A blank t-shirt costs about eight bucks to print. You can sell it for 28, sometimes for $35. That is a $20 margin on a product you never touch, never store, and never ship yourself. You don’t need a warehouse. You don’t need $500 of inventory sitting in your garage. You upload a design, connect a store, and when someone buys, Printify prints it and ships it directly to them. That is print on demand and t-shirts are where most people start because the market is enormous and the barrier to entry is basically zero. But here’s the thing most new sellers miss. The product isn’t the hard part. The design isn’t even the hard part. The hard part is picking the right niche. Get that wrong and it doesn’t matter how good your design looks. So that’s where we’re starting today. Pull up Etsy right now and search funny nurse shirt. You’ll see listings with hundreds of reviews, some with thousands. Same thing happens if you search dog mom shirt, retired teacher gift, or trail running tea. These aren’t random. They’re niches. Specific groups of people who want something that feels made for them. Now, here’s the mental filter I use for every t-shirt idea. Does this design solve a problem or does it validate an identity? A problem solver is a gift. Something like funny retirement gift for co-workers. The buyer isn’t buying for themselves. They’re buying for someone else and they need it to feel personal and giftable. That’s a high intent purchase. An item that validates an identity is something the buyer wants to wear themselves because it says something true about who they are. Introverted, but will discuss dogs or a shirt with the specific mountain range someone hikes every weekend. They’re not buying a t-shirt. They’re buying a flag to wave. Here are five popular t-shirt niches on Etsy and Tik Tok shop right now. Use this list as inspiration to find your own. One, occupation humor. nurses, teachers, electricians, welders. The more specific the job detail, the better it sells. I became a nurse for the money with a laughing emoji. It works because it’s an inside joke. Only that person’s people get it. Two, dog breed identity, not just dog mom. Specific breed mom, golden retriever mom, dachshund dad, Frenchie owner. The specificity is the entire point. Three, running and trail culture. I run so I can eat tacos. My pace, my race. Endurance sports are booming, and runners love gear that signals their tribe. Four, retro vintage aesthetics with a modern twist. [music] Think 1970s font styles applied to current hobbies. Discolf, van life, vintage camping imagery. This is all over Pinterest right now, and it photographs beautifully for listings. Five. introvert and everyday chaos humor shirts that say things like, “I’m at capacity, not today,” or, “I need a nap and a raise.” They’re doing huge numbers because they’re relatable without being heavy. Pick one of these. Don’t try to do all five. Go to printify.com, create a free account, and head to the catalog. Find t-shirts, and you’ll see dozens of options. Start with items that have the best seller or trending badge. Three shirts come up constantly for good reason. Gildens, Bella and Canvas, and Comfort Colors. These are the ones serious POD sellers keep coming back to. Here’s why they’re different and when you might pick each. The Bella and Canvas 3001 is soft, lightweight, retail fit. Sitting around $10 to $12 to produce, it’s good for a modern look and boutique aesthetic. It’s a solid default choice for most beginners. The Comfort Colors 1717 is heavier and garment dyed, meaning the fabric is sewn first then dyed. It gives it that worn in, slightly faded vintage feel that’s all over Tik Tok right now. It runs boxier, costs a bit more to produce at $11 to $16, but sells at a higher retail price. Retro designs and earthy tones hit differently on a 1717. Then there’s the Gilden. Less glamorous, but it has a place. It’s the cheapest of the three, around $7 to $9, runs a little boxy, and the color range is massive. For humor forward designs where the message is the whole point, and buyers aren’t paying for premium fabric, Gilden gets the job done. High volume, lower margin, no frills. I did a full sideby-side breakdown of all three if you want to dive deeper. Once you’ve chosen your shirt, click into the product page and check the prices, available colors, sizes, and print areas. Then click start designing. This opens Printify’s built-in product creator, and it’s more capable and free than most people expect. There’s an AI image generation tool built right in. You type a prompt and it generates artwork you can add to the shirt. You’ve got text tools with a range of fonts or you can upload your own. You can use any of our graphics or you’ve got two paid options, a shuttertock integration for licensed stock graphics and a Fiverr integration where you can hire a designer directly from the editor. If you design elsewhere like KD, Photoshop or Canva, simply drag and drop in the file. Just be sure to read all the design requirements under product information to get the absolute best print. On top of all this, you’ve got the opportunity to let your buyers personalize any product. I’m going to drop in a design I created in a separate design program. Make sure you upload your designs with a transparent background. Otherwise, you’ll get a giant white square. Most likely not the look you’re going for. Any element in the template can be moved, resized, or rotated. All of this can also be done more precisely in the varants and layers panel on the right. This panel is also where you can add more t-shirt colors and sizes to your listing. In the top toolbar, you’ll see other options like flipping, fitting the placeholder, removing the background, creating a pattern, cropping, duplicating, or deleting. You can also apply the design to all print areas like the backside in this case or save multiple design elements as a template to use on other products. On the shirt template, you’ll see a dotted rectangle. This is what’s called the print area and is the only area where our printers can print on for this specific product. If any parts of your design are outside of this border, it won’t be printed and probably won’t look very good. If you’ve got a design like a logo that you want printed over the chest area, we suggest a maximum size of 4 in x 4 in, which you can see the exact width and height in the variance and layers panel. Then line up the side of the edge of the design with the collar of the shirt and make sure the bottom edge goes no lower than the armpit. When you’re finished, always preview to make sure everything is how you want it. I always recommend checking how it looks in CMK mode to get the most accurate expectation of how the colors will print. See how the colors become more muted. I go way deeper into all of that in this video. If you’re happy with your shirt, save product. Now you’re in the mockup library where you can choose or create photos for your listing. You can choose to use our mockups or create lifestyle shots with the shirt in a real life setting. A real person wearing the shirt outdoors doing something will convert a lot better than a shirt on a plain white background. Your buyer needs to be able to picture themselves in your shirt. Printifyy’s AI mockup tool takes that exact product you just created and generates beautiful lifestyles for you. It’s a great place to start and is included with the premium plan. You can also upload your own photos that you’ve taken yourself with samples or add purchased mockups. Rearrange your mock-ups and apply them to the listing. Now, you’ll finish building your listing by adding an SEO optimized and keywordrich title, description, and tags if selling on Etsy. If you’re totally new to this, don’t let words like SEO optimized scare you. We’ve got a tool to help with exactly this. Just type in the product and your niche, and it generates a title, description, and tags automatically. For a first draft, it’s genuinely useful and gives you a structure to work with, as well as keywords you maybe haven’t thought of. But here’s the important part. Don’t just publish what it gives you. Use it as a starting point. Then validate these keywords with the research you did before creating your first shirt. for Etsy. Go back to Etsy and search your niche. Look at the titles of the three or four top selling listings. [music] You’ll see patterns immediately. Compare those against what the AI optimizer gave you and see what it missed. Your description should answer three questions. Who is it for? What makes it special? And what does the buyer need to know before purchasing? Sizing, material, care instructions. Attention to this kind of detail builds confidence in a buyer who’s never ordered from you before. Next, fill in all 13 tags, every single one. These are extra keyword slots. Use the exact phrases you saw in your research. Don’t invent keywords you think sound right. Use the terms that are already making sales. Now, if you’re selling on Tik Tok shop, it’s a slightly different beast. Buyers aren’t searching the way they do on Etsy. They’re discovering. A lot of your traffic comes from short videos, not keyword searches. That changes what matters in your listing. Your title still needs keywords because Tik Tok shop does have a search function and they optimizer will give you a decent starting point. But to validate it, open Tik Tok, search your niche, and look at what the top videos for that product are saying in the captions and on-screen text. Those are your key words, the phrases people are typing into Tik Tok search. Your description on Tik Tok shop should be punchy and benefitled. Less, here’s what it is, and more here’s why they’ll love it. Think of it as the caption of a video, not a product spec sheet. Two to three short sentences max. Lead with the person, not the product. For the disc golf lover whose golden is always ready to help, this one lands. Also, Tik Tok shop heavily rewards listings with video content attached. If you can record a 10 to 15 second clip of the shirt, unboxing it, showing the texture of the fabric, wearing it, attach it to the listing, that alone can lift your visibility significantly. One more thing that applies to both platforms, personalization. If your design can be customized by the buyer, a name, a dog breed, a job title, turn this option on and write clear instructions for the buyer. Shoppers are willing to pay $5 to $10 more for personalized shirts, and they actually convert at a higher rate when someone’s looking for a gift. Speaking of paying, we can’t skip pricing. Here’s the formula. Production cost plus shipping plus platform fees plus desired profit equals retail price. For my comfort colors, production is 1072, shipping is $475, and Etsy fees are $375. That’s $19.22 in cost before you make a dollar. At a $28 retail price, you’re closing in on a 50% profit margin, and your profit is nearly $14. And pro tip, price for gift worthiness, not for volume. A t-shirt at $15 might signal cheap. At $25 to $35, depending on the shirt, it reads as a thought through purchase, something worth giving. Don’t race to the bottom because someone will always price lower than you. And that’s a game you can’t and don’t want to win. If you’re not ready to publish and want to come back later, you can save this listing as a draft. Or if it’s ready, hit that green publish button and it’ll go straight to your connected storefront. Etsy, Tik Tok shop, Shopify, whatever you’re using. Once it’s live, a buyer finds your listing, orders, and pays. Your storefront sends the order to Printify automatically. Printify routes it to the print provider who prints and ships directly to your customer. You never touch a box. You’ll get order status updates and tracking numbers. If something goes wrong, a misprint, a lost package, we’ll handle reprints. Your job after publishing is getting traffic. Getting eyes on the listing. That’s SEO, social content, maybe a few Tik Toks showing the design process, but the fulfillment side completely handled. The whole system, niche, design, list, sell. [music] The first design takes the longest. You’ll second guessess the niche, redo the mockup three times, obsess over the title. That is normal. Everyone does it. But the second design takes half as long. The 10th takes 20 minutes. Your first sale is the hardest. After that, you know it works. [music] And knowing it works changes