The Biggest Mistakes I Made with Print-on-Demand

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believe it or not, this was a few years into my print-on-demand journey. I had been making products with the help of POD partners for a little while before I had the chance to explore Amazon’s now-mammoth apparel business.

Over the time that I’ve been doing print-on-demand, I’ve definitely made mistakes. I’ll share them with you, so you don’t fall into the same traps along the way.

1. Doing Too Much Myself

I must have mentioned it elsewhere that I am no good at graphic design, but I still feel this need to make things with Photoshop if I know it’ll only take half an hour. That’s the case with a lot of the print-on-demand things I did at the beginning, and it was stunting my ideas. I was only coming up with concepts that I would be able to do myself, rather than thinking of ones that would sell.

Over the years I’ve turned to Fiverr for the odd design job, but I eventually moved onto an all-you-can eat unlimited design service, which meant that I could outsource all of my actual graphic creation, and just focus on concepts and briefing them.

2. Not Being ‘Always On’

Print-on-demand is a game of timing, creativity and research. It requires you to be ready to convert inspiration into a product at any given time. For the past 6 years or so, that mindset is instinctive when I think of a good domain. I haven’t mastered it with print-on-demand yet.

I now know that I went I got my Merch acceptance email, I was already very busy with my online arbitrage business – as it was going to be the key to me leaving my job a couple of months later – but I still jumped in despite all the distractions. Print-on-demand requires your full focus for a few months to stockpile on ideas, designs and directions for the future, and clearing your schedule for it is very important.

3. Overlooking Low-Value Products

I sell sooooo many greetings cards these days. The profit per sale is far from fantastic, compared to the fivers I can get per t-shirt, but when you do as many units as this, it really makes a difference. It made me realise how many of my designs – assets – can be repurposed for different products.

4. Ignoring Quieter Marketplaces

I assumed that once I got on Merch by Amazon, that would be it. I would just do Shopify and Amazon, and leave it at that. No, that’s way off mark. For some of my seasonal products, Etsy and Depop is popping more than anything else. It goes to show that you have to know your market and where they shop. Amazon make be universal, but not everyone likes to shop in that way.

Get your designs on as many marketplaces as you can, and actually make the effort to market them. A little advertising often goes a long way, particularly on the platforms that are relatively new to the native advertising game.

5. Double-Check Trademarks

There have been countless times when I have both created designs and/or paid for designs to be created with the wild assumption that no one would have trademarked it, just because the domain was free/no one had ever tweeted the phrase before/I thought I was just so amazing, that no one else could ever have thought of it. It’s costly and a big time waster.