Have you seen the ads on Facebook promising passive income from Print on Demand (POD) t-shirts? A few of us have been experimenting with the platforms: Merch by Amazon, Red Bubble, Etsy POD, Shopify. As yet, we have not quit our day jobs.
Coming up with ideas for t-shirt designs is not a problem; I’ve been collecting pithy adages for years. Designing a shirt is the problem: laying out text, selecting fonts, finding clipart and images; making it all work. It takes a long time, and then there’s the labor of uploading and formatting products on the various print-on-demand sites.
Some of the 500 t-shirt designs in a package.
Ever since I created a Merch by Amazon account, Facebook has been displaying ads for packages of upload-ready t-shirt designs. 800 designs for $50; 500 designs for $117, $500 value. You have seen these ads if you’ve been to one POD site. Eventually, my resistance grew thin and I purchased one.
Here is my experience:
Positive findings
Idea generation
A few designs sparked ideas for slightly different shirts I could make. (At the same time, I am not lacking for design concepts; coming up with ideas is as easy as breathing.)
Low bar
If these are the ideas that sell, the bar is low. These designs sell at beach surf shops; at tourist traps; at discount clothing stores. These are the shirts you see and smile at, but don’t buy, if you are like me; if you are grown and shopping for yourself.
Sets
The package is full of ideas for sets of shirts: “Legends are born in January.” Changing “January” to each of the other months of the year is left to the buyer. This is good; it would be upsetting to think that 12 / 800 slots were used up for a simple substitution.
Similarly, “Great since 1995” and “Legendary since 2015” are single designs; you are free to substitute any year. The same is true for “Grandma’s favorite.” Swap in all of the relatives.
Other sets: city names (where my story began); birthday girl / boy’s mother sister brother; I’m 2; It took me 60 years to look this good; Married for 25 years; 2018 Graduate.
If you have an idea for a shirt that can be extended into a set with slight variation, go for it. You get 12 or 20 shirts for the work of one.
See the Edit Text problem below, however.
Challenges
Size
The package arrives in a downloadable 1.5G, *.RAR file.
If your internet is slow, it will take a while to download that file. File Explorer cannot open a *.RAR file, so you might need to install new software to open it. 7‑ZIP is a free program that can open, but not write, *.RAR files.
No Index
After extracting the files into PSD and PNG directories, I discovered there was no index file for the set. File Preview does not work when an image is made of white text on a transparent background.
70% of the designs are laid out in white text, to be printed on a dark shirt (dark shirts outsell light colored t-shirts 5:1).
White text in a PNG file does not show up in File Explorer; all you see is white squares. The files with colored text were mostly legible, but it’s not possible to tell if there is any white text in the file.
File Explorer will not display thumbnails of PSD files; installing SageThumbs solved that problem. The PSD files were built with both black and white text, so that they could be adjusted for printing on dark and light shirts. As the package was prepared, however, the white text was selected and the black base layer turned off (then saved as a PNG), so a preview of a PSD file with white text wasn’t any different from looking at a PNG.
In the end, I needed to open almost all of the files, turn the black background layer ON, and save them again. It takes 25 seconds to process each PSD file using Photoshop Elements. Do the math—that’s 7 hours of processing, albeit in batch, to create an index for the package.
(People using Big Photoshop or Lightroom can probably write a macro to do this for the whole set of files.)
Editable Text (not really)
The advertising for the shirts said that the text was editable, so I thought that I would be able to take the layout of a particular shirt, delete their words and add mine. Strictly speaking, this is true. Each of the lines on the shirt is a separate text layer in the PSD file.
However, if you do not have the exact font used in the design installed on your PC, you cannot change any of the letters in the text. Your PC will not be able to create the new letter. Your PC will substitute a font it thinks is good enough; your PC will be wrong.
You can search for a look-alike font that matches the one used in the t-shirt. Good luck with that. I have a subscription to fonts.com, and I was not able to find easily matching fonts. I could redesign and pick a new font, but that’s kind of is beside the point, isn’t it? Buying the design package was intended to solve the problem of selecting fonts that play well together for a particular message.
Preview : Full collection quality
The shirts shown in the preview selection on the sales page were actually quite interesting and well-designed. They were the cream of the crop. If you are not impressed by the shirts you see in the preview, don’t buy the package. The ones at the bottom of the pile will be trite and stale. There are fashions in fonts and t-shirt designs and you don’t gain much buying styles that were current in 2010.
Maturity
I knew some of the designs would be inappropriate for my brand message, but the percentage was higher than expected.
- I came to see sarcasm as a character defect long before I was 30.
- Some of the designs are just plain mean and will not play well in an anti-bullying world.
- There are a number of puffy rainbow unicorns suitable for three year olds.
- There are a few that focus on alcohol consumption.
Grammar
The first 400 files contained one glaring grammar mistake (your when you’re was needed) and one spelling mistake, “jelousy” for “jealosy,” and one misplaced period.
Conclusion
You won’t be able to quit your day job selling t-shirts with most of the designs in a multi-hundred design package.
If 10%, or 80, of the designs turn out to be useful, the effective price is $0.60/design. One Facebook commenter said he got 75 useful designs and thought it was worth the cost.
The price is deductible if you report business income on Schedule C.
Even if I don’t sell a single shirt using these designs, the purchase prompted me to write a new blog post. Some people pay more than the cost of the package to have a blog post written.
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