide upon a name, do some research and find out if anyone's already using it. Do a search on the US Trademarks and Patents website, as well as some Googling to see if anyone is using the name you've decided on. Also be sure it's not similar to any other brand names, as this may cause confusion for consumers. So here I've got the United States Patent and Trademark Office website up. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna search trademarks to see if anybody's trading under this name already. So we're gonna go to trademarks searching trademarks and then if we scroll down, we'll see something called the Trademark Elektronik Search system or tests. So all we gotta do is click this link and then were given a couple more options. We're just going to search for words. So if we serve something like Apple, we'll see we have a bunch of things registered with the apple name, like the Apple Watch Horse Apples, crabby Apple Cider Company. These are things that we cannot use for our name of our company. If you wanted to make a T shirt company called Apple Head tough luck. It's already been taken. But you'll find that there's still plenty of names available now. Even if you're clear with the trademark Elektronik search system, that doesn't mean that nobody's using this particular word to do business or your Siris of words that is your name. So don't forget to Google and just make sure that there's nothing else out there with same name. Another consideration for your brand name is Can you get a good domain if you don't plan on having your own website? This may not be an issue, but it's always nice to own a domain name, even if you only use it as a redirect toe. One your shops If someone else owns the domain verbatim of what you're considering, this may mean a business has that name or someone is just squatting the no mean to sell later. Either way, it's not a good sign. Now let's say we want to create a T shirt company that shows off really weird fonts, so we want to call our company Weird fonts. We would wanna first Google Weird Fonds, and we'll see that nothing really shows up that makes us think that, Hey, somebody's doing business under the name Weird fun. So this is good. The next thing we got to Dio is typing weird fonts dot com. We'll see that when we go to weird fonts dot com. We get this kind of crappy looking website. This usually means that somebody is squatting. The domain squatting means that you buy it and you hold onto it in hopes that somebody is going to buy it later and you'll see. That's exactly what's going on here. It says by this domain now weird fonts dot com $749. That's a lot of money for a website that we could have got for 10 bucks something like that . So we're just gonna change it a little bit and make it weird bit fonts, weird bit fonts dot com and you'll see something very different comes up we get. We cannot find the server at weird bit fonts dot com. That's a very good thing. That means that there's no server out there on the Internet that's serving the domain name . Weird bit fonts dot com, which means you could buy that domain e. Now, if you're unsure whether or not you've reached the right page like you have a different browser or something like that, look at the URL. If it is www one dot dealing search dot com, you have reached a buyable domain name. You can go toe literally any registration service on the Internet and register this domain name. Now that we've done some research into our name, we can be confident in moving forward with the rest of our project. 5. Creating Your Logo: Let's talk briefly about your logo there. Plenty of great free resource is to learn more about logo design, so I'm just going to review the basics. For the purpose of this course, check the resource is for plenty of links to more info about logo design. No matter what direction your logo takes, it should follow a few simple principles. Your logo should be simple yet complete. Look good in black and white and be recognizable at any scale. Your logo should grab attention of the viewer and illicit some sort of reaction within their brain. The logo should relate to your brand in some way, whether a clever letter form like McDonald's were descriptive animal like Mark Ecko. Finally, your logo should be easy to remember. Memorability comes naturally when you use a logo that follows all of the other guidelines. The easiest way to create your logo is to simply pick out the font that you like and type out your brand name. This works best for short names. This technique can be used as a substitute or together with assemble. If you do decide to create a symbol as a logo, it may be a good idea to incorporate a text version of the brand in the font that you like . Many brands have this lettering and symbol combination as their logo. By having both, you can always use just a symbol or just the lettering when that's all you need. When designing, try to look at the fundamental meaning of even simple shapes and symbols in your logo. For example, a triangle can indicate change. A square can indicate stability, and a circle can show your unified or global perspective. Remember, symbology is a suitor. Science and different cultures and individuals are gonna react differently. Make sure your logo at the very least invokes some feeling. Your logo should be understandable or readable at any size, so avoid thin lines are overly complex designs. It also must look good in just black and white, even if it's a color logo. This will allow it to be printed in one color and indicates the figure and ground relationship remains readable without any color. Whatever you decide to dio, make sure that your logo is in vector format. Vectors are scalable and will not lose definition at any size. Make your vector logo accessible in your design workflow. Some brands choose to display their logo prominently on every piece or every T shirt, while others leave it off completely. In any case, having it nearby is a good idea. Keep the file handy or incorporated into an illustrator template, as we talk about in the lesson on style guides. Most importantly, be proud of your logo. So here I have brands of the world dot com, which just has a bunch of logos on it. And let's talk about what are some good and some bad logos that we see. This is terrible. I can't read that at all without really to savoring and and seeing what it actually says. And then I can interpret it. Bad logo. This is a good logo. It's got a simple symbol, and it would look good in black and white. It would be understandable if this was a Black cross, not green, and it's got the, ah, the name of the company incorporated into it. This is just terrible. I don't know what the heck they're going for their, but right beside that we see a beautiful logo. New balance. We see the movement inherent in the N B symbol as well as the simple text, blow it in just something like Helvetica ish font. Another logo that I really like is Jersey Mike's subs. And it's because it's sort of reminiscent of the old signs, which explains the brand a lot because it since 1956 these are the signs that were popular in the fifties. Also, if we were to make the red and the blue just black, you could still read this design. Finally, let's talk about this. Pokey is dot com logo. Now you might think that this is a good logo, and it's got some elements of a great logo in it. But there's also some issues. You see this outline of black and gray. Uh, it's OK, but it would need another version where it was just one solid color. So it's not so complex because at a very small scale, these lines will sort of blend together and be hard to read. Also, this is a Grady in which is not really a good idea to use in your logo again. This could be fixed by having another version where just the outline of the coin and the outline of the or star that the whole shadow of the kangaroo are prominently shown in one color. So if we fix that, this would look good in one color, and it would satisfy the logo needs. Another bad logo is the TMT, the money team. You see this TMP is such a thin outline that I can barely see it even at this size. So one thing they could do is change us from an outline toe a solid, and it would be a great logo. Take some time to just look at different logo's. Apply the principles that we've talked about here and just see what works for you. See what you like. You'll find some great logos on some unknown products and some pretty crappy ones on some pretty big names. Apply these principles that we've talked about to see whether or not a logo is really that good. But remember, it's all subjective. These rules can be sort of bent and modified to fit a unique situation. Remember, your logo needs to be simple yet complete look good and black and white and be recognizable at any scale. It should grab attention of the viewer and the listed some sort of reaction within their brain. It should relate to your brand. And last of all, it should be memorable. But the last point should come from everything else working together. Good luck. And don't forget love your logo. 6. Building Your Brand With Temple Branding: temple branding before we have a business. We need a plan. Any business personal. Tell you to come up with the business plan before you start a business. A business plan is a comprehensive document taking into account all possibilities and projections for a specific period of time after starting a business. Well, this is a great idea. It doesn't really apply to our business as we won't be spending any money to create our products or to market our products in this course will be examining a shortcut method which will give us many of the benefits of a business plan without all the work. Feel free to research business plans and write one if you feel the need. Business plans are great for planning inflows and outflows of cash, but because we won't be spending any money, I think this is overkill, so I'm not gonna go over it. Instead, we will build a temple toe our brand which will help us know where we're going and why this temple will help us to get our goals collected and written down. We will use the document we create when it comes time to write product descriptions, tell people about our brand right storefront info and much, much more. Let's take a look at the four components that make up temple branding. Starting from the top, we have our vision statement or Bell Tower. Next, we have our mission statement or roof. Below that we have are pillars which hold everything up and underneath everything we have. Our foundation will go through each of these parts and detail to make sure our brand is successfully built. We're gonna work from the top down, so we always keep our vision in mind what we're on the subject. It's an important thing to keep in mind that your brand serves a specific purpose at a specific kind. It's a logical to think that we can build something that will outlive the universe that it sent lacking. An idea of the lifespan of your company will create this harmony with future goals. We must keep in mind the life cycle of our brand to know what actions to take at specific times. The actions that your brand takes are literally your brand itself. And that's why we have this document to make sure that our future actions align with our brand. All right. Let's start from the top with the vision or bell tower. What is your idealized vision of the world of your company of yourself running the company ? All of these things you need to keep in mind when you're writing your vision. Statement. After consulting Google, we come up with the following definition. A vision statement defines the optimal, desired future state. The mental picture of what an organization wants to achieve over time provides guidance and inspiration as to what an organization is focused on achieving in 5 10 or more years. That's a pretty good definition. Your vision statement is what guides all future actions and decision makings for your brand . You should have an inspiring visualization that keeps you on track. Hold on to this vision throughout the entire life cycle of your brand. Finally distill this vision into a short statement so that you can share it with others. Next we got the roof or mission statement. Your mission statement is a public document that declares to the world what you actually do . Your mission statement should say what you do, not how you do it. Google defines a mission statement as a formal summary of the aims or values of a company, organisation or individual. Come up with a specific statement that declares your mission but don't provide any plans, strategies or means to accomplish this mission. This mission will be held up by or fulfilled by your pillars and these air your strategies . Don't worry about any specific strategies when you're writing your mission statement. If you're having difficulty coming up with the mission statement, check out the nine characteristics of a mission statement in the resource is for this video . Next we have the pillars. What holds up our higher objectives, where our mission statement, our foundation and even our vision were kind of non specific. In general are pillars are specific strategies, attributes and tangible expressions of how we get things done. The's pillars build upon your foundation and allow for the final expression of your higher goals of your mission and your vision. We can see that are pillars are directly below the roof or mission statement. These pillars are the operational goals and strategies that make our mission come to life. Make sure you don't put general ideas as your pillars. These belong in the missions, just like you didn't put specific strategies in the mission. Because thes are the pillars, aim for 3 to 6 pillars that define what you do and how you do it. Each pillar should represent an attribute about your brand or product or actions and relationships that your brand or product has now, as I said before are pillars are at hold up our mission, which in turn holds up our vision. Whatever is most important to the fulfillment of your highest goals will make the best pillars. Having these strategies written down would help you greatly and future planning and decision making. Finally, we're at the bottom, the foundation. In the analogy of a temple. Your brand must be built upon a strong foundation, and this foundation must be so important that if it were to crumble, the entire temple and brand would fall down. That's how important the foundation is. Your foundation can be a word or short phrase or a series of words or short phrases. Being generic is okay. As long as it aligns with your pillars, your mission and your vision. It will define not only what direction your brand takes, but what is inside and outside the scope of your brand, and that's it. That's the four elements of temple branding. What you have these written down and stored you could always refer back to them. You can modify them if need be. But most importantly, you have a base from which to start. Whenever you write about your brand, you write any copy you're going to need to take it from somewhere. You can't just make up a new thing. Every time you upload a product, make up a new description that doesn't work. You need to write a unified description that will express your brand and not just for products, but for each of your sales pages, your personal designer pages, countless number of other things. So I hope that you take the time to make your temple something toe worship. 7. Temple Branding SDF Example: I knew that that last video on temple branding was a lot to take in. So let's step back and take a look at one example of the documents that I came up with using this method. Now, these documents are for my personal brand, Sir Douglas Fresh and I wanted to do this to sort of show you the wordage that goes into this is well as how everything aligns once you've done it sort of correctly. And before I start, you know, this isn't the perfect example of this, but it will get you going on the right foot. So first we have our vision, which is an enlightened world, short, sweet, and to the point, I put a little explanation of that because it can really be interpreted a lot of ways. So the explanation is a world where every person will achieve ah form of enlightenment in this lifetime. Next we have the mission. Our mission is to spread teachings that explain the universe. These teachings are universal expressions that progress and expand the consciousness of the individual. Our goal is enlightenment and reincarnation for all who choose to receive. You can see how this last line. Our goal is enlightenment is in line with the vision, statement and enlightened world and will also be propagated down to the pillars and foundation. So for the pillars, I put the general like headings, if you would, if you want to call him that of the pillars and then specific strategies and contents of the brand that will go into making this riel And a lot of these are were said in the mission statement. So teachings that explained the universe that's promoting knowledge of universal truths as well as related to art representing the universe. So, um, underneath are representing universe. We have fractal designs, pure sounds underneath, promoting knowledge of the universe. We have sacred geometry, nature of Adam's origin of the Big Bang. Under unity, we have providing platforms for the communications of ideas, promotion of the ideas of equality and collaboration, and finally under giving. We have free teachings and resource is free art through digital files and encouraging others to donate their works to the public domain. Finally, we have the foundation, which is what holds everything together, and this is sort of like your moral compass, so to speak. So our foundation is love and universal oneness. And if you take a look at the vision, you'll see that and enlighten World is really what comes out of love and universal oneness . So by that quick test of does our vision and foundation lineup, we see that we did a pretty good job of, ah, making this temple something that will stand the test of time. So, uh, whenever you're doing your own temple branding, be sure to think about this. How everything lines up. Make sure that every single step, you know, I know there's only four, so it's not that hard, but make sure they all line up and they're all our iterating, the same thing in their own unique way. You have your morals, your strategies, what you do and your final expression. If everything goes completely perfect with your brand, I hope that this hoped. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me 8. Staying Organized: before we go any further, let's make sure that we don't get lost by planning. Our journey will collect the information that we need in the future and make it easily accessible in text documents. When you're writing your brand statements coming up with slogans, tags writing, product descriptions, things like that, make sure to keep everything organized. The easiest way to do this This. Keep a Google document or were document with everything in the same place you could handwrite these, but it's much easier to keep a digital copy. This document will come in handy when it comes time to upload your designs or any other time you need to write about one of your designs or your brand itself. At the very least, you'll want a document with your product descriptions and tags as well as other meta information, one with your temple branding information and one with your ideas for future T shirts. In practice, you'll probably have a lot more documents in three, so keep them all in a folder. You can even use a program like Scrivener to keep everything in one place. I like scrivener because it keeps all my documents in one place, so I only have to save one specific thing, and it's got everything else in it. It also automatically saves, which is pretty cool. But Google documents Is Justus Good Oven option. You can put things in folders and even better than scrivener. It's available on all of your devices. Here you can see the 27 page script that I've written for this course. The great thing about Google documents is that I've got this on my phone. So with iPhones, I could just dictate this text and then go back on my computer and edit it. Make sure everything is gravy. Whatever text editor that you choose to use online or off, just make sure that you keep everything. These documents will save you so much time in the future. It's ridiculous, and it's very good to invest now in making sure you're not gonna be having headaches later in the game when you need to come up with this information 9. Style Guide: the point of a style guide is to keep a guide to refer to, so future work will remain consistent. It's a good idea to have some sort of a formal or an informal style guide. You may not think that you have enough material to make a style guide, but as soon as you start designing you will. The style guide holds important information like fonts, colors, logo variations, visual elements and the use of spacing. Most of this information can be stored in a single file. Traditionally, you might create a style guide in a word processor for desktop publishing applications. This method certainly works, but I suggest we keep things closer to where we design. By setting up an illustrator document that we will use as a template, we can create a working style guide holding all of our elements by keeping our logo, logo, variations, design elements, colors and fonts all in one place. We save ourselves time every single design we make. I actually teach a free course on you to me titled Setting Up Adobe Illustrator for maximum productivity that shows you how you can set up in illustrator template to use as your style guide. If you would like to learn more about traditional style guides or need to make one in the future, check out the resource is for this video. I can't stress how much having something like this will save you time in the future. Once you've got your style guy down, you're well on the way of becoming a great designer at little effort. I'm going to stop rambling here. That's all there is to it. 10. Collecting T Shirt Ideas: you will find yourself coming up with ideas for great T shirts at random times during the day, like conversating, with others riding in the car at work or literally anywhere else. Have a quick and convenient way to write down or draw out your T shirt ideas as soon as possible. So you know you won't forget. Keep a note pad or a digital device to record your ideas. If you have an iPhone or an android device, I recommend getting Google documents to store your ideas. You could even be super lazy like me and use the dictation function so you don't even have to type here. You can see I have a document in my Google documents with all my T shirt ideas on it. I wrote almost all these ideas down on my phone, and now they're accessible on my computer and any other place that I can have access to the Internet. This method works great if you're coming up with text based ideas. It is very easy to come up with 100 or more designs within a few weeks, and friends can be a great inspiration for your T shirts. People will always tell you there T shirt ideas, even if you're not interested. As soon as people know that you make T shirts, be prepared for a barrage of ideas. This isn't really the type of inspiration that I'm talking about. I'm talking about having genuine conversations with friends. Toe Uncover hidden gems for T shirt ideas in sayings and mannerisms. If your T shirt subject matter is more skilled art, where does not use text at all? You may want to sketch out your ideas or draw it in a smartphone or tablet drawing application. Text based designs are good to draw out as well. Having a sentence written on a page leaves a lot of room between the final design. In that sense, by laying out the presentation of the text with pen and paper, you'll save yourself work and headache. When it comes time to design as well as feel confident that the overall presentation of your design will work, However, you choose to save your design ideas, make sure that you have something portable that is with you at all times. This is why a cell phone is so easy and work so well. You will find that you have way more designs and you're able to produce in the time that you have devoted to design only role with the very best ideas, the ones that you think will be perceived moose favorably by your intended audience but still aligned with your brand personality and goals. Don't throw away ideas that don't make the cut. Keep them around for later inspiration. 11. Graphics Software: Looking at GIMP, Photoshop, and Illustrator: a serious consideration in your design process is how you're going to create your finished image. You'll need to be able to save high quality images at specified dimensions and type. There are many free and premium drawing applications available as long as you can save large files. Any graphics program will complete the purpose before we talk about Gimp, the free graphics powerhouse. Let's talk about the industry standards. Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshopped. Adobe Illustrator is a vector based graphic design program that means that you can create scalable vector graphics that do not lose definition with magnification. Photo Shop is primarily a raster graphics program, which will be the final output of most of our art. Adobe Illustrator and Photo Shop. Both have advantages for different types of designs. Manipulating pictures, paintings as well as creating digital paintings are Photoshopped strong suits. But when it comes to text creating cartoon characters, making logos or creating patterns, Adobe Illustrator is king Free Child of Adobe Software is available at the Adobe website. Although software like photo shop and illustrator are generally considered the standard, there are many other ways to create your artwork, from using computer programs to Web applications and mobile applications to modifying existing images. Think Instagram filters to scanning in drawn images to tracing images digitally on a drawing tablet. There are so many ways to create your artwork. Some of these ways require skills. Some require hardware, some require software, and some just require patience because many options are free. Don't feel like you have to buy any software to create great art. Probably the best free graphics software, in my opinion at least, is gimp Ah, free program that's available for Mac clinics and PC Gimp is a lot like fitter shop. Ah, lot like Photoshopped. Give has been around for a while, and it's plenty of support and tutorials available. However you create your art, you must save the art in a dimension and a format that could be put onto a T shirt or other product. Always keep this in mind when creating art, especially in the beginning, because it's one of those things you just don't think about. Check the resource is for a great list of free applications and free programs that you can use to create your art 12. Creating Digital Art For T-Shirts: depending on your art style, graphic design experience and availability of programs and hardware. Your experience designing may take on many different processes. General best practices, when working with digital images, include rendering the largest dimensions possible practical and accepted by the T shirt vendors. Because we will be rendering in PNG or JPEG format, we should keep a copy of the vector file whenever possible for later use. This will allow us to scale up in image without losing an equality if we need to later. Also be sure to save your photo shop illustrator gimp or whatever other program you use files. Save those files in a place that you won't use them because they may have things that you can't get back from the renders. Now, before we get started designing, I want to talk about finding elements for your T shirt designs. Luckily, there are an abundance of free resource is for inspiration as well as elements to use in your projects. Many of these resource is can be used absolutely free and without attribution. One of the best places to find free resource is is Wikimedia Commons. Wicked media provides high quality files as well as a description of what you can and cannot do with the image. Nearly everything uploaded on Wikimedia Commons is available for remix and use on commercial products. This means that you could take almost any image from wicked media resize it, put it in a shape posted on a shirt and keep all the profits. If anyone buys it legally. Now, be aware that this doesn't apply to every single image on Wikimedia Commons. So be sure you're actually reading the licensing information. We need to be sure that we have the rights to use the element in our designs where there may be legal ramifications. All the wicked media makes it easy to know what can and cannot be used. And for what purpose. Be wary when using an element that you didn't find on wicked media or you couldn't find the exact licensing information even if it says free or free download. There are a lot of websites out there that offer a free download but do not really have the ability to do that because they didn't create the work in the first place. The same legal issues apply with elements as well as fonts, so be sure you're using commercial free fonts, images, symbols, patterns and brushes in all of your work. Of course, you can purchase the rights to premium design elements and fonts if you want to use those. But free resource is are plentiful and really, there's no need to. Now let's take a quick look at Wikimedia Commons. Probably one of the best things is the search bar. And in addition to searching for what image we want, we can also tell it what type. So if I want an SPG file, which stands for a scalable vector graphic, I can just type in, um, whatever I want. It's a tree SPG, and it will show me matches that have boast tree and SPG in the name. Now, this isn't exactly what I want this one actual tree. So maybe I could try Cypress Tree. I'm not sure if anything will come up. Okay, I'm not getting any trees, but I am getting some other cool s p G's now just to illustrate the point about licensing, Let's go back to this tree right here. If you go down here, you can see the licensing available. So here you'll see that the work is in the public domain, waving all of the original owner's rights to the work. Under copyright law, this means that you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. That's what I'm talking about, guys, that is power. That is great. Amazing resource is at your fingertips that you don't have to pay for. You don't have to do anything special. If you want, you can give attribution but you're not required. So that's something really, really cool. And I encourage you to use Wikimedia Commons in your future work. Now. Another big consideration is where can we get free fonts? This is my favorite website for finding free fonts, and there's a very good reason for that. If I search for striding bats, I get this display of all relevant fonts. Now the reason that I like fawn space is because of this filter right here you can click this little button and only show commercial use fonts. Now you may still have to attribute the author of the font, the creator, but you can use these for free in your designs. Now look at all these cool design elements that are just given to us for free. So love romance. If you need a heart, there is a free commercial use friendly heart that you can use in your projects. Never worry about finding elements. If you're willing to look, you can find it for free. Now, before you get all giddy, it's important toe only Pick out fonts that encourage the viewer to perceive positive qualities about your brand. They're tens of thousands of free fonts, many of them free for commercial use. But just because a font is free for commercial use and looks good doesn't mean it's appropriate for your T shirt label or your project. Try to pick a font that embodies the qualities of your brand. Maybe if you're sort of, ah heavy metal type shirt designer, you'd want font with a bunch of crazy elements and, uh, not straight lines or anything like that. Whereas if you're making sort of ah girlie type shirt line, you'd want to use something like cursive. Picking out fonts can be a time consuming process. Well, I really, really, really like fonts to that part, might be just me, but either way, be very careful when deciding which fonts to use in your designs. Websites like font space make it easy to make sure you are only choosing from commercial free fonts. Another great idea to find fonts is to simply google things like 2015 best commercial free fonts. But be careful with these lists because sometimes they have fonso aren't really commercial free. So be sure you're checking into the licensing before you use a font on 30 different T shirt designs. If you want some more sites to find great commercial free fonts, check the resource is for this video. So now that we have an idea about where we're going to get our elements and what we're going to do with our elements, what about actually bringing them into the program? Now I'm gonna go over illustrator photo shop and gimp as faras setting up your document. Basically, all you're gonna dio is file new and you're going to create a document the size that we talked about earlier. You may remember we talked about a 4000 pixel high, 3000 pixel wide image that is the best, in my opinion, for saving our T shirt designs. So let's just do that. Now we have an art board that we can create our design on, and when we save it, it will be the right size. Voter shop is very similar file new and then set up the size that you need. It's a good idea to keep the color mood in RGB color because when you're saving down to a PNG, if you start out in cm like a color, you're going to have to compress that information into RGB color. And you're losing some information when you do that. So if you just save RGB, you won't be losing any information. Also, you're going to want to keep it at 72 pixels per inch, although this doesn't really matter, because we're defining the width and height as pixels, not as inches again. This is our canvas. Once we make our art weaken, save it and it will be in the right size ready to go. Finally, we have illustrator Now Illustrator makes it even better to design shirts because you'll see I have a bunch of rectangles here instead of the just one I had in Photoshopped. These air called art boards and I can have as many of them as I can fit onto the workspace area. Another great thing about illustrator is I can keep Fonds in the document. Save it, open it up. So it off the load, all these fonts and this makes it super easy to just option drag which copies out the font that you want and then start your design here. Setting up one of these documents is very easy. I also teach an entire free course on setting up a template like this if you're interested . But real quick, let's go to file new now. It's already got my thing saved from the last time I did it. So I don't really need to change much. But you'll see here you have number of our boards that I have said to 12. I'll set it down to nine just to show you what I'm talking about. You also can set the way that these are arranged and this is has to do with numbering of the art boards as well as how they appear when you start the new document and where they appear on the workspace. I mean, so once you have these things set up, just hit okay, and you'll be given a brand new workspace with our boards. So whenever you design something, you just put it in here in any one of these art boards, and whatever our board is selected will be saved whenever you go to save. So I'm just gonna show you how quick and easy it is to make a design. So I've got this free font here called Bob, and I'm going to put it in a document. And what do I want to say? Well, let's have it say fun just because that's a simple thing to Dio. So, um, I'm gonna create outlines, and that's going to give me more control than I'm going. Teoh modify individual elements just to make a stupid little fund design. So last I'm going Teoh mess with this effort. Little bed rotated. Uh, okay, that's a really stupid design, but I want to show you how quickly you can turn something like this into a T shirt side. Now, if I use the align panel, I can make this in the very center of the our part. I'm going to go down to align toe art board real quick, and I'm simply going to align it this way and align it this way. Next I'm going to go to transform, and I'm going to make it as wide as I can without going over the boundaries. Now, you could put it up to 4000 pixels or I mean, 3000 pictures, which is as wide as the document is. But I like to use to 998 just because I kind of like that extra pixel padding and nobody could really tell the difference. So we're still Ah, we're a little bit centered. So if you would think about printing this on a T shirt, it's gonna be like on the stomach. But most T shirt designs, arm or upper chest, you know what I mean? So what we're gonna do is I'm just going to change the Y value, bring it down, and then bring it up nice and close to the top. Another way to do this is to set the reference point to the top here. And then I can just go to something like one pixel. If I wanted to be up against the top. Cool. So now we have a basic T shirt design that we've made using a commercial free font and like , two minutes of time. So shift option Command s to save, and then we can change. The options appear now, as I said multiple times before, we want to keep it in PNG, and I'll show you why J. Peg has this white background because it can't do transparency. So that is the case in point of why we use PNG cause nobody wants a big white block printed on their chest. That's just extra wasteful Inc and crappy design. So anyway, we're going to save it as the PNG 24 then hit safe. I'm not gonna do that because I'm not gonna actually so this design on a T shirt cause it's kind of silly anyway, So what's next? Now we have this vector file, so if you're designing an illustrator, you're gonna end up with a lot of these. It's a good idea just to scale them down and create a new document where you just keep all of your vectors in That way, you will only have one thing to back up, and you will always be able to take that vector into another document and make it whatever size you want without losing quality. It's that easy, folks. If you have any more specific questions about the design process, feel free to ask me. Unfortunately, I can't go into every single way that you can create a T shirt design because that would literally take months. But this is a very simple way that will get you up and started with your T shirt company. 13. Formatting and Saving Images: one thing that may not be apparent when you start making your T shirt designs is how to save the artwork so it'll be ready to upload. Adding to this confusion, different merchant vendor sites will require different dimensions. Our best bet is to settle on a single image type and dimension that work across. All of our different sites will be uploading to hint. It's 3000 by 4000 pixels. PNG Image The image type problem is easy. I recommend that you save all of your T shirt images as a PNG 24. No matter what type of program you used to create your designs, this option should be available. The advantage of P and G 24 format is the ability to have Alfa transparency in your designs . While PNG eight allows you to store transparency. You will not be ableto have a pixel that is partially transparent. If this seems a little technical, don't worry about it. Just know that PNG 24 is your best bet. J. Peg doesn't even allow you to store transparency at all, so most of our designs won't work in JPEG format. You shouldn't run into too many issues saving in a PNG instead of a J peg. Some websites only accept JP, particularly society. Six. You may also need a J peg if you're designing for sublimation products where the design is large and covers the entire product, so you wouldn't really need outfit transparency or any transparency there. If you do need a J peg later, you can always convert it. There are plenty of free online and offline image conversion tools. Apple computers have a built in automated program that is great for converting. Images between JPEG and PNG will look at automate er later. In this lesson, when deciding upon the dimensions of your image, we have to consider what websites we will be posting our designs to and what they require. Read Bubble requires images be at least 2400 by 3200 pixels. Screen dot com suggests that image size should be 2200 by 3400 pixels. You may notice that the aspect ratio of these two sizes is different. Screen suggests a taller filed in red bubble screened isn't 11 by 17 and red bubble is a three by four aspect ratio. Although screen has the option of a taller image. Images designed at the three by four will work fine. In fact, every site I've tried, including all the ones mentioned in this course, will accept or even require images in the three by four aspect ratio. Selling on certain products requires an even higher resolution image. For example, a queen sized duvet cover on red bubble requires an 11,000 by 11,000 pixel image. Well, this is a T shirt course, and we're not going to be designed and huge images like that. I just want you to know that if you want to branch out into these other products, you may have to create images that are a lot bigger. That's why, in other lessons in this course, I recommend that we save a vector copy of all of our artwork. That way, we can scale it up later to any size without losing quality. The disadvantage of working with extremely large image sizes is being limited by the ram and the processing power of your computer. Larger images also take up way more hard drive space. Luckily, the size that I recommend should be easy to design for on any decent computer So what size is that? I have found in my personal experience that 3000 pixels wide by 4000 pixels tall is the ideal image resolution. Vial sizes are not too large, and this image size will work on all of the merchant sites discussed in this course. I settled at this specific resolution because spread shirt doesn't let you have an image with a dimension longer than 4000 pixels. Also, it's the three by four aspect ratio that we talked about earlier. 3000 by 4000 pixels means we're designing a 12 megapixel image. This image will look great on T shirts. Now that we've talked about what size we want to make our image, let's take a look at converting as well as doing other image calculations on our already made designs. I have open automate er, a program that comes on all Apple computers by default. It's a really great program. It seems a little complicated at first, but it's really pretty simple. We're going to choose a new workflow you'll see over here. We have a bunch of different actions, and we drag these actions over here to build our workflow well. First of all, we're gonna wanna bring in the images that we're going to manipulate. So I'm going to take these two images, maybe three, and throw them in here. Okay, so now we've got the specified items thes air, the pictures that will be operating on. Now, if we go up to the search bar and we type an image, we'll see all of the things that are related to images. What we're going to be dealing with in our every day struggle of being a designer is things like crop images. Okay, now, before we go on, we get this pop a box saying that, Hey, you're going to mess up your original images unless you copy. Um, so that's something that you want to keep in mind. If you don't do this, you're going to be messing with your images that you have. And if you don't have another copy of them, this could be a bad thing. So we're gonna go ahead and add that so you'll see here that we can taken image, copy it to a specified folder, and I'm just going toe put a folder that I've got ready. You'll see now that we have, Ah, simple workflow going on. We have getting the images we have, copying them to the new folder and then cropping them to a different dimension. Cropping isn't the only thing that weaken Dio. If I remove this will see that we can also do things like scale the image, which is really useful, especially if you're creating something very big. But you do need a smaller size for a specific vendor that doesn't allow you toe upload a larger image than required. Most vendors actually will let you upload a larger image like red bubble screened pretty much everywhere else. But in case you run into that problem, you scale images. Lastly, I want to talk about something that's very important, and I mentioned earlier, and that is change type of images You can see when I drag this in there. It's a super simple menu. All it is is pick what you want the image to be. So if I run this right now, I will have these three images instead of PNG, which there and now in J. Paige format with the same resolution very powerful. Now you can also chain these for even greater results so I'm gonna go to scale images, pull it over, and I'm not gonna add a copy of this time because I've already copied it. But now I'm going to scale these images by 50%. You can also do it by a specific size. Now let's see what happens when I run this after a little bit of work are workflow is completed, so let's see what we've made. Now I've got this folder over here new renders, and this should have our new images in it. Now you'll see, before this particular image was 232 megabytes, that's a huge image. It's in 11,000 by 11,000 pixel image. So now over here with the J peg, the same thing is only 15 megabytes. And if we go to get info, you'll see that it's 5500 by 5500 which is half of the original resolution of the image. And instead of a PNG image, it's now a JPEG image. Using simple work. Flows like that will save you so much time. It's ridiculous. So get to know the automative program and get toe love it because it makes things so easy, and I really hope that it makes your workflow better 14. Keeping Designs Organized: When you begin to create your designs, you're going to come up with many, many files. It's important for you to keep your files organized as well as adopted naming convention, which will allow you to easily differentiate between multiple versions of the same design without actually opening up the image and looking at it. When you're saving your designs, try to save them all in a single folder or in just a few separate folders, a whole different collections of designs. Here I have a single folder in which I keep just about all of my T shirt designs in one place. I know that they're backed up on Google Drive, and I feel comfortable knowing if I lose a design. All I have to do is search forward in a search bar. Whether you have one folder or multiple folders, make sure that you keep it backed up. You can create a folder on Google Drive and save all your designs to that Google Drive folder. As I have done other cloud solutions like Dropbox work Justus Well, this will allow you to access your designs anywhere and will ensure that they're safe in the event of a hard drive failure or somebody steals your laptop if you spill apple juice on it, or whatever else could happen when naming your files do so in descriptive and segmented way . You'll find that win creating designs. You have multiple versions of the same thing with color. Variations were, with or without a logo, something like that. The best way to deal with this is to have two parts to every file name. The first part will give you the name of the design. The second part will give you which version of the design or other information about the design that you need to know without actually looking at the image. Differentiate the two parts of each file name by using a special character like brackets. I saved all of my designs in this simple, simple way. First I have the design name. Then I have in brackets version information, more info like colors, things like that, as well as whether or not I'm using a logo if I'm doing versions with and without a logo. So say I have ah design called the Power of Organization. Well, I would create a blacking version, a Whiting version as well as a black ink with white outline version. Here, you can see I've used brackets to differentiate between these three designs. Now, this is Justin example. Really? I do something like this. I use a shortened version. Be okay to mean black. And wh t l l to mean white outline. Soon you'll develop your own sort of shorthand way of letting yourself know what you just designed. Let's take a look at some of these designs in this folder, and I'll show you what I mean. Up here, I have two versions of five, which is just a symbol, and I have five dash white and find ash black. That's an old habit I got into it never really got out of just attaching W H t for all white images and be okay for black images. For the rest of these designs, I put pictures in them, so I used Part two in our naming convention to say which image is inside of the fi design. Looking down here, I have several different versions of my believe in your destiny live in love logo. I put different Galaxies and other pieces of my art within these outlines. I then put CV to mean circus version and white off to mean there's a white offset of these designs. Adopting a file naming convention will save you a lot of headache later. Often when uploading designs you'll be choosing from a list of file names not looking through the actual images. Using a naming convention will ensure you're putting the right image on the correct shirt and help you out in general. 15. Types of T-Shirt Printing: T shirt printing has been evolving for many, many years. Although the business model presented in this course does not require us to actually print or make any of our T shirts, it's a good idea to know how our shirts will be made. This will ensure we get the quality that we want and are designing our shirts correctly. We will talk about four major ways to get our design onto a T shirt. They are screen printing director, garment bringing, also known as digital printing, plot printing and dye sublimation. There are other ways to make a T shirt, but we will actually be able to sell shirts using the four techniques we're gonna talk about. The first, and probably most recognized is screen printed. Screen printing involves using a screen and a plastic plate with your design cut out of it . Incas then spread across the screen and sinks down through the cutout design. In the plastic plate. Screen printing is often said to have a higher quality than the next method directed garment printing. This is because with screen printing, we have the ability to choose what type of ink that we want. Assuming the printer stocks it. This gives us the ability to get her hands on very high quality inks, something that digital printing can't quite match. The major disadvantage of screen printing is the high cost of set up screen printing requires plates to be made for each color and for each color to be printed individually. This makes screen printing uneconomical for single shirt orders. Ironically, screen dot com doesn't even screen print designs. None of the merchant vendor sites we talk about due for single orders. The next method director Garment Printing, also known as Digital printing Prince of Design, directly to the fabric. The design is loaded on a computer instead of cut out of a plastic plate, so there's little set up costs per design. This makes selling a single shirt economical. When digital printing or direct to garment praying first came out, there's a lot of concern about the quality. Both of the ink and how well the printers could print. It is true. At first, digitally printed designs were subpar. Luckily, as the technology has grown and been accepted much better, digital printers have become standard with high quality inks and crisp printing. Director garment printing is not only easier for the manufacturer, but easier for the designer. Most of the vendors that we will be selling through use direct to garment printing because there isn't this set up costs like you have with screen printing. The biggest advantage of digital printing as a designer is the ability to use as many colors as we want, including Grady INTs and even semi transparent design elements. This is great for us as we're not limited artistically and can sell single designs to consumers at a reasonable price. The third method of printing is plot printing, including flex printing and flock printing. These methods adhere physical materials to the fabric because we're using a physical material. Vector images are usually required to get the cut needed In this type of printing plot, printing is similar to other transfer printing method, but with fabric or other material instead of ink. Plot printing is more commonly referred to as flock printing were flex printing, depending on what type of material is being transferred. When we're talking about flock printing, we're usually talking about a textured material and when we're talking about flex printing , we're usually talking about plastic. Whatever material is being transferred is bought as a stock rectangle and then cut into the design. Once cut, the unwanted bids are removed, often by hand, and the heat press is used to transfer the design to the fabric. Sometimes flocked printing can utilize a sticky sheet to hold a material like glitter. Flex printing can also use unique material like foil and glittery or glow in the dark plastic. The last method of T shirt printing, as well as many other fabrics, is sublimation printing sublimation, Printing Adheres Inc. With heat transfer in key transfer, involves printing and gone to a piece of special heat resistant plastic. This printed piece of plastic is placed face down on the T shirt, and heat is applied so the ink transfers to the fabric. Sublimation printing is used for all over print designs and is the best way to accomplish a design that completely covers a piece of clothing. Yoga pants and leggings are printed this way. The shirt I wore while filming this course was a sublimation printed shirt. After considering all of these methods, most shirts sold online today are printed director garment. The only reason for this is cost sublimation is becoming more popular for T shirt printing , but it's still an expensive option. As faras plot printing is concerned, Spread shirt is to go to. It's hard to find a merchant vendor that allows you to use flex and flock printing as they are labor intensive. Finally, screen printing is usually only used for big orders of a single design because of the high set up costs. I hope this lesson helped you wrap your head around how shirts are made, and I encourage you to learn more about these techniques as well as the other techniques used. 16. Marketing Research: Planning Ahead: Usually when a big company launches a product, they generate a lot of ideas and do a lot of research into who they think is going to buy this product, then use these ideas in this research to generate specific strategies for reaching this target market. The reason that they're doing all this work is they're investing a lot of money in marketing, not to mention they have to cover all the expenses of bringing a product to market. But don't worry, that's not us. Luckily, we won't be spending a dime on. Advertising will be using free tools like Social Media as well as intelligent product descriptions, product titles and tags to make sure designs get found on the Internet. Just because we're not spending this money doesn't mean we should completely ignore this research. Spending a little time to get to know your competitors, your consumers as well as the market in general is gonna benefit you in the long term. Describe who you imagine wants to wear your shirts. Once you've got this person in mind, think about other aspects of their life. You know what music do they listen to what kind of car they drive What kind of work do they do? What do they do for fun? But also think about where they go on the Internet, cause that's where we're primarily son our shirts and also what social media outlets through the use. For example, a lot of people use instagram. But maybe if you're targeting teachers for your shirts, instagram might not be the best place to go. And maybe Facebook, where the older generation has sort of adopted, would be your better bet. Also, take a look at the competition. What do they do it? What is their business model? What are their most popular designs? But most importantly, what is the personality that you pick up and take away from this brand just by looking at their shops or their website? Think about what elements gave you. This clue was that the colors was that the fonts they used wasn't the size of the design relative to the shirt. Was that the artistic nature? Whatever it is, keep that in mind whenever you go to develop your own sites and your own personality for your brand. Now, keep in mind that many T shirt businesses exist outside of the business model work talking about here. I'm talking about traditional, you know, screen pit print shops that print their own shirts, talking about brick and mortar stores, popular brands that you've seen. So take a look at these brands and look at what's made them successful and try to see how you can apply it on our business model. You know you don't need tohave a storefront display to make a product look good against a background. You know you can do that in photo shop, So just get some ideas of how you can take what has worked for big businesses in the past in many different outlets, all selling the same product and see how we can distill these ideas and make them work online with our shops that we have on vendor sites. Also what we're looking at designs. Take a look at popular shops on the sites that were going to be selling on like spread shirt, screen society, six Thread Lis, cafe, press, Zazzle and Red Bubble. Once you feel familiar with the overall environment that we're going to be selling and who's around us, then we are more confident in ourselves when it goes to bring in our ideas to market. So don't forget this step and think about it 17. Getting to Know Marketplace Vendors: There are a variety of T shirt website, so hope you bring your designs to market. It's important to know that not every marketplace operates on the same business model, and some popular stores that you've heard off like Big Cartel, etc. Etcetera will require you to stock inventory. We're gonna focus some marketplaces that will print your designs when they're sold, as opposed to investing an inventory, which costs money. Many of these companies sell more than just T shirts. Look at all the different products that Zazzle offers. Cafe Press also a huge amount of products. Some companies sell canvas art, leggings, blankets, postcards, stickers, wall clocks, calendars, bandannas and much, much mawr. Each of these marketplaces requires different image sizes for different products. However, some sizes can be used for multiple sites. We'll get into that in the design section of the course. The process to upload images is also slightly different from site to site. Some merchants require you to upload and keep designs on their site and then later post them on the products. While other sites do this in a single process. Each of these merchant sites has a reputation and established fan base and buyers. This does not necessarily relate to how well your products will be seen online. A very important part of marketing is how well each site optimizes each product page. For search engines like Google, as well as image search engines like Google Image, as well as helping your shirts be found from search engines, it's also important to consider how well uses searching for particular subject within the site will find your designs. Some sites are easier than others to get a new design seen by people searching for a particular time. Many sites put great emphasis on how much a particular design has already sold, making it hard to gain traction in a populated search term. This could be a good thing if you design gets a lot of sales and becomes one of the top designs for a particular term, but it can be hindering starting out. Some sites provide trending designs. Some pick what is displayed, and some allow users to look at all the new uploads for the entire site. Websites also have a varying level of community. Having a community of designers is a powerful tool to help you find success in your artwork , 18. Comparing Marketplace Vendors: before we start, I just know that these are my opinions. I want to get you guys more acquainted so that you could build your own opinions. These sites are always getting better or lagging behind, not to mention new sites pop up all the time. I choose thes specific merchant sites because I believe they're most likely for success using this business model. Don't limit yourself to these sites, but I recommend you at least try these seven and see what works for you. Zazzle and CafePress offer the widest range of different products you can sell your designs on. I kind of think of them like the Wal Mart and Kmart of, ah, selling T shirts there. The big businesses. I'm sure they make huge revenues, but, um, there's sort of a do everything. They're not really cultivating designers, and they're not really a place that designers like to, you know, show off. Hey, check out my cafe press profile, whereas you might say, Hey, check out my society six or my red bubble profile. So with that being said, they're both great sights of great quality prints. In the past, I've sort of thought Cafe press was a little bit more progressive. They do offer sublimation shirts, which is really cool if that's something that you're you're into designing. But recently, Zazzle, I got to say, has had really nice design upgrades, so people look out for them as well. You know, they're both really good reputable sites, even if they are kind of like the less trendy and less hipster place to shop and place for artists to hang out. In contrast, society six Red Bubble and Thread, Lis all have good reputations for being hip and trendy. These three sites also have great communities for their artists of these communities. Thread Lis is the most exclusive with the voting system that is required for threatens to even print your design. If your design is the winner, they will give you $2500 but will require you only sell that design through thread lis. This lump sum of money that threat list gives you as well as the requirement of exclusive rights licensing, are both unique and should guide your decision whether or not to use thread lis. If you decide to use thread lis, you'll need a great designed to get anywhere. It's gonna be hard toe win and get printed, even if the design is good unless you're known in the community. Read Bubble is the most welcoming community, harbouring many great photographers, painters and digital artists. Red Bubble is also the best, in my opinion, at getting views and sales for new artists. Another cool thing is that rebel cells your T shirt designs as stickers automatically, these stickers sell a lot better than you would expect. Personally, I've sold thousands of stickers without ever intending to sell a sticker at all. Society six is great for good looking art previews on products and is a refugee does tend to promote the few or to say like and does not do as good of a job promoting new and unknown artists. Society six is a well respected company by artists and has a lot of hip and trendy artists and users. Screens like the little brother or sister of T shirts sites, and I say that because of the subject matter, their designs screen seems to specialize in pop culture designs and caters to a younger audience. This isn't really screen's fault, but a result of their viral success. Screen was a very small company at first, but got popular when it's designs or designer's designs went viral on sites like When You low, giving them a foothold with younger users. Screen features popular designs on the site and has a strong social media presence, especially on Danilo. Ironically, screen does not screen print any of its shirts. They are direct printed to the fabric. Last but not least, we have spread shirt spread shirt is in a category all its own. They're the biggest and baddest site to open a T shirt shop. The reason I say this is because of the actual quality of the shirts and printing techniques offer flex printing Flock Printing as well is digital printing. You can get those raised textures like velvety, smooth and even glittery with flex and flock techniques. Spread shirt offers many shirt related products, including hoodies, tanks, the whole shebang. Spread shirt is a T shirt centered, business like screen, but also does sell things like bandannas, leggings as well as other merchandise like phone cases and coffee mugs. Spread shirt is one of the few sites that allows you to upload vector graphics. Vector graphics allow for the wider range of print techniques and ensure you get the most crisp looking designs on the finished product. Spread shirt offers a lot of customization for your shop as well. Whatever sites you use, make sure that you're not completely ignoring the other ones. Keep an open view on places to sell your shirts. And don't think that just because you sell in one site, you can't sell on another site unless you go through thread lis and they pick your design, in which case you have to just say, sell it a threat list. But with that one exception, I mean you can sell on Redbubble Cafe Press, Zazzle Society six all the same designs, and then you're multiplying your chance of selling a shirt by however many storefronts you have. So don't be afraid to try all of these sites. Get your stuff out there and see what works for you and what is worth continually investing your time toe upload to and once again remember, these are all. Adjust my opinions, make up your own opinions, see what works for you. Once you have a Google account for your brand, it's very, very easy to sign up for all the different vendors because you now have an email address. And really, that's all you need. Now I'm not going to sit here and make you watch me sign up for every single different account. But I want to give you a quick introduction to the forms that you'll be filling out So you're prepared for read. Bubble gives you the quick option to pick your user name first. Probably the most important part of signing up for an account for Zazzle, you have to scroll down to join as a designer, where you'll be confronted with more crap that you have to get through in order to actually sign up. Here is the final form that will get you to sign up for a Zazzle account. Cafe Press has a slightly easier way to sign up. Just bring you to the form on spread shirt. We have a similar looking form to sign up, and we also will be given different options to customize our account as soon as we sign up . Screened has a very simple and minimal sign up form. Society six also has a very good looking and simple form to sign up with Finally thread. Lis, in classic style, has probably the best looking form to sign up with. Now you're a little bit more familiar, and you'll be able to sign up for all your accounts quickly. So how do you know which sites you want to sign up for? And where do you fit in on these different vendors? When looking at the vendors to sell your shirts on, I cannot possibly know what you'll be most successful on. A true artist may strive on thread lis and make plenty of money. Zazzle offers the dream to sell any design as long as it's catchy. While Red Bubble lets you feel like a true artist among a community of piers, I recommend that you sign up for all these accounts and upload a few designs and see what type of feedback you get before spending the time to upload your entire collection to a specific vendor. Whatever you do, be sure to appropriate your time to what sites your most successful on. Personally, I'm most successful on red Bubble, so I have the most designs uploaded to red bubble. I also have a lot of designs on screen where I sell a good many T shirts. Good luck signing up for all your accounts. And if you have any questions, let me know. 19. Printful and Teespring: Hello, everybody. It is, Sir Douglas Fresh. And today we're gonna talk about T spring as well as print full these air to sites I didn't mention earlier in the course because they're a little bit different. But that doesn't mean that we can't make money off both these sites and actually pretty good margins for these two sites. So let's take a closer look. Print Full print Fel is similar. Teoh Other sites that we have like red bubble in that they offer a large variety of products shirts, posters, more posters, canvas mugs, pillows, totes, embroidery and leggings. So they do have a lot of products. Where they're different is that you have to make your own store, whereas something like red bubble or society six air screened, you get your store in their sight. This o R print full does it so that you need to make your own store on your own site, and then you could integrate it with their A p I. And you'll see these icons for, like Shopify woo commerce. And these are all the different ways that you can connect your store to print full. So it's actually pretty easy to Dio technically, but it is more time consuming. You do have to go by a domain you have to have hosting. You have to set up your site. Make sure all the attributes are correct. The prices are correct. You have to actually make the images, which is sort of annoying. Let me show you what I mean. These this is my website from, uh, using print ful. It's actually a WordPress site. And I'm using the Wu commerce plug in as well as a simple woo commerce theme that was free to make the site so it didn't cost it didn't take very much money to build this site and get it up and running. But it didn't take a lot of hours because I did generate all these previews in photo shop. Andi, I've got, I guess, 90 T shirts. So do check these out. These air Pretty cool shirts, sublimation, galaxy shirts dot com, plug, plug, plug. But back to what we were talking about. So, yeah, um, you have your store customer checks out through your store. The money is sent to your PayPal account, and, um, the order will show up on print full and then it says it's automatic, but you you really have to approve and manually, you know, say okay, cool. Make sure that this is the right artwork that you want to set up and you can store. Um, can store a significant amount of artwork on print. Full moving on. Let's talk about T spring now. T spring is a little bit different than the other T shirt business models that were used to were used to setting up a store. And then every time somebody buys a product, we make money well with T Spring Worm or making a blockbuster movie and hoping a lot of people come see it. And what I mean by that is we're making one product and we're promoting one product or one design, and we're hoping to sell a lot of copies of that one design. Now, if we go to print ful and we start a design, um, we'll see that we have an estimated profit of 7 15 at a specific sale school. So what screen is basically saying is OK, if you sell this amount of T shirts, it's gonna cost you this amount of money for us to print Um, and this is the profit that you can expect to make now. Selling 50 units of a shirt might seem like a lot, and it is when you're just starting out. But you could make some real money when you get a fan base. Or if you can target a fan base that love a design and buy it up, you can see that this has 14 30 profit per sale. That's a huge profit margin. It's about $10 more than give or take. Then I make selling a T shirt on Rebel, so that's a huge incentive to use T spring. A disadvantage, I will say, is you have limited styling options. It only lets you, ah, do so many different types of colors and styles of shirt. This is sort of a good thing because it forces you to be artistic and choose which colors your design looks best on. But it is a little limiting and ah, little bit strange for me cause I'm used to being able to sell on whatever I want to sell. So I hope that this video helped you out a little bit. If you're thinking of going with either print full or T spring. I will say I haven't actually sold anything on T spring. I haven't tried. I haven't, you know, went through the process of making a design. But I have seen people be very successful with t spring, so certainly don't look past it and print ful. If you want to take the time to set up a WordPress site, it's pretty cool to have your own website and again, uh, plug for sublimation galaxy shirts dot com If you into the universe and things like that check out, uh, these designs, but anyway, uh, thanks for taking this course and ah, stay awesome. 20. Preparing Descriptions and Uploading: No matter how much artwork we create and how awesome this artwork is, it's not gonna matter unless we can get her artwork on the Internet and onto products. In this lesson, we're gonna talk about uploading your artwork efficiently. The only thing that really feels like work to me about running a T shirt business is uploading the artwork. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. Uploading artwork is a boring, time consuming process that is absolutely necessary to our success. The good news is we can streamline our uploading process by having the necessary content ready and of high quality. With proper planning and direction to our uploading, we can enjoy the process and turn up loading into a simple, mindless task that can be enjoyed while watching movies. You tubing are listening to music. When we're uploading, we will be asked to provide a title tour, work a description tags as well as select a few options like category or type. Using this meta information to our advantage is key to a lasting success with our brand. Your product description is your biggest opportunity to showcase the personality of your brand as well as linked to any other sales pages that you have on the Internet. It's important to spend time to come up with the concise description that gives the viewer a taste of your brand and lets them know more about what products you offer to come up with this description. Look back to your temple branding information and think about what you want to consumer to know about your brand and why this design exists. Think about how much time it would take to write out a description for each shirt you design. If you're uploading 20 shirts, you could easily spend an hour writing a description for each one. Instead, we can plan ahead with the base description that is reusable. Once we have our base description will simply modify it for various merchants, storefronts and products. Keep a list of all the Web page links that exist for your brand, including social media pages, every single shop on merchant vendor sites and whatever other online touchpoints you want to promote and might want included in your final descriptions. You may think this will create an unwieldy amount of links, and you're correct, but if you do it smart, you're enhancing not only the user's ability to look of your products, but a search engines ability to find and authenticate your presence on the Internet. The more links you have on pages pointing to other pages that you have the better rankings you will have because thes merchant vendor sites are reputable, according to Google, a lengthen the description will be a point towards your design ranking better in search results, tags air slightly more limited in terms of what we can put in them. No links, no bold, just words and phrases. But people do actually read your tags, and it's another opportunity to be personal, like throwing a Kanye West tag on a stop making stupid people famous design. It's also an opportunity to do it. Tags were actually meant for toe associate your product with something or an idea. Your title should have a related tag. Things related to your title should be tags and things that somebody who would like this design might search for could also be tags. Many places do set limits on the amount of tags per design, but if you have room, it's good to use it. This doesn't mean that you can throw whatever into your tags doing that makes you look desperate and trashy. But by relating your designs to relevant ideas and things, using tags, you are adding value and capturing interested eyes you may not have. Otherwise, you can create a list of brand related tags we want to include whenever possible or whenever we have not reached the maximum tag limb with our product specific tags. Once we have our description and our tags prepared, we have made most of the up loading material we need, minus the title and some checked boxes. Titles. Air Simple but still important. Your title is going toe, identify your work and should be unique. If a design is part of a collection, you may include the collection name in the title, as well as the actual title of the design. Title Text is given higher weight than description text by search engines, so be sure you are including things a user may search for when titling your designs. As for check boxes, each site is a little bit different, but usually all you're doing is selecting a category that your design belongs to. Uploading is a little bit different for each site. Some sites, like red bubble allow you to upload toe all products at one time. Some sites make you upload separately for each product you will be designing. Others require you to upload your designs to their website and then post the design onto one or multiple products. All of these ways have their advantages and disadvantages, and each merchant does it a little bit differently. If you're unfamiliar, the upload process can seem confusing at first. So to help you out, I'm gonna go through up loading to read bubble in detail and then quickly overview up loading to the rest of the sites. I've got my design here that we're going to be uploaded. I'm going to drag it over and start the upload process on Red Bubble, once the upload has completed, will be given some product previews, as well as boxes to put in the title description and tags. And here you have the check boxes that I was talking about. We'll start with the title. This work is called the Carbon Peacock, and it's part of something called Future Art fashion. You can see how easy it is to keep your design name and the name of the collection Separated. If you don't like using this little pipette, you can also use brackets. I like the little pipette, but if you want to use some other character, go ahead. Next, We're gonna work on the description. I have a special description prepared for fractal art, so I'm just gonna copy and paste it into the description box. I also want to put some links in the description. So I'm gonna go to links and I'm gonna copy and paste everything in there. After I have done this, I'm gonna want to go through and delete things that I don't think are relevant. Like screen, which doesn't have much of my fractal art on it. Once I'm satisfied with the links, I'm gonna go over to my tags now, already have some tags ready. So I'm going to copy and paste the fractal art tags that I have prepared. These are general tags for all of my fractal art. So I'm gonna add a couple tags specific to this design. Once you're happy with your title description and tags. Don't forget about the check boxes. I'm gonna select digital art, not mature content, and set the default view. Two posters. Once you've got all this done, click save work and your art will be added to your store. Once it's done processing, your image will show up as your regular product page that everybody else will see. And there we have it. Now that we've got the general idea of uploading, I'm gonna just go through a quick time lapse of me uploading one designed to all the other sites that we talk about in this course. I'm not going to hold your hand the whole way because I knew that this is something that you can figure out and it's gonna be pretty boring toe watch me go through every single one . But I do want to introduce you to the differences in these merchant vendor sites and also prepare you for other merchant vendor sites that we don't talk about in this course as well as those that don't yet exist. So just follow along as we quickly upload this designed to all the other sites. I hope that this quick overview has showed you a little bit more about Thea polluting process and got you ready to upload your own artwork 21. Comparing Tags with Adwords: Now, when we're looking for key words, Um, we want to know how many people are searching these keywords as well as how popular they are, because if we're designing for something that nobody's looking for, nobody's gonna find it and we're not gonna make any sales. So the easiest way you would think to do this is just a Google search. Now I want to find out if the tag Galaxy shirts or the tag Universe shirts is going to get more attention. So first of my search galaxy shirts, and we'll see that we have 26.8 million results, and then we'll surge universe shirts and we'll see we get 16 million. So it looks like galaxy shirts. Um, at least have more presence on the Internet. This is how many pages linked to that through Google's algorithms. It doesn't necessarily mean how many people are searching for it. Now, if you want to find that out, um, of great, free way to do this is to use Google AdWords. Now I say this is free cause we don't actually have to spend any money on AdWords. You'll see. They're asking me toe re enter my billing information, but I'm not buying anything, so I don't really have a need to. So we're gonna go to tools and go to keyword planner, and that's where we can do a little bit of research for our keywords. Okay, so once we're in the keyword planner, we've got a few different things. Weaken Dio. What we're gonna want is to get search volume for a list of keywords. And finally, we're going to search for new keywords based on what we find. So, um, that's look at galaxy shirts and universe shirts, okay? And what comes up is ah, just a basic number of the average monthly searches. Now, it's pretty easy to see that Galaxy Shirts is getting a lot more monthly searches than universe shirts. And we couldn't just tell that through searching them on Google. Once we know that information, we're going to go back to keyword planner and we're going to search for new keywords and add group ideas. So now that we knew the galaxy shirts is what we want, we'll search for that. Don't worry about anything else. We're not gonna purchase any ads. We're just doing a little bit of research So, um, we see that we get ad group ideas as well as keyword ideas. So if we go to keyword ideas, you'll see the Google suggests a bunch of different keywords that are similar, and you get to see how many monthly searches they have Now. It's saying galaxy shirts gets even more monthly searches. So low discrepancy there. A lot of these. They're just basic, you know, tags that, ah, have nothing, nothing to do with what we're saying. But we do get to see Galaxy shirts for Guys is pretty often churched, comparatively to some of the others. On Also, Galaxy T shirts with the tea is also getting some surges. So let's go to ag group ideas and see if we can learn some more. And these are collections of multiple keywords that Google thinks would work well together for you. You don't have to use all of them. You can just use whatever you want. So let's go to Galaxy Shirt and we'll see that. Ah, we got a bunch of similar tags that we could use if we want to. Let's take a look at some of the average monthly search searches we can see that galaxy shirt Men is getting a decent amount of searches, and this is something that we might not think of. You know, a lot of galaxy shirts might be designed for women. So whenever a guy is searching for a Galaxy shirt, they might find a bunch of women shirts and then search for galaxy shirt men, which seems to be happening. So that's something that we can use in our tags, and maybe our competitors aren't using that, so that gives us an advantage for that keyword. So use this tool to get some ideas about tags and also to see a rough estimate of how well the tags will perform. You don't do this for every single tag, but if you're stuck between two, it's a great way to compare. And because Google is so big, it's pretty representative of the entire population. So it's a pretty good metric for how well these tax will dio 22. Free Traffic Secrets: before we set up our accounts. Let's talk about the importance of social media marketing. Your success in the T shirt business will be directly related to how many people actually see your product sales pages. There are several ways users will end up at one year sales pages, and our job is to increase thes ways and make them more prevalent and easier for users to find on the Web. Today, there are many free social media sites that allow anyone to market themselves or their products. In addition to the common social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, there are social networks more geared towards products, most prominently Pinterest and one yellow. Not only do social media sites allow you to gain views through likes and followers, search engines index the pictures you put on social media, and you will get additional traffic when your images show up in image search results never underestimate the power of your images online or the percentage of traffic that they will bring. Another thing to consider is the size of the image. Search engines love big images, and users often filter to show only large images, which are relatively uncommon on the Web compared to small images, while most the time you'll be limited by what previews merchants give you. If you do plan to have a website, keep this in mind. Remember, your images that are online are the only representation of your product. They are your product to prospective customers. Customers can't touch the fabric or even feel the thickness of the pain. By using brand name fabrics from reputable printers, we can offer a consistent product that are consumer probably is already familiar with, like a soft American apparel hoody or a heavyweight guilty and shirt. This non physical barrier means that we have to woo are consumer in other ways. One way to do this is to create and post previews of your products on social media. One of the best ways to do this is toe. Have a sample of your shirt and a model and take some pictures even if you're the model. But if you don't want to spend the money to actually buy one of your T shirts, there are plenty of free options. The easiest way to get previews of your shirt designs is from your merchant vendor sites themselves. Sites like screen spread shirt, red bubble. All have great previews available of your design on a T shirt. All you have to do is save these images on your computer or phone and post them. It's really that easy. You can save an image on your cell phone posted to instagram with a link to the product, and you have created and placed an ad in a few minutes on your phone, all for free. It's pretty sweet. Before we do any online promotion, we need to be sure we have our social accounts set up. I recommend using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Winnie Low to promote your images. I recommend these five because they're well established and have a huge user ship. But you may also want to try Flicker, Tumbler and Google. Plus, you will be given a Google plus account when you sign up for your Gmail account, but all the other accounts you'll need to go out and sign up for Google Plus just needs to be activated and customized. Be sure that in the about me sections or whatever it's called for each site, you're using brand identity statements as guides. Look back at your Temple branding document for inspiration. Your descriptions across social media sites should be similar but tailored for each site. You can put a lot more about yourself on tumbler than you can on Twitter, so let's go through signing up for these sites when you low Israel easy email password and pick your user name Pinterest. Same thing. Instagram. You will have to actually go and open up the app in your phone. You can sign up through the APP. Twitter is very simple. To sign up for Facebook, you'll have to sign up for a personal account and then create a page for your brand. I recommend using the same user name across all of your sites. If this user name isn't available across all of the sites, try not to use it, even if you can get it for one site. It's gonna be confusing to your consumers if they have to use a different name on a different site. So you may have to add something like official at the end or shirts at the end of your brand name so that you can get a unique user name. Once we have our accounts set up, we can go ahead and start promoting immediately. Never underestimate the power of social media 23. Posting to Social Media: setting up social media accounts is one thing, but running them is another. I remember my advertising teacher in college always said You have to feed the beast, which I thought was a rather grim way to look at it. But she does have a point for social media to be successful. It needs toe actively engage the end user, which is your consumers. Just like your product descriptions, tags and designs themselves. Your social media presence will help define your brand personality. I'm going to group the 1st 3 social network sites as social sites being Facebook, Twitter and instagram. The next two, When you low and Pinterest, we will call products sites. This is because Pinterest and one yellow are unique in that they can act like a shop more than a stream of post. It's not as important to post in a timely manner on these products sites. It can be done all at once. We can quickly post to a Nilo and Pinterest as soon as we upload our designs. Chrome, Firefox and other browsers have the Pinterest, and when you low buttons available, that will allow you to post in just a few button clicks you can see on Pinterest as well as when you Oh, you have a collection of products displayed on a single page, which is great because it shows people a good amount of art quickly, without having to scroll anywhere. Taking a look at these products sites, you'll see what I mean. This looks more like a storefront than it does a social media feed. You can set up different collections within Pinterest and when you low to showcase different lines of shirts. When you low is very similar to Pinterest, it's another product site that acts sort of like a storefront. You can do different collections of different designs. You can see that you get a really good looking, sort of store type social page when you use when you low, let's take a look at how simple and easy it is to post once we have our Pinterest and when you low buttons installed on our browser. If I just click on one of the buttons, I'll be given an option of what image I want a post. Then you can pick which board you want to go to and pin it. The same is true for one ILO. You just pick the image that you want. Pick where you want to post it. Hit post to any low. Set the price so the public prices 28 64. Also, just a little side note. If you don't wanna have to type this in every time, log out of your red bubble page and then post because you'll see the price that everyone else will see, not the one that you could get if you were to buy your own product. So this is a man shirt and then you just hit save and you're all done simple. Is that so? Back to what we were talking about before we've covered the products sites when you on Pinterest. But what about the social site on the social sites being Facebook? Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Google Plus, you are creating a series of post, which create a narrative of your brand and will also allow for a dialogue between your brand and your consumers and potential consumers. This is more of a challenge than posting to Pinterest, and when you low to be successful on social sites, you'll need a plan. Don't be afraid to refer back to the Temple branding documents created earlier when posting on social media to make sure you're being consistent with your brand objectives. The model for posting images on social media is similar to the model we used, posting our designs to the marketplace vendor sites. The description becomes the body of the post. The tags become the hashtags, and the product itself becomes a preview of the product we're sharing. It's easy to see how this could be simplified in the exact same manner, coming up with the base body and hashtags and slightly modifying these for each post. Try to post a zoo often as possible, but not more than 3 to 5 images per social media service per day. This isn't a real rule, just the guidelines, so consumers don't feel bombarded. One a day is better than none a day. Studies have shown that around 8 p.m. is the best time to post on social media, but any time is better than not at all. Keep a plan of what products you will promote today, tomorrow and the next day, so you don't forget to post. Now, if you want to post something, say on Facebook, you could just go to here at a photo of video uploaded and then write your description. An easier way is to use the share, but with the share button, we can easily post without having to write a full description of what we're posting. You can see by clicking the Facebook, we get a pretty good looking post for our page. And then we can add in our description and tags here if we want to, even if we don't want to were already given a title, which shows exactly what the designs called. The only exception is Instagram. Not many places have a shared to instagram thing because it's a mobile application. So if you want this, get on your phone, go to the site, download the image and post it to your Instagram. While this may seem like a hassle, if you're waiting in line for the MBA or something like that, it's a great thing to do to keep your mind occupied. And so you feel productive to illustrate how easy this is to do. I've typed up just a simple little description with some tags. I can then copy this description and use it for other posts that are from the same line of T shirts. This will save you a lot of time typing out these descriptions. You can also keep a document backed up with these descriptions, like you did for the meta information when we actually posted our designs on March and vendor sites. Best of luck in all of your social media endeavors, and I hope that everything you post goes viral. 24. Tracking Payment and Sales: now that we've done all this work to get our shop working and actually making sales, were gonna want to know what's happening with those sales. Each different company has a slightly different way that they let you know that you get a sale, but most of them can give you an email. If you choose to set that read bubble, send your nice You've made a sale, email and then another follow up email whenever you're item ships, which is really cool. Having these emails is great because it's instant gratification throughout the day and you don't actually have to be working, you know, to get to get the feeling of cool. You know, I sold something, and it's really cool to do that without having to, you know, sit behind a desk or take a payment physically and things like that. So it's a really cool thing because we signed up for that handy dandy PayPal account. We can collect all of our money from all our different shops, no matter the website into the same account. If for some reason you do want to be paid in different way like a physical check, you can do this through the vendor. Some do charge a fee for a physical check, but you can do like bank deposit things like that again, depending on the vendor. Now, each vendor is different in the time between when you actually sell something to when you receive your payment. As far as I'm aware, nobody pays you right when you make a sale. The reason that we have this waiting period is because there may be a delay in the customer payment as well as there's a delay between when you get the payment. When the items made, there's another delay in when it shipped a delay and when it gets there, and then there's a period where the customer decides whether or not they want to return it . So once everything goes smoothly, that's when you can finally get paid. The waiting period is usually between 1 to 3 months, where your commissions will collect and you'll be paid at the end of the period, read Bubble and most other sites. It's about a month weighed. Make sure that you're familiar with the payment schedule, so you know that you're getting paid. I have heard stories about designers selling on sites that were new companies or just small , sketchy sites starting out that maybe didn't make it. And they would rack up commissions but never get paid because the company failed her. Maybe it was just a sketchy company. Now, personally, I've never dealt with this issue. But, uh, if you try to, if you deviate from the sites I talk about, make sure that you check the reputation of the site and that everything is is legit above the table. And it's It's a well funded company, and it's not gonna go under anything like that. With the reputed herbal vendors I recommend in this course, you never have to worry about not getting paid. It does kind of suck that at first you might have to wait like a month after you sell your first shirt till you get any money. But really, that's not a big issue. And once you're selling stuff every day, you're not going to think about that at all. You're just going to be making money periodically. As you start selling mawr and more T shirts, it may seem difficult to remember exactly what your top selling shirts are and identified trends. Each vendor is different when it comes to tracking sales. Rebel makes it easy to find top selling shirts in your shop. Here you can see what was the all time bestseller, and red Bubble also promotes the top sellers automatically, which I think is a great thing. Different sites provide different metrics, but whatever metrics they do provide, make sure that you get some sort of a sense as to what you want to promote in your shop and on social media. Usually what is the most popular or the most so design is the best to promote. We'll talk more about using our sales data to develop our shops and developer social media strategies in other videos in the course, including the next video. 25. Optimizing Stores: congratulations. You did it. You now have an online store. Anyone can purchase T shirts from virtually anywhere in the world. Once you're done with your red bubble product up loads, you're ready to make your store attractive but more importantly, easily navigable to the user. The objective with your storefront is to convert views into interactions, including purchases, likes and traffic to other products and pages. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who has just stumbled onto one of your sales pages. They don't know anything about you or your brand. What will they see? What will they click on? What is their perception based on the information shown? Can they see other designs? And what can they find out by reading the description? While we can't control what every single person is going to do, we can control what they have the options to dio. By providing the viewer with similar artwork, we can increase our chances of our artwork being seen and sold. We can make this happen by declaring the designs relevant. By grouping them, we're gonna look at grouping images on red bubble. The concept can then be applied for other sites Some sites, like screened, required you to open separate shops under the same designer name. The idea is generally the same. Other. The implementation is a little bit different. We will use groups to show people what they want to see based upon what they're viewing. Groups are displayed below red bubbles default carousel products, which are your top so designs in terms of sales. If you've ever poked around Red Global, you've probably found yourself looking at thes image care cells. This is no different for any other user of the site. The average viewer probably isn't aware that you have different lines of clothing, designs or other art that you want them to see. They're only going to see your top sold items because that's the only default carousel that red bubble shows. Visual images that interact at riel time communicate wonders, which is why these care cells are so amazing. Showing relevant and quality art on every sales page. Through these caress, Els makes you look more legitimate as well as prolific as a designer. An added bonus of the groups is you'll be able to maintain a hierarchy of sorts for your designs so that your new designs that are of an old theme will be with the designs of their kind, not buried with old work. Once we have our products grouped, weaken still reorder them. The idea here is that we want to have designs that sell better shown more. Find out what designs air selling best and promote these. Chances are you'll have a few designs that consistently outsell the majority of your other ones. This isn't a coincidence. These designs will continue to sell. By putting these designs toward the top of the group, they have a better chance of being seemed on the image carousel and therefore sell it. 26. Continued Success: the thing about the Web is it's a Web. Take a look at any successful design company on the Internet. Take a look at all the different type of content they have on various sites, as well as how it all points back to their shop. If you can understand the network of content and content providers utilized by top brands, then you can emulate it and share in their success. Having lasting success with your T shirt brand is not just about your designs, and it's not just about your promotion, and it's not just about your subject matter. It's a combination of these things and mawr, resulting in a consumer experience where they develop an idea about what you're selling, who you are and whether or not they want to purchase your product. There are many different ways of perspective. Customer ends up, but one your sales pages. By utilizing different types of media through different content providers, we can maximize our chance of exposure by understanding where traffic is coming from Beit Google searches, social media, word amount or content aggregators. We can know why we're at a certain level of sales and how we can improve not everything works the same for every brand. There may be a community site related to your subject matter where one post will get you more views than 100 posts on the social media site. Don't forget the Web is a Web. The more so we spend, the more connections we make. Try to keep the bigger picture in mind and don't friend. If you don't have very many Twitter followers, or if your Facebook post doesn't get any likes, you may have won one yellow page that just through Google image search is getting you more traffic than all of your Twitter posts combined. You won't know until you try different methods. Don't be afraid to try something new. Good luck and thanks for being awesome. 27. Thank you and Author notes: thank you all for taking the time to learn a skill that can better your life. I believe that by empowering every individual person on the planet, the playing field can be levelled. Allowing the brightest stars to shine you have is much potential within you to create the next hot fashion trend, as does any other designer or brand even more than a shot. At some lofty goal, you have the ability to spend your free time creating something people will like enough toe actually spend money on. I encourage you to turn off the TV and spend more of your leisure time creating something that you'll be proud of 10 years from now. I created this course for three reasons. The first reason is to improve my teaching abilities. The second reason is to help a younger me or people that were in the position I was two years ago when I knew that I wanted to start a T shirt company, but at no idea what to do and finally to empower others to create and to help them find themselves on the journey towards a higher consciousness. I hope that this course has empowered you to be a better person through self expression and a passive income. I am proud of you for taking this journey and wish you great success. If you would like to please share your designs on my Facebook page, I would love to see everything that you create. And finally, if you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to ask me. I'm more than happy to share my experiences with you and help you along the way. 28. 2018 Update: Hello, beautiful people. My name is Douglas James. Thank you very much for taking this course. I wanted to make a video to update you on what's going on in the industry. In 2018 we're going to go through a few of the top sites, talk about some exciting new products that they have as well as look at the traffic. So you know what? Sites are popping off and I'll give you a little preview. Red bubble and print full are doing great. So the sites I recommended are doing good, and you can follow the advice, and I hope you have. And you are selling, at least on redbubble cause you gotta be on. So let's take a look first, some exciting news from society. Six. If you uploaded in society six back in the day or didn't because it was too complicated, I feel your pain. I had to go through and learn a program. Automate er, which turned out to be a great thing just to learn how to resize images quickly so that I could use this platform. But now, as long as you have an image that is 6500 pixels by 6500 pixels. You can upload it, and it will automatically go on all of the products. The one annoying thing is you still have to click on for each of these products. But you see, they've got some corner things like backpacks. And, uh, what else is there? Oh, window curtains, which are pretty exciting. Red double red Bubble has some great new products, like graphic T shirt dresses, a line dresses thes graphic T shirts with black sleeves. It's Willis tank tops. There's still a great site. We're gonna talk about how their traffic is doing super well and how they just keep growing when we get to the traffic section, but still a solid site, not too much as faras the up loader. It went through several phases, and now it's good. Now it's at this pays where we're at now, and it's super easy Upload. It's on the products, typing your description, typing your tags ban. Everything is good to go. All right. Spread shirt spread shirt is a great platform. They have been for years. They produce high quality prints, high quality products. They have good customer service. It's a solid company through and through personally. I used fretful because I like the all over print shirts and I don't I'm not really interested in the extra products, but they do have these, like aprons and other Let's see what's in here cause I don't use it, so I don't really know Dog bananas. Perfect. That's what we need. So if you need some crazy products, use this service and you. There are ways to link WordPress site, too. Yours pressured account. So, really, the possibilities are endless in summary spread shirts got more products than ever, and it's still a great Zazzle. I don't really like Zazzle. Three. Only reason is, I feel like it's kind of the opposite of society. Six. It's more like every designer in the world that just wants to make money is here and there . They're selling their stuff. Not to say that good artists don't come here, but it's more of a Wal Mart. It's the walmart of the T shirt that being said there of great website, they sell a ton of stuff and it's a great place to have. Your business is well, you know, I'm not telling you to go to one of these service. I'm telling you to goto all of the services. Just where to focus your attention is what you need to think about. So I always say Red Bubble First Zazzle might be a good second or third. They have great. Create your own products, things like skateboards, playing cards that you might not be able to get anywhere else. So keep them in your deck of where you sell your products. Now print full. Amazing, exciting, incredible news out of print full. They have all kinds of new all over print products. Now you can buy all over cut and sew shirts, and these are. There's all kinds of different products these women shirts, men, shirts, 10 cops all over cut and sew. And this means that it's not like it's not like this. You won't get this right here. See, this is when you have a blank and then you sublimation print onto it, a cutting so they print onto a piece of fabric. Cut it out, and so so it's a lot higher quality, and it's not much higher price. You can see 29 95 verses, $21. That's $8 that your customers will probably want to pay to get a much better product. Another thing that you need to be very aware of is that there's no more American apparel except for a few extra small shirts that they're trying to get rid of at bargain prices. $14. So just know that know that we're changing and we're going to Los Angeles apparel I haven't purchased in L. A. A pair of myself, but from reading the reviews, it sounds like the fabric is thin and people don't really like the quality. That being said, don't run away from print full because you've still got all over cutting. So tank top. All overcome, ensues shirts and for women's you've got the same thing as faras tanks and T shirts. You've got a crop top. You've got a tank top is well, but you also have very exciting dresses, and you have skirts, swimwear and leggings. So this is really, really exciting, and these are brand new the cutting service bikinis, so you could be the first in the market with these. If you choose to put them on your site. Very cool. Very exciting. Love you. Grateful, moving on friendless threat this is different than other sites. It's not like red bubble, where you put up your design and then hope people buy it. This you have to be chosen. The gods of thread lis must choose you and must choose your design. And if they do, it's very good. You'll see that they have these heavily. These design contact Here's just one so you could win 1000 cash if you win the design, plus anyone who is printed so you don't have to win to be printed if they choose your design. It's pretty cool because you get on the site and you get exposure and you get $7 of each T design sold on threatening. Stop calm the margins air good here. They increase the earners a while ago, and you can see that you could make $7 a shirt, 13 a hoody eight, a phone case and 18 or 10 an 18 inch art. These are a little bit better than the default red bubble margins and a little bit better than a lot of the margins that you'll see. Except for maybe print. They have pretty high default march, but all in all, if you are a bang, an artist. Get on thread lis. It's worth it if you make it. But don't just only focus on threatened us. Make sure you're selling your stuff elsewhere. But the best designs cf thread this once of first. And then if they don't want an exclusive contract with you, then you can put another place. So let's talk about trends, and we're going to do this by looking at the traffic of these sites that we just talked about. So first off red Bubble, you can see right here that we got some upward trends going and it's right 5 66 in the U. S. So that's pretty high. Global rank. 13 04 So red bubble is doing good. More and more people are visiting it. It's becoming a bigger, greater platform. So I'm very happy that I recommended Red bubbles so strongly, and I continue to do so because it really is all it's cracked up to be. It's a great site to sell, and not only that, it's a great booming site. So in the future you don't worry about the company tanking maybe 50 years down the road when there's way more competition, but for the foreseeable future. Red bubbles doing great. So keep on investing your time and your effort into redbubble society. Six. Okay, so Society six is has been up and then down a little bit, but it's still a solid site. It's rank 21 in the United States, 2100 and 5400 global rank, so it's still a very popular site. But once again it doesn't have the upward trend that rebel has spread shirt. So spread shirt is also a big site. It's a little bit lower than red bubble, but once again you have. You have ways to check out where you don't have to say, so that could be a contributing factor, but it's definitely not as big as red Bubble, so you can see that it's about where it was last year after going up and then going down again, but still a solid platform and print full. The other site that I love is also got it upward trend going, and this might be because it actually used to be called the print full dot com. So we look at Well, look at this just cause I'm curious now so you could see that it really dropped off right around then. And that's when they bought the domain print for Doc. So, um, going from here onward, which is the only relevant data, you can see that we're on a steady upward trend, and that's a good thing. Can't recommend painful enough. You do have to have your own your own website to do it. I have a great course on skill share, which takes you through the entire process of doing that, starting with a blank WordPress site and going to a store front. And we actually create my website Future Life fashion dot com. So very exciting. Moving on Zazzle Zazzle is always been a huge site. You can see it's rank 38 and ranked 11 in the United States. So it's the second most popular site that we're gonna look at. And it's got, like, another wavy trend going on. So it's up and down. It's up and down. It's still really big, but it's having a little bit of trouble with all the competition still worth looking at, especially if you want to design skateboards. Okay, thread, lis and dread. This has a general upward trend going. We got a little dip here, but it's still becoming popular. Popular pocket. It's a little bit lower rank, so let's look at the numbers against 7000 for Zazzle, 3400 for print, full 3600 for spread Shirt 2001st Society six and 500 for rental. And those were the U. S. Numbers. So anyway, thread Lis is a growing site doing better. It's always been the hipster that the hips Trieste of sites, so be given more hip story than society. Six. So it's a great thing for great artists and get out there, get on site, make some money if you can. And one last thing. Guys, I have, ah, make money as an online artist. It's a public group on Facebook and feel free to join. We got about 200 members, and you could push your products. If you want. I will add updates like this one about print, full warehousing, which is pretty cool. They have warehousing now, like Amazon. Film it. So that's another thing that print full has done since I made the course is they've allowed you to do this. So if you want to get something from Alibaba and I mean like you couldn't get, find a supplier and then order your designs on T shirts and things like that, you can have them warehouse it and then ship it for you. So that's really exciting. So thank you for watching guys. Thank you for taking my course. I'm so happy to help empower you to be creators. And I love to see all the things that you've done. I'd love to talk to you. So if you have questions, joined the group and start a discussion. So it's not just you and me. It's something that other people can benefit, too. Or just ask question on this, this video on this course and I'll get back. You hope you're having a great 2018 and continue to be very successful in your T shirt. Endeavor. Peace, love, life 29. 2020 Update: Welcome to the 2020 update of this court's in this update. We're going to look at the traffic of the different sites. I'm going to introduce you to two alternatives to print full, and we're also going to talk about something very exciting called partner programs where you can legally self ban are. Let's start off by looking at Red Bubble Rebel is the most popular site we're going to look at. I love Red Bubble and continue to recommend it to this day, and you can see that it's 13 86 in the ranks, which is actually a little bit down from 13 04 the last time we checked it in the last update, still immensely popular and, in my opinion, the best option to start selling your products. Next. We have Society six, and it dropped just a little bit from 5400 to 5600. And then we have spread shirt dot com, which is down from 3649. It is now 6446. So what that tells us is that less people are using spread shirt spiritually is actually one of the oldest platforms, and it may not be the best to open up a brand new T shirt shop. And now let's look at print ful another one of my absolute favorites and it's at 5426. But with print full, you have to remember that this is not all of the print full shops. This is just painful dot com, because all of the shops using print ful or hosted on their own domains, so it's actually pretty amazing. That print ful dot com itself is this high ranked, especially since it was at 10,718 the last time we checked. So it's getting more and more popular. Next we have Zazzle and Zazzle is doing great. It is number 2123 which makes it. Third on the list will see what number two is coming up very shortly, but it's doing good. It's almost twice as popular as it Waas. According to rankings, it was 3827. Now it's 2123 so Zazzle is always an option. It's not my favorite, but they do have an immense variety of products and now in 2020 they have even more products, so definitely worth checking out. Next up, we have thread, lis and thread. Lis is at 14,576 which is actually better than it was when we last checked. Last time it was at 17,000 and 83 So threat. This is doing a little bit better. It is more of a niche sites than these other services, but as always, it's great to do. If you are a well known designer, you could make a lot of sales, and now we have key spring. Now. T Spring is the number two spot. When Key Spring started out, it was a sight that allowed you to make a design. And then you had to get a certain number of orders by 10 2030 and then T spring would actually print and ship your shirts. Now T spring is much more similar to the other vendor sites accept. It has really great margins, so if we hop over to t spring, we can see some of the products that they now have. It's not just T shirts and hoodies anymore. They have a decent product line but they do have very good margins, as I said before. So especially if you're just starting out in 2020 definitely check out T spring. Now on the reverse side of things, we have a website I do not like very much, and that is t public, but it is well rank. It is number 3372. What I don't like about it as an artist is that they only allow a 20 megabyte file, and they expect you to have these huge dimensions in a PNG format. And yet they want you to have under 20 megabytes, which doesn't make any sense to me. So personally, I do not recommend t public, but I do want to show that it's doing pretty well in the traffic. Next up we have cafe press. You can see it's at 9435. So it's way behind Zazzle, which is in my eyes. It's main competitors, so it's something to think about if you're considering going with either Cafe Press or Zazzle because maybe they have a specific product that you're looking toe offer. All right, Next up, we have an interesting site called custom egg. Now Custom Inc is interesting because it's actually just a layer on top of print, full meaning that somebody made this website only to display print ful products. And then whenever you order something on this website, it's going to just have print ful printed and ship it for you. So that means if you already have a print full site, there's absolutely no advantage to using custom ing. But if you don't, the huge advantage of using Custom Inc is it is super easy to get your products up. It may seem intimidating to open up a print full store, make a WordPress will commerce Shopify integration. So this is an easy way if you want to get on some print for products next up, we have fine art America now. We didn't talk about this much before, but it's popular, so I want to get it in your brain. It's something worth checking out. It's in the top 5000 sites, and something interesting about fine art America is They tried to change it to this other website, which is the next one. We're gonna look at pixels dot com, but it didn't really work out there having a little bit of trouble, getting more traffic and orders onto pixel dot com. And the difference here is on pixel dot com. They have a little bit wider range of products, although I have to say it's not the widest range of products, and it may not be the best option starting out, especially with so many other good options, but because they are at the same company. If you had your art on fine art America before it is also now available for purchase on pixels. Next up we have a site that I really love, and unfortunately it's not bad, well ranked. And that is part of where now art of where is a beautiful, amazing company that does their own manufacturing and does a really good job at it. They're Canadian company, and they have extremely great clothing, which they make in their factory in Canada. I've had a lot of success using Pinterest to get traffic to my art of wear profile because this stuff is just so beautiful that people on pinchers like to click it, and I've definitely made more sales on this low ranked site, and I have some of these other high rank sites. Moving on, Let's look at some up and coming competitors to print full now. Obviously, I love print full. If you want to go with print ful, that's absolutely great. But I want to throw these out there because they're relatively new, and they're now to the point where there an actual competitors that you can use instead of plentiful and have great results. Let's look at the 1st 1 Good. Now you can see that it's at 21 to 71 so it's not the most popular site, but again, just like print ful. This number is not reflecting how many people actually go to a good and shop. This is only guten dot com. All the other websites that sell green products are on different domain names. Let's take a quick look at what they have to offer at guten you can see they have some interesting products, not a huge amount. Now, if you click these, you're gonna find more T shirts and things like that, but pretty standard and good quality products from the reviews that I've seen. And next we have another print full competitors that is doing even better than good, and I read even better reviews about it called Print. If I Let's look at some of the products they have now, the first thing you'll notice about print if I is, they have an immense amount of products, and that's because they actually work with different print providers. And this may represent a paradigm shift in the print on demand business. Whereas a company like print, if I doesn't even print their own stuff, they just have partners, which then print their things for them. And whatever they're doing, it's working very well. They're highly rated, and they're highly respected despite being a relatively young company. And that concludes looking at the traffic. And now, for the most exciting part about the update and that is Partner Programs Partner Program started popping up in the past year or two, and what they are, is there programs that allow you to sell officially licensed Fanar and the Red Bubble Partner program is a great place to start, although there are a few other programs and you can see the current brand partnerships here so everything that you see you can make fan art for and there's some huge names here like Star Track, Rick and Morty. Johnny Bravo, Dexter Doctor's laboratory at Debenedetti. It's really pretty cool. I've had a lot of success in the partner program already and made a course that teaches you not only how to use these programs but how to create art that is specifically designed to do well in the part of programs. Thank you for watching guys. I hope this update has helped you and guided you to make the right decisions for 2020. Thanks for watching piece.