Category: Printful Videos

Welcome. I could not be more excited to talk to you today. I cannot think of a single person in the world of design that could be more knowledgeable about this than you are. Uh so, first of all, to answer uh questions that I’ve been getting all day today because I keep talking about KD. Uh what is KD and what is it used for? Uh yeah, so yeah, happy to be back. Thank you so much. Um yeah, so KD is a design tool that’s meant for a couple of different things. Uh not just print on demand, but you know, if we have people that are trying to grow their business or build a brand, which I think many uh Printull users are. Uh but you can do so many different things with KD from getting started with some templates or graphics or fonts to make basic text designs. You can even be making advertisements. You could go so far as to use AI tools. I commonly refer to KD as the tool that grows with you. So, uh if you want to do something quite simple, you can do that. If you want to do something quite robust, uh you can also do that. If you want to go crazy and use the pen tool or draw something, you can do that. Or you can just use templates and graphics. So, uh yeah, anything under the sun really design-wise, you can do it in KD. And I find it super uh helpful whenever we are uh thinking about POD specifically because very often to take your idea and to transfer it onto a product, you need a wider toolkit than you might otherwise uh have used for maybe like a digital design or something. Let’s get to a bit of a demo. Uh I’m going to uh open up a view where we can see your screen. you want to walk us through uh KD a little bit and maybe uh we can talk about what we’re going to do today. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. And I’m I’m probably going to throw a whole lot at you all. So, if there are questions uh drop them in the chat, just interrupt me at any point. This is probably going to be a lot, but I’m going to do my best to not be overwhelming. I basically want to get you all from zero to something, right? Go from zero to 100 quite fast. And in KD, when you get signed in, you’re going to arrive at what I just call your dashboard or your design hub to do different things. We have like an AI studio over here. We have the templates page, which I’m currently on here. We have a bulk mockups feature. But I want to hang out on this templates page right here that I think is going to be really relevant for many of you because you can just search for either a trending niche or a style that you know best or want to design for. We can actually just search for it. Now, you could just scroll through all of the many amazing templates that we have. It’s even going to learn you as you are searching for different things. You can see I’ve been searching for a lot of more bright designs lately, I would say. So, it’s it’s giving me a lot of what it suggests for me. Yours is probably just kind of randomized for the first time. You could also just be searching through different graphics. So, maybe you’re in exploration mode, which is kind of what we’re in right now. Maybe we just want to be going through looking at either photos or backgrounds, textures, illustrations. Maybe we want to pick out some different fonts. You see, I’ve saved a couple here with the little heart feature. Let me go back to templates for a second. I think one of the styles and niches that we were talking about a little while ago that I think is always popular is uh mental health. But mental health kind of mixed with a little whimsy. You know, not to make light of it, but you know, just to get us feeling a little better. So, I’m going to actually search, and you could do this for any kind of style or niche. You don’t have to follow me exactly. I’m just going to type in mental health t-shirt. And this is kind of a start for me when I’m going to try to decide what I want to design. You can see I’ve already harded a couple of these. And you’re going to see kind of every style, right? You’re seeing a whole bunch of stuff. You’re seeing like very intense kind of flyer stuff. You’re seeing like more like health related stuff. You’re seeing more retro mascot stuff. I really like this one. I hearted this one earlier. Uh, this one is really nice as well. Oo, I like this text over here. I’m going to heart that. So, this is really where I might start to get some inspiration. You can click on any of these templates and underneath you’re going to see a lot of things that are similar, which is very, very cool. Or we could just go ahead and uh use the template itself. If you ever want to just get into KD uh without having to go through all of that stuff, you’ve arrived in KD and you’re like, you know what, I just I just want to start playing around with all this stuff. I want to play around with fonts and everything like that. You can just go up here to the create button uh and explore or excuse me, create a new project. Now, you actually sent me some stuff that we’re going to utilize together. So, I’m going to switch over to being already in the editor. So, I’ve already created this project and I dropped in some stuff that matches the the kind of style, right? Maybe a little bit more chaotic, I would say. Uh, but before I go further, do you want to maybe explain like how we got to this point where we’re going to start creating stuff with this? Right. So, uh I’ve been showing off uh these uh products for like several sessions today. So, if you guys were here, uh you definitely know what we’re talking about. But uh what I have uh created for today’s event is a whole brand called uh like imperfect duckling and we’re all talking about how life is hard. Uh and it’s all based on like ducks that are experiencing the exact emotions that we’re all experiencing. Uh yeah, like uh an example of the way that I used the crying duck in the book is I’m going to quickly like switch to my uh top down camera and show people. Uh is just this little duck right here. Nice. Yeah. Saying uh shut up. I need to be productive. Uh ah that’s good. So what I’ve done is I’m not really all that good at design. I’ve sent a bunch of ducks to you and uh and I also sent you the font that I used for the brand. I was like, “What would you do with this? Show me your magic.” Okay, great. I love the style. I love the direction, the niche, the colors, all of it. I think it’s super super cool. So, if you remember a second ago when we were looking in the templates, which by the way, if you’re in the editor, you can also do the same thing I was just showing you with all the templates. We saved a couple, or rather I saved a couple that I think could be cool. And maybe I want to use those layouts, those text formats uh to inspire. So, if I go down here to my likes tab, which everything under the sun that you like is going to be in here, whether it’s graphics or templates or whatever, you can see a couple of these here that I have hearted. And when you click them, they are added to your project, which is what we’re we’re on right here. It’s just kind of a big canvas. You have an artboard here. And I’ve already added two of these here to my canvas. They actually are pretty close already to the colors that are in these these ducks already. So, let’s say that we want to maybe edit this one. And this is how any of the templates are going to work that you start using or editing or playing with. Every piece of these or every piece of this is going to be editable. So, let’s say um I really liked that one. What did you say the text was for that that mug? Let’s maybe make something similar. You said I need to was shut up. I need to be productive and duck is like capitalized. Okay, so maybe I do it like this and this would be I need to be and then the text is very much like very similar to probably other tools people are familiar with or really any anywhere you edit text. Uh, and then I’m going to take this text right here, and we’ll say I probably won’t capitalize it in script because it’ll look a little weird, but I will keep the uh I will keep the pun there. Uh, so I’m going to take all these and we have these alignment tools. Uh, so because this is kind of like more of an aligned center design here. And then, okay, maybe maybe we want to change that at some point. But now I’ve got all these little these little ducks here. Um, I don’t really need this heart element, although it’s actually kind of cool. I can uh drag one of my little ducks up here. And so now I’ve kind of done something a little bit more custom. I mean, maybe you found these in uh our our elements panel, like maybe you found a set or a series that you liked a lot, or maybe you got them from somewhere else, or maybe you drew them in another tool like Procreate, and then you uploaded them to KD, what whatever the the case may be. Now you’ve done some really cool stuff by editing a template to be more close to you and then using the elements that you have here. Similarly, you could you could do the same thing with this design here if we wanted to. Um I want to show you a really really neat like this kind of blows my mind. It’s a very simple feature, but it kind of blows my mind. Let’s say that this layout Okay, we haven’t changed the text yet. Let’s just imagine that you’ve changed the text to something witty that you’ve already done. Uh, but now we’ve got this element that doesn’t really make sense for like my brand, right? My print on demand brand. I can just grab this and because I’ve uploaded all of these here in the uploads, I could just hover over and click this little replace button right here and it replaces it at the actual size in my design. And now I can go on and edit all of my different stuff. And you know, maybe I can take the the background, which looks to be a like a purple. And then maybe I can take this little eyropper tool, and I’ll grab the little pink from this towel. And so now I’m starting to get more designs that match just from using templates along with elements that are maybe more custom to me, you know? Mhm. And just that little like hack of replacing it seems so simple, but the way that made my heart sing because it so meaning that you don’t have to figure out which layer the previous thing was on and if you should put it under the left sparkles or over the right sparkles and sizing it and everything. I immediately was like, “Yes, that’s one click. It’s so easy.” It’s one click. Yeah, because otherwise Yes. you’d have to have deleted that and then maybe it’s in top on top of the stars and then you got to go in here and figure out which you know if any of you ever are really wondering and want to get into the nitty-gritty. We have a layers panel. It’s a little I would say maybe advanced but you can always see what’s on a particular artboard and you can even like hide things if you want to you know make variations of stuff. Maybe a little bit more than what we need to go into today but it is there if you’re ever like why can’t I figure out how to get this on top of this or this behind this or whatever. we have a little bit more robust features for that. Um, but yeah, where should we go from here now that we’ve got a couple of designs? Uh, so I did uh I kept like watching uh the the chat to see what people uh are looking at and I also know a few of my favorite features. So I’m going to be throwing stuff at you from both my brain and the people’s brain. Okay. Uh there are uh a couple of uh questions in the chat that I see about mock-ups, which we are going to get to, I promise. Uh but one of the things that I want to like emphasize uh because let’s go a little bit chronologically is like artboard size uh and uh u making sure that your images because I sent you PGs are vectors and can be scaled to different design sizes. So can you show us where all of those settings and especially the vectorzing feature would be? Yes. Okay. Great questions, especially for making sure you have the highest quality upload for your for your garment, your or your product, whether it’s a mug, it doesn’t have to be a garment. Okay, let’s start with um size. Let’s start with the easiest one, which is size. So, right now, whenever you add a template or if you create an artboard, which there’s an artboard tool here, you could you could just draw, you know, whatever kind of size you want with the artboard tool. Um, whenever you click on an artboard, you’re going to see the size over here on the right. Now, mine is in pixels. It’s just how I like to work. You don’t have to do that way. We can actually change that in this little hamburger menu. We could go and change it to inches. Now, we know I mean, this is a massive artboard, 30 by 30. [laughter] I don’t think we’re going to have any issues if we export it from from here. So, if you ever need to know or excuse me, if you ever want to adjust it and say, “Okay, typical t-shirt size 16x 20,” you could just pop that in or you could come up to the custom artboard size setting. And I believe we already have a Printful t-shirt size right here. So, if you’re ever worried or concerned, uh you can al also always find that over in Printull. I believe it’ll tell you the exact size or there are also guidelines you can download. pop those in KD if you really are worried about it. But I would say the most important thing would be the I don’t want to go too technical, but the DPI of this you can control. So if we were to click this little button called export, you see right here, we’ve got control over the DPI. And that’s just I don’t know how how much technical we want to go into that. Basically, you need a lot. You need 300. And as you can see right here, the export size is going to be 8600 pixels by 10,800. Uh way more. You could probably leave this at 72. It’ be fine. But needless to say, you’re going to have a massive image ready for print uh for Printull. And you can also remove the background. Another very key important part of this is because if you’re not doing something with a pattern, like I think your mug had a pattern on it, for example. If I wanted to do it on the sweater or the shirt you’re wearing, I don’t want that gray box or that pink box. I want it to be transparent. And so I can remove the background right here from the export settings. Now, if everything I just said was a lot, I got an extra hack for you, which is just going to the quick export feature and then just selecting three times, which is going to take this, it’s going to make it a PNG, and it’s going to do 300. You can think of three as 300. So, it’s going to multiply it by three times. So, you’ve got options here for being speedy. Now, before I go to the vectorz, did I miss anything here? Uh, you didn’t miss anything. And I also just imagine the size of this design. If you were to take this uh 36 inch long uh design and export it at three times the length, the the the the 12t long is or 9 ft long, I guess, is maybe a little bit too much. But uh a quick question uh that I saw um a in in the chat right here that I think uh kind of touches on the templates that we have right in front of us. Uh where was it? Where was it? Where was it? I think it was very uh helpful and it comes up a lot. uh essentially asking like once you uh use some of the stuff like templates, can you just use that for free to sell? Um, right. Okay. I maybe I’m interpreting that as like the template itself. Do you think that’s what they mean? Or like on a garment? Uh, no, no, no, no. on on a garment like for POD once you have a KD account can you use that? Of course. Of course. That’s the whole purpose of this. Yeah, absolutely. And there are no IP issues, no nothing. No, we try to keep it very very very very simple. We have a whole page to this. I’ve got a whole video on this as well. There are no certain assets that can only be used for shirts and then certain assets that can only be used for bookmarks. It’s just it just you you have at your disposal the fonts, the graphics, the templates, the images to use for all of your physical and digital in products. It’s that’s how we just have made it solid. Yeah. And I did find the exact question from Francis which was essentially uh do you have a paid subscription? Uh uh first can you use these things and then the additional question to it is do you have to have a paid subscription to use the templates and not be at risk of IP or copyright issues? Great question. The answer is no. Although I will say it’s a little bit of a moot point because you’re only going to be able to export them at a specific size anyway. So, you know, I just I always talk about the free plan is really a a a start to try to see if KD’s right for you. You can do a lot of things. You can use all almost all the tools, edit it all, but there are some things that are capped to the to the paid ones and size being one. So, I really try to say this is a non-issue. The answer is you can still use it. It’s just, you know, you’re kind of limited to stickers [laughter] kind of because you won’t be you won’t be getting that 10,000 uh pixel export if if you know what I mean. Yeah, I do. And I feel like that is like uh a great way to do a free plan because uh there uh I think it’s a very clear way to say like hey this is a great tool uh and there’s so much that you will get once you have it. Uh but you can’t just guarantee that uh for like you can’t just tell people that it’s going to be great for them and expect them to agree to pay money for it. uh letting them just try it out is is a fantastic way to uh show off the capabilities of the tool which I feel like are great. Absolutely. Um then uh I guess the kind of next question and the next thing to uh check out in my opinion is okay so if you’ve you’ve created these designs uh how would you then turn them into mock-ups? Yes. Okay. Great question. So, there’s a couple of different ways we can do mockups. Um, also, I I realized I forgot the the vectorz question. I’ll I’ll briefly show that. Uh, anytime you’re anytime you’re looking at or excuse me, editing text or like little elements where you can already change the color, you can see here when I’m selecting text, I can change the color. When I’m selecting these little elements, they’re already vector. Vector meaning uh endlessly scalable. um they are mathematical paths that can continue on forever. They will always be the highest resolution that you are seeing. Uh but sometimes you’re going to encounter an image like this, a graphic that is uh flat. So it is not vector meaning it is not endlessly scalable. At some point it will become grainy. At some point it will become uh you know illeible a little bit. Uh so we have some options for this. We have a lot of image tools over here that you can use. One of them being an upscaler which can just if you’re really worried about it, you can upscale it and it will increase the pixel size. I don’t remember. I think up to about 4,000 pixels, which is probably going to be enough for you. But yeah, it’s pretty big. But you could also just vectorize this. Uh I like to set mine at the max depending on what I’m doing just because I want to make sure that it doesn’t leave any colors out. And after it thinks about it for See, this one’s a little bit of a tough one because these ducks have a little a lot of little detail in them. Yeah. So, I might use uh a tool like AI to change the colors a little bit. Uh let’s try this guy cuz this guy only has a couple of colors. So, let’s go to vectorize. I really like that guy. That’s That’s one that I haven’t used in anything before. Yeah. It’s so cool. Yeah. Okay. So, now this guy is fully vector uh because he had a little more simplistic colors. And so, now if I really wanted to change uh I don’t know why I would want to change his feet, but I could. Maybe I want them to be a little bit more red or something like that, you know. Okay, so now you can do it. But now he’s endlessly scalable. So big, small, you know, whatever. I It’s not going to be an issue for um uh legibility. There’s not going to be any graininess. So anyway, there’s your vectorzer. Uh we’re working on getting an even better one cuz we’re maxed out around 15 or 16 uh colors. If you all want a better one, please come over to the channel and keep saying that you want it because that’s the way to get our team to do things. Uh, but let’s talk about mock-ups. So, I’ve already done a couple of mockups for one of these shirts that I made right here. And don’t don’t be alarmed. I’m going to show you exactly how I did this with the other ones up above, but we have what are called live preview mockups here in KD. So, if what I mean by live is if I were to change the color, it’s going to change the color on all the mockups immediately. If I were to change the size of the design, it’s going to change it on here. I can also change it individually on the mockup itself. Now, you may be asking, how did you get there? Well, let’s do it with this one. I actually really like this t-shirt that we have come up with. Um, you have three ways. When you click on an artboard here, you can click mockup here at the top. You can click mockup over here on the right or you can click this little arrow and then click mockup. And then when you do that, it is going to open up our mockups catalog where we can do things like type comfort colors and let’s go for the 1717. Hell yeah. This is this is my favorite blank in the entire catalog. I nearly at this point after years of being in the POD space, I want to say that more than 50% of my entire t-shirt collection is this exact blank cuz I love it so much. It is the best. Especially like yeah, all the different color options that it has, the softness of it. Oh, it’s just it’s it’s really really good. So, let’s say that you’re happy with with the you know this comfort color 1717. We can keep adding more mockups to this. So, we don’t have to just do it on a on a shirt, for example. So this little arrow here is dragable. So let’s say I come up here and I just let it go. I can do another mockup up here and you can move these all around. So let’s say also I think this would work really nice on a tote bag I think. Yeah. Um so let’s go ahead and click one of those. A tote bag filled with like school books or something or a laptop for the for the message. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So let’s go with um let’s just go with a basic one for now. Okay. Yeah. that that work that works pretty well. And you could keep on building this out um on different mockups. Now, as I mentioned before, because they’re live, anything I change on here is going to change over on the mockup as well as uh including the color. So, if I want to see what this I I believe I don’t I think it’s called butter or something. It’s one of my favorite uh colors. I think it’s probably I we’re going to talk about the very light yellow. I think it’s called ivory on the color. It’s called ivory, not butter. That’s the butter one is darker. The ivory. Ivory is what I’m talking about. I don’t remember the hex code exactly, but I know that one sells a lot. And I actually own a lot of those because I like them a lot. And that looks pretty nice. I think it looks it looks pretty nice on this color. So anyway, the point being is you could be changing uh these at any point. Now, what I also like to do, and this is maybe a little advanced, is I like to select all of these. I do that holding the shift key, by the way, and clicking. Then I like to um duplicate these uh which you can do with command C and command V just or control C and I forget some people don’t have Macs. Um and then I could like basically continue to parse out um I think there’s also a lilac colorish and now I’m starting to see all of my different uh products on different excuse me my designs on different colors on the products that I want to sell. And at any point you can download these um right from here to use however you want. Yeah, this is actually a great uh point to to bring up because just now Cidra in the chat asks so you can choose the specific comfort color shirt color. Uh and this is a great moment to talk about the exact hex codes I think because you just showed that you can like you can change the color of the product but what is the specific color of the shirt? Yeah. Yep. Exactly. So maybe if you want to go uh tell me one that would be awesome. Yes. Uh so I can go right into uh Prull’s product catalog uh and type in let me just uh share my screen is I don’t know I wonder the best way to I’m just going to full screen it for now. Uh so I will just look for comfort colors 1717 and we’re going to find that exact shirt. Uh it is uh this garment diet shirt and on the Printful product page you can hover over each individual color and you will see a hashtag and then six either numbers or letters and all of that is the exact color codes. Which one do you want? Do you want the ivory or do you want the Let’s do Let’s do ivory. Okay. Ivory is FF. Okay. 4 D9. 4 D9. Yes. Okay. Nice. And then what is the the purple lilacish color one? Uh it’s called orchid and it is orchid. Uh E A D. Okay. 3F2. And I really like the fact that you are able to input them um you know manually. I I think there’s probably going to be someone immediately thinking of like oh uh so why don’t I just have a drop down for every single shirt and stuff. But if there’s ever a new shirt color available, it is not going to be just immediately available everywhere. So, being able to just switch it out for yourself and see what it looks like uh on every single color that you can think of, I think that totally works. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is is really helpful for those of you who are going to be selling on maybe Etsy, for example, where you you do want to go ahead and offer a couple of different shirts. Sometimes I like to to take the mockup here in uh KD and we have this remove background feature which will uh for lack of a better phrase remove the background from the image. Uh and sometimes what I might do um I’ve been doing all of my Etsy listings in square now because I think it’s just the best for um you know like uh all of the the apps or excuse me all the views mobile, desktop, iPad, whatever. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll have this is maybe a little poor example, but I’ll have a cutout of one and then because we just saw we could take all those hex codes. I’ll have like a bunch of circles up here above uh amongst the top and uh if I want them to be really nice and tidy, I’ll use the tidy tool. And then I’ll have I’ll have the other colors here for example. So maybe we have that ivory one, maybe we have one that’s black, which probably doesn’t work for this design, but maybe we have a pink one. And maybe we have whatever. You get the idea. So, I’ll create kind of like a listing uh a a listing image with the same sort of text that says like color options or something like that. And this is a really good way that you don’t have to keep on making tons and tons and tons of shirts. I guess you could also just copy and paste over the Printful mockups as well and you could just put them on here. This is probably a bad representation, but you get the idea of basically insinuating, I have this shirt in a whole bunch of other colors because you’re limited in the amount of images that Etsy lets you upload. Anyway, if it’s your own Shopify or something like that, you can go nuts with the amount of photos, I think. But, um, I think yeah, for social media. Yeah. Uh but uh there are uh certain things about mockups that I want to remind people about uh such as uh they do need to represent the product accurately. So I think the hex code specifically is a fantastic way to do that. And I also uh I believe that for example the comfort color shirt picture that is just a picture that you guys took of the shirt. Correct. Yes. So, anytime that you see um let’s see, let’s go back to the mockups panel just quickly. Anytime you see a product like that, I believe we also took a bunch of the Gilden ones. Anything that has a code. Yeah, these are all uh all images that we we ordered all the products and took photos ourselves. So, they are the actual and we get a lot of questions as to why they’re in white. They’re in white so that you can go put the the color of the product in. I I don’t know any other way to explain that, but they’re white here so that you can add it and then you can use your artboard color to change it to the actual hex code that you need. Anyway, uh a lot of these are going to have a code. So, for example, you see 64200. I guess it’s that’s what it is. Gilded, whatever. Uh you can always click on the three dots to see the actual code of it. And now, I know some people are going to say, “How do I know the sizing is right?” Excellent question. I would always always always just go check your your Printful mockup. Now, if you’ve added a template such as this one that um some of these are going to be 16 by 20 anyway, and then you add the mockup of the shirt, it should immediately put it in that box. Um but again, always check the I believe Printull has um the templates. I’ve used them before where you can just I I keep one in my um I keep one in my project and I just add it and make sure my design is okay. Uh and then I can just replicate. Boom, boom, boom. get them all out, you know. Yeah. Uh something that uh I mentioned uh in like an earlier session in the way that I like to use KD project is I have a project for each product type. So that way I don’t need to copy over uh all of the guidelines, all the artboard sizes are correct. Uh and I can see exactly uh all of the like compositions that I created of a design previously. Uh, meaning that at some point I can just like look through everything and can be like, okay, I remember that this composition with the two little elements on the sides of the text looked good on this hat. Therefore, I can like replicate that but with slightly different designs and slightly like different colors, approaches, etc. And honestly, uh there are so many ways to utilize all of the tools. I also saw a couple of people uh I’m trying to make sure that we have enough time for everything, but I saw a couple people uh asking uh if uh uh you could expand a little bit also on the video mockups that we could generate. But I just want to make make sure that people can see uh the the little like improved color options photo. Can you like go back to that? Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I just I basically I grabbed the other one. I added a little drop shadow here. Maybe it’s a little too much drop shadow. Uh, and then this is how I like to make mine. I like to give you like some proof of like multiple kinds. And then I would like I’d probably have one listing for this and then I have another listing of the dark. So I I I’m always going to have two another good option about or tip about colors. I’m probably going to do this same design flipped so that it works on dark colors because it’s not going to work, right? The black text is going to go away. So I would just duplicate this and then change all the colors around. Yeah. Um, but you were asking about video, right? Yes. Okay. Yes. So, um, here we’re in currently the editor here, but I’m going to flip us back over to, uh, what is called the AI studio here. And underneath here, we have a ton of different things from just general uh, workflows for mockup. So, more of what I was just doing, but they’re a little bit easier to use, I would say. So, if you’re really really concerned over all the editing I just did, you could pop open one of these, upload your product, and then basically select a style or or um describe it yourself, and then it’s going to give you uh the output, the mockup of your of your design. But we have a couple of different styles for videos. So, we have these product listing videos and then we have the UGC style videos. These are going to be great. the the product listing videos are going to be really really good for something like Etsy because Etsy is really pushing video. You can stop the scroll by having something something of your product like a tote bag moving around or uh picking up the mug that you might you made with the duck on it. Maybe you could just have a simple uh one of the ducks. So, for example, let’s go here. Actually, let’s do one that is a uh let’s see. Yeah, let’s do this one because this is a shirt. I don’t have a mug. Uh, let’s go and let’s pick this one. And let’s go use image. These are really, really easy. We can pick which animal we want to put in here. Let’s go with a black cat cuz um I love cats. Oh, I wish there was a duck there. Honestly, if there was a duck in those options that we duck. Yeah, I’m a little worried about trying to Maybe I’ll prompt that one later and send it to you. Uh, but let’s just go like this. Aspect ratio. We’re going to do one by one and we’re going to hit generate. Now, while this is generating, we can leave this and keep making more. So, without having you sit there and wait for me to watch this happen, uh in our previous session, I actually already generated a couple with a different niche, a different design style. So, I did one for uh this tote bag, which is kind of just a POV uh video of the the product. So, I would do this once I have validated that that design is actually going to be that size. I may I I’ve already checked in Printful that that’s legit. I’ll bring it over here. I’ll pop it in here. And then I could either describe a surface or choose one. And then you’re going to have really really great uh stuff for socials, right? You could put a little trending sound behind this, maybe some captions. Uh I tried a couple of other ones with this little uh showcase of this water bottle with a little snail on it. So, you have a bunch of of different options. Uh, and if you’re worried about using a particular uh, AI avatar or model, you can always uh, upload your own. So, if you’ve created a character or something, you could upload your own and use it amongst all of the workflows if that’s how you want to do it. What’s another one that I did that I thought was pretty decent. There’s actually a great question in in the chat about this uh from from Erica uh saying, “Yes, I assume there’s a way to use the Printful Basic like mockups to import them into KD and then make a video that way.” Yeah, absolutely. So, in any of these, like if we were to uh basically the same way I just did it. So, you can up uh you can open up a workflow and click on you can actually just drag an image in here from like your download. So, if you had already copied it or downloaded it from Printull, you could just drag it in or you can click and then drag it in or upload it from here. If it’s already in KD, you’ll see here, here’s all our little designs and stuff and our mockups that we made. Um, but you can just drag it into here right from Printull. Go through the steps, you know, click who you want, click the background or describe it, select the motion that you want to have, so maybe it’s a turn or whatever, and select your aspect ratio. Uh, yeah. And then you can go from there. But it doesn’t have to be it doesn’t have to be a mockup from INKD. It can be a mockup from Prull. And uh the additional question that we kind of uh I saw it a little bit uh earlier uh I don’t quite remember who who asked this specifically but uh people were concerned that when uh AI starts working on the mockups, it’s not going to keep uh the actual design the way that it was initially created. So, the AI would change certain things about the design on the product. Uh, but as as much as I’ve used uh KD’s features, you guys, I can tell you that I’ve never seen that happen ever. Uh, and it looks pretty good. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I mean, that was happening like months ago, I would think. Yeah, we had some video would be doing some weird stuff, but as the models have gotten better, for example, this one is Seed Dance 2.5. Wait, hold on. I need to share your screen again. There we go. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Yeah. uh like I I agree in you know months ago that that was an issue where you might generate an image or you might generate a video and the the the design would be a little weird but even with this one from an interesting angle like it’s really keeping everything intact especially with more powerful um models like as Zance 2.5 came out and then I think another one just came out cleaning we have cling 3 4K which is also really really good um I have not witnessed any issues with it as of light. Uh let’s check out our animal interaction one here. Yeah, that looks great. Uh I don’t Yeah, that’s very very nice. So Oh, I mean Yeah. So you have this. Okay. So I will say for Etsy, this is probably a little too zoomed out. Um but you know, it’s still cool. Maybe is as the second or third thing in your Etsy listing or or this is a great social post though, um as an example. So yeah, I I haven’t had any issues since the new models have come out, but it is noted if you are experiencing issues, definitely reach out to support. We’ll give you your tokens back 100%. That and also uh I feel like for something like this, I just want to uh hearken back to something that we had last session. People were sharing pictures of their dogs and their cats uh and their dogs names and their cats names in the chat. So, do uh mention once again you guys if if you guys have a cat, especially if it’s a black cat, let me know in the chat. Uh and maybe share a photo [laughter] if you’re able. Uh I really want to know. Uh and uh we uh have maybe only like 10ish minutes left. So, the two things that I still want to definitely cover uh as like features that I really love is first uh branding uh and and like the the uh way that you can kind of put your brand into KD and and use it uh very comfortably. And um next to talk a little bit about uh I excuse me I saw some questions that were not necessarily about like product designs and product mock-ups but something that you can use within your store within your socials uh that is like maybe a social media banner or something because um I don’t want people to come away from this thinking that KD is only really useful for like product designs you know. Yeah, 100%. All right, let’s cover the the brand first. So, there’s two ways that you can uh create and access this. When you’re here on your dashboard, and you’re probably going to get a notice for it anyway when you when you sign up, you may see something up here that just says brand. We have already started one, but if you were to add one, you have options here for just importing a URL. So, let’s say you do have a Shopify site or you do have an Etsy store, you can actually just import your URL. I have tons of videos on this on YouTube. I think I have like six videos you can go watch exactly step by step how to do that. Or you can create one from scratch which is going to prompt you to either use a template or create one new. Now I’m going to take you to one uh that we have already been working on uh which what did you say it was called? I’m going to change the name here. What did you say it was? Uh oh. Uh imperfect duckling. Imperfect duckling. Uh, okay. So, this is what you’re going to see after you import your URL. Or if you don’t have one, it’s okay. You don’t have to have one. You can add each of these individually. So, what you’re going to see here is logos. You’re going to see colors, color palettes that you can build. You can edit different color palettes so that I can access them in the editor. You can have your fonts defined, um, like uh, the script that we liked, the the headline that we liked. You can upload all of the graphics. So, let’s say that or you can add them from from if you’ve already been making them in KD, you can add them from ink. I uploaded the ducks that you sent me. Um, and then you can even have a visual style and this is what’s going to be added to some of those workflows I was just using. You can actually click on brand on some of the workflows and it’s going to use your uh colors. It’s going to use your colors. You’re going to use your logo, things like that so that you stay on brand. Now, you can edit anything from here. Again, I got videos. I don’t want to waste your time there. You can check out the channel. But if we’re here in the editor, let’s say, uh, this one is not quite on brand yet. Uh, if you see over here in the left side, this little brand thing, you can see I’ve got the imperfect duckling, and it’s got my logo, it’s got my colors, it’s got my fonts, and it’s got my graphics. So, if I wanted to take this text, and I wanted it to be that body text, I could simply just click it, and now it’s going to change it to my uh to my text. Maybe it’s a little too big, but we can change that. Um, or we could actually, and this is a this is a pretty new feature that I’m stoked about. We can click an entire template. It doesn’t even have to be one we’ve edited yet. And then under this little more tab, we can just click apply brand. And then we can apply like the settings. And it’s going to It changed it all the script, but it it it it adapted all of our colors here. We would want to turn that to not be this. And yeah. Anyway, not not a great example because of the headline font that I did, but you can still add your brand colors. So, for example, if I wanted to apply my colors. So, boom. Now, I’ve got my color palette uh applied, or if I wanted to change the sparkles to something else, or if I wanted to change the heart or the text, you get the idea. You can also edit or add things from your brand so that you can keep it on brand. If you want your store to be like niche, you want it to be using the same colors, you want to be using the same Yeah. all that stuff. Uh which really leads into your next point about social media. Yes. If you go back to the the the templates panel over here, uh either on the dashboard or in the editor, you’re going to see things like marketing that you can use for banners, posters, you can ads, uh signage. Here’s some social media ones here that are pretty cool. Uh so we could add like, you know, if you just want to do some inspirational quotes, we can just do the same thing here. We’ll go to apply brand and then now we’ve got yeah our our post here. We can also find our brand colors over here in brand underneath the color panel. So if I wanted that background to be a lighter pink or black or what have you um I could do it this way as well. So we have a lot of different things for social media as as you were saying. We also have um let’s see let me go back over to the workflows because this is relevant for this conversation. Uh, let me go back to the AI Studio really quick. And then if we go to marketing, you can do the same thing outside of I showed you the UGC ones, but let’s say you wanted to uh do this really cool one with the crane. Or if you wanted to do this, we have some features like um this is pretty trendy, right? You see this like what is this? The cutout of like Instagram with like a hand coming in or like text bubbles or something like that, you know? These are really cool. So you could do the same thing. Uh oh, you can see right there, apply your brand and then it’s going to apply your your duckling and then pick a background. It’s really really cool. So, we do have more than just uh graphic design in KD. We do have the whole marketing suite if that’s where you want to go. Yes. And uh I first of all just want to let you know that uh I have now seen I think like with five or or six total black cats in the chat which is beautiful. Uh and then and then second of all uh I uh can tell from the chat and also from what’s going on inside my little heart is that people are very uh excited to start playing around with this stuff and being like okay and I can do this and I can create this and I can do that which I think is the perfect like mood to give people whenever you’re talking about design you know uh absolutely uh my like one kind of final question uh because we are coming up on like the last I don’t know 3 minutes left in the session is if uh somebody knows kind of nothing about graphic design and has never really uh tried to design anything on their own and they’ve previously like if they ever done anything they’ve maybe got someone off of Fiverr or or a friend did it for them where would they start because I want people to even the people who are like very scared by all of the uh features and all the uh AI studio options. What would be their starting point? Where would you point them? Yeah, I would say I would probably do the same thing that I was showing you in the beginning. I would come to uh maybe maybe the templates feed and I would check out a lot of these different styles, a lot of these different niches. Maybe I would start uh typing in because these are made by like a team of world-class designers that we hire here at KD. So, these are made from people that have gone out and search the internet to see what’s trending and what’s great. And what I would do is open up some of these designs and see how they’re made and and not be afraid of destroying it. We get a lot of comments like, “These templates are so beautiful. I don’t want to edit them because I’m going to destroy it.” Well, the good news is you can just go back and open it again. You don’t have to be afraid to do that. In fact, the only way you’re going to learn is to be able to go in and change it and and search through the 800,000 fonts we have or whatever. I don’t know what the number is, but like yeah, I just go through and and and start messing with stuff. Uh our social I’m sorry, I’m distracted here. Oh, that’s that’s really cool. Our thing is our Sorry, I knew that was going to happen. I was like, this is gonna happen. Oh, look how it did my uh my brand. It did the little like cry, plan, [laughter] snack, panic, repeat. That’s hilarious. Okay, that’s amazing. Anyway, that wasn’t the question. I would definitely look at some of the templates. Um, yeah, I don’t want to try to, you know, plug, but we have tons of tutorials on on YouTube to help you get started from square one. If you really want to go uh from scratch, I can show you how to do that. If you want to use AI, I’ll show you how to do that. Um, if you want to start with Pinterest and then kind of build it out using hodgepodge templates, I show you how to do that. I mean, there’s so many different ways. I just don’t want you to be scared. I think that’s what I see most people doing is they just don’t do anything. And I think you should start

Hello everybody. I can see some people joining in here. Uh so not to give you guys any spoilers, uh we are going to be starting in about 3 minutes. Uh I see some people still trickling in. If you’re in here already, make sure to let me know where you are from. I’m going to be keeping a very very close eye on the chat here.

I see someone’s from New York. Hi. This is going to be exciting. It’s actually a bit of an experiment this time because we are streaming to both YouTube and Facebook at the same time. I’m going to be keeping an eye on two chats. Uh, and hoping that I don’t miss anybody, but you guys will surely let me know if I do. All right. What I’m also interested in, oh, someone is here from Austin, Texas, Ohio, Poland. Hi everybody. Michigan, Florida, Georgia, so many places. I’m really curious what your niches guys are as well. So, if you have started your store or you’re thinking about starting it, what is the niche that you want to be working in? because that is going to be very helpful to me later when I’m showing you some of those design steps that I would personally take when going through the design process. Someone’s in here from New Mexico, South Africa, Philly, Lena, a couple of people from Georgia in here actually. Hi everybody.

Right. Okay. Someone’s saying baby clothes. What this is going to feel like hopefully to you guys is a bit of a choose your own adventure. Uh so you’re going to get a lot of say in what we do both through polls and also through letting me know in the chat. Uh someone’s doing LGBTQ events and a travel group. Is that like together? Is both of those combined or are those separate? Let me know. This one’s from Toronto. Hi. Hello.

Oh, both together. All right. I can h I can kind of see how how those work together. But actually to think of like LGBTQ events and a travel group as this kind of like joint safe space, I don’t know, makes me happy.

Fatima is very excited to be here. Hi, Fatima. Happy to see you. Uh, someone’s working in Shopify. This is actually very uh helpful information because very often I see people going through uh different sales channels and being like, “Oh, this person is looking at Etsy trends. That doesn’t apply to me.” Trust me, all of these things do apply. So, we’re going to get fully started in a little bit. Someone’s from New Hampshire. Vintage travel and tourism. Okay. Good to know. Good to know. Okay, so the countdown is officially over. It is now the hour on the dot and we can get started. Hello everybody. Uh my name is Liz if you’re new here or Elizabetha and I host these live streams about once a month at this point and I keep hearing a bunch of people, new sellers or experienced sellers keep saying that they kind of never know how to approach designing. So, they have created a bunch of designs in the past, but they never know what the workflow is, like how do you get started from a completely blank slate. So, what I thought I would do is I would show you what my process looks like, but also let you participate in it. This is a bit more of an experimental stream than what we usually do because uh we are streaming to both YouTube, our YouTube channel, and also the Facebook group Printful Insiders. If you’re not a part of it, do apply to go in there. Uh, and what is going to happen and the way that we’re going to do this is I’m going to give you guys an opportunity to vote and you will get to decide what the process is and also leave whatever questions or comments you have in the chat. Our moderators from either YouTube or Facebook are going to put all of the questions together. I’m going to try to answer as many as I can throughout the stream, but if I don’t get to them, we’re going to cover them towards the end in a full Q&A. Uh so without further ado, uh I’m going to show you kind of what the voting mechanism looks like so you can see. So this is a bit of a setup that I have in here. you will get four polls and we’re going to talk about technique and what product type to choose uh and what aesthetic you guys might want and what color scheme. And the reason I’ve set it up this way is whenever you approach designing a new product, I feel like the best thing to do is to answer a bunch of questions for yourself first. So, what technique do you want to use? What kind of product you’re designing for? What kind of trend or aesthetic or specific niche you’re thinking about? And then what color do you want to use in your designs? If you’re picking a specific technique, are there any limitations to your colors? So, you can keep all of that in mind and build yourself a framework before you even get into designing. So, I see a bunch of different niches in here already. For example, uh someone’s talking about uh different like vintage stuff like old trains and ships. Um, I saw also like countryside bliss potentially that being a niche that I can definitely see as a Pacific aesthetic. So, what we’re going to do, uh, is I’m going to ask our lovely moderators to share the link to this poll. uh and if you are let’s say watching from a TV or you can click a link you can also uh use this QR code and scan it and vote that way if you want to use your mobile device. Uh so I’m going to give you guys five minutes uh and I’m going to see what you guys decide on what we’re going to do. So, something that I’m very curious to see uh is what people are going to be excited about in terms of technique. I personally am a big fan of embroidery, but I know that that is something that people are less free to design within. So, if uh you have a limited color palette, then you might be like, “Ah, this is this is not free enough. I I had a very specific design in mind or I have a logo. So, I’m not going to go for it. So, let’s say I were to just like, you know, for curiosity sake, vote for embroidery. Uh, and I can then see what our percentages are. So, a bunch of people uh are currently looking at DTG or DT Flex. So, we’re potentially looking at maybe a printed t-shirt, you know, the the classic. Uh, let me know actually what what you voted for in the chats. I also am very curious to see you guys’ opinions. And next, after we decide on what technique it’s going to be, we also need to figure out what product type we want it to be. So, there is overlap with all techniques and virtually all product types. Maybe not uh as big in some product types as others. So like all over print hats might be smaller than embroidered hats but still uh let’s just pick apparel for curiosity sake so that we can see the numbers and people are heavily voting for apparel. So if you are not team apparel get in there and and vote for the other options and we will move on to aesthetic just to see the numbers. Uh if you have not uh been able to get in there, make sure to find the Canva voting link in either the chat or scan the QR code on screen to vote. Uh these are kind of vague descriptions of aesthetic just to at least give myself a little bit of wiggle room in here. Um I like everything edgy and counterculture, so I’ll just pick this just to see what people are choosing. Uh, and it’s actually kind of neck andneck with this slightly fairy core, outdoorsy, green, foresty vibes and then this more like edgy, dark, uh, high contrast uh, you know, chains and and and safety pins and and the magic cable and everything. So, we’ll see what people are choosing. Uh, do not be swayed by my choice. I just want to see what you guys are voting for. Uh, and then we also uh, have a color scheme. So, this uh I have thought a lot about how some of these color schemes are going to be harder to apply to some aesthetics, but I think that’s the fun of it. And I’ll be able to show you a bit more of an interesting approach with each of these. So, let’s just pick one at random and see what people are voting for. So, you only have a couple more minutes to vote and then we’re going to move forward. Uh, and let’s see. So, okay. So far, aesthetics have switched. We’re looking more and more at that fairy core aesthetic. Product types. People are very still heavily leaning towards apparel. I think we know how this one’s going to go. Technique. Ooh, technique has gotten closer between DDG flex or all over printing. Let me know why you’re so interested in this. I’ve seen quite a few people asking uh questions about all over print uh stuff and how to approach it. So if anyone uh in the chat really is super interested in all our printing guidelines, let me know what you find so cool about it. Uh and uh I also saw somebody asking uh differences between like DTG, DT flex, what are these things? Uh um and let me just quickly run through them while you have like another minute to vote. So DTG versus DT flex are both printing techniques, but they are built very differently. DTG works like a printer that you would print with on paper. So let’s say you put in a t-shirt into a printer and it sprays color onto a t-shirt and that’s how you get direct to garment printing. And then DT flex is uh a lot different in function but similar in look. So you use a film to put color on that film and then put that film with color kind of sandwich it with a t-shirt and using heat we get transfer of color from the film to the t-shirt. Uh so it’s kind of more of a sticker than sprayed on ink. Uh, so it is more vibrant and more durable, but then less flexible and and less soft in in texture. So, we’re basically done with uh voting and I see someone asking, yes, we’re also Carol is asking actually Carol Summer if we’re also streaming live on YouTube. Yes. Uh, I’m taking a look at both chats on Facebook and on YouTube just so we can give everybody the opportunity to vote and to learn. So, I’m looking at the very, very last votes for aesthetic. It’s neck and neck between two. So, jump in there. Your vote might be the deciding one. And let’s see if I can actually get some responses on here. Total responses. Bunch of anonymous ones. Your responses. This. Okay. I have to kind of use this. I’m seeing a lot of twos and a lot of threes in here. I think two wins in the color scheme. Okay. So, I’m locking some of this stuff in. So, DTG locked in. DTG or DDT flex apparel for sure is something you guys are super interested in. And then, ooh, I think the the slightly edgier aesthetic is winning. And then we saw that the color scheme number two, the blues and the browns was people’s favorites. So, this is what we’re going for. Uh, and what your uh, task is going to be from now on is to stop me and ask me questions anytime you have them. Uh, I’m going to go over to Prull’s catalog to show you what uh, products we’re picking and what techniques and how to filter stuff. And we’re going to start from the very base, picking a product, downloading a print file, and then starting to build out our stuff slowly. So we are in Prull’s catalog and this is just like all products. So what we know is that we definitely want apparel that is either DTG or DT flex. So what I would do in here is I would go by technique uh and filter DT flex and DTG printing and see what we get in here. And then you either can pick clothing through here or in our case because apparel is the biggest half of the the biggest part of the catalog, we can go through and and take a look at something we enjoy. Uh now I want some opinions in here. Uh do you guys want more of a t-shirt or more of kind of long sleeve thing? Let’s see. Someone’s also dark at dark times rebellion is saying DTG is much better quality. DT flex is more vibrant and detailed but the quality is not up to par. That is interesting. I am someone who prefers uh DT flex for prints and uh over the past like year year and a half I have several shirts that I basically live in and sleep in and they’ve been washed like I don’t know over a hundred times at this point. Uh, and I find that um, DT Flex does last longer, sometimes almost longer than the actual fabric itself. So, if it’s a a thinner cotton t-shirt, I can see it slowly start disintegrating while the print is still there. So, uh, let’s see. People are saying t-shirts, t-shirts or tank tops. Okay. All right. I feel like t-shirts t-shirts are winning. Uh and then uh someone’s also saying on so it’s Sophia Magdalena on uh Facebook is saying a session like this for all over print apparel would be great. Uh we do have previous live streams for all over print design tips specifically. We are going to go with the poll here but I see your love for all over printing which is wonderful. So we’re going with the t-shirts. Let’s just pick men’s t-shirts and filter by technique in that case. BT Flex DTG and I’m gonna go with what is I’ve said this before many many times. My personal favorite blank is the Comfort Color 1717. Uh there are a lot of Gildan stands out there and a lot of Bella Canvas stands. Uh and I can also see a bunch of love coming for these kind of boxier TE’s. Uh, but the uh the comfort colors is just my comfort zone, so I’m going to go with that. Uh, and we have a bunch of colors, and we need to also remember our color scheme that we picked out, which is the browns uh and and the blues. Let me actually show you guys again. So, it’s this one. We’re looking at either darker browns or darker or lighter blues. So, let’s keep that in mind when looking at colors. Uh what I will do first, so we’ve picked out our product. Uh is I’m going to scroll down, click on file guidelines, and download the print files so that I can design with them. Uh and my measurements are in centimeters just because the site can can see where I’m browsing from. Yours would be either in inches or you can go into settings and change them. But uh you can see that the front and back so 30.48

is the same for both DTG printing and DT flex printing. So kind of if we’re looking for front and and back prints doesn’t matter what we download. So let’s just make sure we take the front and back print and click download for the print file template. So it’s going to save for us here. And uh what I would normally even do if you’re designing in uh some type of software that is going to allow you to set specific dimensions is for just a rectangle. I would take these measurements 30.48 * 40 by 64 and put them into Canva. So let me start a new design. We are going to do a custom size. We’re going to select our measurements. So, if your measurements were in inches, you can select inches. Here, I’m going to go with centimeters. And I’m going to remind myself what those numbers are. 30.48.

30.48 time 40.64. Am I right? Yes. So,

we’re going to create a new design. And the size of this exact placement is going to be the exact size that your design needs to be. I see a lot of discussion uh on on uh printing techniques and what you guys prefer. So if uh there are things that you really feel should be addressed as questions about DT flex, DTG, even a lower printing, uh feel free to put them in. And if it’s a a specific question, I’ll definitely be able to answer that to the best of my ability. Uh now, someone uh let’s see, I saw a question in here that I really wanted to get to. Uh there it is from panhandle drift. Question about the Bella canvas shirt. I recently noticed that the inner tag branding almost shows all the way through the back of the shirt if it’s a lighter color. This is uh an important note to address whenever you pick you are picking uh t-shirts. I’ll be very brief on this so that we can get into designing but just so you know there are different fabric weights in different products. So a Bella canvas, for example, is a good example of a relatively lightweight shirt. So it’s it’s kind of in the middle here. It’s a bit more lightweight than than something on the thicker side of things. And if you combine a lower fabric density with a lighter color, there is just going to be more likelihood of something being visible through it. So if you think about a very sheer uh white fabric, you can put a hand on the other side of it and kind of see the outline of that hand if that is something that uh you are not looking for. So lightweight shirts really are the most helpful for uh warmer climates uh and uh in general sometimes feel better when you’re doing uh you know activities outdoors. If that’s not something that you’re looking for and you want a more durable fabric, I would advise that you pay attention in this kind of material thickness area. And you can even see the exact fabric weight in the description of every single product that we have if you scroll down a bit more. So, I hope that answers your question. Uh, let’s jump over and start designing. And I’m going to grab some of these colors from here just so we can have them. And we remember that we were looking for a very uh that’s not the right thing. Uh that we were looking for a very edgy kind of dark aesthetic. So we’ll keep this in here somewhere. And something that I always advise, especially if you’re using something like a Canva or KD, is to go into the templates or in uh I think in both cases on KD and on Canva it’s called templates. It’s over on the left top corner uh you can really find very interesting things that other people have already created on the platform to use as inspiration for yourself. So, something that I would do if I was just starting uh and I knew that I was looking for a kind of darker, glooier design, uh is I would just type in keywords of of something that matches uh or let’s say I would say edgy t-shirt. If I want something that is a specifically a t-shirt design, I would type that in. And you can see a lot of designs like that already. So, uh, what is helpful is looking at what is in common for the designs that appear under these keywords. Uh, I see a lot of, uh, spray paint, you know, like here and here. Uh, I see quite a bit of mixed media as well. So, photos and like paint on top of them. Uh, let’s see what else. You can also use other similar keywords. I quite like these illustrations, so let’s keep those as well. I know the color isn’t right, but we’ll fix it. Uh, you can also try to look for specific elements that you want to include. So, we had that little eightball in the voting right here in the aesthetics. Maybe I want to include specifically that in there. So, I can go in here and see what people have created with an eightball. uh or well pool that way it’s easier to see. So a lot of it is more pool inspired uh we know okay so there is a bit more of a niche here you can also go into elements look for eightball here as well and see what kind of graphics are available to you and and what textures and and what colors are you know most likely to pop up. Um, and so what we’re going to do here is pick out a few things. I’m going to go with an eightball of some kind. I like ones that are a bit more illustrated. So, something like that. Uh, we can also look at similar graphics that appear as recommendations. This is also quite cool. It reminds me of an older Americana style tattoo. Uh, and then in addition to it all, we can start looking for similar elements. So, we had chains. Let’s see if I can find some chains that would look nice.

And yeah, so a lot of these are this 3D style, but if we’re looking more for an illustrated flat element, you can type in here um illustration and that’s going to find stuff. Uh or you can try flat, which is also going to help you quite a bit. So this is a completely 2D flat element. uh this is a completely flat element etc. Uh all of these keywords are made by the people who are making the elements. So if it makes sense to you as a keyword, it most likely made sense to someone else who was creating that element before. So let’s see if we can get maybe a round chain to add in there that is also going to be flat so we can see. Yeah, this one is completely, you know, flat with no highlights, you know, nothing that we can put in the middle. We can use that to frame the able. We can start thinking about how to stylize this. So, we have arrived at a very messy but very important point in your designs. What I find most helpful uh when being faced by, okay, there are so many different directions that I could go in. My personal favorite way to go is to think word association. Uh so when I saw the the eightball in there and I saw maybe some dice in there as well, I thought of luck, right? Um so what are some things that are some cool words that we can include in the design that could match this type of stuff? So if you have any ideas, drop them in the chat. I’m very interested. I immediately think of bet, luck, lucky, unlucky. That could work. Bet on yourself maybe as a bit more of a motivational uh niche. Uh and then let’s think of trust related stuff maybe. Uh so bets are not a surefire thing. Trust is a surefire thing. I don’t know, trust issues or I don’t know. Uh I make questionable choices. So stuff like that, phrases that uh to me seem fun and interesting, I will put together in my head or usually in some doc somewhere or in a notes app or even scribbled down on a piece of paper and I will start thinking about what visuals go with this stuff. So if we are thinking go for the sixes. I see uh Nicholas posting in there as well. Uh what I immediately think of with this is we have some chains. We have uh I want to add maybe some dice in this as well and see how that goes. Uh and I like the bet on yourself idea. Let’s see if we can find some kind of dice that is going to match a bit more. This could work actually. I wonder if we can try and include some more of the blues that we had in this color scheme here. Maybe this. Let’s I keep uh another thing that I keep doing a lot is I always add a bunch of pages just so I don’t lose any elements that I already liked, but I can just keep refining and refining and refining. Uh let’s try some text and just say bet on yourself. Now what is useful at this point is to go back to these inspo things that we found earlier and see what types of fonts they are using. Because as we start thinking about text to add to designs, text can convey a very different message depending on what font we use. Uh, and in this case, I really like the idea of using a spray paint inspired font for the text that we’re using. So, this one right here is a good one. We can also jump into fonts and look up spray paint

or just spray and see what we can find here. So, this one is a bit thicker, which is cool. I quite I like the one that we had here. I wish it was bolder, but I think we’re going to be able to make this work with a few adjustments. We’ll get to those later. So, let’s say it’s an eightball that is crashing into paradise or something. Or we can do something like a collage together out of those things. Um, maybe add a few flames into this as well. We’ll think about this. And then we have bet on yourself

which we are going to then play around with to make a combination of elements that is going to look cohesive and not like a bunch of stuff thrown on there. Uh I see uh Ray Simpson agreeing. Roll the dice better on yourself. Absolutely. I could actually make that a top and bottom text which is a very common uh composition that you can go for. Roll the dice. Bet on yourself. So, let’s see what other elements we could add in that would match this kind of fiery uh aesthetic. What I like to do, um, and it’s the same on these kinds of online platform based tools like KD, like Canva, is for virtually any element, you can rightclick and go into info and then see what else is similar to this. So sometimes artists have a collection, but if they don’t, you can click on see more like this. And there’s a lot of this more old school Americana style things coming up, which I really enjoy. I like that we can instantly see some dice with some flames. That might come in very, very handy. Let’s see what else comes up when you kind of look for stuff like this. That That is fun. That definitely matches uh the aesthetic that we were going for in the beginning. Uh, and let’s see, maybe some extra flames that we’re going to look for later. So, this combination, once again, I’ll just make a new page. I’ll remove some of the elements that I don’t want, and I’ll start mixing stuff up. What I quite like about a lot of elements uh on Canva and I think this is more usable on something like KD uh is you can change a lot of the colors within the element especially if it’s an illustration. So here we can use the same red and have very similar uh color flames or uh and this is something that we should actually do because it’s part of this challenge is I’m going to make these flames blue. So, we have some colors in this design already, which are the colors that we had in the color scheme in the very beginning. I’m going to try some blue flames for this. I think it was here. Yes. Let’s see if we can combine some browns and some blues in here. So, for the black, we are going to go for a darker brown. something like this. We’re going to add a bit of a vintagey texture to this in the end. And we’re going to make sure that every black that we use matches or close to black that we use matches together. So this right here can stay. This right here can stay. And so we’re starting to slowly arrive at an idea. What I would like is for this to be a blue, but a slightly different blue. Uh maybe something like this. Move it over here. And see where we can kind of attach these things together. What I also would like is maybe some more skeleton elements. So I’m back in the elements tab. Type in skeleton. I don’t know. Hand, I guess, works. and see what else comes up because I want a bit more of that outline style that as you can see all of these elements have a very thick even outline versus this one is a bit more plain. Let’s see if we can find something that matches a bit more. This has an outline but only an outline. So that doesn’t work for us. We can look for Let’s see. This is actually quite cute. And that these are all very outline based. Do we have anything that has a center? This definitely has a center. And I think that also matches the aesthetic quite well. So, let’s use this. And my favorite uh thing about these collage style designs is if you have a spot that cuts off a little bit in a way that you don’t like, you can just go ahead and hide it behind some of the other stuff. So, let’s see if we can adjust the placement of everything to fit and to come out of each other there. here. These can be turned a little bit. This can be larger. This can be a bit smaller. And we can kind of move this into the center. So, let’s start working on the text a little bit. We’re going to come back to some of these elements. See if we can hide them more properly and combine them more. Like so. What I like to do with text is to work it into the overall design itself. So with something like a top text here, I would go into effects and either pick curve, which can get a little bit boring because it is a very even curve and it might not work for a lot of designs, or and this is a very underused thing, is you can go into apps and find whatever is going to warp your text for you. So, I’m just going to go for some something like a text warp app and I’m sure it’s going to give me a bunch of different options. So, you could keep scrolling for days and most of these are going to work for you. Uh, I tend to use Typcraft quite a bit for this. I’m sure uh text warp works uh very well. Type warp I’ve used before. They’re all very similar. Let’s just go for typcraft. Let’s see and hope if this has the same font that we have uh lacquer

ler does it? Yes, it does. So, we have the correct font. We can type in roll the dice in here and we’re going to get essentially what we had right here. Uh but warpable. So you can add an outline to this if you want. So the inside might be this kind of pale blue that we had or maybe even the yes this right here. And the outline can be that dark blue that we had in the color scheme. So you can see a preview of the text. But what apps like this do is they don’t just work on a text element and keep it a text element. You input the text that you want. You adjust it within that app. And then it creates an image for you that you can then use. You can adjust it after, but you can’t quite move it and wiggle it into place the way you would if it was just a text box. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to look for some interesting options here. And if I don’t find them, I’m just going to click custom and fully start adjusting this the way that I want. So, I want it to be a curve, but not quite as basic of a curve. I want it to maybe go up a little bit at the ends there. Kind of like that. And you can really squish those letters as much as you want. You can move them towards the center here. Can adjust the curves here. I might keep it like this. Maybe make the top wider than the bottom

and add to design and see what it looks like. So what I am immediately seeing is that a I really like the shape. If I were to compare it to something that is just a regular curve, you can see how the top one is a lot more spray paint adjacent and not just a neat little curve. But what I do want to do about this, and you can click on edit right here to go back into your editor, is I want to make the outlines a little bit thicker. So let’s try triple the thickness of this. Update the element. That’s a bit much. So we go into two. Update element. And that actually looks right in my opinion. What we can also do is I think I might go for the same color outline as we have in here. And then where was I? Update element. Pick the right color. update and see. I think that matches the rest of the design a bit better. I think it also matches the vintage aesthetic a little bit better. Uh, and let’s do the exact same thing with this. So, we have I think it might be easier to just copy this over. Change the actual text to bet on yourself

and go into custom and switch everything out this way. So, we want the bottom now to be a bit wider than the top. We want the curve to be quite prominent. And we can really play around with this stuff. I want this section to be a bit thicker and for it to look a bit more messy. So, we have this element in here and we can arrange them however we’d like. So, we can remove this and we already have something that looks a lot more custom. Let’s put it that way. Let’s see what else we can do for these elements. And maybe some of you even have some ideas in here. All right, let’s see.

I see a lot of conversation uh about different apps as well. Uh someone uh see SD Wallace 1962, I love photo pe uh but it freezes on my laptop. Uh someone says that they I think Bodie Pearland used a design lab. So the choice for um whatever design software you want to use definitely lies the most on what features you’re looking for, what your budget is, and how familiar you are with designing in general. Uh for beginners who want to get into print on demand specifically, I normally recommend either KD or Canva just because they do have this giant library of stuff that you can use and squish and warp and change and uh find ways to introduce your own ideas into them. Uh but if you are someone who comes from a bit more of a design background then you can use um free uh but more uh experienceheavy let’s say uh apps like uh I guess Inkscape is one of those that has quite it has like 20 plus years of use uh and and existence but a giant learning curve. Uh so if you’re into that you can try that. Um I know a lot of people who work more on on minimalist designs but they really really need vector tools go for Figma. Uh and then obviously you have the the Illustrator, the Photoshop, uh the professional tools that if you are willing to shell out some money, you can really uh get into some very very very custom stuff. Uh, I’ve kind of gone for the the the most beginner friendly options for this type of demo just because I feel like it’s more easy to follow for for the majority of people. But whatever you are familiar with, you can kind of repeat this process and this ideation in in anything. So let’s see what someone else is asking or saying. I saw uh someone have a great idea. Um, how about a So, a couple people are talking about distressed stuff. So, Ray Simpson uh is saying, “How about a background like a brick wall or a distressed metal?” Uh, I did also see, yeah, like Nicholas is asking, “Is it possible to make a distressed look on Canva?” Uh, and what I feel like for uh a DTG uh design specifically is if we go for a full background, it might look a little bit like a square on a t-shirt. I like the idea of a background, but I think uh and let me just adjust this a bit more to be to curve around the design a bit more. What I would almost prefer is some background elements to create the feeling of a background without without there being a full kind of opaque background behind this. What I also like is the idea of distressing. Uh let us see what kind of stuff we can do uh to add a distressed texture over everything. So, uh, for text for example, we can go into especially if you have like I’m going to try and show you with a regular text just so you know. Let’s say we have this paragraph here. There are a bunch of different effects that you can apply uh that are these pre-made effects in here. But if you are looking for more uh customizable things, you can take a look at all of the Canva apps that are out there. So, specifically for text, uh what you might be really uh into. I don’t see it here, but you can just go into the app section and look at text effects and find one that really specializes in in distress text textures. Uh we also have like there’s text embroidery for example which is a very specialized thing. There’s uh blend text which does a very good job in making uh two opaque elements look like they’re blended together. Uh there’s fire text. So you can really find a bunch of different things. Uh and then what I also enjoy about these apps is that let’s say I actually haven’t tried this. So let’s see what happens. distressed text and no but distressed texture.

It may well be that there is something that is going to match our needs. So we have texture in here.

So and we select an image. Does it work or does it just work with images that we upload? There might need to be a workaround. Let’s see if we can do this. Uh, let’s try an upload that I have. This is just from a recent thumbnail. Let’s see if it works on uploaded images at all. And yes, it does. So, what I would do in this case, it is it is a bit of a workaround really. But I would download whatever the final design is, upload it again, and then put a texture over everything. That way, it’s going to be cohesive. you don’t have to look for separate apps for separate design elements and you also uh get to just keep it all in one spot. Uh it is more of a workaround than than some more professional options but I think uh if if we want to we can live with that. So let’s put some finishing touches on this. Uh, and I’ll really quickly take a look if anyone has anything for us to try.

Right. Okay. I have a couple of spots where people are asking uh how they can remove backgrounds more easily. So, uh, in Canva, you do, I believe, need the paid version of Canva to be able to remove backgrounds upon download. Uh, and for, uh, most of your designs that are going to go on either DTG or DT Flex, you do want the option to remove the background. I will say that I would definitely prefer it. Um, for something like an O all over print, you don’t really need that. Uh, but my advice is if you don’t want to spend any money on a more premium option, what you can do uh is once you upload your design, if it has just a clean white background, you can remove the background pretty decently in Printull’s design maker directly. So depending on how complex your uh design is and how busy your background is, the tool is going to work pretty well for you. uh in my experience and if you and let me just uh try and show you an example. If you had something like this and your background was about the same color as everything else, you would not be able to successfully remove the background just because the tool does not know where your background ends and the element begins. So if you are trying to remove background further later in other tools like friendos design maker, make sure that your background is as different from everything else as it possibly could be. So I would in that case pick a different color. This is actually a nice color color palette. We might go for something like that for a t-shirt. But you would just go for a color that is completely different from everything else so that the tool can see, all right, this section is background and this section is uh the design. So let’s just put some finishing touches on this if we’d like. What I’m noticing uh when seeing something like this is I agree with I believe it was Ryan who said that we need a background. Uh, I think we do need something something extra on here. So, as a last little addition, uh, let’s see. Maybe I can I don’t even need an N. I can just create an ellipsus or a circle by pressing C or by just going into elements, finding simple shapes. uh is I might want to create a bit of a flat shape like this in a dark color.

Not quite this color, but maybe this color. And put it behind everything. So that is going to let us

have our elements stand out a little bit more. there is this separation between uh the ball and the flames which wasn’t quite as obvious before we added this. And we might want to make this even like a darker blue just so you can see all of the lines and outlines of elements. So that way you can see this is where the eightball ends and this is a big bit of a gap and this is where the flame starts. And it’s going to also allow us to see if we need to move anything to make it really mesh with everything else. So, I would probably make this larger, move this over a tiny bit, and just see how we can organize our elements the best way possible. So, I think something like this looks quite well and we can download it and see how we would put this on a product. So, uh, before you do anything, this is something that I see people forget to do all the time, is a select all of your kind of central composition elements, group them, and make sure that this is centered. Because after moving a bunch of individual elements, something that happens to people a lot is that they will end up with something like this. And some of the elements are centered and some of them are not. So, just make sure to center them. Uh and then second of all, uh this is not very intuitive but important to do when you see a design and you feel like, “Okay, this this looks good. The composition is good. It’s done.” Think about where it’s going to go on the t-shirt. Especially with t-shirt placements specifically, you have to remember that there is going to be a few inches off of the collar. Let me actually try and show you like this. There are going to be a few inches that are going to separate the print placement from the collar. So, you might feel like your design already in your design space has enough of a gap, but that gap is going to be even larger when it’s printed on a t-shirt. So, if I look at my design right here, the immediate advice that I would give is select everything, group it, don’t group it if you want, make it as large as you want it on the placement, and then move it up. just move it up a little bit because that way it looks unbalanced in here, but you will see that once we download the actual image and put it on a t-shirt, it’s going to look right because it’s going to be a chest placement and not just sit in the very middle of the t-shirt. So, I’m I’m happy with this as our like little demo design. We can move stuff down a little bit if we want. Right. So, we’re happy with this. We can check what page this is on. So this is on page six. We click on share download. Select the page that we want. You can directly select it right here if you’re on this page or you can go through and pick out which one which one you want. I’m going to click transparent background. Excuse me. This is a paid option. If you don’t have paid Canva, then uh feel free to download it the way it is, maybe with a brighter background and remove it later. Uh, and I can totally leave it at one. I might download it at a slightly higher resolution just so because Canva doesn’t have a specific DPI setting, I can be extra extra sure that it’s going to hit those DPI numbers. Even though we put in the exact correct dimensions when we were creating the uh space for our design, I’m just going to try it this way. So while this is downloading, yeah, you can see that my first bet on yourself typo uh was saved into this. But this is our uh bet on yourself design. It’s a PNG. And we are going to switch over to Printful to this uh this is actually Bella canvas. We wanted to get this comfort color 1717. And we’re going to pick out what color we want. So, if you have a very specific color in mind before you go into designing, you can set your artboard or your canvas to be that color and that way you can make sure it matches. In our case, we had a specific color palette to work on, so we kind of had to live with it. Uh so something that I would pick out for this type of design is I would either go with a pale blue that is going to be a slightly different shade of blue than that pale blue that we have in the design or a complimentary color like this kind of paler yellow butter is nice. I also a color that that I really enjoy in comfort colors specifically is some of this like granite colors and and bay these very muted greenish gray shades. So let’s I don’t know pick a size. I I usually go for a large uh pick a technique. I think for something like this DT flex would be great to get that really crisp outline on everything and start designing. We are going to jump right into the design maker and I’m going to select a few of the colors that we were considering just so I can compare them. Right. And then upload Yes, I understand. Save and close. I’ll upload the design that we just created and we’ll see where it’s placed. Right.

Right. We’ve waited. It’s uploaded. We click apply. And you can instantly see that this gap is maintained. Even though the Let me actually zoom in for you so you can see a bit better. Even though we had Is it going to work? Let me just place it again. Uh even though we had this kind of crazy uh idea of putting the design at the very very top of your artboard, there is enough space from the collar down for it to look cohesive and and for the placement to look right on a t-shirt. Now, let’s talk about color. So, we can see that the DPI is good. We only needed 150. This is 250. We’re right on the money. Uh let’s look at some colors. So, this yellow I quite like as a combination. This is butter. Uh we can also go lighter with ivory. Uh and it’s going to be less saturated and maybe matching a bit more of the glooiness if we want a bit more glooiness out of this. I think granite is a very good combination with these colors. So let’s see uh what you guys think of colors. So do we want to go um yellow, pale blue, or dark gray? So, let me know in here uh what you would like. Uh I also saw a question from SD Wallace. Uh will Canva allow you to use your own custom colors by adding the RGB or the hexodimal or hex code? Uh I will jump over really quick and show you, but yes, you absolutely can do that. So, for any uh anything or any element that you want to change the color, let’s just pick this one. Uh you can just pick out whatever colors exist already in the default uh solid colors or in uh the you know options that you have in here. But you can also add a new color and put the hex code that you want right in here. Now there isn’t an RGB selection but there is a hex code selection and uh there are a bunch of converters online. There’s a frequent converter on Google. If you only have the RGB code, uh you can definitely get to a hex code and then pick out the color that way. Uh and uh so someone was saying uh everyone’s picking yellow

and then Okay, I saw someone saying, yeah, Nicholas is saying that it’s a little too cute. Uh we’ll see if everyone’s agreeing with me on yellow. Are we going a bit more ivory with this or or more butter? I like the combination of of blue and this brighter yellow a little bit more. So, we would just go with this. All right. Uh if I were to wear this, it would almost definitely be this this gray color, but it I I clearly do not like fun in my life. Uh but yes, I agree. Um, enjoy the moment. Uh, saying that there’s good contrast with the yellow. Yes, it’s also a light enough color so that we can see all of the outlines and everything. And we can take a quick look at the mockups before we jump over to any of our questions. And I I would buy this. I would wear this. Uh, and at the end of the day, once you’re done designing and once you can look at something like this and decide that yes, I would probably wear that, I think I think we’re good. So uh let us see if there are any uh questions that I have not yet answered. Right. Uh so let’s start over. This uh probably came up a bit earlier uh from uh Sharon Dennis 1914. Uh okay. I’m confused with the dimensions you just entered. the file guidelines on your website is listed in physical inches, which of course determines the pixels after you multiply it by DPI. Yes. Uh you I I love that you’re approaching this from a math standpoint. I will try to explain it as best I can. So what happens? Let me just get in here. Leave this. We all saw it. It was wonderful. But let’s say we go over to the file guidelines in here and uh the immediate thing that we see in the guidelines is a physical size. Now, if you uh were to design something on a piece of paper that is exactly this size, centimeter, centimeter, inch to inch, uh and you would put it on uh a product, it would be the perfect DPI that it would need to be. Uh so you are correct that these numbers do take into account DPI uh when thinking about it but uh you are working backwards when you are using this these numbers. So you know the size of the garment you know the size of the print placement. If you use the size of the print placement you are going to hit the DPI number that we already have in mind and you won’t even need to worry about it. uh versus if you can’t create a large enough artboard for your design, you can uh work in a different order. So, let’s say in my design app, for whatever reason, I can’t create uh an artboard that is 30 cm by 40 centimeters. You know, it’s too large. What I would do in that case is I would pick out let’s say um you know uh a 3 cm by 4 cm uh artboard and then I would use DPI knowing what how many dots per inch or how many pixels per inch need to be there to calculate how high I need the DPI number to be to get to the right size of of the print replacement. You know when we think about DPI and printing we need to consider that printing is physical. So the most accurate uh measurement that we can give is the actual physical size of the print placement. I hope that made sense but you are thinking of it in the right way. But if you create the exact size of the print file that we recommend, you’re going to be good. All right, let’s see. Um, black gold Texas tminus 100 says, “Can you explain why I need Canva or KD in order to use Printful?” You don’t. You really don’t. Uh, so if we were to jump over to just start designing without any design that we had previously, you could create a really good design without needing any external tools. Uh something that I have done a bunch in the past is I would go into quick designs and just pick out something that really you know matches what I have in mind from here or I can use some of the clip art that we have. There’s a gigantic library that really can it can either be a photographic or uh you can find the shapes that you want or you can find sections of maps. There’s a bunch of stuff that you can create with built-in tools that exist just in the Printful Design Maker. Uh but if uh there is something very specific that you have in your vision, you want to change exact colors of stuff, change dimensions, you want a very custom specific font, uh or in the case of something like KD or Canva, if uh you are looking for uh elements that you can kind of take and use in your own design, uh that is not nearly as rich in resources as an external tool. So, if you want a bunch of different elements that match your vibe, uh you can find a lot of them on the in the Printful Design Maker, but maybe not as many as you might want, which is why I’m just showing how you would do this process in Canva, but you can definitely replicate a lot of this, not all everything, but a lot of this in the Printful Design Maker. Uh, all right, let’s see what are some other questions. Uh, I saw a question from Sophia Magdalena on Facebook. How to maximize the canvas for all over print apparel with bright colors and designs that doesn’t leave the fabric feeling stiff and rigid. Okay, I feel like there are maybe two questions in one with this kind of thing. So for first let’s let’s talk about fabric. uh for all over print apparel. Uh there are as of recent well as of maybe like sixish months ago I think uh we have different types of all over print fabrics available depending on what product you’re looking for. Uh what used to be possible is that all over printing was only available in synthetics. But then relatively recently through a fairly innovative approach and a completely different technique we are now now able to offer cotton all over print products. Uh and depending on what fabric composition you’re looking at depending on what product you’re looking at and uh depending also on like what category you’re looking at. So it could be, you know, a pillow is probably going to be a slightly thicker, stiffer fabric than, I don’t know, something like a soft little t-shirt. This is going to be what primarily affects the thickness and the stiffness of the fabric. The actual print does not, especially for all over printing, affect the the feeling of the fabric itself because the technique uses heat to take paint from paper and to press it onto fabric. It’s not a layer or anything that would create any thickness. And then the secondary question that you might have is how do I uh maximize uh the the brightness of all over print apparel? If you’re looking for a very bright and vibrant color, I would usually go for a more synthetic fabric. Uh if that’s, you know, the the sheer vibrance and vibrancy of the colors is what you’re looking for. Cotton is going to always be a little bit more muted than synthetic. Uh, but cotton has its own benefits and a lot of people really prefer a cotton fabric to the feeling of a polyester fabric. So, if you are mainly looking for for the brightness of colors, go for synthetic. And let’s see, there’s only like a couple more questions that I think we have time for. Let me get through a few of them. Uh someone let’s see uh SD Wallace 1962 was asking what do you think of AI designs? Very interesting question. So with uh Canva and I want to say almost every other tool that you could use these days, there are going to be a bunch of AI features for your designs. Uh there is a very good reason why I don’t use that in demos is because it’s almost impossible to replicate exactly. The output that AI is going to give me in this session is not at all guaranteed to match what it would give you if you tried to use the exact same prompt and the exact same setup. Uh just because AI is not predictable. And that kind of applies to also what I think of AI designs in POD in general is that if you are creating a one-off design and it matches all of the guidelines that you need, you can absolutely go for it and and enjoy yourself and spend maybe less time on designing that than you would otherwise. But you can’t really create a cohesive look across the board for all of your products in your store for your specific brand. AI is not quite as predictable as we would like it to be still, even though it’s gotten much much better. And if you are a brand builder who wants to create a cohesive collection of a bunch of different products, that may not be the way forward. If that’s your only tool that is going to allow you to create really interesting stuff, absolutely go for it. Use whatever you need to use. But there is merit to the more humanmade aspects of design because that still in my opinion can’t be quite beat by AI. All right, one last question and then we’re going to wrap it up. So I see a question from Valerie Valerie Martin Stewart. Can you provide more exact measurements for where the 12 x 16inch file size is positioned relative to the bottom of the collar band of the shirt? For example, if we want to print the print to start two inches below the bottom band of the knit collar, where should I vertically position the top of my graphic on the 12 x 16 in file? I know exactly the question that you’re asking. We can’t really guarantee uh that a print is going to be exactly 1.7 in under the collar or anything, but uh we actually did have a guide recently. Let me just look that up really quickly. Uh of generally what is the the the average guidance. I might try and open it for you

and show you so that we can have like a visual guideline of everything. I think this might be it.

Right. So here it is. All

right,

bear with me.

Here we go.

All right. Uh so we have this uh post that has gone up on I know Instagram and on on Facebook and on YouTube and everywhere uh that has quite a few guidelines that our design uh and graphics teams have put together specifically for this type of question. Uh so there are a few like proportion rules that you should follow but something that is very useful is uh to see how this changes depending on the general fit of uh the t-shirt. So as you can see and I can maybe try and zoom in not very easily um for different fits of t-shirts. So, let’s say something is going to be uh evenly spaced for the body length and the shoulder top. Or if it’s going to be more oversized, it’s uh going to have more of a space around the the print area. If it’s going to be more cropped, it’s going to be shorter in length and maybe wider in in the shoulder drop. So, what you can do is you can go through this and think, okay, if the t-shirt that I’m designing for is a bit more of a classic fit, then I know that there’s going to be about three to four inches uh from the collar until the print area starts. Uh or if it’s going to be a bit more relaxed, that kind of relaxed silhouette has a bit more length to it. So the placement of the print um file I guess should be and will be about 5 to six inches below the collar. Uh this is actually uh what the comfort color 1717 falls under in this kind of fit. Uh and you can see that there’s quite a bit more space from the collar to the print. And you can also see this uh in more like cropped and tank top options. there’s going to be a bit a lot less space from the collar to the actual print. Uh that being said, and it is very important that I stress this as much as I can, we can’t guarantee it because any printing is not done just by a machine that swallows t-shirts and and spits out prints. It is people who take a t-shirt, put it on a frame, and make sure that it fits into the frame correctly. there is not going to be a a very precise placement that okay this this uh print is going to start exactly 2.3 in under the collar. Uh what you can do however is you can look at these types of guides and you can also and this is something I’ve done before uh look at the size of the actual t-shirt that is listed like the in in the size guide you can see that the measurement from the seam to the bottom is this uh and then you can apply that measurement to the design that you’re creating and see you know where it lands visually. There are options, but there is no guarantee is what I’m saying. All right, we are uh 10 minutes past the end time. So, I kind of want to wrap up here. There’s there’s quite a few joining today that I feel like I I haven’t seen a couple of you in in the chat before. So, welcome if you’re completely new. I hope you stick around for for next month and the month after that. And I hope that you learned something and enjoyed this session uh and can have something to take away for yourself in your design process. That being said, thank you for joining and I’ll see you next

Hello everybody and welcome to Amplified, the biggest POD event in the entire space. Especially welcome to those of you who are brand new to POD and have no idea what you’re doing, but are really excited to learn. This is exactly the place where you should be. My name is Liz and I make educational content on Printull’s YouTube channel. So, if you’re watching on YouTube, you can probably click around and see some other videos of me on there. But if you are watching on YouTube, this is a big important message to you. There is a link at the very top of the description and also hopefully our moderators are dropping it in the YouTube chat right now. That link will lead you to our community. If you are watching on YouTube, you better move over to the community and go watch there. It’s completely free, but that way a you will be able to participate in the chat in a way where I will actually be able to see your messages and also you will get access to the giveaways that we’re going to be running here on stream and a bunch of offers from our fantastic sponsors. So, while you’ve got the time, while I’m still doing the whole intro, make sure to go over there and sign up. It’s free. It’s going to stay free. You just got to get in there and get communicating. Now, if you are brand new, this is the best stream for you to be. If you are a bit more advanced or if there’s something that I’m going to be sharing today that feels a little too beginner friendly, we also have a more advanced stream running alongside this one. I’ll be here all of 6 hours. So, can you go over there, you know, check things out and then move over back here if you feel like that’s a little bit too advanced. Feel free to pick whatever topics you like. Just make sure to gain as much as possible from this event. And don’t worry, there will be a replay available. So, if you feel like there’s stuff happening in two places at the same time and you can’t catch things, you can then go back and take a look at whatever sessions you would like. So, I am looking over at the chat here. There are a bunch of people joining. I saw people sharing where they’re joining from. I saw somebody from Toronto, from Philly, from the UK, Netherlands, Massachusetts. Hi everybody. I’m going to be trying to interact with you as much as possible. So, if you ever have like a massive question, that is going to be the place to ask it. There is a Q&A feature uh in the platform that you can use if you want me to definitely see your question and answer it. So, I’m going to have Q&A sessions at the very end of each segment of this live stream and you are going to hopefully get your question answered by me or by some wonderful experts. Speaking of the experts, I have six very separate but interconnected sessions lined up for you. The very first one is going to be an intro to Printull. So, if you don’t have an account or store yet, this is going to be perfect for you. But if you do have an account on the store, it might still be a good refresher and maybe you’re going to learn some things that you didn’t know about the platform, like some cool settings that I think are underutilized by people. Now, when you have any type of question, drop it in the Q&A or tell me about it in the chat. But we will also have experts with me in some of the other sessions. The second session, for example, is all about Shopify. I know a lot of you really want to sell on Shopify or are already trying to sell stuff on Shopify. So, we’re going to have Crystal with me to talk a little bit about how you can really find success on Shopify. At the same time, there’s going to be a bunch of stuff running on the other stage. So, if you’re not a Shopify person, you can find other things about different uh sales channels over there. But my third session is going to be all about products. In my, you know, many many years in POD, that is the most asked question that I ever get. So, if you want to see all the techniques that Printull offers, I will have a separate camera to show you everything up close. I will walk you through the different techniques to make sure that you can pick the stuff that you really want to sell. Once we will have the products covered, we’re going to move over to branding. We’re going to talk about how to create a brand and a community with Dominic from Docor. and you will get real insight from somebody who has built a massive brand based on a community of people who want to buy from them. We’ll have products, we’ll have a brand, we’ll have a store. What else do we need? Designs. So, the next session is going to be with one of our fantastic sponsors, KD, and we’re going to talk all about design and workflows. You’re going to get a very practical demo. So, don’t you worry at that point your store store will be freshed and, you know, fleshed out with products and designs. And the very last session once you will have a store and a brand and everything is going to be about advertising. So how do you get people to come to your store and make sure that they are seeing the products that you are creating? That is going to be our very last hour of the day and that is going to be with Levi. So I’ve given you the layown of of what’s going to happen today. So without further ado, I think we should get into uh some printful setup things. What I’m going to do uh is create a brand new account and walk you through the process and tell you where everything is. And then after that, I’m going to show you some hidden settings, stuff that you maybe, you know, didn’t really pay attention to too much. Uh if you already have an account, don’t run away yet. We are really, you know, going to make sure that you know everything there is to know. And I’m going to try and show you what it’s like once you land on the landing page. So, in this very beautiful homepage of printful.com, you are going to click on sign up right here. Let me actually make sure you can see both me and the screen. There we go. And let’s also take a quick look at the chat. So, what I’m really interested in is how many of you already have an account uh and uh are watching to make sure that you have all of the things set up and how many of you don’t have an account yet or don’t have a store set up and really want to know how to do that step by step. Let me know in the chat. I’m going to keep be keeping an eye on that. And yes, to JB Zion to answer your question, there will also be time breaks. So, every session is about 50 minutes long. And then there’s going to be a 10-minute break where I’m going to have some content for you related to the sessions, but I’m also human. I’m going to have to take a little water break here and there. So, don’t you worry if you are sitting here for all of 6 hours, which if you are, you get a virtual cookie from me, you will be able to step away for those moments as well. So, let’s get going and let’s see what happens when you click sign up on Printull. There are two ways. You can do Google, you can do Apple, or you can just sign up with your email. And we’re going to try that way. But this is probably faster if you already have some accounts with Google or Apple. I have created uh an email that you should not email uh because I’m not going to respond to you. I’m going to delete this after this. But just to show you, uh I’m going to enter my name and my email. You don’t really necessarily have to give us your full name here, but if if you’d like to, feel free. But you can just give us a name, an email, and you have to come up with a password. I really like a strong password. Something that’s really long. Uh, I recommend that. Don’t go with password one, two, three. I know some of you still have those old passwords from middle school or high school. Go change that right now. This is your cue. You don’t have to give us your phone number, but you do have to agree to Printull’s terms of service. If you’re curious, click on either one of those things and go through them. If I had to go through them right now, that would be this whole 6 hour stream. So, do that on your own time. And we’re going to click sign up. The next thing that’s going to happen is we’re going to ask you some questions. You know, what is your goal? What do you know already, etc. Uh, I am entering this as a brand new person who does not have a store yet, but who wants to sell online. So, I’m going to answer that with my main goal for using Printull is to sell online. Then, we’re going to think about who we are. This is going to allow our system to give you better recommendations, be their educational content or products or tools. Uh, I am going to say that I’m a content creator because I live on our YouTube channel. And then I will say that I do not have an online store yet. And I am not going to answer this question with anything specific. But if you have something in mind like clothing that you definitely want to sell or you’re uh 100% on like phone cases and that is going to be your brand that is where you would answer this question and we will be able to give you more personalized recommendations of products. But if you don’t know say you don’t know and then obviously how did you hear about us? You all of you are going to click YouTube because I told you about this. Okay. So, at the end of this little questionnaire, we are going to get a brand new account. Now, everyone’s with me. I’m not going too fast yet. Yes, Cedric. I agree. Strong passwords is security 101. Please, everyone, make sure that you are keeping your passwords as strong as possible. And oh, and I see Kelsey also saying, “I’ve got a store, but I’m definitely not using it to its full potential. So, hoping to learn new tips and tricks.” You’re in the best place for that possible. So, let’s see what we have. Uh, first of all, a little banner to say that amplified is live. I hope all of you are aware that this is amplified and we are live. But the first thing to note, I’m not going to do it right now, but it tells you to confirm your email address to whatever email you gave us, you’re going to get uh, you know, our little email in your inbox saying please press on the confirm button. I advise that you do it immediately right here as soon as you create an account. But I’m not going to go through it and clicking through different tabs. But just so you know, you should be doing that as soon as you create an account. Now, the next thing you’ll see is the dashboard, right? This place with the side menu and everything is your kind of home base. This is where everything lives within Printull. This is where you’re going to find uh whatever tools you might need. This is where you can open the product catalog and start designing within your store, etc., etc. If any notifications pop up, they’re going to be right here in the notification center. This is where you will find the way to get to the homepage if you’re so inclined to like find our blog or whatever. Uh you can also log out through here. Uh and there’s also a preferences menu which I will tell you about a little bit later. What we are going to do first is essentially a little tour, you know, layer of the land. The very first page that you land on has a step-by-step kind of instructional manual of what you should be doing. Step one, design your product. Uh then you connect your store, publish your products, and then set up billing. You don’t necessarily have to do it in that order, but uh if this is an easier way for you to follow the step-by-step instructions, go for it. If you wanted to just jump into some products and and create some stuff just to see what it’s like before doing anything else, before creating a store, you could totally do that. You know this is not necessarily the order that you should be doing things in but each one of these steps needs to be completed at some point. What we are going to first do is look at our side menu right here. The very first thing under home is orders. And when you start getting orders this is where all of them are going to live. So whenever uh you are going to start you know connecting a store and receiving orders this is where they’re going to appear. And also if you place some test orders or some gift orders yourself, this is also where you will find them. And uh this is a very useful section, but obviously we don’t have anything in here yet. Next we have the most exciting thing I think to most people is the product catalog. Now uh let me know in the chat a little bit. Have you explored the catalog yet? Do you have some favorites? Do you have some favorite categories? or are you like brand new to this and and not sure how to even navigate this at all? Because we could go really in depth here. So, I want to see what you guys are interested in. Uh Trina, just to say, yes, there will be a replay of this shared. Uh it’s going to be available both on in the community space and on YouTube. Uh and I see someone saying, uh is test orders available now? You can just place an order of whatever product you’ve created and send it to yourself. That’s your way to test out how someone else is going to receive the order. The look is going to be exactly the same packaging, everything. Uh, and let’s see. Oh, Christina is saying, “You find the catalog very overwhelming.” I could see that. So, let me actually try and walk you through it a little bit and explain where things are and how to navigate it. There are kind of two ways to approach this. The very first one is collections. They are on your left right here. If you’re interested in something specific like let’s say some bestsellers or our brand new products, the stuff that you might not have seen before or the stuff that has the fastest delivery to the region that you have specified, that is all in there for specific categories of stuff. When we also have seasonal collections, they’re going to likely appear here. And there’s also a collection drop down down here for some more, you know, evergreen things. Like if you’re looking for the perfect beachwear thing or the perfect gift that you want to create for someone, this is where you might be able to find inspiration. But if you want to see everything and just filter through it, this second spot uh in the menu is where you should be. It’s going to be men’s clothing, women’s clothing, everything. or you could just press all products and it’s going to take you to all of the products. Now, once you do this or you enter any section whatsoever, you’re going to see this little line pop up saying how how many results you’re seeing based on the region that you have selected. Uh this is going to first depend on which region you’re located in. But when you are kind of thinking about where you want to sell, this is the moment to start considering location and shipping types. So let’s say uh you are maybe based in the UK, but you know that the vast majority of your market is going to be in the US. Consider selecting that as the region and seeing which products are produced closest to that region so that shipping times and shipping costs are as low as possible. We have facilities all over the world. So, it’s best to make sure that the product that you want fulfilled isn’t maybe only available in the UK or in Canada or in Riga Lapia because the shipping from somewhere like California to Ria is going to be long and expensive compared to maybe something that’s within the region. The way that you can switch out the region is by going to the very top here. Do you see this world icon? You can press on that and then you’re going to have a couple of things that you can edit. The very first one is called global default selling preferences. If you click that dropdown, it is going to tell you everything that I just told you. Uh so we can maybe X this out. Uh and your selling region is going to be available in a drop down here. We have a few larger regions that you can pick like for example North America or Europe or you can even go granular and pick a specific country. What we’re going to do is we’re going to click on worldwide. And this is going to tell us that when you click worldwide, it’s going to give you the entire product catalog just so you can, you know, know what is available and what options you have in different places or if you don’t want to limit yourself and you just think I’m going to have customers all over the world, that is what you click. So you click on that, you click apply changes, you click got it. It’s going to explain all the stuff that I explained to you just now. and you’re going to see literally the entire catalog, all of the products, everything that we have. Uh, by default, it’s sort sorted by most popular. You can find the newest product or the highest rated products or based on price, whatever you’d like. But my favorite thing to do is use these filters at the very top. It’s going to have category filters. So instead of going through categories on your left right here, you’re able to click on, I don’t know, you want unisex clothing or you want specifically just accessories, you can use that. There’s product specific filters, you know, something like just backpacks or just beanies. Uh there’s color filters, there’s branding option filters, like if you want everything you sell to have an outside or inside label, you can do that. Uh you can filter by sizes, like some are poster sizes, some are clothing sizes. There’s the sizing is is a lot. So, if you’re looking for just I don’t know the uh the smalls in all apparel, this is going to be what you click. The best one, however, is the technique filter. Techniques is my most favorite topic ever because that is going to completely change, excuse me, I have six hours ahead of me and I’m already losing my voice. Uh if you are looking for a specific way to change the way the product is going to be perceived, you are going to click either I don’t know embroidery and then it’s going to be a premium product with this like really nice textured embroidered design on it or you’re going to click all over printing and something is going to be completely covered in a design. I’m going to have a session about this in about an hour and a half. You can join that if you want to see close-ups of those products and of those techniques. But for now, we’re going to take a look at just this menu right here, this filter that we were looking at. You can click on knitting, and all of the knitwear that we have is going to be in the catalog. You can click on DT flex printing, and only the items that have DT flex, which is our premium direct to film printing technique, that is going to be available here. So, use the filters as much as you can. that’s going to help you navigate the catalog. Or if you are just, you know, interested in what is available, you can scroll everywhere. You can heart the products, adding them to favorites, the ones that you are really excited about, like a pickle ball paddle set or maybe this Gildan shirt is a big favorite for a lot of people. You can heart those, add them to favorites, and you’ll be able to find them much easier. So, let’s see. Maybe I want to heart some stuff so that we can get back to it later. I really like actually this sweatshirt from Cotton Heritage. So, let’s add that to our favorites. And let’s say I’m going to really like a mug and I’m going to be interested in a mug later. So, let’s just heart a couple products and see what we can do with them after this. So, we’ve covered kind of the the lay of the land of the catalog. What we’re going to do next is take a look at a product page. So once you’ve gone through all the products and you know what you want to sell, let’s maybe go back to the sweatshirt right here. You can click on that product and it’s going to take you to the page that belongs to this specific product. Everyone with me so far? Let me take a look at what people are saying. Okay. Okay. April is finding the the worldwide default uh market setting to be really useful. I’m glad we’re already learning something in here. Then I am also oh someone is is saying throat coat tea is a game changer for for losing my voice. I do have a tea over here. So cheers to you for recommending that. I don’t think it’s throat coat but it is nice green tea.

Ah much better. Now let’s see what people are saying. Uh what is an easy way to find all my favorite products? Francis is saying let me actually try and show you. So once you click on just the product catalog, the very first thing that appears right here above all the categories and the collections is my favorites, you can click on that and you will see all the favorites that you just saw. Or if you were looking at a product moments ago, let me actually make sure that you see me as well. If you were looking at uh a product like just moments ago and you clicked away and you lost it, it immediately appears also in the recently viewed section, which when I’m just browsing through and looking for ideas, I use this all the time because I forget what I was just looking at and and immediately go like, “Oh, no, no, I’ve lost it forever.” And I have not. So, let’s click back into uh the product page for for this Cotton Heritage uh sweatshirt. I really like it. It’s very much unisex. It It fits everyone kind of slightly loose, slightly baggy, and I honestly find the color selection really, really pretty. I am a big fan of some neutrals and some earth tones, as you can see by looking at me. So, this carbon gray is a really, really nice color. We can maybe click in here and see that it’s kind of like a heather gray, but it’s a bit more leaning kind of greeny brown. Uh, and another color that I really like is latte. It’s not heather, it’s smooth and just the the latte color is the perfect way to describe this. It’s just nice and earthy and everything. So, what we are going to do is take a tour of this entire product page and see uh what information we can find here. Once you open any product, the very first thing that you should be looking at is the technique section right here in this corner. Uh, let me actually make sure. I think my screen is lagging a little bit. Let me try and full screen it. Yeah, you should be able to see it a bit better. So, here you have the technique section. It’s either DTG or DT flex for printing. Or if you want an embroidered design, you can click into here and switch to embroidery. And you’re going to have access to either standard embroidery, so a limited set of specific colors, or unlimited color embroidery. So let’s take a look at let’s say DG printing. This is just the you know the most basic printing that everybody is aware of. So let’s keep it simple. We can pick a specific color or specific size here if you’re trying to order something for yourself. Uh but uh we’re uh going to be selling this online. So I don’t necessarily need to pick a color or size here. I just need to pick the technique. The next thing that you would do is you would click on start designing. But I think that is rushing it. That is saying, “Oh, I don’t need any other information on the size of the design or on the limitations or on the needs that you have.” Uh, so I think that you should not press this until you have scrolled down and looked at this section right here. Now, let me see if I can share maybe my screen again like this. Yes, it works again. Perfect. So, we have a description where you will find everything that you would need about the fabric um composition or fabric weight uh or the specific sourcing of where it comes from uh or the features that the garment might have or another product might have. So, if you’re looking at let’s say a tumbler and you’re wondering if it’s insulated or if it’s dishwasher safe, you would scroll down and you would find that information here. There is also uh a section called shipping which if you have a specific market in mind when you are selling you should select that market right here and see what the delivery time and the cost of delivery is. So let’s say I want to sell in the US it is going to take about a week to be delivered to the person. First item’s shipping is going to cost $839. And if I add another item to that same order that is going to cost an additional 220. This is in euros, but the same concept concept applies if this is in any other currency. And then the next section is the one that I need you guys to be really paying attention to whenever you start designing a product. Now, I want complete honesty in here in the chat. How many of you always always take a look at the file guidelines before designing anything? Because I know it’s not 100% of you. So, fess up. Do do you always just go into the designing? Let me see.

All right. There there are some questions that you guys are also responding to each other with. That is beautiful. Uh I also saw a question from Katie. If you if you’re just starting, should you keep it to your market only? Not necessarily. It depends on where you’re located and it depends on where you think your customers would most likely be located. So, if I, I don’t know, want to sell merch about, uh, I don’t know, fraternity the themed merch, I’m not going to be selling that in Europe, even though I’m located in Europe, because Europeans don’t tend to have fraternities. So, it’s not really going to match anything within the region. So, think about what you’re selling, what kind of designs you have, and your target market is going to be a lot clearer. If you don’t have a target market in mind yet, consider where you want to go because it’s always better, especially when you’re starting to think about advertising and social media, you need to pick what language you’re going to be uh communicating in. And you also need to make sure that your targeting with ads is a little bit more specific than just everyone on the internet. So, think about your target market first, then pick your products. Now, let’s see. Uh, Kinhasa is quite often looking at the file guidelines. That is commendable. Thank you. In the meantime, uh, Jany is saying that you just start designing immediately, which I know is very common. So, my advice to literally everybody is make sure to take a look at the guidelines. The most important thing is the size of the print area so that you can design within that size of an area in mind. So let’s say you want a horizontal text, but the design area is vertical. You will make a design, you will upload it, and it’s not going to look right on the product. So this is your first most important information. And make sure that you’re selecting the correct tab. For example, embroidery if you want to embroider it because the area is going to be different for different techniques. For the same uh, you know, shirt, if I wanted to, this is the sweatshirt. For the same sweatshirt, if I wanted to put a print on the front, uh it would be a much larger area than what would be possible with embroidery. So, keep that in mind. And then the next thing to do is to scroll down. You can see that it changes the information below as well and see what the DPI number is. We’re going to get to what DPI is, don’t you worry. And to make sure that you are following all of this information as well. It’s important because if you make sure, let me make sure that you’re seeing me for this. If you can make sure that you are following every single point in those guidelines, that is going to give you the best possible result, you are completely unlikely to have some kind of misprint or a bad result or maybe a print that flakes or anything. If you can follow everything as much as you possibly can, you are going to make sure that you and the customers that you are going to have in the future are going to get everything as well as possible, reducing your returns, improving your reputation, and giving you much fewer headaches in the future. So, this is my big red shiny disclaimer. Read things before you design. Now, let’s take a look at this whole page and let’s go into designing. The way that I would do that normally is I would pick whatever technique. So in this case it’s DTG and the front area uh and I would download the print file template for it. What that creates is essentially this uh file uh within your downloads that is a zip file. Once you unzip it, there’s going to be images in there or different files like a a Photoshop file or a PNG image of the guidelines. I have downloaded the guidelines for this before and I’m going to open them in KD and just make sure that you see what those look like. So, let me make sure that you can see me well. I have them right here. So, what I’ve done for this is I have downloaded that print file template. I have unzipped the file and I have dragged the PNG image into KD. Uh I hope you can follow along that and what you are going to have is this beautiful image that you can use for a bunch of uh different stuff like figuring out the size of your area, seeing the DPI number right up front, uh having a note that it should be the final export should be in PNG or JPEG. So this is a very useful image that’s going to also show you the approximate placement on the shirt. Now, uh, I’m seeing, uh, some questions right here. So, let me take a quick look. Um, I’ve got a good question that might be outside of Printful. How does SEO and keywords work? This is actually a great great question, especially if you’re just starting uh, to sell and you want to have social media and stuff. Uh so what you are going to do is you’re going to take a look at either the other stream uh later in the day where we have a specific session about SEO or you’re going to stick around and we’re going to talk a little bit uh about that in a couple sessions once we are actually building out our store. I also saw a question uh what is KD? Uh, KD is one of our fantastic sponsors and also I think the best way to design stuff for POD. I am not just saying that because they’re sponsoring the event. We asked them to because we really like them. It is a great way to design stuff because the options that you have with KD are very tailored to POD. So, what you would have is, for example, templates that are pre-made that are going to match a bunch of different POD needs. You can create uh mockup videos or you will see that a lot of stuff is specifically tended as designs for merchandise. And what is my personal favorite little thing is you can click export and select the actual DPI number. When it comes to webbased tools, that is an absolute gamecher for POD. That basically never comes with anything. And KD has so many things specifically made to make your life easier. So if you have never heard of KD, look up Kit TL and you’re going to be amazed. But let’s get back to our design. And the first thing that we’re going to do is talk a little bit about math because I am a nerd and I am boring. Don’t run away yet. It’s going to be very quick and painless. Uh what we’re going to do is figure out a number that your uh canvas size should be. So DPI is let me actually take a look at you. DPI is dots per inch. It is the number of literal ink dots that you can fit within one inch of your print when it comes out and it’s ready and it’s an actual shirt. Uh, and the number really tells you how many of those dots we can fit into an inch with a specific technique. Meaning that your design should have at least that many pixels in that inch to be full quality. So that’s not blurry or anything. To be sharp, it needs to be at least a specific DPI number. The way that you would use it is you would take that DPI number and you would multiply it by inches of or or centimeters or whatever, but for DPI specifically, it’s inches of the placement. So to figure out how wide the top of your uh design should be, you should take the width in inches and multiply it by DPI. Now, in our specific case, as you can see, we have 12 inches as the width and we have 150 dpi. I am terrible at math, so I did this in advance. It should be, and this is also listed here, but even if it isn’t, you should still be checking. 1,800 pixels wide and 2400 pixels tall. What you’re going to do then is you’re going to create your artboard in KD and make sure that this artboard size right here is set to the number of pixels in width and height. And once you’re exporting your design right here, you’re going to make sure that this DPI number matches at least that number in pixels. As you can see, when I had 300 right here, the export size was 6 in by 8 in. So quite small, but high quality. But these pixel numbers, if you set the DPI to exactly 150, it’s going to match exactly the size that we have here, 12 in x 16 in. Uh, somebody is asking, uh, is KD free or subscription? There’s a bunch of free features, but I do really recommend the subscription personally. That’s what I use for literally everything that I design. Uh, but there are a bunch of free features that you could use. And you can also just keep it free for a while and see if you like it. See if it matches the way that you like to design things. Uh, we’re going to have a whole session specifically on design. This is just me, you know, showing you some setup steps. Now, what we’re going to do just for the sake of time and so that I can show you our design maker, we’re going to get in here, open up templates, and just pick something that looks like something we like. Let’s actually pick this one. I quite like it. I know it’s meant for mugs, but it says witches brew tea, and I’m just drinking tea here on the side. What you will see is there’s going to be a a little window that’s going to appear usually outside of your artboard. You can close your templates. You can pick that and you can uh enlarge it however much you want. Usually everything’s a vector. So yes, so it stays high quality and you can move it out of the way a little bit. You can pick out whatever design elements you’d like or you just can select the whole thing and move it over into your artboard. Like for example, I will select like witches and this little witch and the brute. Do we like the stars? I don’t know. Vote in the chat. Do we do we want the stars in here or no? There’s somebody asking oh about Procreate. Procreate is another really good one. Uh it depends on what you need. Uh KD for example has a really nice vectorzing feature which if you already have some kind of um design that you want to turn into a vector and scale it up or make sure that you can change the colors of it. That’s a really neat feature. It’s great for mockups. So, I would say Procreate is a nice tool, but KD just has more options for POD specifically. Uh, someone’s saying no stars. Yes, for stars. Someone say, oh, oh, you guys are ah, you guys are disagreeing with each other. Oh, no. No stars. Stars. Yes to the stars. One, two, three, four. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. No stars. We’re going no stars. Uh, I’m going to grab just this section. Leave the stars behind. And this is going to be our design that we’re going to be using. Uh, because this is a vector, meaning that it’s uh an essentially infinitely scalable image, we can change the colors right here. I’m not going to go too much into it, but maybe I want the the the pinks to be a bit, you know, different colored. Uh, I can also choose this dark and make it darker and make the image a bit more contrasty. I’m going to click on the artboard. Uh if you want to keep things more organized, you can rename it to sweatshirt.

Click on it. Click export. Make sure that the DPI is at least 150 like we talked about. Uh make sure that you remove the background and the additional settings and keep it RGB. I know the traditional wisdom is to print everything in CMYK. Printful’s printers work in sRGB. It is listed in our guidelines. Keep everything that you export either sRGB or RGB. Now, we click export and it’s going to be in our saves. So, what we’re going to do next is go right back into our product page. I’m going to show you that in a second. But before we do that, I want to make sure that I have answered all of the things that are appearing in the chat. Francis is saying, “Please explain what vectorizing is.” We are going to have a specific session on design in I think like three hours approximately. It’s going to be KDP specific, meaning that you’re going to get the answers to those questions, but JB Zion is already doing a great job of explaining what vectorizing lets you do. It essentially turns the limited sized image into essentially an unlimited scaling opportunity. And you can then take specific parts of that image and change their colors with Enkd, which is also very helpful. So, we’re going to cover that and we’re going to also demo it. So, stick around. But, and Mila is also asking a great question. Are those images on KD free to use? Yes. Yes, they are. Uh, which is another fantastic thing about KD. massive library of uh different uh templates made by the actual users of KD or uh the illustrations that are on there are free to use for you once once you have a KD subscription. So, it is super useful. There are also people asking about a bunch of different tools. Any tool that you use is fine. If you want to illustrate something on paper and scan it and then like put it in a tool and stuff, that is also completely fine as long as you are not going to get stuck on the design part and just keep designing and never actually selling. So, let’s get into our sweatshirt. If you guys remember, uh I think with that kind of purpley uh witchy shirt, I’m going to go with this lavender sweatshirt right here. Uh, if I was actually selling it, I would probably pick a bunch more colors, but I’m just demonstrating. And we’re going to click on start designing right here. That is going to take us to the design maker. Right, this is your spot within Printull where you can do everything you need to do to turn just a product into the product that you are going to be selling. At the top, you can see a bunch of different tabs for the different placements. So, this is the front, back, outside label, inside label, left sleeve. A lot of different placements where you could put different designs. We’re just going to stick with the front for simplicity. And you can either upload your own design, you can create some text elements, you can use our free clip art. Uh there’s a bunch of stuff in here as well that is very cool. You can use quick designs, which is something our designers have put together to make your life a bit easier. There are some premium images that you can use uh that like will cost money but are perfect if you just need that something that’s going to be extra premium. So, a bunch of different options for you. We’re going to upload uh an element right in here. Uh but you can also go at the very top and do everything that you need to do to the product to make it ready for designing. You can pick your technique like uh we did before. So if you click in here and then you realize, oh no, I actually wanted like DG flex and not the DG, you can show change that here. You can select colors like if you are selling, you can select multiple and those are going to be the colors that this product is available in. I’m just going to stick with one and you can select the specific size if you’re ordering for yourself or select all sizes if you’re going to be selling. Whatever is going to be uh your situation. So, we’re going to click we understand the conditions uh for file usage and we’re going to click upload and upload our little download that we have here from KD. Let’s click open. It’s going to upload it to Principles Design Maker. And once it’s going to be all loaded in, we’re going to click apply. And that is going to add it to our sweatshirt right here. Now because we uh created it uh in the actual uh size of placement, you can see that this fits perfectly in here. And also once I start resizing it a little bit, it tells us that it is good quality, meaning that our uh system Yeah, it’s it’s telling me that I’ve moved it a little out of the design area. Our system is essentially saying you’ve done a good job calculating your DPI and your pixels. It is large enough. it is going to come out well. You can also click on this little uh popup right here and put this design on multiple products at once without having to go in and out of the design maker, which is super helpful if you want to create a whole collection of something. And uh if uh you think you’re done and it’s perfect, you can also take a look at the mockup to see what the actual design is going to turn out like and how it’s going to look in your store. I’m quite happy with this. Uh, and what you will do is you will either go back to design and adjust something or just save it as is as a template. Once you have a store connected, you can publish it directly from here. But we’ll just save it as a template for now so that I can show you exactly where it lives within your brand new store. You go into the section called my products. So, let’s just click into here. And what you will be seeing is what’s called product templates and publish product. If something is a created product, no matter what you’ve done to it, if it’s not being sold on a store, it is going to be under product templates. If you have published it to a store, it is going to be in here. Now, for this reason, I have set up a brand new store just to show you what it looks like, but I also have a store ready to show you guys that has literally, you know, everything that I have done so far and that we’re going to be using. So, this is it also says Liz. It’s also my store, but it is a store that I’ve been using for quite a while at this point. And if I click on my products in this case, it will show you a bunch of different products in here. just pages and pages. A really nice feature that I like to use quite a bit with uh the my product section is the product collections. So let’s say I have a couple of stores and so for example on like page three everything is a completely different theme that I have used before that is you know more of a a neutral minimalist thing but I want all of the products in one collection or for one store to be in one place. What I would do is I would for example I don’t know let’s say I want uh this this and this to be part of a collection. I will select these products. I will click on these three dots and I would add them to a collection and create a brand new one. And the uh example of a collection is right here at the top. You can see it’s called Imperfect Duckling. It’s a store that I’ll be using throughout this whole whole six hours. Uh, and it just has a whole bunch of products that are themed around one particular store so that I can have them all in one place. I can bulk select them, not worry about anything, and then just publish them in bulk. Uh, I’m seeing some chatter uh in here. Uh, Nishe, I think that’s how you pronounce your name. Can the design be sold directly from Printful? Does it have to be connected to a storefr website or platform like Shopify? It does uh normally need to be uh connected to different uh platforms and we’re going to get into those platforms in just a second. So, what you have here is a whole host of different products and you can get in here. You can edit them through the design maker and you know change some stuff about the design or uh you can also click into here, find a bunch of different settings and download mockups. This is something that people don’t really know how to do very often once they’ve already created a product. You can click there, click on basic mockups and download whatever you would like. pick out the products that the the colors that you want and the exact, you know, types of mockups and pick whether you want them to be JPEG so your uh website runs smoother or you want them to be PNG and you want a transparent background. Generate them and then download them. So that is something that I find is a question very often. This is the best and easiest way to do it in my opinion. But once you have all these products, what are you going to do with them? you are going to sell them in a store and for that you’re going to click on this next section called stores. It is going to have the stores that you have connected right here. And uh let me actually click into the brand new one that we just started so you can see what it’s going to look like for you. Bring you back. We have a store section that is brand new. We just created this account. There’s no uh stores anywhere in site. You can scroll down and you will have a really really helpful very short little quiz that is designed to help you figure out which platform you need to be on. You can uh click through here. Let’s do this very quickly. Uh your web development skills are complete beginner maybe. Uh and then you want to sell in your own online store, not a marketplace like an Etsy for example. And then uh you want pretty simple customization options then what we’re going to give you as the best options are you know Shopify and Wix etc. This will give you a bunch of useful information about each of these uh different platforms but you can also click on learn more and it’s going to take you to the connection page where it’s going to give you a bunch more information and some tutorials and everything. Uh if you want to see literally all of the different integrations, you would go to this page right here. Uh and I’m sure I can ask maybe some of our moderators to drop the link in the chat sometime. Uh but what it essentially is is just printful.com/integrations right here. You can scroll through this. You can use all the filters, whatever you’d like, and you can compare the options that you have. So either it’s going to be a platform, something like Shopify, something like Squarespace, or it’s going to be a marketplace, something like Etsy or Amazon. The difference between the two is essentially if you want to have more control over how your products are displayed and where they live, that is going to be your platform. There’s no built-in traffic in there, but you get a lot more branding control and you get a lot more ability to essentially just funnel people to that one link. So, for example, the link that you would have in your Instagram bio is just going to be your Shopify store and that’s where you’re going to be sending people and there’s no kind of interaction. But if you want built-in traffic that is still it’s going to be a little bit hard to get it, but if you want like a built-in audience, that is going to be your marketplace. There’s a lot of different sellers selling on there that you have to compete with, but you can use free stuff like SEO and and keywords to get the traffic to your Etsy store. For example, for our example, uh we’re going to use Shopify because uh from conversations with you guys, I know that it’s the most common and most desired platform, but whatever we’re going to be talking about throughout the day can be applied to anything. So, let’s say you already have um a Squarespace store or a big cartel store or something. you can take the tips that we’re going to have throughout the day and just you know put those into the filter of whatever sales channel you have. So what we are going to do next and let me actually take a look if I’m not missing any of the communication that we’re having. Someone’s saying I was using Wix but I moved to Squarespace. Can I link my Printful store to Squarespace? Yes, you can. Uh, and can you delete a platform you no longer use? So, let me try and show you. I’m not sure if I have something like this just, you know, on hand, but what you would do is you would go into the store section again right here. You would click on this. You would click on store settings and you would go a little bit down and you will have the remove button right here. So you can just completely remove this uh specific store that you have this specific platform. Right? So if uh you have an old store that you no longer use, I’ve had uh a little bit Okay, I see some people saying that that we’re frozen. Are we frozen still? Can you guys see and hear me?

I’m looking for a sign that I can still be heard and seen.

Can you do both Etsy and Shopify? Yes, you can. Can you still see and hear me? Yes. Yes, you can. Okay, beautiful. Wonderful. I’m not scared anymore. Uh, can you do both Etsy and Shopify? Yes, you can do literally every single integration that we have. An integration is just the communication that Printull would have with your, you know, sales channel provider. That is the easiest way for you to be able to sell anywhere because when someone places an order at a store that is integrated with Printull, we are going to receive that order directly. We are going to take care of it and fulfill it and send it out. And as long as everything is set up on your end, you don’t even have to do anything about it. And as soon as you start growing, that is going to be a gamecher because you can’t just be sitting there approving orders and designing stuff for people and stuff like that. So an integration, which is essentially any connection that you would have with something like a Shopify, an Etsy, Squarespace, Amazon, whatever, is going to be the way that you will be able to do POD and scale. And yes, you can use every single platform that we have in the menu at the same time. No issue with that whatsoever. Now, we are coming up on just a couple minutes left within this session. So, let me make sure that I am covering some of the questions that we have in here. Uh a reminder that we have a uh Q&A section within the platform. If you are watching on YouTube, you should be on uh the community that we have and you can also upvote some of the questions. Uh and let me see what are the most upvoted questions. I’ll have time to answer a couple whilst I’m answering questions. Uh there is also a giveaway going on in the chat. So, this is a reminder for all of the people over on YouTube to go into the community and participate in the chat there. That is the only chat that I’m seeing and that is where the giveaways are happening. The most popular question is uh many of us have been asking for onscreen left chest guidance and hopefully movable rulers with precise measurements which could be variable by shirt, brand, and size, but nothing in return other than empty grade suggestion. And we’re looking into that. I’m so sorry to hear that. Uh a big uh reason why all of this takes quite a long time is because making sure that something like that is applicable to every single product with a left chest placement requires a lot of compute power and setup. So it’s not just like a tool or a toggle that we can provide. It’s a lot of manpower to develop and create that. I will pass this on and I’m sure a lot of my co-workers are watching right now who are able to maybe help with that. This is clearly a very popular thing that people are asking for. Let’s do that. And there’s an other question. Uh where was it? Oh, why are chat comments overlaid on the presentation where they’re also showing uh the chat window? Great point. We’re going to try and turn off the chat a bit more often, especially when I’m showing you what’s happening. But if you really uh want me to do something about it, let me know and we can maybe try and like make the chat smaller for follow-up sessions. Before we end, there’s only a few seconds left in this. I’m going to shout out our giveaway winners. We have five winners who are going to be winning $20 of store credit within your Printful account that you could use however you’d like. The winners are Katie Nichols, Linda Clark Taylor, Boang Ma, Raquel Marshall, and Chris Jamsky. All of you guys are getting $20 coupons in your email that you can use for whatever you’d like within Printull. I am going to take a break and be back here in 10 minutes with Crystal to talk all about Shopify. And I will see you guys later with some more stuff. Okay, so you’ve got a design. Nice. That’s a great start. But now it actually has to look like a product. And that’s usually where things get tricky. Most brand owners out there don’t have time for a photo shoot. And don’t even get me started on stock models that look nothing like your customers. And that’s why we’ve come up with AI mockups, which will change how you launch products with Printull. You can get there through your my product section. If you’ve been with Printull for a while, you’ll just need to switch on the my products toggle first where you’d normally pick your mockups on Printull. There is a new tab now. You’ve got basic mockups, the ones you already know and love. And then there’s AI mockups for when you want mock-ups that actually look custom, like they belong to your brand. Just click generate with AI to get started. And you’re already in creative mode. This is where it gets good. You pick your product color. You pick your print area. front, back, whichever side you actually want to show off in your mockup. This is the key step of the process. You get to write a whole description of who’s wearing it. Age, gender, features, skin tone, hair, body type, even their expression or how they’re standing. You’re basically building your mockup down to the smallest detail. There’s the background, too. You can go with a preset or just write your own prompt and get something fully custom. It can be a studio location, a city background, a forest, whatever fits your brand. You click generate and that’s it. Printull just takes it from here with the help of AI. And there it is, a fully custom realistic mockup and it’s already saved to your library. If this is not quite what you were looking for, rewrite the description and regenerate until it is. Love it. Click select mockup and it slides right into your listing with all your other mockups. If you need more mock-ups for the same product, just keep generating. They all land in the same spot, just sitting there, ready for you to pick and add to your shop. This whole set looks good to go, ready for your store, ads, and socials. That’s how you get a store ready product photo that looks exactly like it belongs to your brand. Head to Printull and try AI mockups for yourself. Most Printful sellers never get to see their product get made, but today one of them is coming behind the scenes and onto the production line. Hi, my name is Elizabeth and today I’ve invited JM from Polone Goods to come join me here in Ria in our fulfillment facility and try to fulfill his products himself. And in addition to that, I’m going to pick his brain about what it takes to become a successful seller. Let’s go. So, I had been working full-time in New York City for about 15 years and was laid off from my full-time job. Rated a sweatshirt uh with my favorite food, a pano choka, put it online, and I didn’t know what the reception would be. I thought it was kind of cute, really ky. I put one ad on Meta. Sales shot through the roof. But it turned out people really loved that sweatshirt and it really connected with a lot of people. I literally went above my bed and took some photos of the life of Panosa sweatshirt. Thought they looked terrible. I tried editing them and I was like, you know what? I’ll put them up online and just see what happens. And this one image over my bed. Um that ad sold thousands of sweatshirts. One of my favorite kind of stories uh with these products and especially with the life of Pan Shakawat sweatshirt is that it ended up in Lebon Mar. Tell us a little bit about that. Leon Mar is the top first department store in the world. It’s in Paris. They were like we want your products for the exhibition that’s coming up. It’s called Paris Paris. It’s everything celebrating Paris and we love your French food items. I had never done a big deal like the wholesale deal with anyone, let alone the biggest and like most prominent retailer in the world. They were just like, “We want it.” Um, and then it was a lot of more take it till you make it. I had to chat with my vendor printful to see if we could do a large order, have it shipped to the store. I got to go see it in person, see all the products, got to see people wearing, like checking them out, like just really smiling. And that was the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me and I think that will ever happen to me. There’s a probably a bunch of people who are just starting out like maybe they’re just working on their like very first product but they haven’t launched it yet looking at you in the past in that very beginning. What would you give that person as advice? But finding like a good niche that you know resonates with like-minded people is probably the best place to start. But really a lot of like you can start small, test some ideas, get some feedback, not just from friends but like from people you don’t even know. That’s like probably the best way to get started. And then you’re not overextending yourself. you’re not spending all this money. Like I really didn’t start with any money invested in this other than I need some money saved to live off of um and some money to run the ads. Um and then from there it’s just about expanding and iterating. Uh a lot of things that I create I like personally and then they don’t sell and that’s fine because I don’t have any inventory for them. But if something does work out really well I can expand on that, create an ad for it, push it out further, create content. You actually have a very fun current collaboration going on. Can you tell us about how that came to be and what it Yeah, I do. So, Magnolia Bakery emailed me saying, “Hey, we really like your stuff. We saw you on Instagram. We’re going to bring the desserts. You bring the funny puns, you do the designs, and let’s do a collaboration together.” They really like working with small brands in the community. I actually live 5 minutes from the main bakery in New York City. Very popular from Sex in the City. Uh so, did a few designs for them. We have Kake It Make It uh pudding as in banana pudding, My Self-Care First. And then we did a little video photo shoot uh before we launched that at the bakery with actual people that worked at the store. They sported the apparel. We walked around the West Village, got some content. It was really fun with working with them and doing that. The banana pudding hats the best seller so far along with kick it till you make it, which are my two favorite things. So with so many really cool products already launched, what is something that you’re most kind of excited about? be that product design area like I don’t know a technique maybe something in particular but most recently I’ve just been thinking a lot about the success of my butter line really have focused mostly on apparel and hats but recently expanded to wrapping paper and I have a tote bag and I put the butter on both of them and honestly I went a little viral with the wrapping paper so I’m really excited about that I agree I love the the butter designs it’s like so fun to me and it’s So, in a way, nostalgic a little bit, just something you never think about as something you could relate so well to until you realize other people also love that. And it’s just like a fun, kissy thing that kind of brings everyone together. Yeah. Wrapping paper is kind of like this hallmark of holiday sales. Your product actually is featured by the New York Times for the holiday gift guide, right? Yes. So lucky enough, uh, the New York Times reached out about carrying one of my products, a hat that says your yu apostrophe re asterisk. Oh, I see. You’ve mentioned that you actually really enjoy embroidery, and your first product, I think, was hats, right? What makes it a thing that you like? What I love about Printull is they have unlimited embroidery. So that means I can use any amount of colors. So, I can really take something like whether it’s a croissant or like my dirty martini, um, really make it come to life in a way that you really couldn’t unless you were handstitching. What is something that you would give as advice to sellers who want to keep their lineup fresh and who want to like maybe experiment and stuff? They’ve had a store for a while, so they’re kind of feel like kind of trickling away. I think um, just giving it a try and seeing if it works and not like having the expectation that it might, you know, take off. I’ve always believed that if you’re passionate about what you’re doing and you love it, that’s honestly enough. But then also thinking about from the customer side like what they might want. Um, and if you’re making them happy, then that ultimately translates into what I think is successful and that’s just making people smile. And we are all done. JM, I hope you enjoyed your time here. Where can they find you? polychromegoods.com and also on Instagram and Tik Tok. Okay. And for all of you guys in the meantime, happy selling. Okay, I’ll be seeing you around. Just uh don’t forget your bag. Oh, right there.

Heat. Heat.

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hey, hey.

Hello and welcome back everybody. Uh I saw a bunch of activity in the chat even during the break. I am here with Crystal. Hey guys. She is the CEO of Girl Plus God and building a massive merch empire while still working full-time in radio, which is crazy. Good job. And for those of you uh who don’t know me, there’s a little like name tag flashing on the screen. My name is Liz. I make educational content for Printull’s YouTube channel, but I’ve got nothing on Crystal who has been on YouTube for 10 years sharing all of the knowhow and everything that you have to build all of the great things that you have built throughout the years. Please, you be killing it. I I I try I try my best. Uh but I was seeing some questions in here from you guys. Hey you guys. Yeah, the uh store that you guys just saw was actually called Polychrome Goods. Uh also, yeah, a customer of ours. I love the Butterline still to this day. Uh but like a great example of something that you can also create just, you know, from your own bedroom. Absolutely. Uh and speaking of create, Polycom Goods also uses Shopify. So, what we’re going to talk about today is all about Shopify. Now, uh, can you tell us a little bit about kind of your journey and and, uh, why you think Shopify should be the choice? I’ve been on Shopify for a long time, and the people that know me know I don’t play about my Shopify because if the billiondollar businesses are on Shopify, I need to be there, right? Like to me, getting on Shopify meant I’m serious about my business. It means that I am coming to make as much as I can and I’m not going to be afraid about it. Shopify has so many things to help you build and grow. Even if you’re starting from nothing that you can really build up to a million dollars on Shopify, right? You guys are hearing that a million dollars on Shopify. You better get excited. Uh I see uh a bunch of people also like welcoming you and being excited to see you. And Gabrielle and Colin and Erica and Raquel. Oh my god. Leah is also saying that you inspire them so much. All right, don’t do this today cuz I’ll cry. Oh, is that a challenge? Okay, that’s actually a terrible thing for me to be like, “Oh, I I can I can totally make people cry on command.” That’s fine. This sounds a little morbid. But yes, uh before we get into uh the meat and potatoes, I think we can do a little tiny giveaway. Let’s do it as well. Let’s do it. uh because we have uh created a bunch of cool merch for Amplified merch and we want people to have it. Uh so this is going to be a little fun merch giveaway. Okay. Uh if you keep typing in the chat, we are going to pick one lucky winner who’s going to get a $50 coupon code for the Amplified merch store, which uh you can find very easily in the platform. Uh but keep typing and telling us why you are excited to be in the session and we’re going to uh get a winner in just a little bit. I love it. And in the meantime, okay, uh you mentioned that uh for Shopify, it’s kind of important to be ready to start building and it’s not just like a little let me dip my toes into it. Uh a lot of people are kind of, you know, worried about the fact that it’s a paid platform, right? You have to pay. Um, do you think that that is like a a legitimate worry that people could really put themselves in hole with this or maybe with POD it’s not so much of an issue? I would say, and I’m not trying to just be super inspirational cuz I want people to walk away with actual tangible advice, but this is a mindset thing. So before you get on Shopify, I really want for people you to think about like I really want to do this. I can do this because you can. and you’re watching me, somebody who started from zero, right? So, I understand that tension of like, but do I want to pay? First of all, you get a free trial, right? So, let’s maximize the free trial. Like, really go in there and set a goal. If you have a 3mon free trial, what are you going to accomplish in that 3 months? Right? Let’s let’s just be real with ourselves. I really want to do this. I can do this. And so in that free trial period, I’m really going to test out everything that I can. And then after that, when it’s $39 a month, challenge yourself. How do I make $40 minimum per month? Right? And I’m talking to those of you who are like, I know that I can do this. I know that I have what it takes. I know I have a really good product. And I know that like I deserve this. I’m not talking to the ones that aren’t ready for that. I’m talking to the people who are like, you know what, I can do this. Yeah. And I feel like if you are in that mindset, you would really be best served by something like Shopify because it has so much to offer you, right? Like it’s I find it to be especially great for the people who want to do maybe like I don’t know for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you want to do a sale. There’s so many tools available to you. Yes. That you know if you are actually committed and ready to try it, that is that is the best spot to be in. Yeah. Now, let’s do our little giveaway announcement because there’s a lot of please pick me, pick me, both of us. And I want you all to focus on the discussion and not just the giveaway. So, all right, drum roll, please. It’s going to be Rhina Ruth. Congratulations. You get $50 to spend on Amplified merch. I promise it’s really pretty. Our designers work very hard on this. It feels good. Like the shirt feel like Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, we’ve got good products in here. We’re not a t-shirt company for nothing. Uh so, uh let’s get back into the the conversation that we’re all here for. Okay. Uh when you are looking to start selling on Shopify, uh is there I know that for a lot of especially beginners, there’s a a big worry of like it’s going to take me ages to figure out. Yeah. Uh, so why would I start spending money immediately and and then just, you know, burn a bunch of money in the months that it’s going to take me, right? I think again, like we said, you have a free trial, right? Go in knowing exactly what you’re about to do. I would say even before you get on Shopify, know who you’re about to talk to. Okay? If you don’t know what a niche is, I need you to figure that out. All right? Niche. Sometimes people call it niche. Whatever you want to call it, where you’re from, find out who your people are. find out like how you’re going to show up for them. That is going to really help you maximize on a platform like Shopify because it’s not Etsy, it’s not Tik Tok shop. You got to bring people there. So that means you really need to be connecting to people. So go into Shopify with that mindset and then go in and just say, “I don’t have to have the perfect store, right? Don’t compare yourself to other people and say, I have to have it perfect. I have to do it like everybody else.” Just get started. Done is better than perfect. And listen, I am the queen of perfectionism and overthinking everything. I want everything to be so pretty and this and that. Oh yeah, you got to get started, right? Because we got to start making some money and then you can build and make it better and make it even greater. But there are free themes on Shopify. I know we’re going to go through some of them. Um, so you have free options. Don’t go in trying to spend a bunch of money. Go in with your goal to say, “I’m going to launch by this date.” Give yourself a date. I would love all of you to give yourself a date and say I’m going to start by this date. Yeah. And also what’s helpful I find cuz I’m also the exact kind of person that like nobody can see what I’m working on until you’re ready. You can like password protect your store until you’re ready to go. Like while you’re still building it out, you can uh give it the link to a few people to give you some feedback on it. Uh and while still keeping it very protected and and not accessible to the people’s judging eyes. So don’t you worry about that. Yes. Uh and when it comes to uh Shopify, I know that another worry that people have and we touched on this already is design, right? Especially all the themes, everything like that. That sounds confusing to people because it involves some code behind the scenes. Oh no. Oh no. It’s more than just adding an image. Uh so let’s maybe take a look at an example. I have built a store just for this. Uh I referenced in the in the previous session a little bit. I’ve called it uh imperfect duckling and I have uh built it out fully. Uh and I’m going to show you kind of what it looks like. Uh and uh you can judge me all you want. I am not the Shopify expert here. This is what I love though because I think that this really shows that you don’t have to be an expert. Right. It’s okay for you to try. And already I love this. Welcome to our silly little store. I love that. Uh you guys, I know you can do better than what I just did. So, if you uh are are seeing this and you’re like, “Okay, this is not too bad.” It means that you’re literally like a day away from building a store. So, this is great. Uh we can scroll down a little bit, but you can kind of see what it looks like. It’s all pretty seamless looking and very simple, but we can take a look at the actual catalog and some products. And first, can you go back to the homepage? I want to talk about just that line. embrace your perfections and how powerful that is cuz that shows that you know who you’re talking to, right? That you’re looking for somebody who is maybe struggling with that. So, that is that’s a great first line, right? And I also saw uh somebody saying Crystal is going to make me cry. Uh if you know if you’re sitting there at work and secretly watching this, maybe don’t. But if you’re in the privacy of your own home, embrace your imperfections, you know, cry, feel free. Uh, and there was also uh somebody saying, “I got my page ready.” I know that’s right. Good, good, good, good. I know that’s right. Uh, so let’s maybe take a quick look at just some of the options I just put together. Okay. Uh, you did this. Yes. This is great. Thank you. This is great. I tried my best. I know you were going to be here uh with me and I was worried that it was not going to be good enough, so I just This is like not lying at all. I would purchase these products. First of all, I love pink. That’s my favorite color. Number two, I love that the niche is clear, so it’s for a particular person. And then number three, I just love how unique it is. Like ugly and perfect duckling with that crossed off like so emotional cuz you know, we always talk about not just creating a product, but actually creating that feeling and emotion behind the product. And this whole store has that. Yeah. And I feel like what’s useful to maybe show people is that I used a completely free theme. We are going to like go through everything in the back end a little bit. But uh for reference, uh the theme that I use, let me actually find it. It’s going to be one of the frees for sure cuz I am not spending hundreds. We’re not doing that. Please don’t do that. Yeah. I mean, I know uh a couple of our like Printful customers have used like transitioned into the paid themes eventually for some features, but just to start off, you don’t have to go in and spend a 400. Yeah, absolutely. Not at all. Make 400 first. Yeah. Well, ideally make more than 400. Yeah. But just make Yeah. Make make that and then, you know, invest it back into the company. Yeah. And you can see so there’s a bunch of different free themes. I use this one. Okay. And you can instantly tell that this looks kind of nothing like my story. Nothing at all. Yeah, he got a sweater on. Yeah, he’s cute. The sweater’s cute. Everything’s cute. But you can see that the the theme like it has some of the building blocks in here, especially the homepage look is quite similar. But you could really customize it to be whatever you want. What made you choose this one? Uh, I’ve liked the high contrast and the very opaque elements. I like when nothing is transparent just because uh it it’s gotten very popular with like Apple’s uh kind of liquid glass look and everything. I wanted the opposite. I wanted it to be as cartoonish as possible just to match everything. But you can really tell that it looks nothing like my store, meaning that if you and and I didn’t spend that long on uh the actual build. So uh what Let me actually switch over to my store and show you. It looks very different, meaning that in just a day that I spent on this, you could really customize it to your own liking as much as you’d like, you know. So, uh once we’ve kind of taken a look at the different uh uh themes, can you tell me a bit more about uh any tips for design and navigation? And if someone just started out and was like, “Okay, I like this theme. Where do I go from there?” So, let’s scroll down a little bit. Mhm. Okay. So, I probably would have you have discover new arrivals right there. I might have like a larger way that said like shop now, right? You want for people to be able to buy immediately. I may have also had scroll down a little bit. Mhm. I would have a collection. Yeah. Immediately. So that people can see collections immediately. So that would be like t-shirts, hats, maybe mugs, accessories. Um, so you want the quickest way that people can check out for sure. Whether it’s cute or whether it’s just bare bones, make sure that people can check out very fast. Also remember in 2026, mobile is king. So you want to see what this looks like on mobile and how easy it is for somebody to buy from their phones cuz everybody’s looking on social media. So that is important. I always basically design for mobile. That’s my primary focus. Um, but there are still some people who are like, uh, I got to buy it from the last and that’s fine, too. But focus on mobile for sure. And then I would have feature products down here. So, everything looks great. Again, as somebody who loves pink, this will absolutely get me. Um, but I do just want to see some things like, you know, the banner with shop now. I want to see some collections. And I didn’t even make these clickable, which is a massive Yeah, but you know what? It’s okay because this is a learning experience. So, for somebody who’s just like, “What what do I need?” The fastest way for somebody to shop. So, even if you had it like this, yes, we would want it to be clickable. I love hearts. Like, well, I can’t I can’t buy that right now. You’re making it hard for me. Uh I might have some gifts for you after this. We can we can talk about it during the break, you know? You know, I love a gift. Uh but yeah, I have collections just in here, but I’ve just realized when you were saying uh it’s best to have like hats and shirts and everything. I’ve like put it in themes, but now that I’m thinking about it, that’s not how I shop, right? And that’s not how most people shop. Like, if you’re looking for a t-shirt, you’re not going to go through everything. And I do actually like the themes that you have cuz I my brain works like that. So, Hearts Club and Ducklings, but like you said, everybody is not going to be like, “Oh, what’s Hearts Club? Should I click that?” So, you want to get people from your store straight to checkout as fast as possible, right? So, usually I even say I want to see a buy it now button. I want to see a add a cart button. Something like that. It’s only really uh in here available once you go into the thing. Um, but we can actually maybe talk a little bit more about this listing situation right here because I maybe because I uh went through it like as a demo for myself and everything, but for many products, I just added the one image, added whatever description Printull provides and like moved on with it. Yeah. What are some things about a listing that are going to make it more successful? Well, first I do want to point out too um AI is built into Shopify. So utilize that how you can on your homepage you can tell AI like build me a a button here. Trina is is actually just asking does Shopify offer. They do have an AI builder and so I would really really really maximize using the AI especially if you’re not great with design. So you could have taken this theme and just told it how you want it to be built out. So that’s first and foremost for the product page. I would definitely say focus on SEO. Um, so hearts knitted sweater, we might need to add a little something to that, right? Just to make sure that people can find it. If they’re just searching looking for a heart sweater. So, even if this let let’s pretend that it’s almost Valentine’s Day, right? Then I would probably add like Valentine’s Day sweater for woman, you know, and add a little bit more inside of your listing. Um, I think of course I love the fact that everything is pre-populated for you for this type of brand and for all of you who have a very special brand like this, make sure you add some of that into your language, right? So that could be for anybody who feels like they uh are on a journey to love themselves, this sweater is for you. You want to add as much emotion as possible. Nobody really cares that the sweater is like lightweight. Now, some people do. So, I’m I’m going to say that some people care about how it feels, but what makes somebody purchase is the emotion, right? So, sell the emotion of what people are getting from this brand and then have all the little other stuff that is going to already be on there. They give this to you already, right? Just add your personality into it. Um, be you. Like I would say that truly as you’re building your store, don’t try to tone yourself down. Be your amazing authentic self because that’s what people want, right? You’re so right. Cuz like a big part of um me just putting these kind of designs and things together. Uh I don’t know if you can tell, I am not wearing pink. I don’t normally wear pink. Uh but inside that is kind of what my personality is like. inside. It’s like little small ball of awkwardness. I tried to like convey that a little bit and stuff. Can maybe even like try and show you uh one of the designs in here. Um I love that mug. I love the hat. I love that you got the I love so many of these products. That shirt is cute. Don’t give up tea. Yeah, it’s so it’s like trying to be the most like I did my best. I tried this. But this is maybe the most accurate one that I have. Just nervous energy radiating everywhere in every single spot. This is so good. I’m so proud of you. I tried my best. This is so validating. Honestly, so proud of you. Uh and then uh once I’ve kind of like covered design, right? Then we’ve talked about okay what your listing needs to look like, what your like store theme needs to have in it. Uh there are then a bunch of questions that still appear for people about uh like oh no taxes, oh no payments, oh no how do I set all of that up and h how does that work? I saw uh even like a couple of uh questions from people of uh okay I understand that there’s like a free trial and everything and I don’t have to spend a bunch of money. Uh but do I need to like how much does it does go to taxes in there and and it’s scary? Uh, and what would you say to people who are scared? I know the fear is going to be there, but that’s why we talked about mindset, right? And it’s okay to be fearful. It’s okay to mess up. I want you to mess up to be honest. You’re going to do it. So, let that go. Okay. And then I would say the first thing that I recommend is to open up a separate bank account. Even if you don’t have a business banking account, just have a separate bank account for your expenses. I want you to feel as much like a business owner as possible. So, for me, Shopify feels like I’m serious about my business. And then that separate checking account makes you feel like I’m serious about preparing for taxes. Now, hear me cuz I don’t know where you guys are located at, but if you’re in the States like me, I know you don’t want to deal with the taxes, but I try to think about it like if I’m paying taxes, that means I’m making money, right? True. Hello. That means I made some money. And so I try to say that it is a privilege for me to be able to pay some taxes because I have created something from my mind to people’s wearing it and that’s the best feeling ever. And Shopify will help you with that. So Shopify will help you set up your taxes, your tax collection and you having that separate bank account and knowing what you’ve received so that you can pay your taxes is great. Um I would not let that scare you though early on. just focus on again being organized. Don’t be mixing your bank account money and really think about the long-term strategy, right? I also saw a couple people uh saying uh that this really resonates with them like brave is being afraid and doing it anyway. I think is kind of the most accurate way to portray anything like starting to build a business. Yeah. Yeah, no matter what system people use, no matter if it’s peyote or something completely different, I don’t know, maybe you want to try to start teaching guitar to people. I don’t know why that came into my mind, but whatever is the business that you’re trying to build, it’s going to be scary. It’s going to really feel like you’re doing something that could fail. And that thought that that could fail is heartbreaking. And you don’t want the thing that you worked so hard on to fail. Uh but if you don’t try, you’ve already failed, right? Yeah. You didn’t really do anything to were in success in the first place. Yeah. And on your deathbed, you’re going to regret not trying whatever you wanted to try. And listen, I made a lot of money, okay? And I failed a lot. It’s going to happen. I still get scared. So what? I’ve I’ve had my own warehouse and I always stick beside my print on demand. All right? So, I always say, I’m not going to tell you to do something I wouldn’t be willing to do. It’s scary all the time. It’s scary to pivot. Shoot is scary and I have the money you need. Okay? So, it’s like, why not try this? It’s risk-free. Why not try it? I did see somebody else say PayPal, too. You can set your PayPal up right inside of Shopify. So, that is possible. And set that pay that PayPal up with your new bank account. All right. Keep everything separate for your new business. Yeah. And something that also is helpful, I guess, for people to consider, yeah, is every single kind of partner that you’re working with, that could be Shopify, that could be whatever uh sales channel that you’re using. Some people are asking about Wix also, like Wix totally works. Yeah. Uh, and that applies to Printull as well. We want you to succeed. Our like we don’t make money unless you make money. Meaning that literally everything in the setup is going to be made to make your life as easy as possible. We know all of the struggles that people tend to go through. We talk to the people who have made it. We talk to the people who have not and are struggling with something. And our job is to make it as accessible to people as possible. Meaning that you just need to use the resources at your disposal. Shopify does a lot to help and their like AI thing, the sidekick AI builder and real people. Well, yeah, they’ll talk to you, too. Yes, they’re very nice. They are nice. Yeah, they are going to give you all the opportunities to be in the chat with the little sidekick thing and ask them questions and it’s honestly shockingly accurate. I did use it a couple times on like building out this stuff and adding a custom domain, which we will talk about as well. Uh, and uh, there like I to up to this point had never known what a DNS like server thing is and how to set anything up for a custom domain. And yet you ask the that little chatbot one thing and that’s easy. Yeah, I’m I’m a little hesitant to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway. Um, Shopify also has like capital. So once you start making money, they will offer to give you money to help you with marketing, to help you with getting products. So there is an incentive for you to like keep going. So I also see somebody uh asking I saw a couple of questions about returns throughout this. We can just kind of like slightly touch on it. Uh someone saying like it’s not risk-f free if you have a return though, right? Oh, it’s not completely risk- free if you have to handle returns and stuff like that. What would you say to that question? Well, first I mean it’s still risk- free because again I had a warehouse. If you want to talk about risk, okay, we’re talking about you got to go import products and you got to pay all the tariffs and that’s risk, okay? When you’re using print on demand, like you have the opportunity to test things out, see what works, see what doesn’t. You have to be upfront with your customer and say, “Hey, this product is made just for you, so it’s going to be final sale.” Right? If something happens, the company will cover it for you. Let’s say it’s like printed wrong or something goes wrong in that way, then you’re covered. But you don’t have to take returns if you don’t want to. You have the opportunity to say, “Hey, I’m making custom products. Nervous duck hoodie is just for you. I made it just for you, so you can’t return it.” And some people may say, “Well, that may not work.” Well, if you create a product that people really want, they will buy it. I promise you that they’ll buy it. Yeah. And it is accurate to say that that product is made just for whoever is buying it. It is also uh I find it helpful to communicate that with the customers. It’s completely up to you if you want to say that you work with Printull or you don’t want to work with Printull. We’re not going to put our name anywhere in your store or on the packaging or on I don’t know the care labels anywhere. Meaning that you get to completely decide if you want to disclose that. But I find it useful to at least say that the product is made on demand. Yeah. Because it also helps uh some people to understand that it’s a bit more eco-friendly than just a bunch of products being produced and and living in a landfill if nobody buys. Right. Right. And that it depends on who your customer is. Right. So I think for this type of brand, it could be like, “Hey, all my nervous baddies, this was just made for you.” Like especially made for you. So, think about language that you can use to make people feel more comfortable. I love using things like custom, like I it’s just it’s one of a kind, right? Nobody else has this specific one but you. And then just say this item is final sale, right? Let people know that. There are places inside of Shopify where you can just put a returns and exchange page. Okay? You can put that up front and let people know. And again, the risk is then just on people. say like, “All right, I’m willing to to do it. I love this brand.” And trust me, people do buy final sale. I’ll buy something final sale if I really want it. Mhm. And it’s not like a crazy crazy investment piece. Then yeah, for sure. Yeah. Like I am willing to buy a $10 mug pretty pretty easily. I would buy this stuff. And I’m not just saying this cuz I don’t I I don’t just be lying, but like I would buy this stuff right now. I’m I’m gonna steal some of this stuff. I steal might not be the right word. I’m going to take some of this stuff because it is so freaking cute. Like I would love to get this and knowing it’s just made for me would just make me be like, “All right, cool.” Right. And I feel like that’s also how you set up the communication with your customers and with your community or whoever it is you’re selling to. Uh the reason why people buy things is not just because they need a t-shirt to wear tomorrow, right? That is pretty much never the reason why somebody is going to buy something that you’ve made. They buy it because they like it and it says something about them and it really touches on something that that is very true to themselves inside. Yeah. And that is going to be uh I guess like a lot more valuable to the person that you might imagine. Yes. They’re when for example I’m making something like this. I I did not consider that anyone else relates to this but me and yet. Right. Uh do you want to maybe take a look at uh the back end of Shopify? and try and try and cover things. So, this is like your I immediately like hiding a shame. I’m scared. No, this is this is your this is your back end. So, when you sign up for Shopify, this is what you will see. And once you start making sales, you’ll be able to see that right here on this this homepage. Um, so if you go to orders to the left, then your first order will show up there, right? You go to products, you’ll be able to see all of your products. Look at all of that inventory that you have available. I tried to categorize things. This is actually a great opportunity to maybe like show that little like AI thing in action. I I just took a bunch of the things that it recommended based on the photos of the product in the description. The only things I added myself were just essentially this. and it immediately recognized, oh, this looks like it’s t-shirts in uh the category of clothing tops. And I just click accept and it’s there. I don’t have to scroll through this endless menu of everything. And back in the day, you used to have to do that. Yeah. So, this is good. Yeah, that and also it really uh helped with all of these like metap fields, which correct me if I’m wrong, this is my assumption. Uh, metap fields is going to be uh your way of of um getting information out of the website for filtering and also for SEO. Now, see, I don’t do that.

So, I did the extra the extra step. You can you can really tell I was nervous to show you cuz I was just like, did I do all that? No, you didn’t. And I’m like, girl, I don’t I don’t be doing all that. But no, this is good because now that the AI is built in, it really helps you to like maximize everything. And then I typically based on the conversation we just had, I I put this item is custom for you in that description. I let that be known to people because you do want to communicate that. Yeah. I also get rid of stuff like um where it’s sourced from. That’s just me personally. I just, you know, I’m like, would people care about this? Yep. So come in here and play around. Like come make it yours. Make it very specific to your brand. And it can be, I know, overwhelming when people first see this and they’re like, I have no idea what I’m doing. But that’s okay. It’s okay. You’ll learn it like you learn everything else. So yeah. And being able to poke around in there and really figure just play around and take the pressure off. Have fun. Yeah, I I mean it’s such a blessing, if I could use that word, to be able to start a brand for free, you know? I know that there is like, okay, we have to pay Shopify, but like for you to be able to ship some stuff to people for no cost and it look good to have your logo on it, right? Nobody knows where it’s coming from and all you have to do is focus on like your marketing. That’s so great. Yeah. And I’ve seen it work as well for so many people and you being a great example, but also like we have a couple of um people within the entire amplified event that are successful uh brand owners who have built this kind of stuff with POD. So it’s not like we’re really just kind of being like, “Oh, no. I promise it works. I am in no way affiliated with anything here and I promise it works.” No, we’re we’re just being real about it. And I’m inspired. I’ve met people here that I’m like, you know what? Yes, I’m doing that, too. People that have like moved out of their country. They’re vacationing for months at a time, right? So, and they started from zero. We all started from zero. So, it’s like you can do this. Yeah. People are still sharing their stuff that that works for them. Like someone’s saying what their disclaimer is. This product is made especially for you as soon as you place an order, which is why it takes us a bit longer to deliver it to you. making products on demand instead of in ball caps or juice over production. So, thank you for making thoughtful purchasing decisions. Will, this is beautiful. Good job on that. That is great. And we also had another one uh lowered down from Stacy. Uh, this product is made especially for you as soon as you place an order. Uh, which is why it takes us a bit longer to deliver to you. Making products on demand instead of in bulk. It’s so gorgeous. It’s like the fact that you can uh take the information and share it with the customer and make sure that they are aware that you are doing all of this work to uh not over pollute the planet and also to deliver stuff to them uh in a timely manner and just like taking a second because it’s being made literally. Yeah. Somebody say people do care where things are made. That’s why we’re all different. Like if it is important to you, put it in there. Yeah. I take it out, right? Like it’s up to you. Yeah, it it is. And also you can get all of that like information for for each product. You can decide what is going to be helpful to uh the customers who you are talking to. For some it matters more, for some it matters less. Uh and we can also like uh jump back into uh the back end here a little bit uh and take a look at you know a couple of sections that I find really useful. Okay. Um, I was uh genuinely wondering uh if you have ever tried and used like all of these discount sections now you know I have. Yeah, because I uh was going to and and then I did the thing that I tell people not to do. I got scared. I was like, “Oh, this is going to be a lot. I have no idea how to do it.” Okay. So, what would you advise about this? I would say that first you got to know how much you’re willing to give up before you go adding a discount. We are in Q4. I just did another panel about that, like winning the holiday season. So, know how much you’re actually willing to give up on your sales, but know that a lot of other people are going to do sales. So, you can come in here to create discount and then you can Yep. And so, you can either do buy X, get Y, you can do an amount off orders, you can do free shipping. Um, so you have options. I would say let’s start with amount off products. All right? And then you can create your discount code. You can also do this for brand new customers or for those of you who are brand new and you’re like for my first 50 people I want to offer you 20% off. You’re my founding members, right? Then you can create the discount code founder or you can do uh a welcome code. You can say welcome 10. A lot of big brands have that also. Here’s my little tip. Don’t tell nobody I told y’all this, but if I were you, I would go subscribe to your favorite brands, right? Go subscribe to their email list and just watch how they sell to you. Watch how they sell a discount to you and then figure out how you can replicate that with your own brand. Now, you don’t have to copy, but I do want people to know success leaves clues. You don’t have to go make anything up. People have been doing e-commerce for years. So go and see like and think about what makes you hit purchase. What makes you say it’s time for me to buy this? And then implement that into your brand, right? I love free shipping. I don’t want to ship. I don’t want to pay to ship anything. So if you if you send me a free shipping code, I’m like, it’s time. So think about that. Mhm. And to me as well, free shipping is something that helps uh with like getting people to actually buy. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to give up a bunch of profit. You can just price your products accordingly. For sure. And even Printull is allowing you to do that inside of Printull now, which I love. So, that option is available. And you can absolutely put the shipping cost into your product. But somebody just seeing free shipping could be the difference between them saying, “I’m okay, and I need this.” Yeah, I can actually like show people. Yeah, let’s see. Exactly. Maybe this is not the right view. There we go. That was better. Uh the uh best way to do it within uh Printful is just you find whatever product you’re selling. You just go into the published products, the stuff that is already in a store. Uh and pick out whichever one you want. They look kind of like this. Uh and let’s say I want to uh give free shipping on this hearts knitted sweater. Uh that is a pricier shipping price because they all I was just about to say you make it. You I could move. Yeah. Okay. Let’s Let’s to not scare anybody cuz this is the the one product that is like coming uh exclusively from our partner in China. Let’s do a t-shirt or something. Let’s do a t-shirt. Yeah. Yeah. To be less scary. Yeah. Let’s do this. You went way too hard. I just like picked whatever. Yeah. And so this definitely like the shipping price depends on where the person is and everything. And you can enable free shipping right here. So, if you click that, that is going to like immediately set the shipping to be free. Uh, but then what I would do immediately is I would go into edit prices and make sure that you edit your price accordingly. Yeah. Yeah. So, if we saw that the absolute maximum for shipping was $12. I usually don’t even necessarily advise just cover the whole thing cuz it’s like a a range. So maybe you can do like a $10 extra and this is going to be $42 instead of 324 in this case. Uh and it’s going to cover your shipping in the vast majority of cases completely uh in this case entirely and you are going to have that little nudge for the people who are in there and are going to help them to get to the checkout even faster. And I know sometimes people are like, “But I don’t want to do that to people.” Well, listen, they’re doing it to you if you’re shopping. This is what’s happening. So, it’s kind of like you have to cover yourself while still figuring out how to like get the customer to to purchase. It’s psychology, right? Know that there are psychology to this. Yes. And also to understand uh about like how to think about selling not as a scammy thing but as a you have a product. People have a choice whether they want to buy your product or not. If you actually believe in what you’re selling, you’re not going to feel weird about like uh going on your own Instagram and being like, “Hey guys, I made a brand.” If you actually like what you’re doing, you’re going to be happy with that. And there uh was a a question about where was it? Uh that if you are not active on social media, how how would we or in this case maybe you cuz I uh don’t have experience with this uh how would you advise uh marketing your brand new uh Shopify store? Well, first I would say you should probably get on social media, right? It’s free and uh even if you don’t want to be on camera, you can even for something like this, if you created a brand that is going to inspire people to believe in themselves and to feel seen, you can create like different graphics for that, right? Sharable content that people still say like, I really like that. If you have a friend that loves to be on camera and you don’t, make them the face of your brand. Um, I don’t particularly agree with building AI people, but if that’s your thing, build yourself an AI person. Um, there are so many different ways. You can go out in the community. I think social media has us forgetting that we’re real people. So, you can go to live events, right, and sell your your products. you if you’re already in a community or you go to a church or your co-workers, I think you spoke to it like if you really believe in what you have to offer people, that’s a mindset shift also because now it’s just an exchange. I have something for you that’s going to help you believe in yourself and then you have something for me, the money, right? So, think about it that way. We’re just exchanging. And I believe in my product so much that I never feel bad about selling it because I know that people say, “I feel so good in this.” I always get compliments. People love compliments, y’all. If you can get people to get a compliment, they will buy it all day. So, think about it like that and figure out what works for you. Everybody doesn’t want to be on TikTok. Maybe you want to get on YouTube. Yeah. Right. Or maybe you want to get on Pinterest, right? A lot of uh people kind of overlook Pinterest when it comes to marketing their stuff, but I remember uh talking to Mac actually. She got me about to get on Pinterest today. Yes. There there’s a lot of opportunity to market your stuff on something like Pinterest. Uh there’s a lot of SEO based opportunity there where you don’t necessarily have to put your face on Tik Tok. you can just use great, I know, product photography if that’s something that you’re really into and you want to try. So, make sure to look into a bunch of different avenues and not just be like, I don’t want to be on Instagram, therefore, so I’m not going to do anything. Like, try different things and do what feels comfortable to you, right? Be authentic to yourself because if you’re trying to do it like somebody else, you’re going to give up. So, do it like only you can do it. And now we got Substack. You can write, okay? Yeah. You can tweet that whatever we call it now X. You can find a way Reddit. That’s another one people sleep on, right? You can start a topic. If I were doing something like this, it would be like, “Does anybody else feel unseen in 2026?” You start a whole long Reddit and then you’re like, “Here’s some stuff for you. There’s always a way. Yeah, way. I I always immediately think of all of the different platforms that I have spent an unhealthy amount of time on. I used to be a Tumblr girl back in the day. I would spend hours and hours on there and if somebody who I whose like Tumblr blog I followed a bunch would start a brand that aligned with what they were about, I’d be like, “Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much. There’s something for everybody. Don’t think you have to you have to put your face out there. You don’t. I know some people who they all you can see is the the hands and then there are like really big brands on YouTube and it’s only hands. They’re like opening stuff with their hands. So go crazy. People can tell them it’s a person. Yeah. Why do they need to see your face? I mean, in this day and age, we don’t know whether it’s people or I mean, is this AI? I mean, we’re not fairly uh there uh are like more and more questions coming in. I I will address one of them in a second, but just as a reminder for everybody, uh there is a dedicated Q&A section. It also has some questions, but your question is much more likely to be seen and and to be answered if you are going to get into the Q&A section and and answer that. So, let us uh do one more thing before we get into a full Q&A and that is talking about custom domains. Okay. Uh big reason why I want to talk to you guys about it today is because this is the first time where I was able to create a custom domain for myself. of this. Uh so we are very kindly sponsored by dots store domains which I find to be one of the best domain uh services out there just because for print on demand specifically and also for online businesses in general that are stores of products having dots store at the end of the name is going to be much much better for your SEO and is also going to communicate exactly what you have if you just see the link of whatever it is. So, you’ll be able to see that this uh store right here is just imperfect duckling.store, which is wild to me that that’s a thing that I was able to do. And dosstore actually. Yeah, let me let me actually show you what I’m talking about. This is just imperfect duckling.store is the store. And it’s crazy to me that it just works. Uh I will try and like show you briefly on the back end where you can access it. You can just we’ll discard this like discount. Uh, but you can search up domains in here and it’s going to open the uh settings area uh where you’re going to be able to find it. But if you go to uh the storere website and just look up whatever uh your brand name is and dotstore, you will see if it’s available or not and be able to purchase it. Uh, dots also has a uh coupon code amplified all caps for you guys, meaning that you can get your first year for 99. Wow, that is that is massive. That is uh so if you were just sitting there on some products and waiting for people to be able to, you know, like, uh, I need a sign. I need some kind of thing. I need more time in my life. next uh Friday, I’m going to have some time. I’m going to sit there and work on my store. You have a coupon code right now that is going to allow you to have a custom domain store very quickly and for basically for free. Yeah. So, go do that right now. Uh look up whatever your brand name is, see if it’s available, get it, and then add it to your Shopify store. Now, we have a few minutes left. There were a couple of questions that we wanted to talk about, right? Uh but let me see what people are saying. uh about yeah what’s the name of the partner for the custom domain that’s uh storere domains uh and the actual website is is get.store store. And yes, I also uh have our lovely moderators sharing the links in the chat. You can go right there, find uh your domain, add the code amplify to the checkout, and you have it for literally less than a dollar for a whole year. And let’s be clear, if you don’t know how to do any of this, you can outsource it. Yeah. You can just get somebody do your Shopify, your dots store, your designs, right? Yes. So, let’s see some of the questions that we have that are uh let’s let me filter by unanswered. Okay. Uh I have built a Shopify store and I’m super happy about it, but how do you get people to go to it? You market it. Yeah, we just talked about that a little bit. Like find a social network that works for you. If you’re good with on camera, Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram, right? If you feel like you’re more of a writer, you can even create your Shopify with a blog, right? I know that people are like, “Our blogs dead?” Well, there are still some people reading them, so you can just do a full blog on your Shopify. Um, so there are ways, but because Shopify, you’re you’re pushing the traffic there. You do have to start getting the word out. So, you are going to have to not be afraid to tell people that you have a brand and talk about it often and say like, “Hey, this is new to me.” Um, I was just talking about that too. Like, for some of us, it feels like I’m ashamed to talk about what I’ve created. I don’t want anybody to know. And we live in a world right now in a time where people want authenticity. So tell people, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I created this brand for the people who feel unheard, for the people who don’t feel loved, and I want you to go buy. Like, I just I need you to go support me. People love that kind of stuff. Show them what it looks like for you to just get started. Show people what it looks like for you to have no idea what you’re doing. People will relate to you. I know it seems scary because you’re like, I don’t want anybody to see me not knowing what I’m doing. None of us know what we’re doing, right? So, just allow people to see you trying and be okay with like, I’m going to mess up. So, and I know that’s easier said than done, right? I know that it’s like, oh, well, I you’ve done it already. I still feel like that sometimes where I’m like, oh gosh, now I got to go tell people that I’m starting something new. But people want to see that. They want to see authentic people um behind these brands. And I think for a brand like the one you created, sharing your story is important. What made you what made you create this? Somebody would sit and watch that. Like I created this because this is how I feel. Or when I was in high school, nobody talked to me and I would have wanted to wear this brand or I made this for real. Like I made this cuz my daughter says she feels this way. Right. I have coached so many people with some brands that have changed the world because they were willing to share their story. And I feel like that is if you take away one thing from here is if you can find that one little nugget of truth and and and authenticity inside you that you feel like you would be able to find people that relate to you. Yeah. Build on top of that and find a way to create with that. Yeah. Now we are running out of time. quite quickly. We’re we’re going to take a break. Uh and the next hour is all about products and techniques. I saw a bunch of questions within like Q&A about uh about where products are made, how are they made, what is the different techniques that we were covering. So, I’ll leave you with a video that I recorded earlier kind of running you through some of the techniques available on Printull and then I’m going to be back live with some products. Working hard today. Oh, I am. I am trying. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. It It feels so nice to have someone so knowledgeable next to me. You’re the best. I love this brand. I’m about to take some stuff while we go on break. See y’all. Byebye. Choosing the right customization technique can be the difference between a high-end brand and a total waste of money. Pick the wrong one and you’re looking at a magnet for zero sales or worse, a wave of unhappy customers demanding refunds. But looking at that list of techniques and all the technical names, let’s be real, it kind of feels like you need an engineering degree just to pick a t-shirt. Let’s dive into the big four techniques. Sounds serious, right? These are the techniques you’re going to see most often for apparel. First up, DTG printing. DTG stands for direct to garment. Think of it as a giant inkjet printer, but for your clothes. The ink actually sinks into the shirt’s fibers. Because the ink lives inside the fabric, it feels super soft and breathable. If you’ve got a design with tons of colors, tiny details, or a vintage faded look, DTG is your go-to. Now, if you want something sharp and detailed, you want DT Flex. It’s the gold standard for vibrancy and durability. This is Printull’s exclusive directto film technique. See, unlike DTG, the ink isn’t sprayed directly onto the fabric. It’s a super thin film that we print on and then heat press directly onto the fabric. It’s like a flexible sticker that’s built to hold on tight to the garment. And the best part, unlike a lot of other directtoil services where you get these messy white glue marks around the edges, this process is completely clean. You get a crisp finish every time without any annoying white residue. See that? It’s crisp, it’s durable, and the colors are incredibly vibrant. Since the print sits on top of the fabric, the ink doesn’t get soaked up, so even a bright and detailed logo on a pitch black hoodie is going to look sharp. If you’re doing polyester blends, DT Flex is the winner. And finally, drum roll please, the one you can’t help but touch, the 3D masterpiece, embroidery. No ink, no film, just thread. This is easily the best way to make your brand feel boutique or expensive without actually spending that much more. Now, you’ve actually got two ways to go with thread. The first is standard embroidery. This is your classic look where you choose from 15 vibrant thread colors and can combine up to six of them in a single design. It’s the perfect choice for logos with clear details and bold solid colors. The second option is unlimited color embroidery. Yep, unlimited. It’s an innovative technique where the machine uses color reel technology. It works by using a single recycled white thread that is actually dyed instantly while it’s being stitched. Because of that, the thread can transform into nearly any color you can imagine, giving you unique design options like gradients and highdetail shadows without the machine ever having to stop or switch needles. You don’t have to compromise on your palette to get that premium look. You can do multicolored designs, solid colors, and even smooth gradients. But a quick heads up for beginners. You got to keep it simple here. A needle and thread just can’t do those tiny details as well as a printer can. You want to think big, bold, and clean designs here. There are some specific rules of thumb you’ll want to follow, like keeping your text at least 25 in tall and about 0.05 in thick. Even for a basic line, you want to stay at 0.05 in to keep the satin stitch looking solid. And when it comes to unlimited color embroidery, you’ll want to keep your design elements at least 79 in wide. Small elements aren’t just harder to stitch. They can actually prevent the color transition from happening at all. Find the full list of these and other little nuances in the embroidery guidelines in the description below. Definitely check those out after the video and before you start designing so your first embroidered products come out exactly the way you envisioned. Oh, and if you can’t decide between thread and ink, you don’t actually have to. For some apparel items, you can use embroidery, then level it up by adding a DTG printed design to the back of a t-shirt or hoodie, or even to an outside or inside label. This is a winning combo if you want your brand to look like it belongs in a premium retail display. You can have a clean embroidered logo on the chest for that professional branding and then a massive detailed DTG print on the back. It’s truly the best of both worlds. Lastly, let’s talk about knitting. This one is a bit of an outlier because it isn’t actually being added to fabric at all. Unlike other techniques where we apply ink or thread to a finished product, we use jakard knitting technique to weave your design directly into the product using different colored yarns. It’s an intricate process that knits the pattern into the structure of the garment. So essentially, your design is the fabric. This makes the final piece feel incredibly premium and durable. It’s never going to fade or peel because the colors are built into the garment structure. It’s the go-to choice for retro style patterns or your own take on ugly Christmas sweaters. Something to keep in mind, since you’re working with physical yarn, you have a specific 36 color palette to play with, and you can pick up to four colors at a time for your design. You can also choose between the solid mode for clean logos or the pixelated mode for experimenting with gradients or more detailed art. It’s a unique way to add something extra special to your store’s lineup. Next up, let’s talk about the techniques that let you cover every inch or in some cases almost every inch of a product with your design. At Printull, we group these into two categories: all over print or AOP and sublimation product. Now, they both actually use the same tech, which is basically like transferring a tattoo onto your product. And unlike temporary tattoos you got in gum wrappers as a kid, this one actually looks good and stays sharp forever. In most printing, the ink just sits on top of the surface. But in this process, we print your design onto special transfer paper, then use a heat press to bond the dye directly to the material. Because the color is absorbed instead of just sitting on top, the print feels totally smooth and won’t peel or crack. When we talk about all over printing, we’re referring to a wide variety of items where the design is pressed onto fabric like leggings, sweatshirts, hoodies, and dresses, but also things like flags, backpacks, tote bags, and pillows. These are printed on big sheets of fabric first, then precision cut and sewn together. This is why your design flows so perfectly across the seams without any awkward gaps. Now, when you’re choosing your Oliver print products, you’ll notice two main fabric options. Synthetic and cotton. If you want those bold, high contrast graphics that practically jump off the fabric. All over synthetic, which prints on polyester, is your winner. It has a polished finish and produces incredibly sharp details and vibrant colors, which is why it’s the go-to for activewear and performance gear. On the other hand, if your priority is natural and soft fabric, you’ll want all over cotton. Printull is actually the only one in the game offering this right now. While most allover printing is strictly polyester, this gives you that breathable soft matte finish and a more natural, subtle color expression. It’s perfect for comfort focused lines that still want total coverage across every seam, but with a more muted look. Because it’s cotton, it’ll have that slightly livedin feel right out of the box. When we talk about sublimation, we’re using that same transfer paper and heat press, but for ready-made items like mugs, which is a huge print on demand bestseller, as well as laptop sleeves, throw blankets, and even shower curtains. So, if you’ve ever wanted to cover your entire bathroom in your cat’s cute face, this is how you do it. But what about the rest of the printing techniques? Yes, we’re not done yet. First up, UV printing. While researching for this video, I actually learned this is also called UV curing, which sounds very high-tech, right? We use this for most of the hard surfaces like water bottles, tumblers, phone cases, and even glass. Unlike other methods that rely on heat, this one uses highintensity ultraviolet lamps to instantly dry or cure the ink the second it hits the surface. The secret sauce here is that because the ink solidifies so fast, the finish is incredibly durable and scratch resistant. So, if you want your design to survive being tossed in a gym bag or rattling around in a car cup holder, UV is the way to go. Then, we have digital printing. This is the method most of us are familiar with, printing directly on paper. But at Printull, you’re getting access to these massive industrial-grade printers. This is how you get those rich gallery quality colors that I’m sorry, you’re just not going to get with that old printer sitting in your home office. We’re talking posters, stickers, wall art, canvas, journals, notebooks. Digital printing also lets you get a little out of the ordinary with your catalog. You can do wall calendars, jigsaw puzzles, or even wrapping paper sheets. Wrapping paper has actually become a huge favorite for sellers. is the perfect way to tap into that holiday rush at the end of the year. So, that’s the lineup. I know it can feel like a lot at first, but definitely take your time exploring these techniques. The best part is that you don’t have to choose just one. The beauty of print on demand is that you can experiment with all these without ever having to buy a single piece of inventory up front. Let me know in the comments which technique are you going to try first.

Hey y’all. I hope you enjoyed that little breakdown that we pre-recorded for you guys. Uh, but we are going to get even more indepth in the session. For those of you just joining right now, hi, my name is Liz. Uh, and you are in the most useful spot for your own print on demand journey amplified. So, what we’re going to be doing in this specific session is answering some of the most commonly asked questions that I get from sellers. It’s all about uh what are the limitations of this specific technique. How is this made? What should I choose in terms of printing versus embroidery versus all over printing and stuff like that? Make sure to get in here and write down all of the questions that you have in the Q&A section all about products. And not only am I going to explain to you the different uh techniques, I’m also going to show you products up close. But before we get into all the samples that I have for you guys, I’m going to do a little bit of a visual breakdown. Whenever somebody asks me about all the techniques that we have and what are the options, I like to kind of break them down into categories so that it’s easier to understand. And I’ve even made a little bit of a slide for you to explain what it looks like. So, let me show you. These are all the customization techniques that we have. Let’s maybe try and get the chat off of the screen so that you can see the entire presentation. There we go. And uh the very first category that I think is helpful to think about is uh let me see if it’s going to work. Yeah, there we go. uh print placements is what I consider it. So there are different ways to print on products. There’s like sixish depending on how you count, but some of them cover the entire area of the product and some of them only cover a specific placement. So if you consider a t-shirt, there is an area that is called the print placement that you’re going to be able to print with a bunch of techniques. And the two that we have in terms of print placements on apparel is DTG or direct to garment and DT flex which is our more premium version of a direct to film technique. Now let me see in the chat here if you guys have ever used either one of these. I’m assuming if you’ve tried print on demand before, you must have tried, excuse me, DTG before because it is the most common, the most well-known, and often the most well-liked printing technique. And then for some more specialized uses, the direct to film approach or the DT flex approach is very often more helpful. Let me switch over uh to a bit of a different view uh to show you guys some examples of what I’m talking about. So, what I have with me right here is a couple of products. There’s actually a whole bunch that you just can’t see. It’s right out of frame. So, the very first one is this uh direct to garment product. This t-shirt is a little bit wrinkled, but besides that was printed with a direct to garment or DTG printing. This other t-shirt that I’m going to hold up in a second is printed with DT flex or direct to film printing. Right? You can see, you can see, you might not be able to see the difference from afar quite as much, but maybe you can see this is a little bit more vibrant looking. We’ll take a look at these close up in just a second. So, you can see that this t-shirt was printed with very opaque printing, right? But it is a little bit more textured and it is also very flexible. You can see that I can crumple it very easily. that the t-shirt is fairly thin. If you can take a look at this fabric and it is very breathable and this print doesn’t really like stiffen up at all. And you can also if I can try and maybe show you super super up close if this is going to focus. Yes. You can see that ever so slightly there is a little bit of bleed when it comes to high contrast colors. You see that slight bleed around imperfect duckling. It really isn’t visible unless you are looking at it this up close. But like from afar it’s perfectly contrasty on its own. But if you are considering different printing techniques, you really want to know just how good certain techniques are at certain things. Now contrast that with DT Flex or direct to film. Let me lay this down in front of y’all. and try and show you. We have a piece of fluff over here, but besides that, we have a very large and very vibrant and very high contrast print. Now, if you were to hold this in your hands, you would be able to tell that each one of these things is quite stiff. So, I don’t know if you can see far, it is very, very smooth and it is quite stiff when compared to the previous print. This t-shirt is much thicker, which is why it doesn’t really feel super stiff as a print, but you can really tell the difference if you’re just holding these in your hands and up close. But even though it is quite stiff, you can still see that it has a massive benefit to it of zero bleed. It is perfectly crisp and perfectly clean and there is absolutely nothing going on around it in terms of color bleeding. It is basically like a sticker on a t-shirt. So what is the difference between the two and why do we care, right? mind will even care. Is this printing? Why? So, the approach to both of these techniques is completely different. They’re uh one of them is essentially printing kind of like what your printer at home would do. Uh you know, spitting ink onto a t-shirt in a very controlled manner. That is more direct to garment printing. Essentially, if you were to use a garment as a piece of paper, that is how that would work. And then DT Flex is your approach to uh creating the most crisp and most vibrant print possible. And the way that you would do that is you would put all the ink on a piece of film and then you would put that film onto the garment and you would heat press that uh that ink onto the t-shirt. Meaning that there’s no spray ink happening and there’s no distribution of ink. It is exactly where you want it to go. But as a result of that, there is a slightly thicker layer of that ink. And that ink is a little bit different. It doesn’t get absorbed into the fibers as much because it is just heat pressed on like a layer. Meaning that the result is slightly stiffer but a lot crisper. Depending on what you are looking to create, that is going to be a big deal for you, right? Either you want it to be the most precise lines and the brightest colors, or you like a bit of a vintage feel. you want your, I don’t know, shirt, whatever you’re designing on to feel as lightweight as possible, then DTG is your friend. So, these are the two uh techniques that have print placements as their like the way that I would think about them. But there are also a bunch of other ways to print on products and a lot of them have full coverage. So, there is all over printing, different kinds of all over printing and there is sublimation. Uh the main difference uh between the two is in the um approach to creating the actual product. Sublimation prints on readymade products. So think you will take a sock and you will print all around it. That is going to be sublimation. Or you’re going to take a mug and print all around it. Those products need to exist in their final form. versus for all over printing. It is also, if you guys know, often called cut and sew, meaning that we print on a bunch of fabric and then cut out the pieces of fabric and then sew it together after it has been printed. So, all over printing almost always refers to fabric based products. It’s usually going to be apparel. Sometimes it’s going to be bags or uh laptop sleeves, something like that. uh whatever is uh fabric based it is likely not always but likely to be all over printing. Now all over printing also splits down into the different fabric types. There could be cotton and there can be synthetic allover printing. I’m going to show you these examples right here in a sec. So first next to me I have an example of an all over synthetic print. It’s this jersey right here. It is probably one of my favorite products that we have in our catalog. just because it has so many different placements where you could put your design on. It’s just it’s very fun to wear. It’s very lightweight and it is very much like sports wear, right? It’s I’m going to show you up close actually. Looks like this. And the fabric itself, you can see it’s the opposite of transparent. It’s, you know, quite quite opaque and yet it is very lightweight due to its structure. With uh synthetic fabrics like this, what we are able to do is we are able to uh print all of the ink onto a piece of paper and then use that piece of paper with heat and pressure to put that ink into all of this synthetic fabric. Now, that is uh not something that is really all that possible with cotton, which is why a massive and fairly new innovation is all over cotton printing. And let me show you an example of that in a second. So this shirt right here is fully cotton, mostly cotton. There’s a little bit of elastin in there to to make it stretchy, but this is a cotton t-shirt. And yet it has all of these very unusual print placements that you would normally never get. You would never ever with regular DZG printing get this large of a print on the back. And yet it is cotton which is something that a lot of people request and ask for. So let me show you up close the main difference between these two. When we have something like uh you know a polyester fabric we are able to get very crisp and perfectly vibrant prints. Right? This is very very contrasty. Um but at the same time it’s not you know it’s not a natural fiber. A lot of people are quite against that. Let me know actually in the chat if you are an enjoyer of natural fibers. I know we have a lot of those as a customer. Uh and when we are talking uh about uh the fabric composition, it often is also a massive selling point to your customers when you’re considering uh whether to go for a cotton piece or a polyester piece. But do be aware that when you print on cotton, there are things about cotton as a fabric, there are going to potentially be limitations for you. So if you look very up close, let me see right here. You can maybe sort of see that the fabric, it’s very, very hard to tell on camera, but the fabric is a little bit fluffier than all of the synthetic fabric that we were looking at previously. There is a little bit of fluff going on here. Very, very, very minimal and fine. But these fibers are naturally going to stick up a little bit. Meaning that whatever you print on them is not going to be as perfectly crisp and vibrant as you would have on uh a polyester fabric. In addition to that, let me actually try and show you here. because it is a little bit fluffy and the fibers stand up. Whatever ink we put on top is not sinking into the very depth. So when you stretch it, let me try and show you up close. When you stretch it, you can see some of the white parts poking out in between the dye and the color. Uh it is barely noticeable. I will say that this is something that we really only bring up just because if you get really really nitpicky it might become a thing. But uh it is useful to note because if your designs are full coverage like dark and red and you need everything to be super vibrant. All of the massive dark or black prints that you are going to put uh all over a cotton shirt are not going to be a true black. It’s going to be a bit more on the, you know, dark dark gray side. It’s not going to be quite as opaque as something like an Oliver synthetic print would be. Now, we talked about, and let me remind you what we were looking at. We talked about uh the two different kinds of full print coverage, right? There’s all over printing, which is printing on fabric, cutting it out, sewing it together like the product products I just showed you. There’s also sublimation that goes on uh already made products, and I’ll show you a couple of examples with that as well. One uh very popular example of suppleation is mugs. Very often when you have a mug, you’re going to have a ready-made mug that you’re going to put a printed design onto and sublimate it. And I saw a couple of questions in in a couple of previous sessions about if supplimation is available. Yes, it absolutely is. Depending on, you know, the product, if the best technique for the product is going to be sublimation, like the mug or a bunch of other things, that is going to be the technique that we use. Let me actually show you up close what this looks like in a sec. But another product that uses sublimation that is also, you know, maybe counterintuitive a little bit. Hold on. It is the laptop sleeve. So this section right here looks like it has been kind of printed and sewn together after. So, you would think that this is maybe all over printing, but realistically, and let me show you up close. If we pull it away as much as physically possible, you can see a little bit of white right behind that seam. I’m putting a lot of pressure into this, but you can tell that this was a readymade product where a print was applied on top and then pressed onto it with heat and pressure, meaning that it was sublimated onto this product. The same thing goes for this mug right here. It was already a ready-made mug with some color here and some color here. This is my favorite like drink product that we make in my opinion, which is the mug with color inside because you can really match the design and all the colors to whatever the product color is and make it really, really cute. And all of this, the way the mugs are made is it’s printed on this kind of long rectangle piece of paper, stuck to the side of it, like so, put into a oven and baked onto it essentially. So, obviously a very special oven. Uh, I’m sure you can attempt this at home, but I don’t know, you know, your mileage may vary, but these kinds of products use the the sublimation technique. I’m gonna have a lot of products next to me in just a second once we’re done with all of this. But let us move on to the third category of uh product and that is non-printing is how I would refer to it. Uh the main kind of thing that people think of when they think of print on demand is obviously printing but there is a lot more to it than that and knitting and embroidery are I think the perfect examples of it. Now knitting is a completely customdesigned knitted product. The actual pattern like the sizing and everything of the product is the same from model to model but uh you can design the entire product in whatever colors and whatever patterns you would like and I will show you an example of it in a second. But then we also have embroidery and embroidery at Printull splits into two. standard embroidery which has a limitation of specific thread colors and unlimited color embroidery which uses this very fancy way uh of dying the thread as it is coming out to be used. So you can create a bunch of cool stuff with unlimited color embroidery. You can create gradients. You can really uh create very tonal slight shifts and differences in your monochrome uh designs. So, uh, there is a lot that you can do with techniques like this, and I’ll show you a couple examples in a second. So, one of them is this knitted sweater that you probably saw uh in in the shop before that we had. This is uh one of my favorite pieces that I’ve ever held in my hands. I love how vibrant it is. Uh, and also, and you can really see it more up close in here, the design is very, very beautiful when it comes out like this. And yet, there’s nothing weird on the inside of it. So, the way that this is knit, it’s called jakard knitting. Uh, and if you take a a look up close, you can see that the base of it is the same, but these outside sections that create the design are the things that are different. So, it’s not like there’s a bunch of loose yarn kind of hanging out the way it would have to be if you knitted a sweater at home. Obviously, a homemade sweater is a lot more filled in with love than this little heart sweater that I have here. Let me know if you are a knitter in the chat. Uh but when you design something and you want it to be created on a knitted product, be that a sweater, a beanie, a vest, whatever you’d like. We have a lot of products in the catalog, then this is essentially how it would be created. There are color limitations. Obviously, it’s not yarn that is dyed afterwards. So you’re using a specific color that is available and at a time you can only use four colors but you can clearly create really cool stuff with just the four colors. Right? So this is a big favorite of mine in terms of techniques. It’s also I think very innovative. But then embroidery is something that I feel a printful is essentially perfected at least in my very very humble opinion. So this is an embroidered sweatshirt. It’s a very large uh embroidery placement and you can see that obviously the colors of the thread are very vibrant but I have used two very distinct colors. This is the flamingo color that we have in the design maker and then this is the golden color that we have in the design maker. There are I don’t want to lie to you guys. I think there’s like 16 different thread colors available with standard embroidery and normally for the vast majority of designs it is enough. You can also see that it feels great to the touch to be able to like have a sweatshirt on and just know that this is not going anywhere. You can wash it as many times as you would like and nothing’s really going to happen to it. Uh, but there’s also unlimited color embroidery available if you would like to embroider your logo or if you are really set on a very specific color and tone for your artwork or if you want to create some shading within an object, which is something that I’ve seen people do quite a bit with unlimited core embroidery. You can create basically whatever you’d like. This is my very simplistic example of it, but this is a gradient hat. And you can see how it comes from this like orangey sunsety color to this nice yellow with a pink border around it. The fact that I’m able to pick literally whatever colors I would like except for maybe like unrealistically neon is very fun. The only thing that I will say as a disclaimer for gradients like this is that with this technique, you’re able to create gradients that go linear. So from top to bottom or from side to side. Never from the center out or from the outside in. Just because remember you are still designing with thread. You are going side to side to side or side to side to side like this. Whenever a machine is embroidering something. Meaning that even if you create a gradient that’s going to start in the center and go outwards, it’s still uh going to keep moving like this and having to try and adapt your gradient to whatever it is. It isn’t just going to be a subpar outcome. It’s going to be a terrible outcome. Trust me, I’ve made this mistake before. Don’t do it. I’ve tried. It does not work. Now these are that kind of third category of of different products. We have let me remind you what we’ve already covered just now. We have print placements. We have full print coverage. We have non-printing which was you know knitting and embroidery. And then the last category that I really you know think of and yet a lot of people really overlook as a category and as an option is what happens with hard products. So what very often uh people think about is okay so there’s regular printing like what happens to posters and then there’s everything else versus if you really consider it the poster printing is just one aspect of different kinds of printing uh and I will show you an example of digital printing in a second that is not a poster you can try and guess in the comments what it is going to be uh And in my personal opinion, another very very overlooked uh technique is UV printing. So, let’s start with UV printing. While you put your guesses in the comments of what I’m going to show you that is digitally printed, kind of the same printing as posters, but isn’t a poster. Let me know in the chat. Now, this is a great example of UV printing. So each one of these things is very quickly sprayed onto the glass and then immediately cured with UV, meaning that uh these Let me try and show you up close. Each of these sections is ever so slightly textured. It’s ever so slightly raised. You can only really tell when you’re touching it, but it’s perfectly crisp because of that instant curing. It’s very very vibrant. And you can also tell.

Can you see? Can you see that the underside of each one of these is white? Meaning that the color is first sprayed on. Let me try and show you like this. First, there is an underbase that comes onto it. Then there is a a color that goes onto it. Me making sure that it’s very opaque and very bright. And then everything gets flashcured with UV that creates beautiful um prints on glass and on a bunch of different hard materials. But then also you guess in the chat someone’s saying stationary cards, canvas, book cover journals, greeting cards. No one has guessed it yet, you guys. I expected better from you. Let’s see. A backdrop journals, notebooks. No, what I’m going to show you is stickers. Uh, these are created using digital printing as well, and it allows us to essentially take whatever artwork you’ve created. I know my favorite use of stickers is uh when artists take their uh artwork, like physical artists, people who paint and stuff like that. They take their artwork and not only do they create prints uh for for people who, you know, don’t want to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a piece of artwork, but but still would like to support the artists. but also they make little stickers like this that people can really take and uh carry the artwork that they really enjoy everywhere and not just placing it in their homes. So, it’s also a very inexpensive product. So, the use of stickers in a store even if it’s like quite large like this, this could go on either uh like a laptop or I don’t know a table. I have put really large stickers like these on different stationary pieces and stuff. These kinds of things really allow you, and let me try and show you them up close. They really allow you to uh sell the more affordable options with your designs. It’s quite glossy, but it’s not super super shiny. And you can either create sheets with just the one sticker, or you can create sticker sheets with multiple different stickers that people can buy. You can sell them as bundles. It’s a really, really useful thing. I really like creating this paper effect. This is not an actual wrinkle. This is just a design and it looks great and very very very crisp like this. Now we have covered the the big four categories that I like to think of when I think of designs. There’s a whole pile of products right next to me. So let us talk a little bit about how to decide which one to use and how to find which technique is actually available to you for the different products. So the very first question that I often find is oh how to uh how to uh figure out uh that oh should I use DTG or should I use DD flex? Should I use embroidery or is this better as a print? should I maybe uh try avoiding this kind of technique because it’s like pricier and I have no idea if it’s going to work out when it’s finalized etc. So when you are looking at um a design that you have created and you want to put on products you have to think about how detailed it is you have to think about how large you want it on a piece. Like for example, if your design is very minimal and it’s just like this little leaf, you can totally put it on a hat and get it embroidered and that is going to elevate that design even further, providing detail through texture versus, you know, a great example of this actually is this hat that I made right here. This heart is super simple. If I just put this like gradient heart on a print on a t-shirt, it I think wouldn’t quite work as well as it works in embroidery. But then if I try to think of a design like for example the sticker embroidering all of the detail within it and trying to create this texture that is trying to, you know, mimic a little old lottery ticket or a train ticket. uh I wouldn’t be able to embroider this because all of this detail and everything that makes it good would be lost in something that can’t create this kind of effect like embroidery. So whenever you think about your designs, you need to consider what you want it to carry. Do you want to create a feeling of something very, you know, premium and and clean and sharp? something like embroidery is the best way to go. If you want to pack as much detail as possible into it, you can think about printing uh like digital printing or direct to film or direct to garment, right? And then when you go into the catalog, let me open things back up so I can show you.

I have a bunch of different products made specifically so that we can take a look at all of the different techniques, right? So remember all the products that I showed you guys in previous sessions. All of this, you know, has different techniques that were used for it. Like for example, this is all over printing but on synthetic. This is direct to film. This is digital printing. This is direct to garment, etc., etc. So, uh, when you are looking at a product catalog and you know that you definitely want a mug for example, like I think I saved a mug at some point in my favorites or if we go into the search bar, you can just type in mug and see what comes up. We have several. If you want to create a mug, the only option really is going to be sublimation. you won’t even have that drop down and stuff like that because for certain products like mugs or like phone cases or something that you know doesn’t have that vast array of options you’re going to be more limited so remember the very first consideration what kind of design do I have the second consideration is what kind of product do I want to design for depending on that your decision on technique becomes pretty clear now I started seeing quite A few questions in here. Uh, I saw a question from Francis. There we go. Uh, for an already published product, can I change the type of printing? For example, can I edit the design? So, rather than DTF, it’s embroidered. I would say yes and no. There are certain ways that you can uh go about uh adapting your design, but very often uh it’s not going to go great if you’re just going to go from printing to embroidery right away. When uh we think about techniques, each technique has a completely different set of guidelines attached to it that is on our website. Like for example, embroidery has uh minimum uh sizes of lines and different elements. If for uh DT DTF or DT flex, you would be able to create whatever size line you want essentially and you would get that crisp and tiny detail. But if you just take that design that you had with rec film, it would pretty immediately just move to uh being like details too small, can’t embroider, this is going to look terrible as embroidery. So on one hand, yes, you can go in into the design maker for an already published product and adjust it, but I don’t know that you would want to do that in the vast majority of the situations. I also saw another very very good question. Ah, let me find this.

Oh, there was there we go. There was a question about durability and fading. In general, for pretty much every single item that exists on Earth, there is uh a point at which it’s going to start to wear down, right? Like any shirt that you have ever owned is going to start falling apart eventually. Everything that you have ever touched cannot last forever. So, the best way that we can take care of our stuff is if we follow the care instructions. And the best way to go about communicating with customers about durability is to take a look at each technique individually and consider, okay, embroidery is probably going to last on a shirt a little bit longer than printing. They both last a long time and we have worked super super hard and tested out all of our products for a very long time. Uh, but there is going to be a point at which the the item starts falling apart. Now, we uh have worked very hard specifically with printing to make sure that all of the printing isn’t color fast that you can really wash it quite a few times and it’s not really going to fade over time. We’ve done so many wash tests. So, I would say everything that we have is durable. It’s just that you really have to follow care guidelines. A great example of making sure that you follow the guidelines is something like this glass. uh this specific glass when it’s printed with UV printing cannot go in the dishwasher and you need to be very upfront about that with your customers saying hey this is not dishwasher safe use your hands for something like this and uh at that point if you have somebody who uh has uh put that glass through the dishwasher several several times and the design starts peeling that isn’t a question about durability it is a question about guidelines, right? Uh and I know that I sometimes come across as a nerd about these things. There are a lot of uh things about these techniques that I really really care about just because there’s so much work that goes into making sure that these products are as good and as beautiful as possible. uh so that whenever you are creating your own products, you can take a look at everything that we have written down and available to use as information and make sure that you’re creating the best possible thing. Now, I have had all of the u um admins and moderators in the chat sending you a bunch of different links for embroidery um guideline videos and for different comparison videos. We’ve done a lot of content about this. So, if you have a very specific thing that you’re looking for, I’m sure you could find it. But we have a couple of really helpful questions in here. Wait, I just saw a really really good one.

Let me see. If you also have questions, you can feel free to use the Q&A section on uh the same live stream, but I can Yeah, there there it is. There is the question. Where is it from? From from Bobby. How would you do a distressed ball cap? I’m assuming like a baseball cap. So, one of my absolute favorite products in the catalog, and I know I keep saying that, but that’s just because we are talking about all my favorite stuff. Let me open this. One of my favorite products is our distressed dad hat right here. Whenever I create a new product, chances are it’s going to be this, just because I feel like virtually everything looks immediately cooler when it’s distressed like this. But yeah, it comes in in several uh colors. And the way that I would go about a distressed cap is similar to the way that I would go about literally every uh other cap. Like I would go into the file guidelines, I would take a look at either embroidery or DT flex. I feel like for uh something like a distressed cap, it is better to use embroidery just because it matches the level of texture that the product has and then the the design is already going to have. And then I would download the file guidelines. So I click on embroidery, click whatever download button I need either for the front placement or side and back logo. I would download it and then I would start designing from there. Now we can actually do a very very quick moment and demo of how that works just so you can apply it to a bunch of different products. Can click on this. It’s going to go into my downloads folder and it’s going to be uh archived initially and you can unarchive it. And once you open it, let me actually try and pull this out so I can try and show you. There are several uh different types of the template. There is a PDF, there is an Adobe Illustrator, and then there is a PSD as which is a Photoshop uh file. You can pick whichever one you would like, and then you can just move it into a design program. uh like KD or uh you know whatever you would use depending on uh which file type is better for you. Uh another way to go about this and this is actually something that I do more often now because I’ve designed so many products over time is if you don’t want to go through the hassle of downloading something you can also take a look at the size right here. So for example, this is a 13 uh.97 cm placement by 5.08 cm placement. I would go and I would open a new tab and I would go into KD

and I would see virtually any option to design something. You would just open this. you would pick out uh the exact size either in pixels or in inches or in millimeters. Uh and you would pick uh the exact size that you would need. So for example, in inches, uh let’s just say this is going to be a seven, not 720. That’s a little much. No, you would go for 7 in by maybe, I don’t know, 2 in. This is not the exact size, but you put in whatever uh size you have. You pick that it’s horizontal. You do not select margins and you click create. At this point, you would be able to do all of your design steps. So maybe I want two stars on the sides. Uh I think stars when they’re embroidered are very beautiful. Can line them up very well. Close this. Select these two. Place it in the middle. write some text. Maybe we want

I don’t know. You can you can uh vote for something that you would like in there. Maybe we can do cringe. I feel like this is very youthful and it matches a distressed cap, I think, in its energy. Uh and then we can pick a style, whatever style we would like. The only thing that I will say for embroidery specifically is you should not really be looking for product or sorry for fonts that have these little seraps on there. So if you’ve ever seen a font that has tiny little legs attached to the ends of the letters, those are called serifs. So there are two quote unquote types of fonts, serif and sand serif. Sand serif will not have those little, you know, legs, I guess, attached to the letters and then serif fonts will. If you’re doing embroidery, it’s better to go with with sand serif or no serif fonts. So, if we go back in here, you can see that I have clicked into a sand serif menu, and I can pick whatever I’d like. This a lot is fun, but I want something maybe a little bit more, you know, edgy when it comes to this cringe uh thing. I think this might be a very good match. And then we’re going to, you know, pick some type of color. I’m not super fussed about what color we use. Let’s just go for, I don’t know, a bright red. Just the brightest possible red that we can get. We are going to make sure that it applies to every single element in here. And just for simplicity sake, we’re going to call it a day. This isn’t the like exact right size of the artboard, but you can edit it at any point. You can click on it. I actually uh saw someone Cedra. Yeah, I think Cedra is the way that you pronounce your name. I hope. Uh someone asking a question of can you customize KD artboard sizes that you know you use a lot. Uh you can definitely go into let me try and find it. Whenever uh you are creating a new project, there uh are like favorites that you might have saved or you can work in the same project. Like you can just call this project hat or distressed hat specifically to match this product type and you can create new artboards for every single hat that you can create. You can export artboards individually, meaning that a single project can be very very large and the system can still handle it. So that’s usually how I would go about it, but I know there are ways to save this kind of stuff as well. So in this case, I would click on this artboard. I would click on export. The DPI matters a lot less when we’re talking about embroidery. In the very first session, I talked about how it matters a lot when we’re talking about printing, but let’s say at this point, we want it to be at least a little bit crisp. So I don’t know, let’s let’s just call it like 300 for safety. it’s going to be much larger now because there’s a lot more pixels within those inches. We remove the background. We export and it is saved. And at that point, we go back to our distressed hat. We click start designing. We pick whatever store we’re generally designing for. It’s not really going to match the aesthetic, but it doesn’t matter at this point. We pick whatever file that we need. It’s going to get uploaded and we apply it. My advice with hats specifically, and this is this is maybe a little bit too too niche and too inside baseball, but whenever you are designing a hat, my advice is to always take whatever design you have and lower it ever so slightly just because most people’s heads I can maybe try and put it on and show you. Most people’s heads are not as deep uh to go up. And this is not going to be um quite as perpendicular to the ground as you would like it to be. The more the the higher the design is, the more slanted it’s going to be. And so you’re essentially trying to move it down so it’s more visible to whoever is looking at you straight on. I hope that made sense and I hope that I didn’t mess up my hair too much, but I think you get the idea. So in this case, when I’m designing something, you can see that it feels like it sits very, very high. I would literally just move it down like as low as possible to make it look right. The next and most important thing is you can see that the system automatically assigned a color to my thread. It’s not going to be exactly the right shade of red that I selected, but it’s pretty close. And if I at this point decide that, oh, red doesn’t look right on this product, I’m going to maybe go for a navy and it’s going to be a better fit. Or maybe I just want to, you know, keep it as high contrast as possible and I’m going to go for black thread instead. You can do whatever you’d like. I quite like this red on here. And if we take a look at mockups, I think you can also tell that the placement when we went down on this area is, you know, really nice. you’re uh immediately able to read it. Now, let’s see um if someone was asking something very similar to this. Yes, I saw Maria asking, can we only do this on a computer browser? There uh is uh like for for many many things an opportunity to do it in an app like a desktop app. Uh, but generally I find myself designing in KD’s browser the most. Just because it is, you know, super easy and accessible to just type in KD into your browser and not even wait for for any kind of app to open up. Uh, it doesn’t mean that you have to be limited to it, but it is just something that I find myself doing all the time. Now, um, another uh, question that I saw, especially where was it? uh especially for those typing in the Q&A.

Um was a question there we go about DPI. It was an anonymous question. Is there a place to see how DPI and the other sizing points you made are related to vectors? Interesting question. But most important thing that you need to know and I think if you’re asking about how DPI relates to vectors, you’re probably thinking about uploading a vector design to Printull. That is not something that is going to be achievable because we need to take the file and transfer into it into a physical state. We don’t take on files like SVG, so vector files at the moment just because uh there is no way to see how large it actually is and it’s a lot of information to be inputting into a printer. So the reason why we really care about DPI for printing is we want files that are going to be you know uh a very specific size that is also going to give us enough detail to uh create a good print. So this is generally a great question but you can’t really upload vector files directly. So feel free to design in vector and export in PNG and upon export make sure that your DPI is set correctly. I hope that was somewhat helpful and we are kind of running out of time with this session. So, what I’m going to do is uh wait, let me actually open this up. I’m going to announce some giveaway winners because once again in this stream there are five lucky winners who are going to get a $20 coupon to use at Printull until the end of the year. Those five lucky winners are Ruth Lions, Francis or Riley perhaps, uh Sarah Priest, Bobby Kerr, and Emily Sishers, I think that is how you pronounce your name. I am going to be butchering names left and right. I hope you can forgive me for that. it uh is uh a little bit tough to see your beautiful names and be able to know exactly how to pronounce them right away, but uh congratulations to those who won. And if you didn’t or if you are watching on YouTube, make sure to click the very first link in the description or the link that is hopefully being provided by our uh moderators right now in the chat to be able to join our community. Once you join the community, which is free by the way, you’ll be able to a interact in the chat and have all your questions or hopefully at least some of your questions answered. Number two, you’re going to be able to see all of the sponsor offers. Three, you’re going to be able to participate in the giveaways on this stream. And lastly, you’re going to be able to watch the replay of this whole thing even if you do not have the patience to sit around for six hours and listen to me talk. I know I wouldn’t. Uh so thank you so much for those of you who are sticking around. I saw a couple people be in here uh for the entirety of what we’ve had like 3 hours at this point. Uh but just know that you are able to catch this later as well. Now uh keep asking your questions. I am keeping the Q&A section open, but I am going to take a 10-minute break after this. And now that you know everything about products and everything uh about how the techniques work on the different products, you will be able to start thinking about your brand. In this next session, I’m going to be joined by Dominic who is the co-founder of Docor, which is a fantastic brand that was built in part like I was going to say in partnership with Prull but really using Prull’s product. Uh, and uh, we are going to talk all about branding, how to build the brand, how to build a community. And I’m going to go and drunk some water and I’ll see you back here in about 10 minutes. A lot of people say, “Oh, we’re selling memes on t-shirts.” Sorry, what was the question? How do you trans how do you transition from a meme page to call them round? I think it was the moment where you were able to quit your job. Yeah. And that was like 4 years into business. It was my full-time thing. Like 2 years before it was a euro full-time thing. And when you were able to quit your job, I was like, “Yeah, this is this is it. This is what I’m going to do.” Hi, I’m Dominic. Alex. Yeah, we run uh doge couture.com. Uh you can find us at dogecore.net. dogcore.com online. There’s an e in there somewhere. Um I don’t know what to say. I just we started as a meme page back in 2012. It was 2009 actually. 2009. I wasn’t alive by then. We started as a doc meme page and just started building that as a sort of community just posting there and at some point just grew into place where we had enough audience to actually express ourselves both artistically and like a in a funny way. A lot of people make the mistake of trying to find a niche that they think is what will essentially something they can capitalize on. And the thing that they miss is that whatever they do in life, unless they’re really boring people, that is their niche. And they’re the people that you know, you know it better than anyone else. Like I really like gardening personally. If I wanted to get into making a business that was separate from dog cor that route because what I know rather than trying to copy things that you think will work because it will most likely come across as ungenuine. For us it was like this way where we went running this page and a community around it uh for like 10 11 years. Thousand years. Okay. Maybe not a thousand. Yeah. Before we actually made a store out of it. We were doing it for fun cuz we enjoy doing it. Yes. It’s definitely not United States and after that it’s like Australia, Canada, in Europe it’s mostly Germany and of course United Kingdom. Sadly as as the business grew we had already had contact with with all these different countries and then just as you as you sell more your things get seen and they get spoken about and then things sort of snowball in the right direction which is what’s sort of happening with us now. What do people usually do when you do these tours? I mean what what have people done in the past? We’ve seen some of your other videos that you made. Uh, ask Andre. Just be yourself. Be happy. Be yourself. I don’t think anyone wants to see that. I’m not exactly famous for being cheerful. 99% of all our reviews on Trust Pilot are positive. And same with our product um product reviews through Shopify. But the best ones are the negative ones cuz if we get a negative review, which is super rare. I mean, we’re talking like what we get one bad review a year. Basically, every single year during Christmas, we get one really bad review about someone who orders something too late. Like someone who orders a week before Christmas and he’s angry that it’s not there before Christmas Day. Um, and then asking for a refund and you know that you can’t fix it because you know essentially it’s something they’ve done. It’s it’s myself that usually replies to all the reviews. So, usually I use that as a creative writing exercise to just write some hilarious well I like to think it’s funny anyway. Um, angry reply from myself explaining what’s happened, why I think they’re wrong. But most of the time, like if there’s an issue, someone can email us and we’ll we’ll fix it. We’ll go out of our way to fix it, even if it means losing money because we’d rather have happy customers than than the additional profits. And I think that that’s worked out really well for us. We earn very good money making this just like you. Are you happy? I every day I wake up screwing and a nightmare begins. Every single product page is basically like a related story about it. I try and write a story for every single uh design cuz I just really like creative writing. Yeah. And we hate printful stock descriptions. It kind of gives lore to the brand and gives it a bit of world building and depth that a lot of most stores just don’t really have. I can’t remember the question anymore. I do. Don’t worry. Basically, it was how to be funny. Oh yeah. on the internet. I think it goes back to sort of authenticity. People know when you’re using stock information to uh sell a product. If you’re not taking the time to sort of at least rewrite a stock description of a product, it looked I would say it was lazy, but it’s there’s just so many t-shirt shops out there that put in like the minimum effort and it it doesn’t build trust with the brand. I think it is lazy. Like there’s so many stores right now with, you know, stock mockups, with the stock descriptions, wholeselling our stuff. creative writing is something I’ve always been interested from when I was a kid and I started picking it back up again when we when I started writing the marketing emails and then I was you know started getting enjoying it again and then suddenly it’s like I want to write a story for every single product and the gratification you get from knowing that people is reading that is um actually engage with it engage with and reply to it and and like it personal touch is it allows people to know we’re not just a faceless corporation I like it when I go on a website and you go to the about page and there’s just you know a couple images of the people that run it um and a little a bit about them. It gives it like a human touch that is quite void in in a lot of uh online marketplaces. I guess there’s somewhere in this rant there is some kind of advice about staying true to yourself. Yeah. Believe in yourself and laugh love. You can do, you know, you can do everything you want. We want to be able to be like this is our brand. This is what you’re purchasing and you’re dealing with us two. We do everything apart from obviously print and ship the t-shirts themselves. It’s thrilling. I’m so excited right now, please. This is boring. Can I go game? Can I go home? We chose print on demand because we were absolutely broke at the time and we had no money to actually invest in products. No room for storage. No room for storage. No understanding of international. We also didn’t know if anyone was going to buy anything. Yes. So just starting without any risks to demand was the best option. Do you know that this is actually the first time I’m going to see the village idiot hat in real life? I would I would love to sound like a clown music playing in the background. I I’ll do it. Yes. Thank you. Like a circus beat.

We ignored all of our tax things for the first year until we had to and then when we got an accountant he was like you need to fix all of this. Yes. And that was it was scary. Um cuz you know we were just like I don’t know what how taxes so taxes you know I mean obviously personal taxes I’m talking about business stuff. Yes. So I would recommend anyone talk to an accountant seek help. because of the the way the the business is structured that it’s English company run by a European and an English guy that has Brexit that after well it was before Brexit yeah it was before we’re selling internationally um and it was just most accountants would not touch us or they expected to pay a fortune but luckily I found a very good team in in Manchester that were able to sit down with us well with myself um and learn about what we were doing and and managed to help us considerably in So, yes, would be cash screwed with those guys. Yes. But after that first year when we got the accountant and we had to fix a lot of things, we went like 6 months without paychecks to just cover for everything. Oh, forgot about that. Yeah, I did not. And I would wait some couple years seeing how your business runs before quitting your job. No, quit your job, sell your car, remortgage your house. Death is coming. So, yeah. Yeah. You don’t have a brand yet, but you have a vision, one that Printull makes possible. You bring the creativity, and Printull turns it into real products on demand. Over 500 premium quality items, carefully sewn, beautifully embroidered, and precisely printed, then shipped directly to your customer’s door. Starting your dream business has never been easier. Unleash the brand within with Printful.

Heat. Heat. N.

Hey, hey, hey.

Hello. everybody and welcome back. Uh thank you for those of you who have stuck around. I saw a couple people saying they’ve been here since the beginning. We are three hours in. There’s still three more hours to go of fantastic information and content. And now I am here with Dominic, right? Uh who is the co-founder of Docor, which is a fantastic brand that you just over the break saw a little bit of a story of. But I want to hear more and especially I want to hear more about the very very beginnings. Our audience today is a lot of beginners. This is specifically tended for the the beginners in the space. So can you tell us a little bit more about what it was like when you first started your business? I think it’s more important to talk about what it was like prior to that. Oh, me and Alex who I work with, we spent a long time uh building communities online. uh at the time, this was around 2010, was uh posting in Facebook groups and generating and creating content for those groups, memes, pictures of our pets, other people’s pictures at the time, and putting them in one place. And we just enjoyed sort of growing those pages. And after they got to a certain point, we were able to say to ourselves, I wonder if people would buy anything from us. And at the time, you know, we had no money. Um, like Alex worked in a phone kiosk in Poland. I was working in retail in uh in Canada and we wanted to see if we could build something from from essentially nothing. So it was uh what we did is using Printull and Shopify, we were able to quickly set up a business with like zero risk. Um and even a very simple design uh which one of our first designs was just an MS paint drawing. It was so basic. It was to test the waters to see if it would actually work. And we were sort of blown away by the fact it did sell. And it made us realize that at the time that even if you’re not necessarily very good at art, as we weren’t, um you can still sort of create something that would something simple that can resonate with people. Um like even today, like a we’ve evolved a lot over the last eight years. um got heavily into graphic design and other forms of media. But even to this day, our bestselling designs are some of our simplest. Um so one thing I would say is if you’re struggling to understand if this will work for you, the best way of looking at it is there’s no risk. You’ve got the opportunity to sort of test products without having say 500 of them in your home. And it could be something as simple as words on a hat. Mhm. Printull has some opt some great options for embroidery for your caps. Um, and they were big sellers for us a couple years back. So, it’s sort of like the way I always look at it is it is something that anyone can do. Whether or not you’re good at it is uh down to you, but um there’s no harm in trying to do it cuz you can do it at the same time as running, you know, your your day job. It’s a great side hustle and if you’re lucky or if you’re really talented um then it might become your day job and that once you cross over that that part when you realize that your sort of your hobby and the thing you enjoy doing is now like your everyday task it’s fantastic for the first three years. Mhm. And I actually wonder and I’m sure that some of the people you know behind the screen are also quite curious what was it like in that in between stage when you had started the business but you were still working your day job compared to when was the moment when you felt like you you made it and you were able to quit your day job? when the amount of money I was earning through running the company outpaced my salary at my uh pretty white collar job and I’m sure people here would also think so was it scary in that moment or was it was like no this is real absolutely liberating like uh can I vape in here I was going to say it’s like vaping it’s just just makes it just feels really good. Yes. Uh Juliano saying, “Oh, it’s it’s really a great feeling for only for the first 3 years and then what what happens?” Oh, that’s mostly just a joke about how uh if you stick around any job for long enough, it goes from being a hobby into work. And even if you do really enjoy work, it’s uh it can change. But to this day, I mean, I’m here. I’m I feel blessed to be here. And I hate saying this because it sounds like you’re paying me to say it, but I couldn’t have done it without Printull who have been there for my company with me and Alex who I run it with for so long and looked after us not just in, you know, offering very competitive prices, but a huge range of products, worldwide shipping, delivery, uh, excellent like warehousing options and customization. And the fact that we have went from just one item, a t-shirt on a very simple Shopify website to having now hundreds of products and a lot of range. We couldn’t have done that with without Printull’s help. And there was no way that I was going to so, you know, invest in hundreds of a design if I didn’t know it could sell. So being able to test products on Printull and if they don’t work, they don’t work. You’ve not lost anything. Mhm. Um, so it’s it’s it’s freeing. I’m able to run the business from home. There’s just two people that run it, apart from obviously all the help that you guys do. And uh that’s it’s cool. Yeah, I like it. Uh I’m glad you do. And also as a kind of aside to what you said about any job becomes a job, right, eventually. If that’s if that’s true, then it’s just better to do whatever you love and whatever makes you happy because if you got to work, you should probably work at something that you really enjoy. One thing it did teach me is that I could never go back to my previous job. So no matter what happens, it’s sort of like good knowing that you’ve you’ve I feel very accomplished in where I’ve been able to get to mostly lucky. But it’s allowed me also to develop skills like real skills, business skills, design skills, uh writing skills. And what what I like about this is I went from somebody who had no idea how to really run a business to now like being a business boy 8 years in knowing how to handle taxes running just running an e-commerce business. And I could use those skills if my business fails to maybe open another store, maybe work for somebody else. So I was able to learn in a kind of non-committal way and pick up all these life skills at the same time. Wow. That’s very good for you. And also uh I want to really quickly show the people uh the store that you have just for some context when we talk about these kinds of uh designs. So let me open this up. I’m going to read all these cool comments. Yes, there there is actually a great uh question from Carlos right there that I really want to uh address at some point. Thank you, Raquel. It’s beautiful. And I I find all of these designs to be really funny, but also just I think there is more to it than just humor in my opinion. If you go through some of these designs, there is a bit of a feeling of identity and community in them to me at least. Uh and you mentioned that you started with this Facebook group uh with just people who really like these images. Uh what was it about that I guess community that made you feel like okay maybe this could also be a business? It was just knowing that we sort of had an audience. Once you’ve got an audience it makes it so much more easier to then sell to those people if you wish. And uh that’s sort of the hard part though is creating the audience. It took us a very long time to do it over a certain amount but there’s also now more options to create those audiences because there’s more platforms. Mhm. So, I mean over time we’ve grown our um Instagram, we’ve grown our mailing list, which is another way of having a way of communicating with people. And yeah, so what happened is after we had like a certain amount of people that were following us, we really just was able to we sort of were able to read the zeitgeist of what is funny on the internet and then change sorry like harness that into sort of a funny design that resonates with people that I would say are very similar to myself. Mh. um which is sort of uh introvert weird kids or extrovert weird kids uh like I was when I was younger but we sell we sell to all age ranges and demographics but I think you know we enjoy not only you know selling t-shirts to our audience but we also love like communicating with them and I like to harness not harness but I like to nurture that which is why I want because we work with Shopify and there’s there’s other people in a room that work with Etsy and they work with uh Tik Tok. The good thing that we have with having a Shopify domain is we have complete creative control over how our store looks. So for us, it’s a full package. It’s, you know, it’s a funny video website on YouTube. It’s an Instagram for funny pictures and art. It’s a web store where you can buy, you know, um merchandise from us. And we can talk about our dogs and I can say whatever I want cuz it’s uh you know, it’s my baby. the the dogs are are yeah it’s IKEA on the left which is Alex’s dog and that’s Reuben on the right who’s having a phase at that point that I mean I’m sure that the answer would be it’s not it’s not just a phase you know this is truly the identity of the time. Uh I actually uh wonder uh if you guys in the chat can tell us if you if you have a dog and what your dog’s name is cuz got we got dog people all around here uh and we all of us want to know. But while you guys do that, I actually want to see if we can address this. Uh where was it? Oh, I was going to say I want to look at that one at one point, but we can do the other one you were looking at. Yeah. Yeah. So, there was a great question from uh Carlos on like biggest lessons when it comes to simple designs versus like elaborate and complicated designs in sales. Because for many people, yes, it is like an artistic outlet and you kind of want to design whatever you would like to design and yet uh a big uh part of it all is still how do you make money? Which things make more money? So, what would you answer? I would say that um it’s funny because some of the most complex designs that take us that took us the longest amount of time to make and some of the ones that were maybe we were stretching ourselves as to try and create something that was like high concept have often been the ones that don’t sell that well compared to our simplest designs which convey a message in a lot clearer way and they are able to communicate with somebody really quick. Mhm. For example, one of our bestselling hats just says, “Oh no, it’s me again.” Really plain. And one just says, “Village idiot.” They’re all really simple ideas that resonates with whoever might buy them. And there’s other ideas that I was unable to bring to the table that probably wouldn’t sell well at all. I wanted to make a I wanted to make a design that looked like um a plate, like a memorial plate for Princess Diana, and it says um Princess Diana loves goblins. Um, but I couldn’t work out how to make that look cool on a t-shirt at all. And in the end, it sort of I put a lot of weight into trying to make that happen. Failed. And then, you know, a few weeks later, I can just come up with some catchy saying, put on a hat, and bam, you’re you’ve uh you’ve got a new bestselling product. Yeah. And I kind of want to show people also. I feel like I uh love you guys’ hats so much. I have uh too many, many, many, many hats from Dokor. Uh my one of my absolute favorites is this one, the tummy ache survivor. Uh very real, very very uh also like a simple idea and yet you got a gold star for surviving the tummy ache. Good job. Uh and then uh the other one that I find uh truly very very relatable more often than not is just I’m just a little guy. You know this we all feel that way sometimes. I also find it funny that you never really like call yourself an entrepreneur. No. Um no. I I call myself a a business boy because I feel like that word you just used that I always struggle to pronounce um is just a bit too it doesn’t really work for me. I see myself more as an artist which you know I know you’re all thinking like this guy considers himself an artist. Have you seen the crap he sells on his website? But to me that’s like what I enjoy doing. I enjoy writing. Um and I work with um my my business partner Alex. is more into the graphic side of things. So, one thing I want to sort of say is if you’re looking at this thinking, how am I going to make graphics for something? Do you know anybody that can help you? Because, right, the way that me and Alex work is um and we fell into this over time. So, this is not how we initially started, but the way we work now is we collaborate on ideas. uh and he will focus more on the graphic side of things and I will focus more on the on the like the words on on the the items themselves and we’ve sort of over time picked up different aspects of the business. Mhm. Um for example, he is mostly in charge of running the images on the Instagram pages cuz he’s very good at photography as well. Whereas I handle all the copy and advertising text as well as I still handle all customer service emails because I like that I like that connection that I have with the the customers. Mhm. The slight slightly parasocial but um but they’re all lovely. So I have no complaints. I think Well, first of all, I I want to highlight a couple uh of fantastic dogs of dog names. Yes. I can just like show a picture this up on screen. Yes. So So this right here is Brunello. Uh and I uh could not be happier to have a session on here where we get to like look at dog pictures. That is the the best. Uh and uh also another kind of uh uh thing and yeah, you you just highlighted a great question. What did you do from Jeremy? Actually, let me highlight it. One sec. So this one from Jeremy. What did you do to start building your audience on social media? Did folks just find you? Did you pay to boost posts? X. Uh, now we do use meta advertising to uh, scale the business, but initially we didn’t do that cuz we had no money. We didn’t want to dip our toes into it. We didn’t know how it worked. So, you’re so relatable. Initially, we’re just sort of posting things that that people like and then they would share it and then you could then sell it to people maybe in the comments below. Mhm. If you ever go to say on X, you’ll find there’s a lot of um there’s a lot of there’s a few big accounts on there that they’ll post a funny picture of a t-shirt. It will go viral because the image itself has value and is funny and then through that you can sell the product in the comments. That’s a way of basically getting free advertisement. But that I would say works best for things that are kind of viral meme-based content. Something that is funny. Uh, it can be even a cute image of a cat if you’re selling images of cats on a shirt. Like, is this something that people will want to repost? Is it something that people would want to wear? And if you are like making something that people want to wear in a way that I think expresses themselves, then they will help you advertise it through sharing it with their audience. And if their audience is only a couple hundred people or some friends, it doesn’t matter because they will then share it with their friends. or you know suddenly you’ve got if it’s only if they’ve got 20 friends and 200 people are sharing it you’re looking at you know a considerable amount of people that have eyeballs on the product and then you can generate your first sales that way. It’s what we did and it worked really well. And I honestly find it like helpful to think about this feeling of sharing what you really like and identity because when I think about all of the stuff that I own, that is the best stuff that I have, my absolute favorite things, the the t-shirt that I like wear nearly, you know, at least once a week for years now. I’ve washed it to death. It’s falling apart. is a Green Day graphic tea with like the album art of the Dookie album. If you know that album, you probably really like it as well. Uh, and I am not wearing it just for the, you know, reasons of it is a cool looking t-shirt. It doesn’t look that cool anymore. It’s literally falling apart. That’s cool in itself though. Well, you know, but the main reason is because it says something about me. I want to project that identity. I really like you can wait you can see maybe even right here I have like tattoos of Green Day because I really like them. And that same feeling applies to every single thing that people create and the products that you create because when I wear a a doore t-shirt I want to I want people to see it. I really like it. It says something about me and it’s just I really enjoy it that way. Yeah, that’s true. I mean, um, for those of us old enough to remember this, which is me, uh, back in the day, if you had, if you were a fan of Green Day and you wanted to meet other people that like Green Day, you might not have had room online to go to say Facebook Green Day, the only way to really communicate with what you’re into to then also find other people that have simil similarly minded to you was you wore a hoodie of your favorite band and then someone be, “Oh, I really like that band, too.” And that still happens to this day. Yeah. And with Dora, it’s sort of similar. If you’re wearing a Doora t-shirt, someone might come up to you and say, “I really like that brand.” Because what you’re doing is you’re saying something about yourself and also inviting other people that res, you know, the message resonates with, you could be friends with that you, you know, you’re similarly minded. So, I think that’s one of the reasons why my brand works is because I like to think that each hat in a sardonic way is sort of saying something about the person wearing it because they’re all sort of based on stupid thoughts I’ve had. And luckily those thoughts people like them. So yeah. Yeah. I really love the energy that’s happening in the chat. There are so many adorable pictures. Daphne and and the the the purple ears and the purple tail. I need to spotlight that just because that is beautiful and and and Daphne is more fashionable than any of us could ever aspire to be. Uh but there was also um a question that you kind of wanted to return to in the chat. Let me actually find it. I think it’s this one. Oh, yeah, it was that one. Yeah. Um, let me spotlight it from Angela. So, with this one, um, one of the things that we do at the moment is we’ll often post a rough idea. Mhm. Um, kind of like a draft of what designs that we’re thinking about making. So instead of putting all like a lot more time and effort into refining the idea only to find out it doesn’t sell, you can sort of create a draft image, post that and then see if people are sharing it. That way we’ve been able to look at our Instagram stats and think to yourself, well, you know, a considerable more sorry, considerably more people liked this one image than that image. So if I had to choose between these two to which one to funnel into a design, then I know which one to run with. Mhm. That also means that once I do post on my store, I’m not posting something that will devalue my store because I know that it’s not I’m posting something that some people might be like, “This is this is not really working for me and kind of switching off.” So, we’re able to sort of kind of test how good products are going to sell by just seeing how how well they do on social media. you’re you’re essentially crowdsourcing uh input and and crowdsourcing feedback from the community that you have built that you know already is interested in stuff and I feel like uh for for everyone watching this should be another reason to have something like a social media list of accounts for for your brand just not just to to market your stuff and to advertise it but also to have that community that you can then tap into whenever you need uh to figure out, okay, is this design going to work? Is this something that they’re going to like? What are they really looking for? And that allows that community to then become even more of a fan of the brand because that brand is interested in their thoughts and is communicating with them and is building a relationship with them. Exactly. I mean, the way that me and Alex have always seen it is we’re trying to give free content in the way of that there’s a lot of short stories on our website. There’s the the Instagram pages, us posting sort of things that we find funny as well as posting the art and then the merchandise aspect is sort of secondary to that. So, what we want is to create something that’s essentially for free. It’s free content, but there’s on the back of that, there’s uh things that you can buy that that lets people say, “Oh, I actually like the things that these guys produce.” Yeah. So, yeah, that’s how I see that. Yeah. I also want to kind of highlight an example of uh those short stories. Uh there was I think maybe this is a good example. Yeah. Uh so this is a shirt that I really like both in because of its design style and its like identity based messaging and everything but also if you look at this you want to tell us a bit more about the stories. Yeah I guess I would say a few things. Um one thing if you notice that there’s eight reviews there those are super handy. So, if you are running a store, make sure you’re asking people to review the products or the page. Something as simple as, “Thank you for purchasing. Do you mind leaving the review?” Um, and you can even if you’re using Shopify, delay those emails to be after the products arrive. So, it’s like, “Hey, the products must have arrived by now. If you liked it, why don’t you leave a review?” It’s a good way of getting free reviews that create credibility for your brand. Um, but anyway, short stories. So, originally the the short stories were quite long. So, we’ve had to um give a little brief outline of what the story is about, a hook, so to speak. And then if you want to, I’ve written a short story that you can read here. And um I was doing that for all the products for quite a while cuz I just enjoyed writing writing short fiction. And in the end, I ended up compiling them into a book. So, that was just something that happened naturally over time. But what you’ve got here is I’m I’m merging two things. I’m merging what I’m passionate about, which is writing, along with being able to um have a website that isn’t just me trying to sell clothes, even though that it’s that’s its main pose, but it’s also a place where I can do I can essentially have creative freedom to do whatever I want. So in here I could if I wanted to to have um maybe a blog post that’s just pictures of my dog or just maybe some hobby that I have like maybe you make music. You can incorporate the fact that you make music into the store and thereby you’re not just a a website that has nothing exciting to look at or read. It’s a generic looking website. It’s something that says more about yourself as a person, right? And I feel like a big uh part of this also answers a question that just uh Rebecca uh had just now also like sharing an experience and and I guess a question tied into it. The uh Rebecca says that her social media was getting lots of visibility when when when she was posting photos, but the moment she started posting products, the visibility went down to almost zero. And then shops are automatically suppressed unless you pay high monthly fee for advertising. And I feel like your store is a great example of the opposite. This um this is this is relatively new actually. So we were quite lucky that when we started that that wasn’t necessarily as bad as it is now. The trick is to sort of try and work out how do I get around this. So the algorithm on social media websites looks at what you post and says that’s a t-shirt. Tank it. Right? You’re not posting that here for free advertisement. However, if you look at one of the designs that we just had on the screen, instead of posting the whole t-shirt, just post the art on it and then link to the t-shirt in the comments. What that will do is the image itself, the art you’re trying to sell is the main attraction. It’s not a product. And then you can put the product maybe into the comments or elsewhere. But, um, yeah, it’s true though. If you do just post a product, a hat, a t-shirt on social media, it will you will have issues trying to get that out there. However, if you’re posting in say groups and things like that, you can get around that. So, yeah, just keep in mind that like uh it’s better to post the art and talk about the product than it is to post the product and then try and link from there. That’s true. And I feel like uh a good uh kind of response to every single I guess question related to social media visibility is uh you uh need to find where your people are. And where your people are is going to be the best place to put yourself out there. Whether I don’t know you have um a horsebased brand and uh you are really into horseback riding and that is the thing that you are most passionate about in life. You start uh a brand that is uh all about uh horses. I know nothing about horses. I’m trying to come up with an example and I’m struggling. But uh you are probably then in Facebook groups and in subreddits all related to that and those people care about the same thing that you care about. that’s where your audience is. That’s maybe not like Instagram’s discovery algorithm is going to be the thing, but the the more organic interaction with the community is going to be your way to get into that. Yeah. U for example, you could join a group of about horses and integrate yourself into that and then just grow with them with them. Um coming back to that, there there is an interesting thing here that I think relates to what you were just talking about. This one. So, yeah, this one here. So, um, if I this I believe it’s pronounced Cedra Cedra Hill. Uh, reviews are scary to me in this day and age. It’s part of the my fear of fully putting myself and my creative brand out there. Now, this is what holds most people back from from being creative in the first place. It’s a fear that by being creative, you’re exposing a part of yourself that might come under ridicule from uh I nearly swore again uh from bad people. And um what you really need to realize is that if people are come like this, my t-shirts are really stupid, right? You are underelling yourself. But what I’m trying to say is the reviews are good because the people buying the product want the product. Mhm. They’re not they can’t review the product if they can’t if they haven’t bought it. And they’re not going to buy it just to complain about it. Um and if you get bad reviews, work out why you’re getting bad reviews. I’ve had three bad reviews on my trust my trust uh trust pilot and all three of those people were wrong and I replied to them with an extensive reason as to why they were incorrect which was things like if you buy a t-shirt from me and then ship it to a different country that’s not the country you live in I don’t really think that’s on me unfortunately yeah that sounds like a you problem. Yeah, but at the same time I also was like, “You’re wrong.” Something funny. And then I was like, “I’ll still fix it.” Because what you’re doing there is you’re you’re shutting people down when they’re incorrect. But you’re also saying, “Even though I don’t agree with you, I will help fix this because that builds trust in your store from other people that are reading this bad review and they’re realizing that you, you know, you’re going to step in and be sort of the better business person than it is to be sort of petty.” M and I feel like uh the you kind of glossed over that, but the fact that you’ve had three negative reviews on Trust Ple pilot this entire time. Yes. Is a testament to Yeah. congratulations. Good job. But for real, I wouldn’t let other people’s comments stop you from being yourself. It’s really important that if you are true to yourself and you’re putting yourself out there and you’re not letting other people who aren’t even like you tell you that it’s bad or anything, real people, real like people that you would want to spend time with and listen to, even if they don’t like what you are doing, should be respectful and appreciative that you have, you know, the the the the balls, so to speak, to put yourself out there. It’s It’s a really something that people should be proud of and yeah, I’m very passionate about that. Yeah, as you should be because that that goes for any art, including whatever art you would be putting on a product. Uh there are um certain things that I want to highlight that are art related, that aren’t just the art that you put on products. Uh and let me actually open one of these as an example and show you some more. What would you do if I spilled this all over your laptop? I’d cry probably. I think so. I’m not going to do it. I just had a little No, thank you. Um I I I appreciate your kindness and holding the water back. Yeah, I was just like, “Oh, I shouldn’t put it over there.” Yeah. But uh when it uh comes to the way that you display products uh on the website, I personally am really into the way that you guys do uh the the mockup images. Yes. like this is a great example of of the way that you know it’s it’s a little bit more than just that white background behind a mockup. And they’re different for for different uh you know uh shirts and different designs, right? And while we do always talk about how, you know, product photography is a really good thing to do, like if we were to just I don’t know uh open this, this is already great. Like we’ve been in business eight years now and most of our products don’t have fully modeled shots. Um it’s expensive to get it done right and we are slowly getting around to it. But one thing that you can do that is for free is essentially make sure that the mockups you’re using are not just standard white backgrounds. Try and put a little bit of a creative edge to it. like this one’s this one is quite um I’d say this one’s a bad example because there’s a level of sort of filters that have gone onto there that we’ve used in Photoshop to create that background. But if you go back to the golf shirt, right? Right. Something as simple as just having see photography in the background of a golf course. So simple. Anyone can do that. And that’s what you got to think about is how do I differentiate my product from all the other stores that just have the same mockups that are the, you know, the normal ones. You can also use Etsy to get a lot of good mockups nowadays. There’s people that sell packs for those. And um yeah. Yeah. And you can also if you are struggling with a particular side of your business, be that you know graphic design or or whatever, there are ways to find help. I think a great thing that you brought up was see if you have someone in your circle and your community that can help, but also if you need uh some help with like I don’t know, you don’t you have no idea how to do like the background form mockups that you could apply to all of the products in your store, look at something like Fiverr, maybe hire somebody to do it for you specifically because you ordered it to be that way. There’s one thing to keep in mind is just because it would take you an hour to do something, someone who knows what they’re doing, it could take them two minutes and they will happily do it for for cheap if they, you know, if they want to and they might even do it for free. But I mean that that would I wouldn’t expect anyone to work for free. I’m just saying that you can find help out there, people that want to help you succeed and not to be afraid to ask for some help if you need it. Yes. And it also is important to consider uh I think the fact that you and Alex work together so well is a great example uh of if you find somebody who is like-minded in your circle and in your community uh and you can start building a business together and harnessing each other’s strengths and putting them together for uh like a joint purpose. It is going to very uh quickly make it easier for you to both reach your dream together. You know, build community for your brand as a community of fans, but also, you know, work with your community to create stuff. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, the whole point of this is like me and Alex wanted to just make art. The fact that we managed to turn that into a business is like we feel really blessed to be able to do that. And I think that by being involved in online communities prior to this, we’re able to like like we know what sort of works because we’re posting like we’re posting art that we would like to see on the places where we used to post on the internet like forums and places like social media sites and stuff like that. So the way that we see it is we’re sort of a part of a community prior to this and we still a part of that community, but now we have a business that sort of I don’t want to say caters to them because this caters to ourselves. Me and Alex like to make art that we like for each other, but at the same time it’s sort of we’re having fun with it. And that’s kind of that’s really important is having fun with it cuz if you’re selling something that you mentioned horses. Yeah. If you’re like a horse girl and you’re trying to sell t-shirts to dog boys um and you don’t care about dogs, you’re not going to know what resonates with those people and you’re going to fail. So yeah, I also saw uh a question that I feel like is important to talk about specifically because you guys have a like a standalone store and you sell on Shopify. So it’s not like traffic is coming from a platform like Etsy. Uh where do you get most of your traffic? Uh originally it was Facebook because that’s where the the Facebook page started. Um and then over time that’s dropped off and most of the traffic now comes from Instagram. However, our meta advertisements do pull traffic from both uh Facebook and Insta. Um and we get a lot of um just general sort of traffic from being a recognized brand, but that takes a long time to build including like you know through search engines. And one of the ways that we do generate a lot of traffic for next nothing is because we’ve been around for eight years. We have slowly built up um quite a large uh following in our newsletter. Mhm. So, every week I’m able to email 100,000 people and at least 47% of those people are going to open emails and then some of those might buy one of my products and if they don’t, I make sure the email is good enough that they’ll open up the next one and then maybe the next one I’m selling something new and then those will definitely convert into paying customers. Right. And I feel like this is like a great question, but it is kind of uh like broad depending on where you started, where the people who you’re trying to advertise to is. And uh if you’re curious about like meta ads specifically, we are going to have a session about meta advertising in about an hour and a half. So stay tuned for that. Uh and uh I saw uh a question uh what would you say? So this is a a question uh from uh uh Yasin I think is the way that I would pronounce that but I’m sorry if that is not the correct way. Um what would be kind of your advice on on pricing and on profit margins and how do you you know price something in a way that is competitive enough and yet doesn’t devalue your product uh and people would still buy but you’re not you know uh getting a very very tiny profit margin. Um, we intentionally priced our products as cheap as we could really manage it initially. Um, but we were able to raise that over time as we got more comfortable with what we were selling. And to what you really need to do is work out like let’s just say your most of your t-shirts are being sold in America or Australia, then your profit your profit margins can be quite higher there because there’s more spending power. M but if you’re if you’re some somewhere else that has a lower GDP, you might have to lower the prices to match your audience. It’s finding that balance there. Mhm. Um but really what it is is you if you run Shopify, you can you can really amend the prices on the fly. If it’s not working, lower it. If it’s working, you can raise it. Just try to find a nice balance. And you don’t have to do that straight away. Mhm. And is there some kind of like I guess specific profit margin that you guys kind of shoot for normally or is it really just you adjust depending on what product it is if it’s selling? It really is just adjusting. We don’t really think of like profit margins in terms of um like trying to nail down a perfect profit margin per item. It’s more of what makes sense for this item based on sort of the competition. Um similar brands to our owners. What are they selling the t-shirts for? and maybe we can’t sell it for as cheap as them, but one thing to keep in mind as well is if you’re selling a hoodie and a t-shirt, you can have the t-shirt prices be low and the hoodie prices be high and you know, you can have an item there that has a much higher profit margin. Mhm. And then you have some core products that have a lower profit margin. It’s kind of getting people in the store and trying to convert them on multiple different things, which you know, luckily we sell all kinds of stuff. We got hoodies, hats, and I will say we don’t try and get a profit margin the same for all the items because it wouldn’t really work based on what people are wanting to purchase. It’s a matter of tailoring it on an item per item basis and working out what are people willing to spend more money on. So for example, uh embroidered products tend to be easy to sell at a higher profit margin than a printed screen shirt simply because people see embroidery as a higher value product. even if it might not be at the, you know, from the front side. Yeah, it honestly I’ve been saying this for years and I’m so glad that someone that isn’t just working on this is saying that as well. Uh embroidery is perceived as premium because to an extent it is. Uh there is just more durability related to uh embroidery. You know, it’s going to last longer than a print would very often. Uh, but I really wanna uh put a big pin in what you said about um having items that you intentionally uh price as low as you can and have a smaller profit margin with those because those are going to be your like audience movers. That is going to be the anchor that is going to get people into the door. And then having higher ticket items that even though they’re going to sell less often, the profit margin maybe more than makes up for that. It balances out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And uh a great example, I was just talking about this in a previous session, great example of something that is a small ticket item that could get people in to at least get something once they’re in the store is like stickers and phone cases. Uh and I genuinely feel like uh stickers are a really good one as well because they can very quickly be added to a cart. I always the way I’ve always said is I want items. You know when you go into a store and you’re about to purchase something like three bottles of wine or maybe five bottles of cider and then you get to the the checkout and there’s like gum there and it cost next to nothing and or or a chocolate bar. You just like I’ll just throw that in there cuz it’s there. So having those items like stickers be um you know at checkout just there. So a really tiny little thing that only cost a couple of dollars. they have, you know, that will quickly add up over time the more that people are just willing to spend a little bit more money with a higher profit margin. I am that’s very it’s cheap at the end of the day. Yeah. And honestly, I find myself uh doing this all the time uh when I uh my Instagram algorithm knows me a little bit too well and advertises brands to me that it knows that I’m going to find really cool and really fun uh and really special. and I will go in and onto their website and I’m like ready to buy something and then I realize that it is quite premium pricing and so I naturally am already in there. I really like it. I am now invested and I start looking around. I’m like, “Ooh, that puffer jacket is really cool.” But that is like $600. I can’t sling that right now. But oh, but they have a beanie. They have a beanie that I could buy that is also cool. and I’ve already, you know, invested myself in the idea of getting it and and that beanie ends up in my cart very quickly, even though that wasn’t my original intention when I was entering the store. That’s a very good point cuz what you’ve got there is you’ve gone in there, you’ve seen a brand that you like, and you’re thinking, “Okay, I can’t afford this, but I like the brand so much, what can I afford?” Yes, exactly. We even have items on our website that are completely for free. We have some uh wallpaper packs for your phone. We have an EP of music that Alex makes. And the idea behind those or and some uh zenes as well. The idea behind those is a customer comes into the store and they might not want to buy anything or cannot afford anything right now. If they purchase something for free, they’ve given you sort of they might offer to subscribe to your newsletter and then they’ll come back maybe when they can afford it. So sometimes we have customers that take two years to convert. They’ll buy something, they’ll forget about it, they’ll get an email and then bam, they’re back in the store and they’re buying it. already sort of got them locked in in a way that is is just there effortless for you. Yeah. And when it comes to I think the mailing list is a great example of something that essentially allows you to take advantage of not take advantage sounds bad to tap into the people who have already bought into the idea of the brand and uh get repeat purchases from people. Uh because if you think about the cost of acquiring a brand new customer, it’s a lot. so much to just like get a brand new person who has no idea about who you are to find you, to become interested, to trust you enough to buy from you uh and to like actually convert and go from that website to the card to the purchase to actually getting the product. The cost of that is so much. And uh when you already have gone through that whole process, nurturing that already existing customer who has already bought from you is actually a lot easier and a lot cheaper. That’s true. I mean, that’s why um that’s why I have such a high open rate on the newsletter because I like to go in there and think, well, I’m if I open this newsletter and it’s just someone selling me something every time, you’re instantly going to just never open it. So, I write a little bit on there and maybe I share a video of my dog or a picture of my dog and try and make it sort of I music recommendations or movie recommendations I’ve watched recently. So, you know, think about it this way. If you have like a letter box where you review movies, why don’t you include that little review in your newsletter, something to read, something that people might want to like know? And like you said, once you’ve got the amount of money it cost me to acquire a customer through me advertising compared to how much money it cost me to then send them an email, it’s it’s like a thousand times more expensive. So, yeah, nurturing the customer and not not treating them like they’re just um like a cash cow where you can just go in and just throw stuff at them and hope that they’re going to keep coming back because, you know, anyone can sell uh anything, but trying to like build that community is a slightly separate thing that will is kept people coming back to our store over and over again. Yeah. And uh I want to just like really quickly uh point this little uh question out just because uh Cedra you’re in luck. Um you’re saying you’ve struggled to design embroidery files and you need to lock in. Don’t you worry. Literally the next session that we have is all about design and we’re definitely going to cover certain things about it. There’s some great tools on Printull uh with Printull to do that for you. We try our best. We really do. Um but uh one thing that I also uh wanted to mention in this theme of embroidery is uh Victoria is asking uh in your experience with embroidery uh have you ever had complaints about the embroidery backing or or anything like that? Um a couple uh but they were problems with just missing quality control. It’s rare. It does happen. If you have that issue, just bring it up with Printull and hopefully they can resolve it in your customer’s favor. I mean, that’s what they do for me, so hope I don’t know if they’ll do it for you, too, but uh I assume they will. Basically, one of the good things about Printull is uh if there is a problem, they will fix it. And that’s the main reason we’ve stuck with you for ages because you make sure that you look after us as business people so we don’t run off to your competitors and uh it works. Yeah, I mentioned this uh a couple of sessions ago in talking to Crystal, but this is a great point about any kind of uh partner that you have in this whole uh process is uh whether it’s us, whether it’s Shopify, whether it’s um you know uh a like domain directory like storetore uh whether it’s a design partner like KD, whatever platform you’re using to sell your stuff, uh we are very interested in you succeeding and you being able to do it well. Uh which is why we have this whole event in the first place, right? This whole conference that we’re putting together for free for people is not because we really like talking on camera. I mean, there’s two reasons I’m here. One, they’re not paying me, but I’m happy to be here because I am very happy with the relationship that we have, the business relationship that we have, and also you paying for my hotel and free food. So, I I’ll I’ll come just for that. We we we better do that, you know. Uh and uh there was a fun question, I think. Uh and uh having mentioned before that you wrote a book, maybe you have some insight on this. Uh Bobby here is an author and wants to sell swag uh the works of their book. I mean, that’s a very vague question. It’s like uh I don’t know what your book’s about, so it’s kind of difficult. Mhm. um trends like yeah but I guess it really depend like a lot of photography works really well to sell uh for books um but yeah that’s a tough I’m sorry Bobby it’s a tough one to answer because it really does depend on like what your book’s about. No, just keep that in mind when you’re trying to create something that the imagery on the shirt that you’re trying to sell matches the vibes and emotions or feelings or just like visual things that are in the in the book itself. Yeah. My favorite kind of stuff that goes with books, and I don’t know if this is going to necessarily apply to your book, but I think it applies to most books, is if you uh combine it with a tote bag. If we’re talking about trends, uh there was this like Oh, tote bag in a book. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you maybe put uh the cover of your book, but in just like line work on the tote bag. Uh I have one too many tote bags that are just based on like books or maybe bookstores where I bought them from. Another thing that works uh great with books is also all kinds of stationery. Uh if uh you want to have a bundle in your store where you’re selling a book and you want to put little gift card in there or you want to combine it with a notebook that has the same cover or you want to um have a bundle with some stickers that also have some like quotes from the book. That’s very true cuz they’re both flat packed as well so they they mail really easy. Yes. So I feel like uh there it definitely depends on your like book niche. Let’s put it that way. Bobby goblins. Use goblins. Uh, I’m trying. Oh, yeah. Bobb’s a fantasy author. Oh, yeah. You you you use put goblins on everything and just sell goblin stickers in addition. That’ll work. Trust me. Yeah. Um, and uh uh and uh an all caps question from professor but spelled I quite like that. Professor Prof. Yeah, I’m not trying to do that. How did you guys market organic and paid ads? Um, a bit of both to be honest with you. So, paid ads is like a good bread and butter once you’re an established um established as a brand. However, if you really do want to get your foot in the door, um one of the things to do is just try and get your merchandise into people’s hands that are similar to you. So, one thing that we found works really well for ourselves is if I’m on uh Instagram or Tik Tok and I see somebody, I’m like, I really like this person’s vibe. Like, they are the sort of people that I imagine I enjoy watching them. So, if I enjoy watching them, then my fans must enjoy watching them. And I will say to them, hey, I would you like a free t-shirt? I’ll send you it. And I don’t ask for anything in return. I just hope that maybe they’ll wear it or maybe they will uh advertise it for me for free. Uh, and what you’re doing there is saying, “Look, I don’t want anything from you.” Mhm. But if you like this t-shirt, would you like one? And that’s like a really free way to generate organic sort of uh organic advertising essentially. Um, but it depends if you’re willing to take the risk of giving someone a free item. Doesn’t work all the time. When it does work though, it’s really big. Yeah. I feel like I also uh I did that without you even sending me an item in the beginning. I just really like the products and I would just wear them uh in in everything that I would put online. But we are pretty much out of time at this point. We have another session coming up about all about design. But before we wrap, just one more tiny little thing. We have some giveaway winners to announce and the five lucky people to get a $20 coupon to spend on Printull and uh if you’d like to spend that on like a test order uh to see if your brand new idea is going to work out. The the five winners are Carlos Martinez, Stephanie Marshall, Chameleia Wolfingberger. I tried my best. Uh Arvis Greer and Pana Crook. So, you guys are going to get a little email with a coupon code that you can use until the end of the year. And now you guys have product, you have a store, you have a brand identity, a community, and it’s going to be time to turn all that into design soon. In my next session, I’m going to be joined by Drew from KD where we’re going to uh show you exactly what design uh what your design workflow could look like. But thank you so much. That’s been fun as hell. Thank you. Thank you. Also, thank you for tuning in. I know. I imagine this is really boring, but I hope you enjoyed it. Well, hopefully it’s not boring. You guys can let us know uh in the chat. Please do. Uh and we’re going to go take a break and we’ll be back in 10 minutes. See you guys. Adios. You don’t have a brand yet, but you have a vision. One that Printull makes possible. You bring the creativity and Printull turns it into real products on demand. Over 500 premium quality items carefully sewn, beautifully embroidered and precisely printed, then shipped directly to your customer’s door. Starting your dream business has never been easier. Unleash the brand within with Printful. If you’re struggling to make print on demand sales, then I want to show you a workflow that will save you a ton of time, which is important, especially if you’re doing this as a side hustle right now. With AI workflows in KD, you can easily create merch designs, mockups, and even social videos for your products, all pre-built to speed you up. Find the perfect style for your merch design and select a preset or upload your own. You’ll get a feel for how your merch is going to look even before you hit generate. Then make your mock-ups and even make social videos to advertise your merch on Pinterest or Tik Tok. And new workflows land all the time. Whatever’s trending, it’s probably already in there. This isn’t just a feature. It’s a library that’s going to help you grow your shop. So try AI workflows in KD. Now, if your current print ondemand workflow consists of hours searching for and creating mockups for your listings, the bad news is you’re wasting your time. The good news is we have a solution for that and this is the perfect video for you. Let’s check it out. In the KD dashboard in the AI hub tab, we have these new things called workflows. And there’s a lot of different things that you can do here. You can create designs. You can create videos for social media. You can create mockups, product visuals, even branding and designs. But specifically for this video, we’re talking about mock-ups. So, this is really simple. Check this out. All I have to do is click on one of the mockups. There’s this nice flatlay one. And it’s going to give me a couple of different parameters here. So, I’m going to fill this out by putting my design in here. And then we’ve got a couple of different product selections, which is super nice. We’re going to be adding more to this. And you can add a custom product here if you don’t see yours. But the comfort colors shirt is pretty popular and a lot of people use that. So, I’m just going to go with that. But this makes it really easy to match exactly whatever shirt you’re using for your print on demand product with the mockup right here. So everything is accurate. And then we get to place this design here. And this is going to be a front center. So I’m going to click this and we’re going to hit generate. And in just a few moments, I’ve got a beautiful, beautiful mockup of my t-shirt ready to go. Now, if I hover over this, I’m going to be presented with a couple options. I can just go ahead and download this right here from the dashboard. Or I can click edit. And there’s a couple things I can do. I can remove the background from this. I can upscale it if I need to. or I can open this in the editor to change the background if I wanted to. So, I’m going to click edit in a new project and see what we can do. So, once we’re in the editor, I’ve got my generation right here. It is on an artboard. You don’t have to keep it on an artboard. I can just drag this off and we can work in the endless canvas here, but I want to change the background of this to something a little bit more fitting to the t-shirt. So, I’m going to select my image, go down to the prompt box, and I’m actually going to use KD’s new agentic AI feature to change the background. And what I want to do is change the background to a lavender color comforter because it’s about rest and so I want it to kind of look like bed sheets in the background. And we’ll hit generate and it’s going to start thinking about my request and then give me my generation. So I I love this generation and it fits the vibe of the product perfectly. I want to take another second to explain just how powerful the Aentic feature is in letting you customize things after you’ve created something with one of the workflows. So, I’ve got this selected. I’m going to come down here and delete this prompt. And I’ll type something like I’ve got create four images of this t-shirt on a model. And then you can describe what you want your model to look like. I just said female with dark hair cuz that’s what’s on the shirt, mid20s. And use the same model for every image. And as you can see, it’s starting to think. And now it’s generating my mockups. And in just a few moments, I’ve got all four of my images. And all of these look fantastic. These are ready to go. These are ready to put right on the Etsy listing. No question. The design is perfect. It matches what I put in there perfectly. They’re all crisp, high-res, and it just followed the prompt to a tea. So, I’m going to go ahead and download this one right here. So, I can actually show you how to take this further by creating a video. So, I’m back on the AI workflows page. You can see your recent generations right here, which is super nice. You don’t have to go crawling through stuff to find it. And I’m going to do this little mirror selfie one. And I’m going to upload my image here. So, I’ve got my image. And then you can describe your model, which is also super helpful. I’m going to say something similar. Woman, mid20s, dark hair. And since this is about rest, I’ll just do bedroom for this. And if you want to put something in here that’s not listed, you can just type it in this prompt box right here. This specifically is for a Tik Tok or an Instagram reels post. So, this is going to be 916, but I’m going to show you exactly how to make it square if you want to use it for an Etsy listing. So, we’re going to go ahead and click generate. And when I hit generate, you probably saw that little notice come up that says that you can leave to go do other stuff and it’s going to continue on your generation. So you don’t have to stay on this page the whole time. If you want to go start another generation or go work on a template or some designs or something and come back to it, you can totally do that. And I’ve got my generation back right here. This looks awesome. It’s directly in the setting that I described, the person that I described. The design is actually backwards how it would be on a mirror. So that’s accurate as well. And you can actually generate multiple at a time. So I went back here and I click generate to showcase that you can do multiple. And so this one’s loading. But I can go ahead and download this one right here from the dashboard or I can click edit it in my existing project that we generated the t-shirt in. And I’ve already got a nice artboard right here ready to go. And I can size this up. I can play this video to make sure that the confines of the video looks good within the square. And since this is on an artboard that is a square, I can just click the artboard itself, click export, and it’s in the video format, and it’ll download as a square, perfect for your listing. Well, that’s pretty much KD workflow in a nutshell. I promise this is going to save you a ton of time. It’s super fast, super accurate. So, go try it out in KD today for free. And if you want to upgrade to a paid plan to get some more of those premium features and more monthly credits, we have a promo code for you. So check that out as well. Thank you guys so much for watching and we’ll see you in the next video.

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Heat. Heat. N.

Hello everybody and welcome right back. Uh I am joined today uh by Drew from KD. Uh, and not only uh is uh this a perfect opportunity to cover all of the questions uh that you guys might have uh about design and everything, but also uh you’re going to uh get a full workflow all about uh every single step from uh the creation of the design to the uh actual steps that you should be able to take to to export it, to create mockups, everything. So, uh, I hope you guys are excited. I know I am. Uh, and let me do a little bit of a test and see if everything is working. I think it should be. Hold on. All right. And in the meantime, you guys in the chat need to uh sound off and tell me exactly what part of the process uh uh you guys are excited about. I also see a question from Francis uh about uh since KD is mentioned so often today I have been mentioning KD a lot uh are we going to get a special offer from them? Yes, over on uh the the platform our community you can go into the sponsor pavilion and uh you can take a look. Uh so let me see. Okay, I should be able to pull us up on here. this working. Uh, the only thing I see is that Drew, you are muted. Yes, there go. Excuse me, I am muted. Was waiting for your waiting for your go. Yes, sorry. Okay. Uh, welcome. I could not be more excited to talk to you today. I cannot think of a single person in the world of design that could be more knowledgeable about this than you are. Uh so uh first of all to answer uh questions that I’ve been getting all day today because I keep talking about KD. Uh what is KD and what is it used for? Uh yeah, so yeah, happy to be back. Thank you so much. Um yeah, so KD is a design tool that’s meant for a couple of different things. uh not just print on demand but you know if we have people that are trying to grow their business or build a brand which I think a many uh printful users are u but you can do so many different things with KD from getting started with some templates or graphics or fonts to make basic text designs you can even be making advertisements you could go so far as to use AI tools I commonly refer to KD as the tool that grows with you so if you want to do something quite simple you can do that if you want to do something quite robust uh you can also do that if you want go crazy and use the pen tool or draw something, you can do that or you can just use templates and graphics. So, uh yeah, anything under the sun really design-wise, you can do it in KD. And I find it super uh helpful whenever we are uh thinking about pod specifically because very often to take your idea and to transfer it onto a product, you need a wider toolkit than you might otherwise uh have used for maybe like a digital design or something. Uh so before we get into the nitty-gritty and the whole process, I want to do a quick little giveaway uh just because we have made uh really well in my personal opinion really cool merch for Amplified this year and we want people to have it. So type in in the chat what exact feature you would like talked about. And uh in the meantime, we are going to uh pick out uh a couple or actually one winner who is going to uh get a $50 coupon to spend on Amplified merch. Uh so let me see who is going to be chosen. Okay. Okay. I have a winner. Drum roll. Three, two, one. The the winner is Angela Growl. Congratulations. Uh, and uh, you uh, are going to be able to use this $50 coupon until October 1st. So, get in there and do it soon. Now, let’s get to a bit of a demo. Uh, I’m going to, uh, open up a view where we can see your screen. You want to walk us through, uh, KD a little bit and maybe, uh, we can talk about what we’re going to do today. Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. And I’m I’m probably going to throw a whole lot at you all. So, if there are questions, uh, drop them in the chat. Just interrupt me at any point. This is probably going to be a lot, but I’m going to do my best to not be overwhelming. I basically want to get you all from zero to something, right? Go from zero to 100 quite fast. And in KD, when you get signed in, you’re going to arrive at what I just call your dashboard or your design hub to do different things. We have like an AI studio over here. We have the templates page, which I’m currently on here. We have a bulk mockups feature, but I want to hang out on this templates page right here that I think is going to be really relevant for many of you because you can just search for either a trending niche or a style that you know best or want to design for. We can actually just search for it. Now, you could just scroll through all of the many amazing templates that we have. It’s even going to learn you as you are searching for different things. As you can see, I’ve been searching for a lot of more bright designs lately, I would say. So, it’s giving me a lot of what it suggests for me. Yours is probably just kind of randomized for the first time. You could also just be searching through different graphics. So, maybe you’re in exploration mode, which is kind of what we’re in right now. Maybe we just want to be going through looking at either photos or backgrounds, textures, illustrations. Maybe we want to pick out some different fonts. You see, I’ve saved a couple here with the little heart feature. Let me go back to templates for a second. And I think one of the styles and niches that we were talking about a little while ago that I think is always popular is uh mental health, but mental health kind of mixed with a little whimsy. You know, not to make light of it, but you know, just to get us feeling a little better. So, I’m going to actually search, and you can do this for any kind of style or niche. You don’t have to follow me exactly. I’m just going to type in mental health t-shirt. And this is kind of a start for me when I’m going to try to decide what I want to design. You can see I’ve already harded a couple of these. And you’re going to see kind of every style, right? You’re seeing a whole bunch of stuff. You’re seeing like very intense kind of flyer stuff. You’re seeing like more like health related stuff. You’re seeing more retro mascot stuff. I really like this one. I hearted this one earlier. Uh this one is really nice as well. Oo, I like this text over here. I’m going to heart that. So, this is really where I might start to get some inspiration. You can click on any of these templates and underneath you’re going to see a lot of things that are similar, which is very, very cool. Or we could just go ahead and uh use the template itself. If you ever want to just get into KD uh without having to go through all of that stuff, you’ve arrived in KD and you’re like, you know what, I just I just want to start playing around with all this stuff. I want to play around with fonts and everything like that. you can just go up here to the create button uh and explore or excuse me, create a new project. Now, you actually sent me some stuff that we’re going to utilize together. So, I’m going to switch over to being already in the editor. So, I’ve already created this project and I dropped in some stuff that matches the the kind of style, right? Maybe a little bit more chaotic, I would say. Uh but before I go further, do you want to maybe explain like how we got to this point where we’re going to start creating stuff with this? Right. So uh I’ve been showing off uh these uh products for like several sessions today. So if you guys were here uh you definitely know what we’re talking about, but uh what I have uh created for today’s event is a whole brand called uh like Imperfect Duckling. and we’re all talking about how life is hard. Uh, and it’s all based on like ducks that are experiencing the exact emotions that we’re all experiencing. Uh, like, uh, an example of the way that I used the crying duck in the book is I’m going to quickly like switch to my uh, top down camera and show people. Uh, is just this little duck right here. Nice. Yeah. Saying uh, shut up. I need to be productive. Uh ah that’s good. Uh but uh let me open this back up into a screen share. Hold on. There we go. That’s better. Uh and so what I’ve done is I’m not really all that good at design. I’ve sent a bunch of ducks to you and uh and I also sent you the font that I used for the brand. I was like, “What would you do with this? Show me your magic.” Okay. Great. I love the style. I love the direction, the niche, the colors, all of it. I think it’s super super cool. So, if you remember a second ago when we were looking in the templates, which by the way, if you’re in the editor, you can also do the same thing I was just showing you with all the templates. We saved a couple, or rather, I saved a couple that I think could be cool. And maybe I want to use those layouts, those text formats, uh, to inspire. So, if I go down here to my likes tab, which everything under the sun that you like is going to be in here, whether it’s graphics or templates or whatever, you can see a couple of these here that I have hearted. And when you click them, they are added to your project, which is what we’re we’re on right here. It’s just kind of a big canvas. You have an artboard here. And I’ve already added two of these here to my canvas. They actually are pretty close already to the colors uh that are in these these ducks already. So, let’s say that we want to maybe edit this one. And this is how any of the templates are going to work that you start using or editing or playing with. Every piece of these or every piece of this is going to be editable. So, let’s say um I really liked that one. What did you say the text was for that that mug? Let’s maybe make something similar. You said I need to that was shut up. I need to be productive and duck is like capitalized. Okay. So maybe I do it like this. And this would be I need to be. And then the text is very much like very similar to probably other tools people are familiar with or really any anywhere you edit text. Uh and then I’m going to take this text right here and we’ll say I probably won’t capitalize it in script because it’ll look a little weird, but I will keep the uh I will keep the pun there. Mhm. Uh, so I’m going to take all these and we have these alignment tools. Uh, so cuz this is kind of like more of an aligned center design here. And then, okay, maybe maybe we want to change that at some point. But now I’ve got all these little these little ducks here. Um, I don’t really need this heart element, although it’s actually kind of cool. I can uh drag one of my little ducks up here. And so now I’ve kind of done something a little bit more custom. I mean, maybe you found these in uh our our elements panel, like maybe you found a set or a series that you liked a lot, or maybe you got them from somewhere else, or maybe you drew them in another tool like Procreate, and then you uploaded them to KD, what whatever the the case may be. Now, you’ve done some really cool stuff by editing a template to be more close to you and then using the elements that you have here. Similarly, you could you could do the same thing with this design here if we wanted to. Um, I want to show you a really really neat like this kind of blows my mind. It’s a very simple feature, but it kind of blows my mind. Let’s say that this layout, okay, we haven’t changed the text yet. Let’s just imagine that you’ve changed the text to something witty that you’ve already done. Uh, but now we’ve got this element that doesn’t really make sense for like my brand, right? My print on demand brand. I can just grab this and because I’ve uploaded all of these here in the uploads, I could just hover over and click this little replace button right here and it replaces it at the actual size in my design. And now I can go on and edit all of my different stuff. And you know, maybe I can take the the background, which looks to be a like a purple, and then maybe I can take this little eyropper tool and I’ll grab the little pink from this towel. And so now I’m starting to get more designs that match just from using templates along with elements that are maybe more custom to me, you know, and just that little like hack of replacing it seems so simple, but the way that made my heart sing because it so meaning that you don’t have to figure out which layer the previous thing was on and if you should put it under the left sparkles or over the right sparkles, right? And like sizing it and everything. I immediately was like, “Yes, that’s one click. It’s so easy. It’s one click. Yeah, because otherwise, yes, you’d have to have deleted that and then maybe it’s in top on top of the stars and then you got to go in here and figure out which, you know, if any of you ever are really wondering and want to get into the nitty-gritty, we have a layers panel. It’s a little I would say maybe advanced, but you can always see what’s on a particular artboard and you can even like hide things if you want to, you know, make variations of stuff. maybe a little bit more than what we need to go into today, but it is there if you’re ever like, why can’t I figure out how to get this on top of this or this behind this or whatever, we have a little bit more robust features for that. Um, but yeah, where should we go from here now that we’ve got a couple of designs? Uh, so I did uh I kept like watching uh the the chat to see what people uh are looking at and I also know a few of my favorite features. So, I’m going to be throwing stuff at you from both my brain and the people’s brain. Okay. Uh there are uh a couple of uh questions in the chat that I see about mock-ups, which we are going to get to, I promise. Uh but one of the things that I want to like emphasize uh because let’s go a little bit chronologically, is like artboard size uh and uh u making sure that your images because I sent you PGs are vectors and can be scaled to different design sizes. So, can you show us where all of those settings and especially the vectorizing feature would be? Yes. Okay. Great questions. Especially for making sure you have the highest quality upload for your for your garment, your or your product, whether it’s a mug, it doesn’t have to be a garment. Okay, let’s start with um size. Let’s start with the easiest one, which is size. So right now whenever you add a template or if you create an artboard which there’s an artboard tool here you could you could just draw you know whatever kind of size you want with the artboard tool. Um whenever you click on an artboard you’re going to see the size over here on the right. Now mine is in pixels. It’s just how I like to work. You don’t have to do that way. We can actually change that in this little hamburger menu. We could go and change it to inches. Now we know. I mean this is a massive artboard. 30 by 30. It sure is. I don’t think we’re going to have any issues if we export it from from here. So, if you ever need to know or excuse me, if you ever want to adjust it and say, “Okay, typical t-shirt size 16 by 20,” you could just pop that in. Or you could come up to the custom artboard size setting and I believe we already have a Printful t-shirt size right here. So, if you’re ever worried or concerned, uh you can al also always find that over in Printull. I believe it’ll tell you the exact size or there are also guidelines you can download. Pop those in KD if you really are worried about it. But I would say the most important thing would be the I don’t want to go too technical, but the DPI of this you can control. So if we were to click this little button called export, you see right here we’ve got control over the DPI. And that’s just I don’t know how how much technical we want to go into that. Basically, you need a lot. You need 300. And as you can see right here, the export size is going to be 8600 pixels by 10,800. Uh way more. You could probably leave this at 72. It’ be fine. But needless to say, you’re going to have a massive image ready for print uh for Printull. And you can also remove the background. Another very key important part of this is because if you’re not doing something with a pattern, like I think your mug had a pattern on it, for example. If I wanted to do it on the sweater or the shirt you’re wearing, for example, I don’t want that gray box or that pink box. I want it to be transparent. And so I can remove the background right here from the export settings. Now, if everything I just said was a lot, I got an extra hack for you, which is just going to the quick export feature and then just selecting three times, which is going to take this, it’s going to make it a PNG, and it’s going to do 300. You can think of three as 300. So, it’s going to multiply it by three times. So, you’ve got options here for being speedy. Now, before I go to the vectorz, did I miss anything here? Uh, you didn’t miss anything. And I also just imagine the size of this design. If you were to take this uh 36 inch long uh design and export it at three times the length, the the the the 12t long is or 9 ft long, I guess, is maybe a little bit too much. But uh a quick question uh that I saw um a in in the chat right here that I think uh kind of touches on the templates that we have right in front of us. Uh where was it? Where was it? Where was it? I think it was very uh helpful and it comes up a lot. Uh essentially asking like once you uh use some of the stuff like templates, can you just use that for free to sell? Um right. Okay. I maybe I’m interpreting that as like the template itself. Do you think that’s what they mean? Or like on a garment? Uh no no no no. on on a garment like for POD once you have a KD account can you use that? Of course. Of course. That that’s the whole purpose of this. Yeah, absolutely. And there are no IP issues, no nothing. No, we try to keep it very very very very simple. We have a whole page to this. I’ve got a whole video on this as well. There are no certain assets that can only be used for shirts and then certain assets that can only be used for bookmarks. It’s just it just you you have at your disposal the fonts, the graphics, the templates, the images to use for all of your physical and digital in products. It’s that’s how we just have made it solid. Yeah. And I did find the exact question from Francis, which was essentially uh do you have a paid subscription? Uh uh first, can you use these things? And then the additional question to it is, do you have to have a paid subscription to use the templates and not be at risk of IP or copyright issues? Great question. The answer is no. Although I will say it’s a little bit of a moot point because you’re only going to be able to export them at a specific size anyway. So, you know, I just I always talk about the free plan is really a a a start to try to see if KD’s right for you. You can do a lot of things. You can use all almost all the tools, edit it all, but there are some things that are capped to the to the paid ones and size being one. So, I really try to say this is a non-issue. The answer is you can still use it. It’s just, you know, you’re kind of limited to stickers kind of because you won’t be you won’t be getting that 10,000 uh pixel export if if you know what I mean. Yeah, I do. And I feel like that is like uh a great way to do a free plan because uh there uh I think it’s a very clear way to say like hey this is a great tool uh and there’s so much that you will get once you have it. Uh but you can’t just guarantee that uh for like you can’t just tell people that it’s going to be great for them and expect them to agree to pay money for it. uh letting them just try it out is is a fantastic way to uh show off the capabilities of the tool which I feel like are great. Absolutely. Um then uh I guess the kind of next question and the next thing to uh check out in my opinion is okay so if you’ve you’ve created these designs uh how would you then turn them into mock-ups? Yes. Okay. Great question. So, there’s a couple of different ways we can do mockups. Um, also I I realized I forgot the the vectorz question. I’ll I’ll briefly show that. Uh, anytime you’re anytime you’re looking at or excuse me, editing text or like little elements where you can already change the color, you can see here when I’m selecting text, I can change the color. When I’m selecting these little elements, they’re already vector. Vector meaning uh endlessly scalable. um they are mathematical paths that can continue on forever. They will always be the highest resolution that you are seeing. Uh but sometimes you’re going to encounter an image like this, a graphic that is uh flat. So it is not vector meaning it is not endlessly scalable. At some point it will become grainy. At some point it will become uh you know illeible a little bit. Uh so we have some options for this. We have a lot of image tools over here that you can use. One of them being an upscaler which can just if you’re really worried about it, you can upscale it and it will increase the pixel size. I don’t remember. I think up to about 4,000 pixels, which is probably going to be enough for you. But yeah, it’s pretty big. But you could also just vectorize this. Uh I like to set mine at the max depending on what I’m doing just because I want to make sure that it doesn’t leave any colors out. And after it thinks about it for See, this one’s a little bit of a tough one because these ducks have a little a lot of little detail in them. Yeah. So, I might use uh a tool like AI to change the colors a little bit. Uh let’s try this guy cuz this guy only has a couple of colors. So, let’s go to vectorize. I really like that guy. That’s that’s one that I haven’t used anything before. Yeah. It’s so cool. Yeah. Okay. So, now this guy is fully vector uh because he had a little more simplistic colors. And so, now if I really wanted to change uh I don’t know why I would want to change his feet, but I could. Maybe I want them to be a little bit more red or something like that, you know. Okay, so now you can do it. But now he’s endlessly scalable. So big, small, you know, whatever. I It’s not going to be an issue for um uh legibility. There’s not going to be any graininess. So anyway, there’s your vectorzer. Uh we’re working on getting an even better one cuz we’re maxed out around 15 or 16 uh colors. If you all want a better one, please come over to the channel and keep saying that you want it because that’s the way to get our team to do things. Uh, but let’s talk about mock-ups. So, I’ve already done a couple of mockups for one of these shirts that I made right here. And don’t don’t be alarmed. I’m going to show you exactly how I did this with the other ones up above, but we have what are called live preview mockups here in KD. So, if what I mean by live is if I were to change the color, it’s going to change the color on all the mockups immediately. If I were to change the size of the design, it’s going to change it on here. I can also change it individually on the mockup itself. Now, you may be asking, how did you get there? Well, let’s do it with this one. I actually really like this t-shirt that we have come up with. Um, you have three ways. When you click on an artboard here, you can click mockup here at the top. You can click mockup over here on the right or you can click this little arrow and then click mockup. And then when you do that, it is going to open up our mockups catalog where we can do things like type comfort colors and let’s go for the 1717. Hell yeah. This is this is my favorite blank in the entire catalog. I nearly at this point after years of being in the POD space, I want to say that more than 50% of my entire t-shirt collection is this exact blank cuz I love it so much. It is the best. Especially like yeah, all the different color options that it has, the softness of it. Oh, it’s just it’s it’s really really good. So, let’s say that you’re happy with with the you know this comfort color 1717. We can keep adding more mockups to this. So, we don’t have to just do it on a on a shirt, for example. So, this little arrow here is dragable. So, let’s say I come up here and I just let it go. I can do another mockup up here and you can move these all around. So, let’s say also I think this would work really nice on a tote bag, I think. Yeah. Um, so let’s go ahead and click one of those. A tote bag filled with like school books or something or a laptop for the for the message. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, let’s go with um let’s just go with a basic one for now. Okay. Yeah, that that work that works pretty well. And you could keep on building this out um on different mockups. Now, as I mentioned before, because they’re live, anything I change on here is going to change over on the mockup as well as including the color. So, if I want to see what this I I believe I don’t I think it’s called butter or something. It’s one of my favorite uh colors. I think it’s probably I we’re going to talk about a very light yellow. I think it’s called ivory on the cover. Oh, it’s called ivory, not butter. That’s the butter one is darker. The ivory. ivory is what I’m talking about. I don’t remember the hex code exactly, but I know that one sells a lot. And I actually own a lot of those because I like them a lot. And that looks pretty nice. I think it looks it looks pretty nice on this color. So anyway, the point being is you could be changing uh these at any point. Now, what I also like to do, and this is maybe a little advanced, is I like to select all of these. I do that holding the shift key, by the way, and clicking. Then I like to um duplicate these uh which you can do with command C and command V just or control C and I forget some people don’t have Macs. Um and then I could like basically continue to parse out um I think there’s also a lilac colorish and now I’m starting to see all of my different uh products on different excuse me my designs on different colors on the products that I want to sell. And at any point you can download these um right from here to use however you want. Yeah, this is actually a great uh point to to bring up because just now Cidra in the chat asks so you can choose the specific comfort color, shirt color. Uh and this is a great moment to talk about the exact hex codes I think because you just showed that you can like you can change the color of the product but what is the specific type exactly? So maybe if you want to go uh tell me one that would be awesome. Yes. Uh so I can go right into uh Prulo’s product catalog uh and type in let me just uh share my screen is I don’t know I wonder it’s the best way to I’m just going to full screen it for now. Uh so I will just look for comfort colors 1717 and we’re going to find that exact shirt. Uh it is uh this garment dyed chart and on the Printful product page you can hover over each individual color and you will see a hashtag and then six either numbers or letters and all of that is the exact color codes. Which one do you want? Do you want the ivory or do you want the ivory? Okay. ivory is FFF. Okay. 4 D9. 4 D9. Yes. Okay. Nice. And then what is the the purple lilacish color one? Uh it’s called orchid and it is orchid. Uh E A D. Okay. 3F2. 3 F2. Mhm. Nice. Okay, I’ve got those in. Yes. And I really like the fact that you are able to input them um you know manually. I I think there’s probably going to be someone immediately thinking of like, oh, uh, so why don’t I just have a drop down for every single shirt and stuff, but if there’s ever a new shirt color available, it is not going to be just immediately available everywhere. So, being able to just switch it out for yourself and see what it looks like uh on every single color that you can think of, I think that totally works. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is is really helpful for those of you who are going to be selling on maybe Etsy for example where you you do want to go ahead and offer a couple of different shirts. Sometimes I like to to take the mockup here in uh KD and we have this remove background feature which will uh for lack of a better phrase remove the background from the image. Uh, and sometimes what I might do, um, my Etsy listings in Square now because I think it’s just the best for, um, you know, like, uh, all of the the apps or, excuse me, all the views, mobile, desktop, iPad, whatever. Mhm. Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll have, this is maybe a little poor example, but I’ll have a cutout of one and then because we just saw we could take all those hex codes, I’ll have like a bunch of circles up here above uh amongst the top and uh if I want them to be really nice and tidy, I’ll use the tidy tool. And then I’ll have I’ll have the other colors here for example. So maybe we have that ivory one, maybe we have one that’s black, which probably doesn’t work for this design, but maybe we have a pink one. And maybe we have whatever. You get the idea. So, I’ll create kind of like a listing uh a a listing image with the same sort of text that says like color options or something like that. And this is a really good way that you don’t have to keep on making tons and tons and tons of shirts. I guess you could also just copy and paste over the Printful mockups as well and you could just put them on here. This is probably a bad representation, but you get the idea of basically insinuating, I have this shirt in a whole bunch of other colors because you’re limited in the amount of images that Etsy lets you upload. Anyway, if it’s your own Shopify or something like that, you can go nuts with the amount of photos, I think. But, um, I think Yeah, for social media as well. Yeah. Uh but uh there are uh certain things about mockups that I want to remind people about uh such as uh they do need to represent the product accurately. So I think the hex codes specifically is a fantastic way to do that. And I also uh I believe the for example the comfort color shirt picture that is just a picture that you guys took of the shirt. Correct. Yes. So, anytime that you see um let’s see, let’s go back to the mockups panel just quickly. Anytime you see a product like that, I believe we also took a bunch of the Gilden ones. Anything that has a code. Yeah, these are all uh all images that we we ordered all the products and took photos ourselves. So, they are the actual and we get a lot of questions as to why they’re in white. They’re in white so that you can go put the the color of the product in. I I don’t know any other way to explain that, but they’re white here so that you can add it and then you can use your artboard color to change it to the actual hex code that you need. Anyway, uh a lot of these are going to have a code. So, for example, you see 64200. I guess it’s that’s what it is. Gilden, whatever. Uh you can always click on the three dots to see the actual code of it. And now, I know some people are going to say, “How do I know the sizing is right?” Excellent question. I would always always always just go check your your Printful mockup. Now, if you’ve added a template such as this one that um some of these are going to be 16 by 20 anyway, and then you add the mockup of the shirt, it should immediately put it in that box. Um but again, always check the I believe Printull has um the templates. I’ve used them before where you can just I I keep one in my u I keep one in my project and I just add it and make sure my design is okay. Uh and then I can just replicate. Boom, boom, boom. get them all out, you know. Yeah. Uh something that uh I mentioned uh in like an earlier session in the way that I like to use KD project is I have a project for each product type. So that way I don’t need to copy over uh all of the guidelines, all the artboard sizes are correct. Uh and I can see exactly uh all of the like compositions that I created of a design previously. Uh, meaning that at some point I can just like look through everything and can be like, okay, I remember that this composition with the two little elements on the sides of the text looked good on this hat. Therefore, I can like replicate that but with slightly different designs and slightly like different colors, approaches, etc. And honestly, uh there are so many ways to utilize all of the tools. I also saw a couple of people uh I’m trying to make sure that we have enough time for everything, but I saw a couple people uh asking uh if uh uh you could expand a little bit also on the video mockups that we could generate. I just want to make make sure that people can see uh the the little like improved color options photo. Can you like go back to that? Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I just I basically I grabbed the other one. I added a little drop shadow here. Maybe it’s a little too much drop shadow. Uh, and then that this is how I like to make mine. I like to give you like some proof of like multiple kinds. And then I would like I’d probably have one listing for this and then I have another listing of the dark. So I I I’m always going to have two another good option about or tip about colors. I’m probably going to do this same design flipped so that it works on dark colors because it’s not going to work, right? The black text is going to go away. So I would just duplicate this and then change all the colors around. Yeah. Um, but you were asking about video, right? Yes. Okay. Yes. So, um, here we’re in currently the editor here, but I’m going to flip us back over to, uh, what is called the AI studio here. And underneath here, we have a ton of different things from just general uh, workflows for mockup. So, more of what I was just doing, but they’re a little bit easier to use, I would say. So, if you’re really really concerned over all the editing I just did, you could pop open one of these, upload your product, and then basically select a style or or um describe it yourself, and then it’s going to give you uh the output, the mockup of your of your design. But we have a couple of different styles for videos. So, we have these product listing videos, and then we have the UGC style videos. These are going to be great. the the product listing videos are going to be really really good for something like Etsy because Etsy is really pushing video. You can stop the scroll by having something something of your product like a tote bag moving around or uh picking up the mug that you might you made with the duck on it. Maybe you could just have a simple uh one of the ducks. So, for example, let’s go here. Actually, let’s do one that is a uh let’s see. Yeah, let’s do this one because this is a shirt. I don’t have a mug. Uh, let’s go and let’s pick this one. And let’s go use image. These are really, really easy. We can pick which animal we want to put in here. Let’s go with a black cat cuz um I love cats. Oh, I wish there was a duck there. Honestly, if there was a duck in those options that we duck. Yeah, I’m a little worried about trying to Maybe I’ll prompt that one later and send it to you. Uh, but let’s just go like this. Aspect ratio. We’re going to do one by one and we’re going to hit generate. Now, while this is generating, we can leave this and keep making more. So, without having you sit there and wait for me to watch this happen, uh in our previous session, I actually already generated a couple with a different niche, a different design style. So, I did one for uh this tote bag, which is kind of just a POV uh video of the the product. So, I would do this once I have validated that that design is actually going to be that size. I may I I’ve already checked in Printful that that’s legit. I’ll bring it over here. I’ll pop it in here. And then I could either describe a surface or choose one. And then you’re going to have really really great uh stuff for socials, right? You could put a little trending sound behind this, maybe some captions. Uh I tried a couple of other ones with this little uh showcase of this water bottle with a little snail on it. So, you have a bunch of of different options. Uh I and if you’re worried about using a particular uh AI avatar model, you can always uh upload your own. So if you’ve created a character or something, you could upload your own and use it amongst all of the workflows if that’s how you want to do it. What’s another one that I did that I thought was pretty decent. There is actually a great question in in the chat about this uh from from Erica uh saying yes I assume there’s a way to use the Printful Basic like mockups to import them into KD and then make a video that way. Yeah, absolutely. So in any of these like if we were to uh basically the same way I just did it. So you can up uh you can open up a workflow and click on you can actually just drag an image in here from like your download. So, if you had already copied it or downloaded it from Printull, you could just drag it in or you can click and then drag it in or upload it from here. If it’s already in KD, you’ll see here, here’s all our little designs and stuff and our mockups that we made. Um, but you can just drag it into here right from Printull. Go through the steps, you know, click who you want, click the background or describe it, select the motion that you want to have, so maybe it’s a turn or whatever, and select your aspect ratio. Uh, yeah, and then you can go from there. But it doesn’t have to be it doesn’t have to be a mockup from INKD. It can be a mockup from Prull. And uh the additional question that we kind of uh I saw it a little bit uh earlier uh I don’t quite remember who who asked this specifically but uh people were concerned that when uh AI starts working on the mockups, it’s not going to keep uh the actual design the way that it was initially created. So, the AI would change certain things about the design on the product. Uh, but as as much as I’ve used uh KD’s features, you guys, I can tell you that I’ve never seen that happen ever. Uh, and it looks pretty good. Yeah. Uh, yeah. I mean, that was happening like months ago, I would think. Yeah, we had some video would be doing some weird stuff, but as the models have gotten better, for example, this one is Seed Dance 2.5. Wait, hold on. I need to share your screen again. There we go. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Uh like I I agree in you know months ago that that was an issue where you might generate an image or you might generate a video and the the the design would be a little weird but even with this one from an interesting angle like it’s really keeping everything intact especially with more powerful um models like as Cance 2.5 came out and then I think another one just came out cleaning we have clean 3 4K which is also really really good. Um, I have not witnessed any issues with it as of late. Uh, let’s check out our animal interaction one here. Yeah, that looks great. Uh, I don’t Yeah, that’s very, very nice. So, Oh, I mean, yeah. So, you have this. Okay, so I will say for Etsy, this is probably a little too zoomed out. Um, but, you know, it’s still cool. Maybe is as the second or third thing in your Etsy listing or or this is a great social post, though, um, as an example. So yeah, I I haven’t had any issues since the new models have come out, but it is noted if you are experiencing issues, definitely reach out to support. We’ll give you your tokens back 100%. That and also uh I feel like for something like this, I just want to uh hearken back to something that we had last session. People were sharing pictures of their dogs and their cats and their dogs names and their cats names in the chat. So, do uh mention once again you guys if if you guys have a cat, especially if it’s a black cat, let me know in the chat. Uh and maybe share a photo if you’re able. Uh I really want to know. Uh and uh we uh have maybe only like 10ish minutes left. So, the two things that I still want to definitely cover uh as like features that I really love is first uh branding uh and and like the the uh way that you can kind of put your brand into KD and and use it uh very comfortably. And um next to talk a little bit about uh I excuse me I saw some questions that were not necessarily about like product designs and product mock-ups but something that you can use within your store within your socials uh that is like maybe a social media banner or something cuz um I don’t want people to come away from this thinking that KD is only really useful for like product designs you know. Yeah, 100%. All right, let’s cover the the brand first. So, there’s two ways that you can uh create and access this. When you’re here on your dashboard, and you’re probably going to get a notice for it anyway when you when you sign up. You may see something up here that just says brand. We have already started one, but if you were to add one, you have options here for just importing a URL. So, let’s say you do have a Shopify site or you do have an Etsy store, you can actually just import your URL. I have tons of videos on this on YouTube. I think I have like six videos you can go watch exactly step by step how to do that. Or you can create one from scratch which is going to prompt you to either use a template or create one new. Now I’m going to take you to one uh that we have already been working on uh which what did you say it was called? I’m going to change the name here. What did you say it was? Uh oh. Uh imperfect duckling. Imperfect duckling. Uh, okay. So, this is what you’re going to see after you import your URL. Or if you don’t have one, it’s okay. You don’t have to have one. You can add each of these individually. So, what you’re going to see here is logos. You’re going to see colors, color palettes that you can build. You can edit different color palettes so that I can access them in the editor. You can have your fonts defined, um, like uh, the script that we liked, the the headline that we liked. You can upload all of the graphics. So, let’s say that or you can add them from from if you’ve already been making them in KD, you can add them from ink. I uploaded the ducks that you sent me. Um, and then you can even have a visual style and this is what’s going to be added to some of those workflows I was just using. You can actually click on brand on some of the workflows and it’s going to use your uh colors. It’s going to use your colors. You’re going to use your logo, things like that so that you stay on brand. Now, you can edit anything from here. Again, I got videos. I don’t want to waste your time there. You can check out the channel. But if we’re here in the editor, let’s say, uh, this one is not quite on brand yet. Uh, if you see over here in the left side, this little brand thing, you can see I’ve got the imperfect duckling, and it’s got my logo, it’s got my colors, it’s got my fonts, and it’s got my graphics. So, if I wanted to take this text and I wanted it to be that body text, I could simply just click it, and now it’s going to change it to my uh to my text. Maybe it’s a little too big, but we can change that. Um, or we could actually, and this is a this is a pretty new feature that I’m stoked about. We can click an entire template. It doesn’t even have to be one we’ve edited yet. And then under this little more tab, we can just click apply brand. And then we can apply like the settings and it’s going to it changed it all to script, but it it it adapted all of our colors here. We would want to turn that to not be this. And yeah, anyway, not not a great example because of the headline font that I did, but you can still add your brand colors. So, for example, if I wanted to apply my colors. So, boom. Now, I’ve got my color palette uh applied, or if I wanted to change the sparkles to something else, or if I wanted to change the heart or the text, you get the idea. You can also edit or add things from in your brand so that you can keep it on brand. If you want your store to be like niche, you want it to be using the same colors, you want to be using the same Yeah. all that stuff. Uh which really leads into your next point about social media. Yes. If you go back to the the the templates panel over here, uh either on the dashboard or in the editor, you’re going to see things like marketing that you can use for banners, posters, you can ads, uh signage. Here’s some social media ones here that are pretty cool. Uh, so we could add like, you know, if you just want to do some inspirational quotes, we can just do the same thing here. We’ll go to apply brand and then now we’ve got yeah our our post here. We can also find our brand colors over here in brand underneath the color panel. So if I wanted that background to be a lighter pink or black or what have you, um, I could do it this way as well. So we have a lot of different things for social media as as you were saying. We also have um let’s see, let me go back over to the workflows because this is relevant for this conversation. Uh let me go back to the AI studio really quick. And then if we go to marketing, you can do the same thing outside of I showed you the UGC ones, but let’s say you wanted to uh do this really cool one with the crane. Or if you wanted to do this, we have some features like um this is pretty trendy, right? You see this like what is this? the cutout of like Instagram with like a hand coming in or like text bubbles or something like that, you know? These are really cool. So, you could do the same thing. Uh oh, you can see right there, apply your brand and then it’s going to apply your your duckling and then pick a background. It’s really really cool. So, we do have more than just uh graphic design in KD. We do have the whole marketing suite if that’s where you want to go. Yes. And uh I first of all just want to let you know that uh I have now seen I think like with five or or six total black cats in the chat which is beautiful. Uh and then and then second of all uh I uh can tell from the chat and also from what’s going on inside my little heart is that people are very uh excited to start playing around with this stuff and being like okay and I can do this and I can create this and I can do that which I think is the perfect like mood to give people whenever you’re talking about design you know uh absolutely uh my like one kind of final question uh because we are coming up on like the last I don’t know 3 minutes left in the session is if uh somebody knows kind of nothing about graphic design and has never really uh tried to design anything on their own and they’ve previously like if they ever done anything they’ve maybe got someone off of Fiverr or or a friend did it for them where would they start because I want people to even the people who are like very scared by all of the uh features and all of the uh AI studio options. What would be their starting point? Where would you point them? Yeah, I would say I would probably do the same thing that I was showing you in the beginning. I would come to uh maybe maybe the templates feed and I would check out a lot of these different styles, a lot of these different niches. Maybe I would start uh typing in because these are made by like a team of worldclass designers that we hire here at KD. So, these are made from people that have gone out and search the internet to see what’s trending and what’s great. And what I would do is open up some of these designs and see how they’re made and and not be afraid of destroying it. We get a lot of comments like, “These templates are so beautiful. I don’t want to edit them because I’m going to destroy it.” Well, the good news is you can just go back and open it again. You don’t have to be afraid to do that. In fact, the only way you’re going to learn is to be able to go in and change it and and search through the 800,000 fonts we have or whatever. I don’t know what the number is, but like yeah, I just go through and and and start messing with stuff. Uh our social I’m sorry, I’m distracted here. Oh, that’s that’s really cool. Our thing is our Sorry, I knew that was going to happen. I was like, this is gonna happen. Oh, look how it did my uh my brand. It did the little like cry, plan, snack, panic, repeat. That’s hilarious. Okay, that’s amazing. Anyway, that wasn’t the question. I would definitely look at some of the templates. Um, yeah, I don’t want to try to, you know, plug, but we have tons of tutorials on on YouTube to help you get started from square one. If you really want to go uh from scratch, I can show you how to do that. If you want to use AI, I’ll show you how to do that. Um, if you want to start with Pinterest and then kind of build it out using hodgepodge templates, I show you how to do that. I mean, there’s so many different ways. I just don’t want you to be scared. I think that’s what I see most people doing is they just don’t do anything. And I think you should start. Yes. And uh just to like on a very personal note, uh if you are on YouTube guys, go over there and look at KD’s YouTube channel. Drew is who I aspire to be uh professional life. So, thank you. You’re too kind. And I am being very very very genuine and honest. But we are kind of out of time at this point. So, if you’ve been following along all day, massive hugs to you guys from me. Uh, and you should be pretty close to Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been kind of like plugging it in the chat as well. Uh, but do make sure uh to go over into the uh community and into the sponsor pavilion and you’ll see it in the chat again as well. Uh, and take advantage of everything that we have to offer. And thank you so much, Drew, for joining. Uh, and absolutely I’ll go take a quick break and be back with um Levi to tell you guys all about ads because you’re pretty much one step away from launching your store. Okay, so you’ve got a design. Nice. That’s a great start. But now it actually has to look like a product. And that’s usually where things get tricky. Most brand owners out there don’t have time for a photo shoot. And don’t even get me started on stock models that look nothing like your customers. And that’s why we’ve come up with AI mockups, which will change how you launch products with Printull. You can get there through your my product section. If you’ve been with Printull for a while, you’ll just need to switch on the my products toggle first. Where you’d normally pick your mockups on Printull, there is a new tab. Now, you’ve got basic mockups, the ones you already know and love. And then there’s AI mockups for when you want mock-ups that actually look custom, like they belong to your brand. Just click generate with AI to get started and you’re already in creative mode. This is where it gets good. You pick your product color. You pick your print area, front, back, whichever side you actually want to show off in your mockup. This is the key step of the process. You get to write a whole description of who’s wearing it. Age, gender, features, skin tone, hair, body type, even their expression or how they’re standing. You’re basically building your mockup down to the smallest detail. There’s the background, too. You can go with a preset or just write your own prompt and get something fully custom. It can be a studio location, a city background, a forest, whatever fits your brand. You click generate and that’s it. Printull just takes it from here with the help of AI. And there it is, a fully custom realistic mockup and it’s already saved to your library. If this is not quite what you were looking for, rewrite the description and regenerate until it is. Love it. Click select mockup and it slides right into your listing with all your other mock-ups. If you need more mockups for the same product, just keep generating. They all land in the same spot, just sitting there ready for you to pick and add to your shop. This whole set looks good to go, ready for your store, ads, and socials. That’s how you get a store ready product photo that looks exactly like it belongs to your brand. Head to Printull and try AI mockups for yourself. I remember when it first happened August of 2022 when things really took off. I was seeing more money from my side hustle than I was seeing from my actual job in like the span of a month. And to this point, it still feels incredibly surreal, but it’s obviously very exciting as well.

My name is Bryson Oppman and I am the founder and owner of Got Funny. Gotfunny is a comedic based clothing brand kind of focusing on humor, memes, not taking life too seriously. The goal Got Funny is how can I create something that people can have fun with and enjoy. I think there’s a lot of value in that. I launched Got Funny in April of 2022 and I’ve been working with Printull the entire time. Print on demand was huge for me because there was no way I was going to have the space, time or money to afford like my own printing machine. It also gave me a lot of room to kind of like experiment with different products and different designs. A big part of this business is kind of being experimental and trying different things and print on demand allows me to do that without a lot of the risks that maybe buying upfront would. I think the biggest thing is like scale. being able to go from like 17 orders one month to almost 800 the following month because I wasn’t taking care of any of that in house. Having Printull and that growth, they were able to just take care of it. It’s now like, oh my gosh, all of a sudden we have 800 orders. How the heck are we going to do all this? Even if I were to do, let’s get crazy and say like 500 orders in a day, I feel super confident that those orders are going to be fulfilled and sent out on time. And so being able to free up a lot of my time and energy and money um in order to focus on the things that I like doing like the designing, like the marketing, I have found my true calling in life and it’s making really silly bumper stickers. Please don’t tailgate me. I get very anxious. My best year in revenue was definitely last year 2023. I did approximately like $1.1 million in sales, which is obviously huge for me. 99% of that came from selling t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, stickers, etc. through Printull. And I was seeing more money from my side hustle than I was seeing from my actual job. The bestselling product, it was like a little silly drawn frog said, “Outside I’m croaking, inside I’m broken.” Um, which was kind of the first design that kind of went viral that took off and inspired like a whole collection of designs that were in that same style. I focus mainly on like social media, video marketing. I want to obviously advertise or promote the product through the video in order to generate sales, but I try to approach it in a way where it doesn’t feel like, you know, I’m just coming on camera being like, “Hey, here’s my new design. Please go buy it.” It’s more so, you know, the video works on its own, but then people be like, “Oh, I really like the shirt. That’s a really funny shirt you’re wearing for this video.” Finding a way to, I guess, advertise without advertising really works well. I’d say print on demand helps make this all possible because without it, I probably wouldn’t be taking as many like risks or being as experimental with the stuff that I’m doing. Give it a shot because it’s at the end of the day, it’s not going to really cost you. And I think it’s one of those that once you kind of get into it, get it figured out, then you’ll be very happy that you did decide to start working with Printull. You don’t have a brand yet, but you have a vision, one that Printull makes possible. You bring the creativity and Printull turns it into real products on demand. Over 500 premium quality items, carefully sewn, beautifully embroidered, and precisely printed, then shipped directly to your customer’s door. Starting your dream business has never been easier. Unleash the brand within with Printful.

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Hello and welcome everybody to our last session of the day. I know quite a few of you have been here literally all day from the very beginning. You are troopers. Thank you so much. And uh for this last uh but definitely not least session, we have a conversation about ads. So, uh, throughout this whole day, I know you weren’t you weren’t here, you were in in other sessions, but what we did is we started with just kind of like, uh, an idea and an account on Prull and like, okay, what can we do? Then we built a Shopify store. Okay. Uh, then, uh, we talked about all the products and techniques and everything through that. Then, so this is a full buildout all day. Yes. Last thing to do. Most important though, you got to market the products that you built. Exactly. Yeah. So, I’m I’m here with Levi, you guys. And Levi is the pro at this cuz he built uh over a million dollar business from his dorm room at the time as well. Uh and he’s an expert in all things POD and advertising. So, we’re going to talk all about ads. Yeah. Um yeah, my name is Levi. If you’ve seen me before, you’ve probably know that I predominantly do Tik Tok shop. Um, and being on a social media platform, I would say attention is currency and advertisement is the number one way to sell a product. If you have a amazing product, you have maybe the best product anyone’s ever made, but nobody sees it. It’s impossible for anyone to buy it. So, getting eyeballs on good products is the game. Yes. and uh to kind of like tell everybody especially the people who have been around uh the entire day like Raquel literally I’ve seen you in the chat all day today uh this is kind of the point uh that we’ve been talking about throughout every session and thinking okay you have had an idea for so long you have had this kind of like maybe design in your back pocket for so long and the big question is always how do you get people to see it this is one fantastic way to utilize advertisement. So the the first overall question especially for for the people who have never ever tried anything related to advertising. What are the types of ads that are available to people and what is the difference between them? Okay, so I’m going to run through each platform one at a time. And I want to preface with when you’re first starting out, I think running ads is important, but you need a base of knowledge knowing that a product is going to be successful before you pour money into it. And every single marketplace is much different. Lastly, I would say far beyond anything else, you need to master one marketplace before moving on to the next. So like if you are looking at my products, you can find them on Etsy, you can find them on Shopify. Well, my website which is based on Shopify or you can find them on Tik Tok shop. But I started on Shopify actually moved into Tik Tok shop, mastered Tik Tok shop and then now have been expanding and eventually I want to cover every sales channel but just just get your fingers into everything. Exactly. And when people are looking for my products, the main goal is I want them to be able to find them. Right. And so that is very important in terms of reach. But you want to master one platform before going all in on everything at once. So that’s just a great way to probably lose some money and burn out and burn out Yeah. and maybe not see results right away and in turn um probably not meet your goals that that you’re trying to meet. Um but yeah. Okay. So let’s go through each one. First, the one I know best, the one I’m most confident in, Tik Tok shop. Tik Tok shop is the fastest growing marketplace in the world. So I always recommend everyone to get on Tik Tok shop. how Tik Tok shop ads work. It’s different than all the other platforms, which is why I like to start with it because you’re actually not marketing your products on your own. Tik Tok has these cool things called affiliates. These are people that are master salesmen. So, you can hire them for free. All you have to do is get them to promote your products. Now, getting a really good affiliate to promote a product that has zero sales isn’t easy at the beginning, but no matter what, you’re going to be needing content. Okay? Mhm. So with Tik Tok app, you can post content and you can have affiliates posting content for you. This is the only platform where the actual content production piece is not all really on you. Um, but once you have a good content base for a single product, which means an affiliate or yourself posted a video with that product linked to the video, you can now run ads on that product. And when you run ads on that product, it will GMV Max, which is I’m gonna take a step back. GMBB Max is the name for Tik Tok ads inside the platform. So there’s two types of ads on Tik Tok on every platform on every social media. There’s internal ads and external. For Tik Tok, internal ads means you’re driving people to your Tik Tok shop, which means they never have to leave the platform. They just go from Tik Tok to Tik Tok, right? External ads is like what you’d run on Meta where you’re trying to drive people from Tik Tok to your website. Okay, we’re not going to focus on those because when you’re starting out, all you need to know about is GMV Max. Now, GMV Max is the name for internal Tik Tok ads. And what that means is you’re hire you’re basically hiring someone to run your ads for you. Okay, GMV Max is an algorithm. It’s not a person, but it’s really good at running ads to the right people. So once you have that base of content built up for a single product, you can put it in a campaign and then you set a budget and an ROI and you just click go. And what that does is it trains through all the videos that are connected to that product and it figures out which ones are converting the best and then it uses your budget, your money to spend on those high converting videos and in turn drive sales preferably. So that is essentially to me the best way to ensure that you get the best possible result because no matter how smart you are, no matter how well you know the audience that you’re trying to target, you will not be able to be more accurate than a trial and error process. And if this uh algorithm is working for you and taking uh the different uh audiences and giving your content to them and being like okay this one really really works with this specific content piece that is going to be always and forever more accurate than than what you thought might work. Yeah. Exactly. And you’re having a larger bank to train on. Right. So let’s say you are looking for a certain type of person. Let’s just say like not ads wise like you’re literally just searching for a certain type of person. Well, would you rather try to pick one person out of a hat at a time or would you rather look at a giant list of people and then have an algorithm that just narrows it down for you? I think that’s a easy way of kind of learning what GMV Next does. Mhm. Okay, so that’s Tik Tok shop ads. It seems complicated, but Tik Tok has made it really simple because it’s basically like hiring an algorithmic ads manager. Okay, algorithm is a big word. All it means is finding out what’s converting the best and using that to your advantage. Okay. Second, the also the I would say this is the most difficult ads to run and these are meta ads, but they’re the most closely related to Tik Tok. So that’s why I’m going to go into those second. Okay. Meta ads used to be very difficult because you had to choose the type of audience that you wanted to target. I remember those days having to sit there and being like, okay, so I need to know geographically which people I’m thinking about and they live in this specific state or in this specific region of the country and stuff. And then I also need to think about how old they might be and what their interests might be that they have added to Facebook and maybe even and so you have to like does this person have a dog? like, do I want to target people with a dog in like a Midwestern state who live in this area and have this type of income and work this type? That’s like the old metag game. But I think meta ads, I don’t know if they took a job or a like a piece of advice from GM Max. What I really think is this is kind of just where everyone was going. They realized that instead of people choosing, why don’t we let data choose? Mhm. So they introduced something called Andromeda in 2026, which is the year we’re currently in. So there’s all new things. Andromeda is basically the ads manager for Meta. And when I say ads manager, I’m not talking about the platform where you manage your ads. I’m talking about h it’s like hiring a person. It’s an algorithmic ads manager. Okay? And how this works is instead of choosing all those things, you simply choose the product that you’re trying to sell. And there’s a few other levers you can pull. But then Meta goes out and trains on all its consumers. Instead of training on just like different videos targeting people like Tik Tok, it takes the videos you gave it, so the ads you want to run and tries it on all different audiences. Then it chooses the audience that it best represents and optimizes your spend for that audience. So for example, I think a good way to think about it, my brand sells predominantly to males. That’s who it’s targeted at. Um, between the ages of 16 and 30. Okay. Well, what I would what I probably wouldn’t realize if I if I just set it to target males age 16 to 30, one, I wouldn’t capture like in Christmas time, it’s actually not those people often buying things. It’s maybe their grandmas, their mothers, their dads, their sisters. Mhm. So, all those people would be missing out on seeing any of my ads. and that’s an audience I want to capture. So that’s why it’s it’s better for Meta to choose and optimize for you. Okay, so that’s the basics on Meta. So we have Tik Tok and Meta. We have GMV Max and then we have Andromeda. Okay, you don’t need to remember the name Andromeda. Just remember Meta ads. And just know that that’s kind of how they work. Then we have the easiest ads of them all. It’s called Etsy. Etsy ads are one button. You post a listing and you click advertise or not. And there’s like three levels of spending, like how aggressive do you want to be on it? Like minimal spending, enhanced spending, which is just kind of like it optimizes for the most convenient for your budget, or like advanced where I don’t know, it’s like or it’s efficient spending and then just like a lot of spending. So essentially the button is throw money at listing and then the slider is throw a little bit, throw a lot, throw a ton. Exly. Yeah. And the the weird part about that though to not get confused is it’s actually a slider that chooses either throw money or not and then there’s like a drop down list to choose which level of spending you want to do. But in order to conceptualize kind of like is is is Etsy like creating videos and no what an Etsy ad does is it tries to enhance viewership of your product within the app. So Etsy is different because instead of advertising on a social media platform where people are there mostly for entertainment, people go to Etsy to actually buy things. Mhm. So that those are encouraged buyers, right? Those are like consumers that are going somewhere to buy something. So all it’s doing is ranking it higher on that specific search that you set up. So in Etsy, when you’re publishing a listing, you can you can set like the keywords that someone would probably search up in order to find the product that you’re trying to sell. Okay? And let’s say if someone without running any Etsy ads, if someone searches up those product listings, there’s probably people that already have some products with those same keywords. So your your product is going to be on page seven or four. But if you start running Etsy ads, your product then moves up to one or two. And that just makes it easier for people to make it to your product. It ranks higher. It’s like searching on Google. Usually you’re clicking on the first like five links, right? So you’re just competing for those. The decision-m in Etsy is essentially you have to figure out which product to essentially throw money. Exactly. All that matters is choosing a winner and then running ads on it. If you run ads on a loser, you’re just going to be losing money. But you can test it by turning the ads on and just looking at how efficient your spending is. So if your rorowaz, which is return on ad spend, which means for every dollar you spend, how much return in revenue are you making? For example, if I spent if I got a two rorowaz and I was selling a $10 item, every $5 I spent, I would be getting one sale, right? Because for every $5, I’d be making 10. 5 * 2 is 10. That would be a rorowaz of two. That’s a really good rorowaz question mark. No, I would say two is like the worst where I would maybe keep ads running. It depends on your cost of good total. If you’re selling a product that cost you $1 to make and you’re selling it for 10, two is great. Mhm. Right. But if you’re selling a product that cost you four and you’re selling it for $5, two is bad. This is actually going to be a great thing to touch on cuz what I think is uh maybe confusing when you start, even if you can figure out the way that the platform works in terms of ads. Uh the big question very often from people is well, what’s a good metric? Well, how do I know if I’m doing things well? How do I know if my thing is performing? So, uh, you, uh, touched on this a little bit, but we can talk. Yeah, let’s let’s go over let’s go over. Okay, so we let me real quick put a put a wrapper on those three types of ads. Okay, we learned about G&V Max through Tik Tok, Andromeda, which is meta ads, and then we have Etsy ads, which is just the lever on a product that hopefully works. Okay. Now, on all of those, what you’re technically purchasing is the ability to show more people your product and in turn, you’re collecting a bunch of data. So, you’re in a in the long run, you’re just collect you’re buying data, right? And hopefully, you’re making sales, too. But this data shows you how much you have to spend to make a sale on average, who is making your sales, and what products are getting the most activity. Okay. Now, when it comes to metrics, you’re like, “Okay, well, I’m seeing all these numbers. I’m spending all this money. I’m making some sales, but like, is it good? Is it bad?” That’s I think where a lot of people probably here are at in terms of running ads, especially with Etsy when it’s just so easy to turn them on and off, but I don’t know if I’m just wasting money or spending it or whatever. Mhm. My favorite thing to look at is something called cost per order. Okay. Now, all that means is how many dollars it this is different than ROI because it’s based on your order value. So, it’s how many dollars of ads am I spending to make one sale. Okay. Mhm. Now, this is where it gets a little bit confusing because a different number can mean different things to different people based on your cost of goods sold and the price of your product. Okay. So, I’m going to go through this super simply. Now, if you took if you went to business school, words like cost of goods sold are going to be like, I remember that from economics. I remember that from accounting, but I don’t I I don’t know how that applies here. Mhm. We’ll talk through it super simply. So, I’m going to I’m going to lay out a a little story, okay? I’m a little Let’s just Let’s just I’m going to make the numbers easy. I’m selling a product for $10. No, no, no. I’m selling a product for $20. Okay. Okay. It’s It’s $20 price when But whenever someone buys it, I’m using Printull to sell it. Okay. And the shirt costs 10 and then it costs me two more to ship it. Cheap shipping. Cheap shipping. Really cheap. Yeah. So, which is I I find it funny. People very often see like $4 or like $6 in shipping. They’re like, “That is so expensive. That is crazy.” But not you don’t know anything. If you go to your post office, you try to ship one thing, it’s going to cost you like $20. Now, at scale, it should be a little cheaper, but that’s besides the point. Let’s just say it was $2. Okay. $20 to buy a product, $10 to print, package it, $2 to ship. Mhm. So, we’ve spent a total of $12 if my math is correct, and we’ve received a total of 20. Now, this isn’t considering things like fees on platforms and all that. Those have to be added to the $12. Okay? So, let’s say let’s just add that in. So you so you can really build a list. If I was taking notes here, I would be making a list. I have my cost of item. Mhm. 10. I have my shipping two and I have my fees one. Okay. So now $13 I have spent just to get the get somebody my product that ordered it. But they paid me 20, which means I made $7. Now if we want to run ads, that is just another expense that we’re adding in, but hopefully at scale. So we’re selling more products to make up for that, right? Mhm. So, if we spend more than that $7 profit, we’re actually losing money. We’re paying Meta, we’re paying Tik Tok or we’re paying Etsy to give people shirts at that point. We do not want to do that. We want to make money because we are the one selling a product. Okay? So, you need to your cost per order in this scenario needs to be less than $7 just to break even. Now they’re they’re paying us $20, right? So I’m going to now I’m going to move from cost per order back to ROI. Okay, cost per order rorowaz or ROI is the every dollar you spend for dollars you receive. Cost per order is every dollar you spend to get one order. Okay, if you’re looking at it in an ROI perspective, and I know this seems complicated, but I promise you this is as simple as you can understand it. And once you understand these two things, you can run ads and you can collect the data. If you’re selling a product for $20 and it’s going to cost you 13 to actually print, package, and ship it with fees and everything, that means that if you have a two ROI, you’re spending $10 per sale because $10 time 2 is 20. And that’s your return, right? That’s your return on ad spend or your return on investment. So that would would mean you lost money because you spent 10 but you were only making seven. Yes. Now if your ROI was five, that means you only spent $4 on advertising per per sale. And that would mean that you are still profiting $3. Okay? Right? Because out of that seven of profit, we lost four of it for ads. Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, I only had $7 of profit and now I only have three. Like, why would I even want to run ads? Well, here’s why. Number one, if you sell one shirt and you profit $7, that’s great. Mhm. But if you sell 5,000 shirts and you profit $3, you profit 15,000. Okay. Ads are fuel. Fuel costs money. It’s not free, but it makes a car go, right? It also can make a flame. You probably heard this analogy a lot today. I don’t know. It’s been being said in some of the other things, but if your product already has momentum, right? We don’t want to run ads on products that aren’t going to sell. Mhm. That’s like pouring gas on the ground with no spark. That makes things wet. Okay. If your product does have momentum, it has a spark. If you pour gas on even a spark, it will create something hot and big and that can spread like wildfire. Mhm. Right? And that’s the difference is you’re hoping to scale a product that you know can be successful from even though you’re going to make less per product, you’re going to make way more if you can scale this product to a lot of sales. So that’s that’s that’s the idea behind running ads. Mhm. It’s getting your products in front of more people. That’s a really long way of explaining it, but I hope that was good. That that was quite good at least uh to me because I uh very often when I think of ads my immediate fear is oh no I’ll choose wrong it’s going to be a waste of money or I will think that this was the good choice and then it turns out that that I was reading the metrics wrong and actually with my um you know cost of uh product yeah compared to the profit that I’m gaining this is actually not great and I’m losing money. That that has always been like a worry in my head. And it’s hard because you’re like, especially when you are a little bit unknown. You don’t want to start spending money and not know if you’re profiting or not. But I will reassure you with this. Let’s say, okay, I found out that it costs me $5 to sell one of these shirts on average after I’ve spent maybe $100 on ads. I’ve made 20 sales. So, it’s costing me $5 per sale, right? Yeah. Well, not only just because you you sold it for five, which means you’re only profiting $2. Well, maybe you think to yourself, okay, what if I sold my product for $25? Mhm. Okay, so now I just went from profiting two to profiting seven again, but I’m probably going to cost a little bit more per sale because not everybody willing to pay 20 is willing to pay 25. So, just because a product, even if it’s working, but not to the degree where you think it’s worth it to run ads, there are other things you can change like raising your prices or offering a different offer. Maybe you’re offering like um a bundle type offer where when you buy one, you get one for 25% off. Well, now it cost you maybe still that $5 to get one order, but half your orders, people are actually buying two shirts. And that second shirt basically cost zero for you to sell in terms of ad spend because people were already buying that other one. Does that make sense? Yeah. Um, so anyways, I would say like yes, it’s scary to start, but you can start with a low budget and there are ways to control your spending in a way to limit losses while still giving yourself a chance to maximize sales. Yeah. And uh what I want to kind of remind everyone of is in these types of things there’s when I I was a like finance and econ major and I have a lot of um disdain and annoyance for for a lot of my peers back in the day because it seemed like the only way to really get into anything business related was to be in the IN club and know what every acronym means. and stuff. So, if you’re that when you get into business, you start hearing every threeletter acronym in the book. Yes. And pretty soon you’re just like, is this just business jargon that people are just saying to make me feel dumb? Sometimes it truly is. It literally is sometimes. And I promise it’s really not that complicated. Uh if you start hearing things like cogs and evida and whatever, ju literally open up Google, type it in, it’s going to tell you that it’s actually a very simple concept and you’re going to be fine. just as as a genuine promise. It’s people over complicate it. It actually isn’t really that hard. But while we still have the time, another thing that I really want to pick your brain about is add visuals. Because yes, you got to pick a winner, but you also got to make sure that that winner isn’t just a good product with a terrible image that you’re just trying to push and for some reason it’s not working. What are some ways that we can make sure that the visuals of the ads that we are pushing are actually helping us and not hindering us? So on Etsy, the only ad you have is your mockup, right? So having a really strong mockup for your target audience is really important. For me, if I’m trying to sell products to my target demographic of males age 16 to 30, I probably don’t want my product on a woman age 45, right? because not a lot of people my age want to wear the same thing as their mom or that’s sometimes I mean I do personally I do personally but I think that might be not the best way to optimize your listing. Okay. So all that matters on Etsy is your like keywords and your mockups. Mhm. Easy enough I think as long as you have a clearly visible product. If you have words like you need to be able to read the word when the product is tiny because when you’re scrolling on your phone and there’s four products on your phone that’s like a one by one in square. So you need a very clear high contrast image. Okay, that’s the easiest one. My favorite one is Tik Tok shop and that’s because you’re not the only one creating your ads. Your ads are simply just content from affiliates. You can be your own own affiliate or you can have affiliates making content for you. And the great, sorry I got the hiccups. The great part is that if you have a ton of affiliates making content for you, you will start seeing what works. And when you have something that works, you can message these affiliates and say, “Hey, look at this one that is working. Why don’t we all start making this exact type of ad?” And I think that’s how you scale on Tik Tok shop, right? It’s making content as a ad. Yes. I just wanted to highlight a small question that we had right here which I think is super helpful cuz I’m not someone who’s ever sold on Tik Tok shop. Uh the question uh from Breida I Grace I I guess or Brada uh how do you contact the affiliates to promote for you? I’m actually gonna pull out my phone and contact an affiliate right now if that’s okay. Is that okay? I don’t It is okay. I can actually if you want to like hold it up down here, I will have a top down camera. You know, I think it’s easier if I just hold it towards the camera like this. Okay. Yeah. All right. Like literally, I do this on like calls all the time. Like if I’m doing a call with someone and I’m teaching them exactly. Okay. I want everyone in the chat to comment a niche of like a t-shirt that they want to sell. So like maybe you’re selling political t-shirts or you’re selling beach t-shirts or you’re selling holiday t-shirts. Get in the comments. Comment comment one. The first one I see, I’m going to be finding an affiliate for that niche. Tick tock. Tick tock. If not, I’m going to give it 5 seconds and I’m just going to Oh, someone surfing. Someone surfing. Yeah. Yeah. Camping. Okay. Very good niche. Camping. So, I think for camping, you’d want to find anyone in like someone that promotes like wildlife, nature. I would say that’s all in the same genre. Mhm. So, what I’m going to do is the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to go to Okay, look at this. There’s literally affiliates just popping up on my thing right away. But I’m going to go to just regular Tik Tok and then I’m going to click Oh, they don’t have shop in Lvia. So, this actually isn’t really going to work. Yeah. But let’s say that like up top there’s usually shop, right? So, then I’m going to in the shop search camping shirts, which I’m going to do right now. And the videos will still pop up for me just a bit. You can hold it maybe up right here. The first very th Okay. Yeah. Oh, that was perfect. That’s so cool. Holy cow. We got to utilize this, I guess. Yeah. So, look it. The first thing that came up is a camping shirt. It’s kind of hard to see. I’m g turn down my brightness so you can see it better. Do you see this shirt right here? It’s a camping shirt. If I click on it, I’m like, “Oh, okay. Poppy Design posts camping shirts.” Now, if you’re in the US, you can there’s going to be a see how it says p promotional content. That means that in the US it is a shoppable video. Okay. So, what you do is you click on that little orange cart and it will take you to the product listing page. Okay. So, now you want to start a brand in camping niche. You found a competitor’s camping shirt and it’s being promoted on Tik Tok shop. If you scroll down, there will be content spotlight. It’ll say something like that. Content spotlight or um creator videos, something like that. And there will be all the top videos promoting that exact shirt. Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “This is people promoting other people’s shirt that’s actually a competitor to me. How does that help me?” Well, you can click on that content just like it’s a normal video, and you can then click on that creator. Now, when you have clicked on that creator, you have found an affiliate that already promotes similar products to yours and is clearly a successful affiliate because it’s one of the top five or 10 videos promoting this product. It’s a perfect discovery engine. Yeah, literally this is like how I started out finding affiliates. Then it’s all up to you to convince them that your shirt can sell just as much as these other ones that they’ve already had success with. So I would say something like this. Hi blank whatever their name is. I really like your video about said camping shirt. Okay. I noticed that your video got a ton of likes and views. you must have made a bunch of money off that video because that’s what affiliates do. When they get a lot of likes and views, that means they’re also getting a lot of sales. If there’s a product connected to it, then I would say, I am blank. Who was that? Ariel. My name’s Ariel and I’m starting my own clothing business around camping. I have a similar product that I think people will actually even like better. And I am offering the exact same, if not better, commission than the one you were promoting. Mhm. I would love for you to request a free sample so that I can send you a free shirt. All you did was show them that how they made money. You can help them make money again and then offer them something for free. I don’t think that’s that hard to acquire an affiliate that way. Especially because that was your first try. You could do that 25 times a day for a whole week. You have two 175. My math is right. You would have 175 affiliates reach out to you. And if you could get five, well, that’s enough to start your sales team and launch your product. And this is a fair like a fair question if you never encounter the concept, but they essentially get a commission off of whatever sales that they do. And you don’t have to do anything. Tik Tok does all of this for you. So, if an affiliate sells one of your products and you have a 15% commission, whatever the customer paid, 15% of that will just be sent to whoever posted that video for you right away from Tik Tok and you will receive the rest. But that money that they received is actually profit for that affiliate and it encourages them to make more videos promoting your content. And when they sold a video or sold a product, they sold your product, which means you sold a product, which means you made money and you didn’t pay them until you made money. So that’s why affiliate marketing is so great. There’s no risk. The only risk is the cost of sending them a free shirt, which is probably around $12. Yeah. And at that point, because you’re not really sending them the item at the price, like the retail price that you would be using on your store, it is just the cost of that that what we talked about good sold. Exactly. Not COGS. That’s for business jargon people. Cost of goods sold. Yeah. It’s just whatever it cost you to make the product is the only thing it costs you to acquire a new salesman. Imagine if in like some other business like an insurance company where they only had to acquire a new salesman for $12. Mhm. Where in insurance they have so many salesmen and they have to train them and keep them in their office and feed them dinner when they stay late. That costs hundreds of dollars every day, right? Oh god, how dare they have employees? That’s so so so expensive. What I genuinely think is so much because this is a great uh point as well from Justin here. You’re paying for their popularity. Exactly. And you also don’t have to acquire that popularity yourself. So the two other options would be just what you said right now to have employees who are doing this thing for you and being salesmen for you or you have to then build popularity on your own and get all of those likes and and follows yourself. And I I I want to add something too. Mhm. The cool thing about Tik Tok is it’s actually not social media. Okay. I don’t know if you’ve heard someone say this before, but this is something that I think a lot of people get wrong. A lot of people look at Instagram reels and Tik Tok and say, “Oh, that’s social media.” Yeah. It’s not. It’s called interest media. Social media is Instagram and Facebook where when you post something, all your followers see it, which means your mom’s commenting on it, maybe your friends are liking it, and all your followers saw it, and you get to see everyone you follow, and you like and comment on their stuff. That’s being social within media. Okay? That’s how social media was made. Interest media means when you post something, whether you have zero followers or 100,000 followers, it goes to two to 300 people. This is how the algorithm works within Instagram, reels, and Tik Tok. And based on how those first two to 300 people see and react to your video, it can be sent to 200 to 300 more. Okay? So, take advantage of that algorithm. So, yes. And what what I’m saying is even if you have an affiliate that doesn’t have 100,000 followers, they’re just a a lower tier affiliate that has a lot less followers, they have the same chance at going viral. I have a ton of affiliates. I used to only have like 1,000 followers, but I have a ton of affiliates that are don’t have 100,000 followers. They have less followers than me, but they make a ton of sales because they’re good at selling a product. That’s their job, right? And so, it’s not always about buying their popularity. It’s just recruiting a new salesman. And uh to kind of like cap off this discussion about visuals, we did talk about uh Etsy listing tips, we did talk about Tik Tok and then dived into affiliates. But for meta specifically, what would be your tips on making sure that the visual is as good as it could get? Okay, meta ads actually work with a stagnant visual just like Etsy if you want. So, you can run something called a catalog ad, which basically is just all the pictures of your mockups, and it’s it’s showing them as an ad. When you’re scrolling on Instagram, you probably have seen those ads before where it’s just like the literal product that they want you to buy. Yeah. Then there’s others types of ads where it’s much like Tik Tok where you it’s someone like promoting a product and it’s up to you to like see how much they like it and then you go to the website and buy it. Um, and if you have like Tik Tok affiliates making you content, you can actually use that content or use that content for your meta ads as well. Like you can take that content over from Tik Tok and run it as a meta ad if it’s really good. Um, that one is a little bit more discretionoriented. I think it’s not as straightforward because it’s up to you to choose what you think your audience would like. But I think starting with a catalog ad is honestly great. Yeah. Uh, and I kind of want to pull up something to take a look at just so we can um maybe point people in a direction of how to figure out what types of visuals they should be looking at. Uh, you you brought this to my attention previously. I hadn’t seen this page in in I want to say years. Could you actually show them how to just like how easy it is to look it up on Google first? Yes. Like I think that is something that’s really really strong. But what she’s going to bring up, which I’m going to talk about here for a second, is I said it’s up to your discretion based on like who you’re trying to sell to, right? On like what type of content you should use in your meta ads in order to make sales. Well, luckily for you, there are giant companies out there already that are using meta ads and you can just steal exactly what’s working for them. So, if you just search up meta ads library, there it is. Boom. This is a public and you click ad library. It shows under Facebook and this is a public display of every ad running on Facebook which is meta, right? Mhm. You So if we change it to the US, I guess probably much better. Does anyone in the chat have any like clothing brand that they like or maybe have taken inspiration from in the past or one that they know they have really good marketing that maybe they’d want to use. Um if not I can go through some of the ones that I like which I think might be easier. But we at first we’ll just look at one that I like and if you have one that you are like I love Patagonia cuz it’s like camping. Let’s look up Patagonia. Okay. Cuz we’re going to stay on this this camping theme. Now, Patagonia is a huge clothing brand. Okay. Well, the problem with Patagonia is it’s all I don’t know. I know. I know. I know what’s going to happen this way. Okay. Show us. Um, if you look up, if you see how it’s like all these different countries. Yeah. Um, this is like Patagonia’s like uh it’s a little too big at this point. Yeah, it’s so they have so these are all their ad accounts. So, they have so many. Is there Can we find the US one? It might be because we’re in lobby. I don’t know if we can. France, Italy, Ireland, then other locations. Uh if not, yeah, let’s go for a slightly smaller brand because we’re not in the US right now. Yeah, let’s look look up Scuffers. Okay, this is one where I really like how Scuffers uses influencers and markets their products and I try to kind of mirror some of these strategies. Now, Scuffers is huge. They I don’t they do tens of millions of dollars every single year when it comes to making sales on their exact website. Okay, if you scroll on here, every single one of these is an ad. So like this is literally a catalog ad for Can I click accept? Yes. This is a catalog ad for this hoodie, right? So if I go like this and I go back, that’s literally what this is. Okay. If I keep scrolling, you’re going to see both photos and videos. Okay? Like some of these are just literally full catalog images of what their new drops are. They have things on the ground. But if we look here, this bag that they’re selling, it’s literally just on concrete, which I feel like is kind of aesthetic, like when it has like that like clean concrete look like in a garage that has good lighting. It sells the idea of street style. Exactly. It sells the streetear style and it shows kind of the ruggedness and like like because the the the concrete too is so like you’re not used to seeing products on concrete. I think it has like a extra visual hook and appeal to it. But think about how simple this is. All it says is Scuffers and the name of their product and that’s their like font that they like to use, right? And it’s just literally a a slow zoom in of their bag. Okay. Now, is how you’re probably thinking to yourself, why is he showing us pictures of bags on the ground? Because clearly, if it’s this far up on their meta ads library, I mean, they have thousands of ads, right? Mhm. It’s working. Okay. They’re putting ad spend behind it. And if they’re putting ad spend behind it, that means it’s making sales. So, you could copy this exact same strategy. You could find a piece of concrete just like this and you could put your product, whether it’s a t-shirt, a hoodie, a hat, sunglasses, whatever you’re selling. Mhm. And use the same strategy with a sound and a zoom in of just a lay flat image and it would probably work. It’s a great idea at least to start for making ads. Or maybe you wanted like just wear your product like this. Well, this this video shows exactly how I would hold the camera. maybe the type of lighting I would stand in, how I would make cuts on the video to keep the viewer engaged. All these are just free sauce on what type of ads to make for clothing brands. And you’re trying to start a clothing brand most likely if you’re on Printful or at least some sort of consumer packaged item, whether it’s bags or mugs or whatever. But and if you’re selling mugs, maybe you look up like a mug brand you like or something. I don’t know. But if you’re if you’re confused, I think what this boils down to, if you’re confused on what type of content do I want to promote using meta, the first place I would start is the meta ads library. That is a fantastic tip in my opinion. And also uh what we saw there is a great display. I’m actually going to share this one more time just to show you guys. Uh a great display of everything coming together. You see the specific identity within the types of products that they’re selling. uh you see the types of videos and photos that you could create with KD after you’ve designed something, you could create those mockups. You see the as always with love at the uh end of every single thing as a clearly uh idea behind the brand and the way that they’re trying to promote it. And then towards the very end, they’re taking all of that, putting that together and putting that into advertising. And clearly because they’ve gone through the entire process and they’ve done every single step of this, they have a brand, they have an idea, they have designs, they have mockups. All of that comes together and through advertising, they’re able to promote it to exactly the right people who they know are going to enjoy it. Exactly. We are kind of running out of time, so the very very last thing we’re going to do is a little giveaway uh and and then say a massive thank you to people. So, as the very last possible giveaway time, one of you that is going to type into the chat in the next moments uh is uh going to receive people commenting is just down below, I think. Oh, no, no, no. Uh the uh the people in the chat throughout today’s session are all eligible to get a $50 coupon that you can spend on Amplified merch. We’ve made so much cool merch and we really want people to have it. Our designers work very hard on the designs. Uh so uh you will be able to use uh that 50 dark coupon and walk. All these great comments. Love the train. Loving. Wow. Yes. Uh I’m so glad that you guys enjoyed your time today and uh in general. This has been so packed with info. I know that uh some people joined only during this session. So, you’ll be able to see the entire replay both on the community and on YouTube. If you’re still on YouTube, even after all this is done, you can go and you can join the community and you’ll learn a bunch of great stuff from there as well. Thank you, Levi, so much for teaching us so much. I most of this stuff about ads I didn’t know myself at all. So, this has been an absolute blessing. Thank you guys for spending so much time with us today. Whether you joined 5 minutes ago or 6 hours ago, that is amazing. Wow. This feels like it’s been days. Yes, it’s it’s been a while. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go uh and uh take a a big sip of water. Uh and you know, if you are spending time in here, it means you guys are ready. Mhm. So, what we’ve been saying all day, take that next step into your POD journey into your journey with Fredful. And I wish you guys the best of luck. And who knows, maybe you’ll change your life exactly like I did. Yeah, maybe maybe next year it’s going to be you sitting next to me and talking to everyone. Probably. So, thank you guys. Bye-bye.

We are live. Hello and welcome to Amplified 2026, the biggest event in the world for print ondemand sellers. I’m Adrien Vonarchs. I’m Michaela Paluso. And we are so excited to have you guys here. We have an action-packed event with unfiltered advice. There is no gatekeeping. Everyone has a seat at this table. Thank you for being here. and Michaela, why don’t you tell them what they have in store? Absolutely. There’s so much good stuff this year. I’m so happy to be back at Amplified this year. And to give you a taste of what’s going on, we have two different streams that you can check out. We have a beginner friendly workshop that’s perfect for people that are getting into print on demand. And we also have some discussion panels on a stage right behind us where Adrian and I will be interviewing some incredible sellers. That’s definitely something to look forward to. And if you want to participate today during the chat and to enter giveaways, make sure that you click the link. There will be one in the chat for you and in the description so that you can be a part of all the good things and goodies that we have to offer today. Awesome. And maybe we should do a giveaway right now. What do you think? I think that sounds like a great idea. Okay. So, if you’re not signed up yet, go ahead and grab that link in the chat or the description, wherever it is that you’re at, and start entering in that first giveaway. Awesome. I will announce those winners shortly, but I know you have a panel you need to prepare for. So, why don’t I let you go prepare? Cool. Yeah. All right. Well, have fun. I’ll see you soon. Okay. Thank you. And you guys can come with me. I’m going to take you on a behindthecenes tour. This is going to be so much fun. I want you guys to feel the energy in the room here behind the scenes with all these incredible speakers coming from all over the world. And I’m curious where you’re coming in from. Let me know. light up that chat and let me know where you’re coming in from. I’d love to know. I’m sure we have a very international crowd of viewers here. So, follow me, guys. And I’m going to give you a little sneak peek behind the scenes. So, here we are in the green room. And uh there’s some blindfolds here, which I was not aware of. Uh are these supposed to be here? Uh okay. Well, we’re just going to leave that. Come on with me, guys. We have some very comfortable couches here. All these speakers not saying anything and uh trying to act really natural right now. So, here we have this amazing setup right here. It’s so chill. You’ve got Jay, you probably recognize him. Riley, you probably recognize him. Michael, everyone is in the house today. I’m so excited for you to meet them. I’m going to talk to them shortly, but I just want to show you guys back here. This is the kind of like the end of the green room. We’ve got hair and makeup right here. People working hard over here, or at least looking like it. So, let’s go chat with some of the guests that uh we’re going to be hearing from today on the panels. So, Jay, come on over. This is Jay Duza. You probably recognize him from YouTube. He is a graphic design whiz, multiple sevenfigure seller. Jay, you’re here back for the second time. What are you most excited to discuss today? Uh, I’m just excited to be here and kind of hopefully help remove like the mental roadblocks with people wondering if they should get in POD because we are just regular people and anybody can do this stuff. So, I’m hoping that we can get, you know, more people interested. I love that. I love that. And what’s one tip that you would give someone who is ready to level up? Someone who’s like they’re starting, they want to get to their first sale, first thousand in sales. like something that you experienced that was like a real pivot point for you in your journey. Wow. It’s a bit of a slap in the face there, but it’s not always about you. So, it’s, you know, do some research and figure out what the market actually wants and don’t think just because you think it’s cool or your parents or your family or friends think it’s cool that it’ll actually sell. I 100% agree. Databacked is the way. Intuition is great, but data always wins. Thank you. I’m with you right there, Riley. Come on over. We have Riley here. She started POD in college and has built a brand to multiple six figures. Riley, what are you most excited to discuss today? I’m really excited to talk about Tik Tok. I’ve been selling on Etsy for four years, and as much as I love Etsy, Tik Tok’s currently like my ADHD hyperfocus. So, I just started in April, but I’ve already seen some success. So, I’m really excited to tell new merchants and even existing merchants the potential that Tik Tok has. I’m so excited for that. I’m actually going to lead you the panel with her and she knows herself already. Very, very impressive. So, uh, thank you so much. Let’s go talk to one more individual, John aka Tick tock Whiz. John did $2 million in sales in his first 24 months. He is literally a Tik Tok whiz. John, what are you most excited to discuss today? I’m overall just really excited to be here and I think obviously we’ll talk a lot about Tik Tok shop just mostly Q4 too just the holidays Christmas Thanksgiving Black Friday Cyber Monday a lot of opportunity for a lot of people to take advantage of it. Totally biggest sales season of the entire year. I mean there’s a massive demand spike in the fourth quarter. So hopefully you all get to take advantage of that and you have a lot of Q4 success. If not though, that’s okay too because winners win all year round. Don’t worry about it if you don’t have a winning design or you’re not making a lot of sales. You can win all year round. So, I want to know you made $2 million in 24 months, which is insane. Uh I want to know like what was like the level up point? Like at what point did you go from like I’m totally new to this. I’ve made zero sales or not many sales and all of a sudden it’s like boom just like it was really like when I started applying myself like going all in being like I want to make this my next life. I want to go all in on this, change me and my family’s life. And once I commit my everything every single day to my passion of just growing my business and just wanting to learn and educate myself, just like all the viewers out there, that’s one of the most biggest difference. I I love that advice. You know, it’s it’s humbling to hear advice from individuals like yourselves that had quite a bit success of success quite quickly. And you know, but you started where everyone else did. Like we all started at zero. And I think that that’s important for people to know. And you know, it’s funny too, like have no illusions that it’s easy and you know, now it’s like a smooth ride. It’s never like that, but that’s e-commerce. Like you’re here because you have the entrepreneur entrepreneurial spirit and you’re like down for the ride, right? So, thank you so much. Uh, I’m excited to talk to you in a panel. We have a couple panels. We do. I’m I’m pumped. Thank you very much. All right. I think we have time to talk to one more individual. Michael, I see you there on your phone. Get off your phone. trying to he’s he’s trying to act too busy for me to talk to. I see what you’re trying to do. Very clever. It’s not gonna work. I’m just keeping up with you. Oh, sure. Check checking me alive, right? All right. What are you most excited to discuss today? You are like a graphic design guru, kind of like Jay. So, what are you most excited to discuss today? I think we’re going to talk about uh AI stuff, which is good. That’s a controversial topic, so there’s lots to get into there. We’re going to talk about design skills in general and what a lot of people miss and maybe some of the stuff that experienced designers can uh can help newbies understand so that they don’t go in completely blind and get disappointed and some of the basics. So, we’ll cover that. Yeah, that’s awesome. And what I like about your experience with AI, like you’re I feel like you’re like a AI veteran. You know your stuff. You’ve even created software. We’re going to talk about that on a panel. Uh, but this is like I mean, you know, I feel like AI it’s like the wild wild west right now. There’s like a lot of AI slop. We we got to we we got to call that out. And uh but like there’s a lot of ways that AI can save us time and make us more sales, right? So I want to know for you for you or your students like what is a big level up point that you could share like a quick tip if someone’s brand new, if they haven’t made a sale yet, if maybe they haven’t started yet or maybe they’re trying to get their first sale and they’re working really hard. We all know what that’s like. Um, what would you say is like a level up tip where someone kind of goes to like another level? Yeah, I think you you’ve got to really just think about who you’re selling to. And if you’ve got an an idea that really resonates with you, that makes you laugh, that you really think should be out there in the world, then that was the thing for me that that broke through. And yeah, it I appreciate looking at trends and looking at what’s happening. But often times I think if you’ve got an idea that really matters to you, that makes you laugh that that really connects with a subject that you know about, then that’s a really great starting point. Yeah, it’s funny you say that because a lot of winning designs that I see, they are funny and relatable. They’re funny and relatable to a specific segment of people, a specific niche, right? And so like I think about Jay for example, he made a really good point. He’s like, “Oh, a level up point is like using data to uh predict, you know, demand essentially.” And I’ve always thought that too. Like I said earlier, intuition is great, but data always wins. Like I had my most success when I actually stopped creating designs for me uh just for me. I mean, I know you’re talking about, you know, for you, but also that has mass appeal and started creating mass appeal that was backed by data. It significantly increases likelihood that someone’s going to buy. It evokes emotion and relatability for a certain individual, a certain target audience. And usually passion plus products equals profit. So, uh, thank you so much for being on the panel, um, for being on the panels. And thank you for talking to me. I, uh, you can go back on your phone now. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Well, you heard it here, guys. So many amazing panelists. This is just like a like cherrypicked group of panelists. There’s only a couple of them that we got to talk to. Uh there’s some panelists coming up right now that you’re going to get to see some really impressive stuff. Levi made $700,000 in sales from his college dorm room and he’s just like one of all the other panelists. Sarah 1% Etsy seller. You’re about to hear from everyone. So I’m going to send it over to the first panel on winning the holidays. Mac, over to you.

Hi everyone and welcome to our first discussion on the discussion stage here. How to win the holiday season and I’m here with some incredible sellers. I’m here with Sarah Cops. Oh my gosh, Crystal Lee and Levi Younger and we’re going to be talking about all the things for the holiday season on how you can start and make more sales. We’re going to jump right into it and just get into all the good stuff for the holiday season. So, for someone heading into their first Q4, I’d love to talk about what do you think they should be doing now to prepare because I think you can never fully be prepared for all the sales and the traffic that you’re going to be getting and hopefully more traffic as well. So, Levi, is there something that you do to get more traffic? Yeah. Um, I sell predominantly on Tik Tok shop. So, preparing for Q4 is a little bit different because it’s not about just creating the products you’re getting ready to sell on Q4. also about strategi strategizing your content. And what that means is for every product you post on Tik Tok, the goal is to have a base of content that you and your affiliates are posting that you can then go and promote. So making sure that you’re already starting coordinating with those affiliates for those products that you’re going to want to be selling in Q4 is a huge deal. Absolutely. Crystal, what about you? Is there something you do to prepare? Man, first you got to figure out if you’re going to jump in cuz it’s going to be crazy. And then you have to make sure are you going to sell certain items? How long is it going to take for those people to get those items? Right? Do you know whether or not your people actually want them? I think a lot of times for Q4, we’re only focused on making money and we don’t think about like do my customers actually want these items. Is this going to be my heavy hitter or do I need to like focus in on just one product? Absolutely. Yeah. Sarah, what do you think? Is there something you do that that you do for preparing? Yeah, I think it’s important, especially if this is your first Q4, to spend the time preparing your kind of customer service and operations backend so that if you luckily do get an influx of orders, you’re prepared. Um, some may already, at least on Etsy, you know, have those canned, pre-prepared messages, but you can add the holidays to to that. you know, add the deadlines of when you’re going to um send when your customers need to order in order to receive their gifts by a certain holiday. And having that ready before Q4 starts can be helpful so you can continue to, you know, work within your business and list more products. Absolutely. Is that something that you would say you prepare a good amount ahead of time? Like would you say people should be doing that now, especially on something like Etsy? Yeah, I definitely do. I think if you can kind of feel organized with all of that before the influx of orders begins, then you’re in a better spot. Yeah. That way when they expect their items, it’s not like having them waiting. It’s all there. All of the delays too that you know can happen with just shipping and items and the influx of orders. For sure. Something too that you need to look out for on Tik Tok shops specifically is it’s not just about shipping um and creating those products. It’s also about making sure those products are within Tik Tok’s guidelines. One of the things I fell into is sometimes you can’t really control it and Tik Tok kind of has a mind of its own. But if your products are well within those guidelines and the way you’re promoting them, also making sure you’re keeping people on platform, you’re not trying to or falsely, you don’t want TikTok thinking you’re trying to bring people like to a personal website or your Etsy store or your Shopify. All those things matter because if you do get a product taken down or you have to fight some of those appeals, that is really valuable time, especially the closer and closer you get to those deadlines. Absolutely. That’s a great point too, especially for Tik Tok shop sellers, just knowing and keeping in mind, too. And for Shopify, would you say it’s similar or it’s a little bit different because you’re not dealing with like Tik Tok shops like rules, right? But for Shopify, obviously, you have to get the people there. So, it’s really like are you prepared for that? Do you have your mailing list ready? Do you have your text list ready? How are you going to reach these people outside of just social media? You have the Levis’s dominating on Tik Tok shop, right? So, how are you going to stand out to make sure people are seeing what you’re offering, what you have available, and how long it’s going to take to get to people? Because I think we can all agree that you’re going up against these heavy hititterter companies. How long is it going to take for people to get your products? Yeah, for sure. And when being prepared for Q4, I think that a big question that comes next for a lot of sellers is what products should we be focusing on? Yeah, I know my first year selling, I really just thought if I listed a bunch of random holiday products on my store that like that was going to be, oh my gosh, my store is going to take off, which it can, but it’s not necessarily a long-term strategy for your actual business, especially for me on Etsy. I know it’s different across platforms. I’m curious if you tend to focus on products and designs that are working and then maybe implementing the holidays or if you yourself do just add different products for the holidays. on themselves. Sarah, is that something you do with designs or Yeah, I I do like to add holiday designs when I can, but not 100%. So, as I’m preparing for Q4, I still want to make sure that I have some of those more evergreen designs. I think it’s helpful for beginner sellers to think about what you purchase for family and friends for the holidays yourself and how much of that is, you know, evergreen versus specifically a seasonal thing and kind of understanding what audience you’re you’re selling to. So, yes, I do um do both, you know, holiday and evergreen designs. When it comes to product, I always recommend to stick with, you know, kind of mastering one product before adding more. Just because it’s Q4, if you haven’t yet gain those consistent daily sales, I wouldn’t say just add a product to to add a product. Um, it’s better to kind of stay and in on track and continue to gain moment momentum with that one product before adding more. That’s a great point. Yeah. And how about for Shopify? I know you have a a pretty good like niche and brand that you work with. So, is that something that you do as well for designing or adding new products? Oh, I’m going crazy. Love to hear that. Okay. I know what my audience wants, right? And I’ve been listening all year, so I might have the red and green for, you know, for Christmas. I’m going to go all the way in. I’m going to do 12 days of Christmas, right? It’s print on demand. So, I want to have fun and if I don’t have to go buy those products, I’m going to experiment. So that means the product may be available like one day go buy it it’s a phone case next day it might be a bag next day it might be a mug next day it might be a hat right I didn’t have to go stock those things so I’m going to provide the women that I serve with everything you have asked me for if you want to see girl plus God on it here you go for the holidays right but that’s because I have an established like community so I think if you have been selling you can have fun for the holiday season I agree with Sarah though if you’re brand new maybe lock in on one good thing that you can sell because again it’s Shopify. You’re sending people there. So make sure that they want what you have to offer. Absolutely. I think when I great advice for somebody that already has like their store established for both of you because I think with a newer shop, it can be overwhelming really quickly. And I also think that that’s something that gets people totally off track and off focus and then they start doing like a hundred things and it’s like oh slow down just like really hone in and focus on one thing. I’m curious about Tik Tok shop too of what your perspective is. I think Tik Tok shop is a little bit different for a couple reasons. I think the first thing to keep in mind though, print on demand is special in that you can take as many shots on goal as you want without very much you don’t have to really pay for anything, right? They’re it’s a riskless investment um for the most part. But you actually on Tik Tok shop aren’t really rewarded for a ton of listings on your shop. You’re more rewarded for a larger bank of content promoting those. The other thing to look at is who you’re selling to. Kind of like what Crystal mentioned. For me, I’m not selling to the people that are buying a lot of Christmas decorations. The my target audience isn’t necessarily circling um like Christmas apparel in the catalog that they want for for Christmas under the tree. They want whatever they’ve been wanting for the last 6 months, right? So, for me, it’s focusing on what are things that apply to the time of year when people are asking for it. whether that be hoodies, long sleeves, t-shirts, crew necks that already fit the niche that that I’m providing for. Um, and I think that’s like what I’m sticking to. And then how can you market that specifically for the time of year? So, I think instead of like on Etsy where you focus on Christmas listings or holiday listings or Thanksgiving, uh, Halloween, whatever the Q4 occasion might be, with Tik Tok, it’s we already have these products that are doing well. How can we fit these into that Halloween content, right? Like, how can we make this like this is what you should wear to blank? And I think that’s the way of looking at it on Tik Tok shop is how are you going to apply your products to this time of year. So almost like if you’re because I’m assuming a lot of the ways for sales for you comes from video content or photo content. So it’s kind of like even if there’s something you sell maybe just making content that’s around or focused on the holiday that you’re trying to ramp up for. And the other thing to keep in mind with Tik Tok is you’re not the only one selling your product. Especially like that’s the goal for Tik Tok shop is to create an army of affiliates that are promoting your products for you. So they already know the tactics that Q4 happened. Their their job is to be a salesman for you. But your products need to be able to apply to hey like get this for your son for Christmas, get this for your brother for Christmas right there. Like that’s two scripts that can go out to every one of your affiliates. So I think it’s more of a creative brief than like a change in strategy I would say. Absolutely. Levi, you got me ready to jump over, you know. Right. Tik Tok. The most exciting place to be. There’s so much opportunity on Tik Tok shop especially I think with Q4 too and like how much time people spend on their phones. I think it’s like probably a lot. I think something I want to add on that. Um when I was little lur um there there we used to like wake up early on Black Friday and we like my mom wouldn’t even let us go Black Friday shopping cuz it was dangerous like all these moms and dads are trying to like break down the walls to to get the best deals. I went Black Friday shopping a year or two ago with my grandma and I was like there is nobody here. you know where they are on their couch looking at Tik Tok. And I think that retail side of things has fallen onto us as ecom sellers, which I think is like such an exciting time to be online. But positioning yourself to be able to take on that demand is a huge portion of the difference between winning and losing, especially in Q4. There’s a lot of demand to go around, but there’s a lot of people fighting for it. And so being in a position of strength in order to capture some of that demand and turn that into long-term customers is an opportunity that only comes around a couple times each year. Absolutely. I think it has a lot to do with how we also go in with offering different discounts, sales, pricing. I’d love to talk a little bit about that. I know in my community and the people that I help, that’s a huge question all the time is, do I raise my prices? do I run these crazy sales? You know, and I think you can look at it a few ways. So, I’m curious to hear how you all do this with your pricing strategy. So, going into Q4, do we generally keep our pricing consistent? Do we have a specific strategy that we use with sales or promotions? Sarah, what do you do with your pricing? I personally will run a little bit steeper of a discount than I might otherwise run during that kind of uh Black Friday, Cyber Monday week. Um, other than that, I keep it pretty simple because I know that people are shopping anyway. So, it’s not like we need to, you know, for beginner sellers like who are excited about it, it’s better to maintain, you know, profit for these sales than just go for pure volume because you also can, it’s easy to lose track of your numbers. And um if you decide to start to run ads and all of that, there’s just a lot that’s going on very fast. And so I just recommend um you know, if you’re going to run a discount, maybe just choose ahead of time like this is my strategy at least on Etsy. Etsy runs like shopwide sales that you can opt into and that um can boost your visibility during that time if you’re in that Etsy shopwide sale. But um kind of choose your discount for that, you know, period of time. understand what your profit is. Um, and then kind of stick with that. That’s kind of what I do. That’s great advice. And I have a question. Um, being like a fellow Etsy seller, something that I like to do is like include it sometimes in SEO like of like gift for said holiday or something like that cuz I feel it does help the searchability just when people are looking for that and it also tells Etsy to kind of push that in their own categories that they have on the homepage. Is that something that you experiment with? I think you had mentioned that you do something with your mockup photos maybe. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think the any of the giftable type SEO is great to use. Um, you you want to be sure to not um, you know, if it’s not a Christmas, you know, dog design to not put Christmas dog gift necessarily because that can harm your listing in the long run. But any kind of giftable SEO and then if it is a holiday specific design, I like to use holiday mock-ups for that. I think it just it gets the buyer excited too. you know, they see this even if they’re buying it for themsel, not everyone is buying gifts. Like a lot of people on Etsy, they like to buy, you know, shirts while they’re baking cookies or, you know, shirts on a Christmas holiday or whatever it might be. And it gets them excited when they see it, you know, in a Christmas, you know, backdrop and everything. So, or like the matching shirts. I feel like a lot of those are like a huge seller. The Christmas matching shirts are like the funny like Thanksgiving ones. I’m sure we all see like or the ornaments. I love your ornaments. Yeah, those are fun to list. And you know, to that point, if you are going to um you know, add a new product, certainly choose like something that’s easily giftable like that, like an ornament or a mug or something, if you already have a product and you’re doing well and you want to add another ornaments are fun and can sell year round, too. And with that personalization point too, I think you also can raise the price a little bit because people are expecting that with a personalized product as well, you know. Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And um I want to know too for having a standalone store, Crystal, what exactly do you do? Do you incorporate in your mockups? And I I know you say you run like the cool the 12 days of Christmas promotion, which is so fun, but is there other stuff that you do to kind of get buyers excited, whether it’s email or in your website design or anything like that? I think that Levi spoke to it a bit, which is very important. Whether you’re a new seller or old, you got to know like in 2026, it’s a lot going on, right? So, you have to find a way to stand out, especially if you’re a standalone store. So, I think that we can all look at like these big box stores and see the way that they do. They run their own sales, right? So, it might be not Black Friday. They may have had an anniversary sale or something else. So, I’m running my own thing, right? I’m letting the people know you can get this at this time. I’m also going to run a discount, but we know everybody’s running a discount at the same time. So, I will do something for Black Friday, like get a free t-shirt. I do things like that to stand out because I may have a different goal of I want to power pack my email list, right? I want to get a certain amount of people on it. So, I’m thinking very strategically for the long-term game. And I think that we can all do that. Think about how much money you may want to make or think about how many people you want to touch for the holiday season, but just to know that because everybody’s running a sale, how will you stand out? Will that be a product? Will that be a sale? Will that be how fast you’re going to get your product to people? Or is that just going to be a shopping experience? But you have to figure out how you’re going to impact your people. So for me, it I just choose one for the year, right? So, it’s kind of like your goal of what you’re looking for, whether that’s to make more revenue or to even just grow a list of like people that are going to come to your store and be interested in a product. And that’s okay sometimes, too, right? Like, it’s okay to say, “This year, I may just want to grow my email list, so I might discount a little bit further. Please know your number so that you don’t lose money, right? know how much money you’re actually going to make, but set a goal like I want to make this amount of money or I want to get 20,000 people on my email list, so I may do something crazy like buy one get one free or um buy three, get a free gift or Right. So, very cool. And knowing your audience, I’m sure you got to know, you got to know your audience. I know I can do this because they’re locked in. If I don’t know them, I can’t be offering you a free shirt because they don’t know you yet, you know? So know your people. That’s great advice. And Levi, is there something that on TikTok because I know it’s a bit different maybe for running promotions. Is there stuff that like you participate in on the platform or do you run your own advertisements? Yeah, so one of one thing I always get questions about are these Tik Tok campaigns and these are native to the Tik Tok platform that they offer that you can join. Something you have to be mindful of is a lot of these campaigns overlap and if you’re running percentage discounts on multiple campaigns, you’re taking a percentage from a already discounted item from a percentage from another discounted item. So, one item might not meet your criteria in terms of what you’re trying to make per sale. So, you got to be mindful of that. But, as a new seller, I recommend joining in on these campaigns because when you’re fighting for that initial momentum on Tik Tok shop, exposure is your number one lever. And Tik Tok promises, hey, if you join these campaigns, we take this much of a fee for giving you extra exposure, but it will raise your exposure in the long run. I do think it matters, and I do think if I was starting out, you won’t get invited to as many campaigns, but I would join every single one possible. But in terms of running sales, Tik Tok shop is very competitive price-wise. And that’s because it’s like the land of the sale. I think right now, not only does Tik Tok themselves subsidizing sales. So like every time my store hits certain amount of sales, Tik Tok gives free coupons to people to buy more from my store. On top of that, a lot of these new large brands that are not ecom focused or Tik Tok shop focused yet are being encouraged to come onto the platform. And because of that, they are running cheaper or sales that are larger, cheaper products than what they have like in their other marketplace offerings. So people just know Tik Tok shop is where you go for a good deal. So, if you want to compete in Tik Tok, you need to be running sales all the time. Sales need to be something that you almost have automated and you’re willing to price things higher so that you can always kind of be ready for a sale and you’re not caught in that bind of margins collapsing. Yeah. And I would love to ask too if for someone that’s new having maybe a limited budget, if you’re going to go into paid ads, is there a way that we can recommend for maybe something that’s a a strategy that is more approachable for someone new that wants to get more people to their store and don’t want to spend a ton of money or maybe they do. Like we said, it can be goal oriented on what you’re looking for. But is there a way that maybe we can all give someone a tip that is is new or starting out? Yeah. Um, so in Tik Tok shop, it’s a lot like Meta Ads, new in 2026 called Andromeda. They have something called GMV Max on Tik Tok. And there’s only a couple things that you control. One of those things is ROI, which is actually return on ad spend. It’s called ROI in the platform, which means return on investment, but it’s your return on ad spend. what you’re trying to get for every dollar you spend on ads. And because you can control that, the higher you set it, the less your campaign is likely to spend because it’s harder to hit those higher ROI targets. But if you’re more focused on margins and maybe have a lower budget, you don’t want to spend your only $50 on a low ROI and maybe not even make those sales. You’d rather only be targeting the most warm leads, the most invested customers. And so what I would recommend is setting your budget to where you’re comfortable and then raising that ROI. Okay. Yeah. Crystal, what about you? Is there something you recommend? I don’t know about the ads because that can be very tricky for trying to get people off the platforms, but I think what Levi was saying is even important if you’re creating content that you can like boost it over there on Tik Tok. You can I know that there are some things you could do on Etsy, but for somebody brand new, I really think that organic is your best way to either build your email list, your text list, or just get people to engage with your content. I think Levi said something uh that I heard I’m stealing it from you. It was like every post is like a lottery ticket, right? And so I think if you’re brand new, your focus should just be content, like pushing that content out, showing people the behind the scenes, guys. People want to see what you’re doing. I know a lot of us are like, “Oh, I’m new. I don’t want to show people.” People want to see like, “Look, it’s hard. I don’t know what I’m doing, guys.” Right? Come buy my shirt. Something they want to see that. And that could get a 100,000 views and change your life for the holiday season, right? As opposed to you trying to go get on Meta, put some money in, and then you don’t know it’s a gamble. I would say really focus on your organic content. Absolutely. Something to add on that as well. Founder content is one of the best converting ad types there is. And the reason is is because someone who’s just starting out is so much easier to connect with as a consumer who’s never done ecom in their life than someone who’s been doing it for 5 years. So that’s an advantage you have over these big businesses is saying, “I’m so new to this, but I got this all set up and I’m so passionate about this because blank, right? That is so that is so good at finding your target audience. So, not only are you training the algorithm on your niche, you’re also building an actual audience that will follow you along forever. Yeah. Exactly. And those people take pride in being early on things. And so that’s how you that’s how I would market it is just be like, I’m just starting and like this is what I believe in and if you want to be one of my first customers, like how cool would that be, right? So I think almost take advantage of your status as a a newcomer to the space. Yeah. And and two people are craving relatability and just like being a normal person like all over online. I think that we’re seeing that more and more of like the less produced stuff, the more just like turning your phone camera around and just talking about, oh yep, I messed this up. This product I made didn’t sell. You know, whatever it is. I think that that’s more relatable and can like you said can get you more sales in the long run. It’s not just about the wins. Yeah. Like I think every day I see dashboards of how many how much sales people have but once you see that enough like it’s kind of hard to be impressed unless these people are doing like astounding things. I would focus on the people that don’t care about that at all and would way rather see your dayto-day on like I got these these returns but I sold them to my friends. I’m going to go ship them out to at the post office. Like that is like something that everyone goes to the post office and they’re like like that is is inspiring to they like to see real stuff. That’s what I like to see as a a consumer on Tik Tok. I see someone like that immediately. Yeah. And I’m buying and you can give those people a discount, right? Like my founding my founding tribe like you get 20% off. They will feel like hey I’m a part of this business and they will follow you forever. or my first 100 is like numbered or has this logo on it and like making that sense of urgency for for those OG crew of of customers is a great way to get off the ground. Yeah. And it’s it’s so okay to be new and like not know what you’re doing. Like I think that’s a huge thing. We all at one point did not know what we were doing. Like you have to just go through it to get good at it, you know? And I think that’s really important to to just tell people that even if you are new and you’ve never done this before, like if all of us can do it, there’s there’s no reason why you can’t and absolutely, you know, do great. And Sarah, I’m curious about what you do on Etsy for um maybe if you try and do organic traffic to your Etsy shop. I do a lot on Pinterest to get clicks to my Etsy shop cuz it’s free and it’s a straight link directly to the product and I find that works really well for me. Stealing that, too. It’s so good. It’s I I really think so many people sleep on Pinterest marketing. I talk about it all the time because like I said, it’s free and it’s a direct link. It’s not like social media where you have to have someone comment for a link or go to your bio. Like it’s just they like it, they click it, and they’re automatically like add to cart. Is there a strategy that you use for any outsourcing marketing? Because I know on Etsy it’s a marketplace, but Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. First, I I will also be going back home and doing more Pinteresting for my own shop. um because I did it for a while there and I did see how like how easy it is for the traffic, you know, you see where your traffic’s coming from on your Etsy dashboard and so that is a really great free way. Um and I definitely saw the vis visibility um and traffic increase from that. Um need to do more of it. And I would say in terms of, you know, kind of traffic and visibility for Q4 on Etsy, in in the Etsy mentorship community, we’re always talking about like having a listing goal for your for the week usually or the month. If you can stretch that goal, just more listings in general will, you know, potentially increase your traffic and visibility. Um, if you’re not yet to getting those consistent sales, then adding more listings, of course, is a big part of it on Etsy. If you’re ready for ads, you know, you can always start with on the Etsy ads platform small, like a dollar to $5 a day, only with a couple listings, whatever listings are doing well, and see how that goes. But, um, just paying attention to it and starting small, I think, is is good when it comes to Etsy ads at least. Yeah, and Etsy ads is very approachable for a beginner, too, cuz you you can set the lower budgets and it will give you, you know, that traffic. And always keep in mind, though, not to put, this was a mistake I made when I was first new to Etsy, and I didn’t realize my entire shop was running on like a $2 a day ad spend, and that ran out very quickly on products that no one’s looking for. So, if you’re new to Etsy ads, make sure you do a little research and select the listings that you’ve done like the most research on or that already have favorites and sales. put the money behind those versus just trying at least on Etsy it works differently with Meta and Google and all the things. I would say one thing that’s the same though about all of them is as you start running ads. It’s not a set it and forget it. Even how easy Etsy is, you need to be looking at the data that it’s giving you. What products are is it working on and which ones aren’t because that’s is saving you money and allowing you to pour more into those winners. So whether you’re on Tik Tok, Meta or Etsy, I think that’s not only purchasing the data through buying ads, but looking at it and iterating off of it is so important in order to like scale your business. Absolutely. And listening to that, too, cuz we’re not our customer. So if your favorite is not doing well, be okay with that. Let it go. We all go through that, too. Like putting something out that’s like this is going to do so well and nobody wants it and you’re like Everyone I talked to thought this was the coolest ide. And then the customers are like I don’t want there. Isn’t that so funny how that happens to all of us? Like it’s like you spend all this time on this design or product and then you put it out there and it’s like the one that you almost didn’t post is the one that you’re like what is this? Or the one that you’re kind of like I don’t know about that and it just takes off completely. So, we’re almost out of time, but if we can quickly just run through maybe one thing that you could tell someone watching at home that is maybe a mistake you made that they can avoid or just one little piece of advice for for Q4 and for the holiday season. Levi, do you have one? Yeah. Okay. Number one, just like I talked about in terms of knowing what the violations on Tik Tok Shop are and trying your best to avoid those. Another thing though I would say is know based on what platform you’re selling on, what type of buyer you’re selling to. On Etsy, you’re selling to a very motivated buyer, someone coming to the platform to purchase something, much like an Amazon or a website. Whereas, if you’re marketing on social media, you need to focus on call to action that brings people to a purchase rather than just entertains them like the rest of the app does. That’s great. Cool. Yeah, I think honestly everyone’s going to take away so much helpful tips. Thank you so much for this discussion. I think now I I have some ideas. I think we all inspire each other, too. and everybody watching. And up next, we have a great panel and it’s going to be about playing multiple boards and when to expand onto maybe different marketplaces regardless of where you’re selling. So, make sure you stay around for that and thank you guys so much. Thank you.

Hi guys, Michael here. I am joined by two very handsome young men and we’re going to play a guessing game here. But first, let me find out who these guys are and what they’re up to. So, first let me go over here. Excuse me, young man. What’s your name? Uh, Dominic from Docor. Dominic from Docore. And where are you hailing from, Dom? Uh, the internet mostly. The internet mostly. Um, Dom’s not letting on, but he’s actually from Manchester, just like me. So, we’ve got two MS on the same panel, but I’m not going to let that taint how we play this game. I’m going to be fair and, you know, we’re going to give Eric a chance here. Sorry. Let me introduce our second guest. What’s your name? Hi, I’m Eric and my print on demand store is Sobervation. Sobervation. Great. And where are you from, Eric? I am from the United States, Ohio specifically. There you go. Wonderful. So, we’re going to play a guessing game here. We’ve got a bag full of goodies. These guys are going to put their blindfolds on. If you would put your blindfolds on, please, gentlemen. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to give them a uh an item. They’re going to have to tell me what the item is. And they’re not allowed to peek. You can’t see anything under there, can you, Dom? Nope. No, Eric. No. All right. I’m going to trust them. Uh, let’s get one of these products out here. You can see this. And then I’m going to give it to Eric first. Have a feel of that. Don’t tell me what you think it is. We’re going to get you guys to shout it out in a couple of minutes after you’ve had a feel. And I’ll pass that over to Dom. Sorry, Dom. There you go. All right. These guys are going to have a good feel of that. Now, I can tell you, in fact, I’m not going to tell you anything. This is an easy one. Yeah. Let me get you guys to shout it out in three, two, one. It’s an iPhone. It’s a Mag Safe iPhone tough case. A MagSafe iPhone tough case. Take your take your blindfolds off, guys. You’ve got that absolutely right. Look at that. MagSafe iPhone. What did you say? Uh tough case. Tough case. And it looks like it’s for the newest iPhone. See, Eric knows his stuff here. Would you have got uh It’s the newer iPhone model. Threw me off. That’s where I kind of you couldn’t get it. Okay. So, this is a lovely product and obviously you can print on that. You can get what? Sublimation print all the way around the sides there. So, that looks nice. I’ll tell you what we’ll do with this next one. Put your blindfolds back on, guys. Let’s see if you can tell me something about this one. Okay, this is a hard one. We’re going to get you guys to do a bit more work here. Okay, have a feel of this. There’s not much to feel there. This is going to be a tricky one. Um, and Eric, while you’re doing that, why don’t you just tell me a bit about your store and uh what you sell? Um, so my store is called Sobervation and it started um when I quit drinking alcohol in 2021 and I kind of needed um a creative outlet for uh some of the free time I had now that I quit drinking. And uh I saw all kinds of um motivational type of designs um that are uh they represent like my own sobriety journey. So that’s awesome. Right. You’ve had a good feel of that. Yeah. Got any ideas? But don’t tell me. But just tell me, have you got an idea? I’ve got an idea. All right. Let’s throw this one over to Dom. And I’ll ask Dom while he’s giving that a feel. Dom, what about yourself? How did you get started in your business? Uh just really enjoyed posting memes all the time and spending way too much time on the internet looking at stupid pictures of dogs. And then after a while of reposting these images and taking them myself of my own dog, uh started making art for t-shirts with my business partner, Alexandra. And um yeah, we’ve been on Instagram now for uh several years and in business for eight years. Great. What was your what was your dog? My dog’s called Ruben. He’s the little Boston Terry. He’s like this big. And he’s uh not very smart. Not very smart. Okay. Right. You guys have had a few minutes with that one. Shall we? Um, I tell you what, this one’s it’s a bit easy, but I’m going to ask you something a bit more difficult about it. What do you think is actually inside this? Or who do you think it’s for? Can you guess anything like that? I’ll take I’ll give this one to Eric. What do you think? I don’t know. It feels like a coloring book. Okay. All right. Oh, what do you think? I’m also going with coloring book. Coloring book. Well, you guys can take your blindfolds off because you are right. It is a garden diaries coloring book and it has got some really handsome illustrations here. Look at this amazing coloring. Never seen these since they added them to the store. To the store. Did you know you could do coloring books on print? I did, but I know that they’re quite recent. Quite recent. So there you go. And if you were going to design a coloring book, what would you have inside it? Oh, that’s a hard question. Yeah. So a sober coloring book is a difficult ask, isn’t it? Dom, is it something you could do for for your brand? Yeah. Uh, different types of worms and bugs. A bugs and worms coloring book. That would be fantastic. Yeah. Okay. Should we do a couple more here? Yeah, we definitely got time for a couple more. Um, blindfold. Let me see. Let me get a good one here. Yeah, put those blindfolds on. No cheating, guys. And, uh, let’s see if we can get one that’s a bit trickier here. No, I can’t get you to plug your ears cuz that wouldn’t work. Um, is that a cowbell? More cowbell. Okay. Uh, let’s give this one to Dom first. Okay, so Dom’s having a good feel of that one. Now, this one, um, I don’t want to give too much away, but I think this is kind of an easy one as well. Let’s throw it over to Eric. That one over to Eric. And is this is this a product that you sell on your store, John, do you think? I sell a very similar product, but not that particular one. Not that particular one. Okay. I know. I know what it is. I do. Do you I’m going to make this a bit more difficult. Do you think you can feel the design on there and tell me what you think is actually what it actually says? That’s hard. Um Um I don’t know. Going to have a go at that one. I can’t tell what it says. No. Okay, let’s throw that to Dom. See if he can Oh, it just says amplified, right? And there’s like a chest piece or something. Am I right? Oh, that’s a really good guess, but you’re completely wrong. No, take your blindfolds off. Aren’t you going to ask us what it is? Oh, sorry. Yeah. No, don’t take Don’t take your blindfolds off. I think we know what it is, don’t we? Yeah, that one that one was a bit easy. Yes, it’s a cap. It says first move on it. And um I don’t I don’t It’s a distressed dad cap. It’s a distressed dad cap. Sorry. Yeah, it is distressed. It’s been beaten up and battered around. Very popular. Very popular. I knew that it was a distressed dad cap. How’s that? Because it’s the only hat that has a Velcro back. Uh the rest of the hats have like a uh um copper type of uh back back here or it’s plastic. There you go. All right, guys. Should we do one more of these before our time is up? Let’s see what we got here. I’m having a good rustle around in the bag here. And okay, Eric, take this. I tell you what, we’ll do two at the same time. How about that? We’ll speed things up a bit. Do you can have this one? It’s the cowbell. It’s a cowbell. It says Eric. Dom, what do you think you’ve got there? It’s a little drinking bottle or a Bad Dragon product. Okay. Okay, guys. Take off your blindfolds.

How was that? Oh, I guess we can’t both be correct in you guys are both correct on that one. Right, we got one more, have we? Okay, one more to try. You both got one of these to have a go at the same time. Okay. All right, guys. You don’t need long with this one. Give me a shout out with the answer in three, two, one. It’s a tote bag. Tote bag. That was easy. Now, is that something you sell on your store, Dom? We do. Yeah, they’re uh they’re very popular as well. The the good things about the tote bags is it’s very simple to get a good square design on there. And because they’re quite cheap, they make a really good addition to any kind of sale. So, they’re good for kind of increasing overall sales value. That’s great. Great tip, Eric. You sell them? I do sell them, but I like to do the embroidered um the embroidered design on my tote bags. I think it makes them look super classy and you can charge a little bit more money for them. I didn’t even know you could do embroidery on the tote bag. Only some of them. Only on some of them, but it’s an option. That’s awesome. That’s great, guys. So, we’ll pay more money for embroidered product. Yes, definitely pay more for the embroidered. So, look at that. We’ve got tote bag. What What do you call this one? That is the enamel coffee mug. Enamel coffee mug. We got this one which is what is what would you call that? It’s a stainless steel uh stainless steel stainless steel. 20 oz stainless steel tumbler. 20 oz. I tell you what this guy. What about that? I literally had all of these except that in my Okay, you got all of them. Well, you’ve done a great job guessing there, guys. I don’t I don’t really know if we can pick a winner cuz you both did so well. Um yeah, everyone’s a winner. You can you can take one of these home with you. I’ll let you guys pick whatever you want. You can take it home. That will be your gift for the day. But thank you for playing with me here today. Now, let’s just find out from you guys. Uh what are you excited about? We’ve got um loads more to come today. What you looking forward to, Eric? Um I’m looking forward to um uh there’s a there’s another game coming up with t-shirts. I’m looking forward to that. So, stay tuned for the game that’s coming up. Dom, have you got anything you’re looking forward to? Uh drinking after this event and eating from the buffet until I feel like I’m going to be sick. Yes, there is a great big buffet behind us. You can see it right now. And we’re going to head there right now. Um, and I will hand you over back to the main event. Thank you for joining me for this game of Guest the Product. And we’ll see you in our next game coming up soon. But right now, we’ll hand it back to the main stage.

Welcome to playing multiple boards. In this session, we’re discussing selling platforms and marketing. So, I’m here with Riley, Jay, and John. And I just want to go from zero to 100 real quick and just kind of get right into it because one of the most common questions that I got on YouTube and you guys probably hear this a lot as well is which platform do I start on? And this is a very challenging question to answer when we don’t know anything about your business and your goals because it very much makes a difference knowing that information. So for me personally, I can speak from my experience. I’ve always been a Shopify first seller. That’s always been where I started. I’m a big believer in, you know, committing to choosing one primary platform and committing to mastery of that platform. I did eventually expand out to Etsy, but that was only after doing well over a million dollars in sales. So, I’m curious from you guys, what is your primary platform? I’ll start with you, Riley. What is your primary platform and where are you selling now? Yeah, so I started four years ago on on Etsy and I’m still on Etsy. Etsy is my main platform that I sell on. I actually started a second shop earlier this year for a challenge in the sellers club. So, I have two Etsy shops at the moment, but in April, about the same time I started that Etsy shop, I started a Tik Tok shop. Now, I also run a Printify pop-up shop, just a small thing for a family business. But, so that’s three platforms, four shops that I’m running now, four years in. Wow. That that is a lot in in a short amount of time. Jay, how about you? What is your primary platform and where are you selling now? uh started on Etsy at the end of uh 2012. So, it’s been a been a minute there now. Uh got accepted into Amazon Merch, which is um basically what I would consider print on demand on a tricycle, for example. It’s kind of idiot proof. You just upload your designs and there’s no customer service, so nothing to deal with that. Uh but the Etsy has always been the bread and butter. And I feel like that is almost like e-commerce with like training wheels, so to speak. You can blow up significant on Etsy. uh between my wife and I, we have about five shops. Uh loving every minute of it and slowly making a transition to a Shopify now, which is what I would consider like the big boy bike where you don’t have the training wheels anymore cuz you’re wearing multiple hats now, right? Yeah. No, absolutely. John, I know I believe you’re just on one platform still. Uh is is there anything that I’m missing here? Well, I’m on actually all platforms, but Tik Tok Shop is the main one that I’m I guess known for. Yeah. Yeah, Tik Tok shop’s kind of my main channel that I focus on. Started 3 years ago. I was still in college when I started. And uh one thing that’s really unique about Tik Tok shop compared to other platforms is that the shopping experience is inside of social media, right? People are scrolling through on Tik Tok looking to be entertained and then they land on videos of my product. They don’t even know that’s an ad to them and that’s why they’re making that impulsive decision and purchasing. So Tik Tok shops me and I focus on and all that content can be reproduced on Facebook on Instagram. And so that is kind of the driver of everything. That’s that’s really interesting. And and something very unique about Tik Tok is it’s kind of like the anti- ad platform. It’s like you like the people that who seem to have the most success and um we’ll talk about that more in a bit are the people that have ads that don’t look like ads. Exactly. And it’s like how how real can we make this look? Exactly. And and one I always tell like my friends and my family like if you ever see an ad pop up on YouTube, you ever see a ad pop up when you’re watching TV, the last thing you want to see is an ad pop up and you’re going to use the bathroom, you’re going to go on your phone in school. And so one thing that’s unique about Tik Tok, it just feels so organic. Yeah. You kind of you kind of tune out when you’re when you’re getting ads. And and I totally agree like Tik Tok is very much a dopaminefueled platform and I feel like the ads are also dopamine fueled. So, you’re just like scrolling and everything is very intense. Like, yeah, like nothing looks like an add-on there. So, I want to dive into that more when we talk about marketing strategies. But what I want to know is at what point did you guys expand off of your first platform? Cuz the first question we get from a lot of people that I get is which platform should I start on? And then a natural next question once someone has chosen one that they started on is what next? Like what platform should I expand to? Right? So, I mentioned for me, I got to well over a million dollars in sales in Shopify before I expanded onto Etsy. And I I don’t even think I needed to expand onto Etsy. There was more than enough business just on Shopify alone, but I did anyways because I was looking for an additional sales channel. Um, and so for you guys, like Riley, you have multiple shops in a pretty short amount of time. At what point did you go to your did you open up your second one? Yeah. So, I would like to clarify my second Etsy shop mostly for teaching, mostly for challenges, almost like a test shop of sorts. My main Etsy shop is where I put the most work in right now, probably headto-head with Tik Tok. And then popup is just when my aunt calls me and says, “Hey, I need a new shirt to send to my team.” And I list it for her. So, the second Etsy shop and the pop-up are both a lot more low-key. Um, I chose Etsy initially cuz it matched my vibe more. I was a 21-year-old college kid. I was studying abroad and I liked design. I liked Etsy. I’d been an Etsy customer, so Etsy was a natural first step for me. I actually had no intention of starting a second shop, let alone a fourth shop and let alone selling on Tik Tok. I didn’t have the Tik Tok app. When I did have the app, I had blocked all the Tik Tok shop hashtags because I was not interested in being sold to. So, the reason I started the second shop was I was so, and this is going to sound kind of cheesy, but I was so inspired. I had gone to um a Tik Tok event that I was invited to by Printify and I saw the email and I was like, “Yeah, I’m not selling on Tik Tok. I’ll go meet some people and it’ll be really cool to see other print on demand sellers, other people doing what I do.” And then I got to hear from a few different speakers like you guys will today and I hope some of us can inspire you guys as well. But it was just so inspiring to see the potential that Tik Tok has and the sales volume that’s possible on it. At that point, I felt I had I hate to say mastered because we all have something more to learn. But I’m getting to a point where I know what I know and there’s not so much more that I can learn about it that I felt ready to start learning about another platform. And I chose TikTok and I’ve really loved it so far. Yeah, I think you made a good point there. Like when I say commit to master, I don’t mean like you’ve got it all figured out cuz like anyone running a business at any level knows that there’s always going to be headaches. There’s always going to be ups and downs. Like it’s it’s not easy. You know, in theory it’s simple, but like make have no illusions. It’s not like it gets easier. The challenges just get different. So Jay, over to you. You started on Amazon and then you when did you go to your second platform? Uh, so I actually started with Etsy and then Amazon came around, but it’s not one of those things where like it’s it’s a self-fulfillment type thing where you need to be accepted. So I can’t even suggest that as a platform to go to. Uh, what I would say is like for if we were moving from Etsy, for example, now where I’m about to make a transition to Shopify, what I would suggest is like if you’re not getting sales on Etsy, you’re probably not going to get sales on Shopify, but you’re just going to have a harder time doing this because now you’re wearing more hats. You now have to get really good at marketing your stuff. Where on Etsy, for example, on a marketplace, it’s like walking into a mall with a bunch of different boutiques. People are there to buy. You just have to get their attention, right? Um, that said, you know, if you get to a point where I feel like sales might be stagnating or you’ve kind of plateaued, then things are running well, use that money, that revenue, and that success to fund your next venture, right? So, you’re not out of pocket out a hole uh to get going that way. And Tik Tok, if you’re listening, as a Canadian seller, I would very much love to be able to have a Tik Tok shop. Well, I’m hearing uh, you know, from uh, John here and Levi upstairs and like I would love to be on TikTok and part of one of your communities as well. Yeah, that’s that was that was you said something really important there about mastery. Like let me be very clear with this mastery. Listen, it’s hard enough to master one platform, let alone two or three or four. And I totally agree with you. If you’re not having success on one, you most likely will not have success on the other. So commit to mastery. there are different, you know, each one has its own kind of like structure and processes and and stuff like that. So once you’re clear on your goals, I feel like it’d be a lot easier to understand which one is the best fit for you because in my opinion, there’s no one sizefits-all. Would you guys agree with that? Absolutely. Yeah. It’s it’s also a thing when we talk about mastery like I don’t want to make this seal seem like some convoluted thing that you will never get, you know, able to master. uh when we talk when I talk personally about master it’s like the ability to make sales on that particular platform you don’t have to know all the nuances algorithms change all the time you’re never going to be on top of it and if you wait till you’re absolutely ready you’re never going to be ready kind of like talking to a brand new dad if you had waited till you were absolutely ready it never would have happened it’s one of those things I’ve also heard choose your hard starting a business is a big deal and it’s going to be something that comes with its own set of learning curves the platform that you choose is going to depend on your strengths and your ability to learn all of these different things. Etsy, you’re going to be listing a bunch. Tik Tok, you’re going to be posting a bunch of videos. Shopify, you’re going to be doing a bunch of ads. So, it it’s going to be hard, but it’s doable as long as you put that work in. So, which is it that you want to do by your Absolutely. I I really like that summary. I like the way that you sum those up. I mean, that’s that’s like the minimal bullet point summary, but that like that is all very accurate in my experience, and I I agree. It’s a choose your own adventure based on what you want. So, let’s talk about at what point should do you guys recommend someone move on to another platform? So, Riley, if you had a student and they were like, I’m on Etsy. Now, what I want to I want to go to Shopify because I want to diversify my platforms and I want to get in front of that audience as well. At what point would you be like, “Okay, I think you’re ready.” I think it’s really hard because everyone’s journey is different. What I really would not suggest is doing all of the platforms or even multiple platforms from the beginning because if you’re trying to spread your energy, honestly, so many people start while they’re still in a full-time job. And so it’s managing a business in the pockets of time in between. So in those pockets of time, if you’re trying to do 100 Tik Tok videos and run a Shopify campaign and have five Etsy listings, it’s going to be really hard to manage and and you’re not going to do great at any of them. So start with one, learn the one. For me, it was when my sales were consistent and starting to plateau a little bit like Jay said, like where I’ve not necessarily the ceiling because we have new customers coming all the time. People are still buying items, but where I felt confident enough number one with my income to know that I can take a risk on starting another business, but in my skills to know I’ve learned this. I understand how to create a good design, how to create a good product. Can I list it on another platform and see more success, see another source of income coming in? Yeah. Like reach that audience. Yeah. No, I think I think that’s really good and I really like what you said. I I totally agree that like consistent sales at a minimum consistent sales cuz what we said before like if you’re not succeeding on one platform, you probably won’t succeed on the other. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs, we have bright shiny object syndrome. I have bright shiny object syndrome. Do you guys have bright shiny object syndrome? I have four stores. Yeah, it comes in the DNA of an entrepreneur. Everyone listening is probably like, “Yes, I do. That’s me.” We totally get it. We’re with you guys. But like I do think it’s important to focus really really focus and this is hard for all of us ADHD entrepreneurs but man it will it will be a totally total game changer for you and your business. So guys when like Jay let’s talk about when you would recommend if someone one of your students came to you and said I I’m on I’m on Etsy. I want to like go to a Tik Tok shop now. At what point would you say you are ready my friend? Well if first I’ll ask them if they’re Canadian based business ready. Uh secondly, kind of going back to what I said, right? If you can make consistent sales, if you’re making sales and you’re plateauing, then sure. If it’s a combination of not reaching the right audience maybe, then I would suggest if you’re on Etsy and you want to make that transition, not only do you need the the money, the revenue there to fund cuz now you’re going to get into ad spend in a heavy completely different way, but like maybe start an email list, start some social media marketing where you can capture that and then you can kind of segue your audience over to the Shopify and get them, you know, used or warm, I guess you would call it, uh, to get, you know, used to getting inundated with email marketing, right? Right. It I mean that does give you a huge leg up if you’ve got like an immediate base of loyal fans of super fans of people that raised their hand and said, “I want to hear from you.” Those are your people. And you know, for starting another brand, those are like the first people you’ll want to your warmest audience. Those are people you want to reach out to. Go ahead. Another major point is if you’re a general store on Etsy, for example, I probably would recommend that you get a little bit more niched and build a brand. Leverage the.com. Like go buy that.com, go get the social media handles. Even if you never use them, at least you’ll have them and somebody else won’t take them out from under you. Yeah. Then you will be ready to move to a niche Shopify kind of environment. Yeah, I I I love that advice. I totally agree. John, at what point would you tell one of your students, they say, “I’m on I’m on Tik Tok shop and now I want to diversify to Shopy or Etsy.” Yeah, you tell me when I go. Common theme. I think a lot of reviewers be like, “Oh, broken record, but it’s obviously you want have a stabilized store. you and specifically for Tik Tok shop, it’s the content volume. A lot of Tik Tok shop sellers come to me and they’re already making content or they have a brand already or they are just completely starting and what is the next transition to the next move. It’s ultimately having volume on Tik Tok first. So through your own content, through affiliates is a big thing. We’re going to talk a lot about that here today. But once you have a big catalog and a list of creators making content, all those videos can be transferred over to a platform like Facebook, like Instagram. You can run meta ads to it. use tribe to be able to get attribution to creators to get them commissions. So on Tik Tok to going over to Shopify going over to Amazon, it can be it can be really quickly to be done, but at the same time it’s content first on Tik Tok before the switch. Yeah. I also think it’s important to add this is a lot about another platform. It’s very applicable to a second store as well because so often I people say I see people say, “Well, I can’t decide between this niche, this niche, and this niche.” So then they open two Etsy stores. That still splits your energy in half. You’re learning one platform, but start with one store. One store, one platform, and pour all of your energy into it. And then when you feel like you have a good grasp on it, then that’s when you add a second store or a second platform, but only after. You’re not starting. Pick a niche if you want to have a couple niches in one store until you figure it out. Don’t do that forever. Obviously, figure it out a little bit. But it’s okay to test a couple different themes in the beginning rather than starting two stores cuz it’s twice as hard, right? No, I I completely agree agree. And one thing that uh when we were talking earlier you said is like one niche, one core product, one platform. And that I 100% agree because like where you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. And I’ve seen this before with Shopify sellers too where they they come to me with three stores. They have they have three stores. And I’m like, okay, you have three stores. How are sales? Zero sales. I’m like, and you’re dividing all your energy across three stores. Like it, like I said earlier, it’s hard enough to master one, let alone three. So I I think like as entrepreneurs by nature we are drawn to that bright shiny object syndrome. So it’s hard to like rein it in but y’all let’s rein it in like we’re this is coming from our own experience like from from our I was one of those people. Um I had to rein it in. So anyhow let’s talk about marketing. I love talking everyone likes talking about marketing because everyone wants to know how do I get more eyeballs on my products? That’s like the million-dollar question. You guys are all high volume sellers. You’ve successfully done this. And so I want to get into the strategies. Now, I can speak to myself as a Shopify first seller. I use Meta Ads to reliably drive traffic to my products. And the reason I love Meta Ads, also known as the the the traffic store, is because I could literally run ads today and I could have my product in front of 10,000 people today. And I love that because it solves the problem that so many people have of how do I get eyeballs on my product? Problem solved. Now, I I I I want to say a word of caution here. Like that doesn’t guarantee like I’m guaranteed 10,000 people to see my products. That doesn’t guarantee any sales. And this is where you have to really be calculated with your risk, right? Because you can either make a ton of sales or you can burn through a whole bunch of cash. And nobody wants that. Like, nobody wants that. and you don’t want that, we don’t want that. And so that’s like my strategy to get reliable traffic and, you know, I do definitely do like a calculated risk approach. So it’s like testing at small budgets and then only scaling up the winning designs, the ones where you know, for every dollar you invest in ads, you’re getting like $5 in return, for example. And so you’re scaling up profitably and and very quickly. But I want to hear from you guys. So you’ve had a lot of success on Etsy and and now Tik Tok, but tell me about your experience. How are you driving traffic to your platforms? So for Etsy, this is something I see a lot of beginners struggle with is they think that when they start an Etsy store, they also need to do all of this social media. I initially sold on Etsy, so I didn’t have to do social media. Etsy is a marketplace. So your customers are coming to the Etsy platform and searching whatever your niche is, searching gift for your target customer and looking for your items. Yes, they can find it on Pinterest and then go to your store or from a Facebook ad, but truly on Etsy, you just need more listings, more good listings that are good designs that are based on research. And there’s so much content about there out about how to make good designs. But the more listings you have, the more chance that you have to get found as long as they are well researched and support your target customer. For Tik Tok, traffic is more videos. It’s working with affiliates, which I’d love to hear John talk about cuz he’s affiliate expert here. I learn so much every time he talks. But more videos, like even as a Tik Tok creator, I’m creating 3 to 5 to 10 videos a day. And that’s 3 to 5 to 10 more chances for my product to get seen by my customers. So more but more intentional content, more intentional listings that are based on research both for the videos and for the listings. Yeah. No, I love that. And that is one of the big draws to Etsy is there are people selling successfully that are not running ads and do not have social media presences. Now, I will say with meta ads, you don’t need to have a social media following to make sales like within 10 minutes of running your ad. Uh, obviously it helps if you’re building a Shopify brand. There’s a lot of value in your in your presence as an asset. Um, but I want to hear from you, Jay. How are you getting eyeballs on your products in Etsy or any other platforms you want to talk about? Yeah, so obviously advertising, I mean, that’s that’s probably one of the biggest ones for, you know, a Shopify and or marketplace seller. And you hit the nail on the head when you when you said you’ll burn through money. And that verb is the best way I can give you analogy an analogy for what running ads is. It’s like it’s literally pouring gas on a fire and watching it explode into a massive bonfire. Now that said, you will burn through budget if your, you know, initial fire your your product isn’t the design isn’t solid, the mockup or presentation isn’t solid, and the SEO is whack enough that you’re not going to get found. Mhm. If that happens and there’s no spark, pouring gas on the fire just becomes an expensive, wet, smelly mess. Yes. I I love that you said that. And and there’s like I have like a vision in my head of like sitting in a car and it being in park and putting the gas on and revving the engine, but you’re not moving and the moving is the sales. Like I I need to make sales, right? And you’re just like burning through gas, but like not making any sales, not moving forward. So that’s I I love the way you explain that. Okay, John the Tik Tok whiz. Let’s hear it. Talk about the affiliates. Talk about everything Tik Tok. Well, one thing that’s just unique about social media. My mom runs a brick and mortar store, like a physical location. For her to get people into the door, she’s got to wait for people to walk in. Tik Tok is one of those things that’s crazy. If you think about it, you can post a video that takes you five minutes to make get a million views. Like 10 years ago, marketing was running ads on a newspaper. 20 years ago it was even just say on a radio. Now with social media we post a video and it gets shown to what millions of people that fast. And so that’s just the power of just online marketing. Just the first just to point out we’ll talk a lot about that in the Tik Tok session here in a second. But when it comes to affiliates me myself I can post three videos a day. Uh at my peak I was posting five. I was like man that’s a lot of videos. But my creators I can get a team of a hundred of them to post three videos a day. Now I have 300 videos a day. And so Tik Tok has been notoriously in marketing is a difficult platform to crack consistency because ad fatigue creative fatigue is quite high on the platforms unlike meta that’s just been proven over the past 10 years. So my focus on Tik Tok is how do I get as much volume out there as humanly possible? How do I get so many videos out there that just makes it impossible to see failure? Right. Right. I love that. It’s kind of like the volume play and that’s that’s a that can be a good strategy. Clearly, it’s a proven strategy for you and I’m sure many of your students. So guys, I feel like we could be here all day talking about this. We all love talking about marketing. I hope you all like hearing about marketing. I know most people do, but we are out of time. So, thank you so much for your time guys and for your insights and we’re going to hand it now over to the green room. So, over to you.

Hello guys, Michael Essic here and we are going to do some POD seller questions. So, I am joined here by uh Dominic from Dogcore. You may recognize him from earlier. We actually I think we’ve actually swapped beards since you last saw us. You might not be able to tell cuz they’re so my hair to make sure I don’t look too much like Exactly. Otherwise, people keep mixing us up. Um so, Dom, couple of questions for you. You ready to go on these? Yeah, absolutely. Let’s go. Okay. We’re going to ask you biggest prints on demand win. I think um probably the biggest win was quite a couple of years ago. Um, we had access to uh quite simple embroidered hats, uh, flatbacks, caps, dad hats, baseball caps, things like that. Very simple embroidery on the front. And when that first came out, uh, there wasn’t too much market saturation of people taking advantage of that in the POD space. So, we were able to quickly capitalize on that with some funny designs. We’ve got ones that say, “I love shoplifting.” uh one that is about myself which is oh no it’s me again. Um just really silly things but the fact that we were able to get those out there before anyone anyone else um before the market got too saturated with those designs made us quite a lot of money back when that when when that first product came out. So advice always be looking at what’s coming up new for sale and see if you can get that out onto your stores before anyone else does. Absolutely. Yeah. If you can get that new product and like you say it’s there before the saturation comes in, you’ve got the advantage. That’s great. What about We’re going to ask you some more things here. Have you got a most overrated or underrated print on demand product at the moment? Uh most overrated mugs. I don’t personally understand those. Uh there’s too many mugs on the planet. And uh what have you got against mugs, Dom? What is it? I think it’s just I don’t know if anyone’s been to Britain that every office has a Sports Direct mug and it’s like a it’s like a joke. Um it’s like the size of a bowl. It’s like made for British people’s drinking tea habits. So yeah. And if you spill it, you like flood the you’re I was going to swear there, but you’re you’re not you’re not lucky. Let’s put it that way. You’re not lucky. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What about um what’s one thing that you wish you knew when you started your print on demand journey? very basic tax regulations uh in England because if you don’t be compliant as quick as you can uh and understand what your liabilities are, it will come to bite you on your butt later on. Uh and that can make or break a business. Uh if you’ve kind of got yourself a bit too deep into, you know, owing taxes that maybe you when it finally comes up that you can’t afford to pay it. So, as long as you’re compliant, you’re compensating for it, and you understand it, even at a very basic level, you’ll be saving yourself a lot of hassle in the future. That’s so true. The Beatles sung about that one, didn’t they? The tax man in the UK is going to come and get you if you’re not careful. Are we the same age? Where are you? We’re a lot older. All right. Thank you very much, Dom. Dom, go and have a break. Get yourself a sandwich. Look after yourself. Who have we got next? We got Sarah Caps. Sarah Caps coming from Tampa, Florida. Tampa, Florida out there. Okay, Sarah, let’s see what we can ask you here. What’s your favorite prints on demand product to sell? Shirt? Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of favorites, but I have to say shirt. It’s a good go-to. Okay. What’s your favorite shirt that you sell? Comfort colors 1717. 1717. You even know the code. You know everything about it. I remember. That’s awesome. So, the that’s your favorite product to sell. What’s a trend that you’re excited about in print on demand? I have so I haven’t dove into it yet, but I’m really excited about the puff print that um we just got with Prinify. It’s also going to be easy to design. This is very text forward and on trend right now. So, and that just came out like this week or really recently with Yeah, within the last month, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s going to be great, isn’t it, for like university for sweaters and all that kind of for sure. Yeah, I think so. It’ll be really popular on Etsy specifically, too. That’ll be great. Awesome. Okay. Hey, I think are we going to talk to Jay as well? Is Jay coming over here? Jay is coming. Young man, what’s your name? Where do you come from? Uh, young man. Thank you. The makeup did wonders here. I was worried about weight, but we got 10 years off, I think. Uh, I’m Jay. Uh, I’m coming from BISE by way of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Uh, one of the benefits of, you know, print on demand is being able to kind of do what you want, where you want, and where you intentionally want to live. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You you’ve moved, you’ve done your own thing. You’ve lived the dream, right? Uh, my version of the dream, right? not handcuffed to a desk nine to five and kind of doing what we want when we want. Now I choose to work a 100 hours a week because I actually enjoy what I do because you love it. Yeah, that’s great. So what’s one thing you wish you knew when you started? Oh man, I I wish I knew that just because I’m artistically educated as a graphic designer. U and like this is something I said on the panel downstairs was that I wish I knew that just because something is artistically sound doesn’t mean it’s going to sell. You know, it was the biggest ego check on the planet, but I’m glad we tore that band-aid off early because now I can do more of what people actually want and not just what I think. So, getting out of our own way, if I had to say Yeah. Yeah. That’s so important, isn’t it? To learn those lessons. What about a POD trend that you’re excited about? Is there anything? Uh trends. I’m not a big trend chaser or anything. I feel like, you know, the niches do evolve. So like for example, if we were talking uh a light earth tone or off-white, maybe it’s a crew one day, maybe it’s taupe in another season. Uh so staying a breath a breast of the seasonal or you know, yeah, really seasonal or product changes, that kind of thing within your niche. But in terms of like following a trend, if you’re going to go into like, you know, what’s hot for Christmas or different products, only do it if it makes sense for your niche, I think is where I would stand on that. That’s great. Thank you so much, Jay. Why don’t you go and get yourself a drink, kick back, relax? I believe we’re going to go over here and we have got we’re going to dive into the live chat right now and uh we’ve got some winners to announce of some prizes. So, here we’re going to sit down and talk to Laura. Laura, how are you doing, Laura? I’m doing so good. How are you? I’m okay. I’m sweating a bit cuz I’m moving around so much and it’s so warm up here, but I’m okay. That’s good. We need to keep you hydrated. I know. So, what are we going to do? We’re going to talk to the chat or you have some winners to announce. First of all, we want to announce the winners of the opening giveaway. Awesome. Would you like me to do the honors? Okay, drum roll, please. We have Are you ready, guys, for the uh the winners of our prizes? We have Cheryl Derkott, winner number one. Hooray. Can we get a round of applause, please, for Cheryl? Uh Annie Fontinez. Annie Fontinez, you’re a winner. Benjamin her, you’re up. You’ve won. Shelby Renee, come on down. Linda K. Uh, Jovida Benson. You think I’m saying that one right? Could be right. Could be right. Okay. Uh, Ismael Omar, Alex Everett, Irish Roberts, and Mini Bloom. That can’t be a legal name. Mini Bloom. You know, you never know. Now, you never know these days. Mini Bloom, you have also won. And uh, are we going to go over to the live chat? We got some questions and some comments and some things like that. What are people saying in the live chat? What are they talking about? People are asking a lot of questions about marketing actually. But I want to know guys, what are your favorite products to sell? We heard on our mer from our merchants, from our speakers. What about you? What is your favorite thing to sell with print on demand? Yeah, tell us in the live chat what you guys are selling. What’s working for you? We really want to hear those answers in the live chat. If you’re watching right now, that would be great. I’m seeing a lot of t-shirt lovers here. Oh my god, some some people talking about marine animal prints. I love those as well. What’s your favorite marine animal? Uh the killer whale. The killer whale. What about you? The killer whale is a great one. Yeah, I like octopuses. I just bought some little octopus earrings for my daughter to take home with me cuz she likes octopuses as well. So, yeah, that’s a really good answer. You should put it on a t-shirt. Should put that on a t-shirt. Yeah. Anything else people are saying? Yeah. Phone cases, hoodies. Hoodies is are a classic. Hoodies are really popular in the live chat right now, right? Um, phone cases, loads of t-shirts. Loads of t-shirt. I I think you can’t go wrong with a t-shirt. That’s it. Thank you so much, guys. Keep those comments coming in the live chat. Keep watching. I’m going to head back to the uh main stage right now. Thanks for joining us.

Welcome back to our next session, Let’s Talk Tik Tok Shop. I’m here with awesome people that know a lot about Tik Tok and I’m sure a lot of you are curious about getting started. Maybe you want to make more content. So, we’re going to get right into it. I’m here with Riley, John, and Levi. And we’re going to share some thoughts that we have about it. Right. First thing I want to say is why Tik Tok shop? Why Tik Tok? There’s so many platforms to sell on. I’m really curious about this. Leave. Do you have something that is a real reason why Tik Tok shop? I mean, if you want to be part of the fastest growing marketplace on the planet, then you should join Tik Tok. If not, that’s totally okay. No, but I think what I like to say is like we’re all selling something, right? Um, and if you relate it to a lemonade stand, you can put your lemonade stand on a back road or a a county road and there might be like a hundred people that pass by every hour and you have a 100 chances to sell something. Or you could stick your lemonade stand in in the middle of I5 and millions of people will pass by you every day and you have so much more access to customers. That’s what Tik Tok shop is. There’s millions of people looking to buy products and it’s just up to you to make them buy yours. And I think that’s the exciting part about Tik Tok shop besides the fact that they invented the best, shortest, fastest, highest converting funnel ever invented. I can hear the passion. Me too. Honestly, I love that. I love it. How about you? Yeah. Well, Tik Tok is just unique cuz and I was explaining to Levi a little earlier like the difference between social media and interest media. There’s a big difference between the two. So, social media is Instagram and Facebook. We post a video, our followers see it. We’ve all done it. We post a we post a photo. Oh, my my mom’s commenting on my video my photo or whatever. Our followers see it. Now, in Tik Tok, a beginner with zero followers posts a video, it’s already going out to the public. And based on how those small group of people, those strangers engage with that video, it can go out to the masses. So it kind of levels the playing field for everybody out there because videos get pushed and marketing works on Tik Tok based on interest of the content. And what’s just specific and unique about Tik Tok is it’s the native shopping experience. People see your video inside their feed, like you mentioned, lemonade analogy. I love it. and they can click on the little orange rectangle at the bottom lefth hand screen of the video and buy that exact same product within just a couple clicks. We’ve all seen things on Tik Tok. I mean, we’ve bought stuff before. We get so as well. And it’s so easy to do so. And it’s just unique because the average purchase time between someone seeing a product and a video uh and actually clicking on purchase is 42 seconds long on Tik Tok. Impulse purchase is everything. We are all about instant gratification nowadays. and running when we’re running off the dopamine and we see a product we like, we’re like, “Oh, I have to have it.” So, it’s just a unique experience uh for any customer out there who’s buying on TikTok. And that’s why we’ve been able to take advantage of it. Yeah. I think for me, I come from the Etsy platform primarily. And so, I’m looking at it through that lens of there’s only so many customers, number one, that are coming to Etsy right away. Tik Tok has a lot more traffic than Etsy has. But then on top of that, there’s only so many customers that are coming to Etsy to search for the specific item that you’re selling or that specific target customer. Even if you’re selling in a really big niche, there’s only so much market share that you have versus Tik Tok has done a really really good job of number one having like billions of people on the platform. It’s a huge huge social media platform. But making that conversion of one of the big reasons I was not convinced to sell on Tik Tok shop until I was was I don’t feel like converting someone who’s scrolling to buying. But like John said that conversion has become a native part of Tik Tok where people are coming to Tik Tok to buy because of that social proof. All day long I can look at reviews of restaurants. But if John says, “Hey, I tried this place and the burger was really good the other day,” then I’m going to go because of that social proof. And that’s what Tik Tok provides over any other platform. That’s such a good point, too, because when people are also with comment sections and then reposting and then we’ll get into like the affiliate stuff, too. But just seeing so many different videos of products, it makes people excited and want to purchase and making the jump. You mentioned you’re an Etsy seller. I am too. And that jump from one platform to another, it can feel really intimidating. I know for me, like I’m pretty good with the stuff online, but every once in a while, a new platform is a lot to deal with. I’m curious if there’s advice that maybe you could give to somebody that would be switching over of something that you learned when doing that. So, we have a lot of people here who are listening to this session and well, they’re entertaining, but I have no desire to sell on Tik Tok. I was exactly where you’re sitting literally in April. I got I said this last session, but I got an email inviting me to a conference on Tik Tok and I said, “Yeah, cool. I’m not selling on TikTok, but it’ll be really cool to meet some other sellers.” And then by the end of the session, I was just convinced the sales volume is just so much potential. I don’t know. You’ll hear us talk all about it and I’m so excited to share so much more. But I think going if you’ve already have experience with Etsy or maybe not even Etsy, maybe Shopify, but if you already have the ability number one to create good designs and number two to create good listings, Tik Tok is just getting them in front of more eyes. And if you’re already in the business mindset where you’ve learned how to learn things, and that sounds kind of silly, but just like anything else, each new platform is going to come with its own set of learning curves. So if you’re in that mindset where you’re willing to put in the work and you’re willing to learn it, the results truly can be just exponential. Yeah. And it’s like and at that point too, the way I look at it is if you already have the products kind of designed or created, why not try? You know, you can you can move them over to another platform and just to see what happens. And do you sell on Shopify at all? Yes. Yeah. Did you make that transition as well? Yes. So one thing that’s unique about Tik Tok and a lot of brands want to be on Tik Tok. I know there’s a lot of a lot of us that just want to get on Tik Tok shot for the first time. Brands understand what’s happening on it. And so then the reason why they look at it in such a strong way is because on Tik Tok you get so much content. Of course maybe you’re making the videos yourself but also other creators out there making those videos. And so basically what I do is I take all that content either posting it organically on Instagram and Facebook or taking those exact same videos and running as ads. And so yeah, we obviously made that transition. And then of course too there’s something called the halo effect. So people don’t always buy on Tik Tok. Obviously massive conversions, but people will oftent times look on Amazon or they’ll go into Walmart and they’ll see a product inside there that they sell on Tik Tok. Like there’s a common phrase like, “Oh, I saw that on Tik Tok.” That happens all the time. And so for every dollar that we see spent on Tik Tok, we see about a 50 cent spillover over to Amazon and Shopify because the exposure. That’s amazing. You know, this platform is truly like so cool to me. Like it still blows my mind. the more I hear about it, I’m just like so inspired by it and how many people really are consumers of it. Do you think there’s a specific product type that maybe sells the best with print on demand on Tik Tok? Do do you have one that you think I think this is kind of my rule of thumb. The difference between Etsy, Shopify, um or Amazon is that everybody going to those places in pursuit of a purchase, right? You don’t go to Etsy for fun. You go to Tik Tok for I do. But at this point, I make the joke that like if Amazon had reals that people were addicted to, that’s what Tik Tok shop is, right? But because of that, your goal is no longer to convert a someone looking to buy into a buyer. You’re converting someone who’s looking to be entertained into a buyer. So, that’s a bigger step to be made. Now, you’re putting your things in your products in front of a larger group of people, but you still need that ability to convert someone into a buyer. And I think the best way to do that is having a product that sells itself. If you have a product that like every time we look at a Tik Tok, I think it’s way better for girls. But if if a girl like posts a video and whether they’re lip-syncing, dancing, telling a story about their life, whatever shirt they’re wearing, there’s probably going to be comments like, “Where did you get that top?” Girls say top, not where did you get that top? Or like link that top in your whatever. That means that product, you weren’t advertising the product, you were just wearing it and you were just doing your daily life, but that product is selling itself. So, however you can create a product that that achieves that I think is the best way to find a winner on Tik Tok. That’s great advice. Is there a product that maybe you have that you sell a lot? Well, I think of it in three. Right now during Q4, it’s four. I call it the mandatory three, but plus one for Q4. So, number one, it’s got to have a wow factor. It’s got to have that purple cow effect. If I’m driving down the road and I see a bunch of cows on the side of the road, I’m not going to think anything of it. But let’s say I’m driving down the road and I see a purple cow on the side of road. It’s going to be sure to grab my attention. I’m going to pull on the side of the road. It’s kind of a curiosity. It’s going to be a pattern interrupt. When we’re scrolling through Tik Tok, we’re doing the exact same thing. We’re driving down a Tik Tok road. That product has to catch our attention. So, number one, it’s got to be interesting. It’s got to be fascinating. It can’t be something you’re just going to find in Walmart or Target. Number two, it’s got to have a solvent problem. It’s got to solve a specific urgent problem. Number three, it’s got to be able to easy to make content with because Tik Tok is a content place. It can’t just be something just show show a photo of it. It’s got to be something that can be shown visually. And the last one for Q4, it’s got to be something that’s giftable. Everyone’s buying gifts during Q4. You go into a Walmart or Target, any big retailer during the last two months of the year, so November and December, which a lot of people are looking towards right now. Toys are always in the front of the store. Anything that’s giftable is in front of the store. parents are buying kids gifts or they’re buying uh toys for their kids for Christmas, right? And so anything giftable is something that’s absolutely necessary necessary during Q4. But those are the four main things I would say that every single product that I sell does well and what I see on Tik Tok works out. They have those four things right now. Yeah, Riley, do you have a product that you really like to sell? I sell shirts um primarily on Tik Tok and mostly in my Etsy store as well. I’ve also added some woven blankets, but two woven blankets specifically. I think having a slightly an item with a higher profit margin and that doesn’t necessarily mean a more expensive item, but something like bookmarks or stickers or keychains are going to be a little bit more difficult cuz yes, you can do the volume, but with Tik Tok, you’re ordering samples of your products typically, so that’s going to cut into a little bit. You’re sending out free samples of your products and so it’s going to be a little bit more difficult to make your first million because that’s an attainable metric when it comes to Tik Tok stuff. it’s going to be a little bit more difficult to make your first million on stickers versus a product where you maybe have 50% margins or higher. So, paying attention to those margins, not necessarily higher price, but higher margins. Great advice, too. Something that I think a lot of people don’t think about, too, especially if you’re starting a new platform and then you’re like looking at margins and fees and all that stuff and going into content because I we’ve all kind of been mentioning like with maybe affiliates dripping in there and it’s also such an important part of Tik Tok. I think that the way that people purchase on Tik Tok has so much to do with affiliate content. So, I’d love to talk about that and talk about how much content is really realistically needed by the seller on Tik Tok. Yeah, I can start on this one. I think the interesting thing about Tik Tok is it has its own shop, which is very reminiscent of like an Amazon, right? You can go, you can search for things, you can purchase things directly from the shop. But like my store for example, 85 to 90% of those sales are coming directly from a video. So if you’re not posting videos, you’re missing out on the majority of your traffic to your to your shop. So it’s not necessarily like about hitting a minimum when I think about the amount of content you need. It’s about producing at scale what you can that is already proven to convert. And I think what we’ll get into probably later, but it’s unattainable to strictly do your content by yourself. And because of that, Tik Tok has this thing called Tik Tok affiliates, which is the first platform where affiliate marketing is actually built in natively to the marketplace. And the great thing about being a new seller coming onto Tik Tok shop is that these affiliates that are really good at their jobs already know how to sell products. And they’ve probably sold products similar to yours, which means you can find affiliates that are great at selling your products for you. And not only should you slowly learn how to make content and sell products on your own, but you can learn from these affiliates that are that become your sales team for your store. Yeah, you kind of don’t really have to. And it works differently too because they create the content for you and you give them a percentage versus what it is that they’re purchasing. So they could make the content and don’t get a sale and you’re not necessarily paying for that, but you’re still getting exposure even if it’s not an actual purchase, which I find very interesting, too. I think Tik Tok shop alone has changed how marketing takes place from an influencer marketing perspective where you’re taking a risk on one video and that one video’s performance usually doesn’t really impact the compensation for that influencer, right? Whereas when you look at affiliate marketing, it’s no risk. It’s like print on demand for marketing really. And it’s it’s no risk. You only pay them when they’re already making money for you, right? They make you money to make money. And I think that is like the the turn. And you’d think, well, like why would anyone wouldn’t everyone just want to do like deals where they just get paid up front? Yes. But affiliates, this this this marketing system allows for anyone to be a marketer. You don’t have to have hundreds of thousands of followers. You don’t have to have everyone know your name. You just need to know how to sell a product. And I think it’s like an accessibility factor that has kind of leveled the scales in terms of marketing. Yeah. And there’s no really cap on how much you can make with something like an affiliate, you know, like if you hire someone like demand. Exactly. It’s just there’s it’s just unlimited, which is so cool. And I’m sure you both use affiliates in your store, too. So, I’m curious how how you feel. I think the the engine of Tik Tok I’m like, how do I follow up with that? But there’s this engine of Tik Tok shop affiliates. It it’s just crazy because 10 years ago, if you ever wanted to do affiliate marketing, if you ever want to find affiliates to make content for you, it was called traditional influencer marketing where you’d have to DM the affiliate on Instagram. You have to say, hey, how’s it going, Michaela? I’m going give you 20% and I’m going to send you a sample. They’re usually going to respond. Oh, you go back and forth through DMs and that entire process. And then you have to put a link in bio in your Instagram. Oh, if you want if that affiliate wants to sell your product, they got to put in a link in bio. Then they have to use a promo code. It was a huge mess. Tik Tok said away with that. We’re putting our entire affiliate system combined with the sellers. And so it makes it so easy. The attribution’s done. We don’t have to collect information from the affiliate. Everything gets tracked through that little orange rectangle that’s in the bottom left hand screen of the video. So that’s just one unique way that makes anyone be able to see success with affiliates. It just makes it so simple. Now, when it comes to actually the marketing strategy behind it, we could go into a whole this could be two hours long if you want to talk about affiliates, but um it’s one of those things. Affiliates, I think, and I was just talking to someone about this the other day. I think Tik Tok shop affiliates are the best marketers on the planet right now. Like, they are so good at their job. And like you mentioned, you only pay them when they actually generate a sale. So, it’s a commission-based model. The marketing only works or you only pay for marketing when it works. And that’s one thing that’s really unique about Tik Tok. Uh, and for anyone just just starting out and that’s I mean I was working construction 3 years ago and I’m able to I’m sitt up here. It’s pretty cool. Uh, but like three years ago I had no experience with marketing and now I can just use these creative what I can leverage other people’s time, energy and their skill of going viral to make me money. What? And so it was a light bulb moment for me. And they make money too which is cool. It’s like it’s like a whole thing. Like the affiliates make a lot of money. They’re like the best job they have. Yeah. Yeah. And they’re definitely needed like it’s it’s really cool. There’s so many people on TikTok especially that are getting on and selling products. And Riley, do you do the same thing with affiliate? Absolutely. Yeah. I I create my own content as well. I my viral product came from an affiliate video. Like my $20,000 week came from an affiliate video and this was my second month on Tik Tok. So this is not something Etsy it took me 15 months to see a,000 sales. Tik Tok it took me like 3 months. So the the scalability is just crazy. But one thing I hear so often whenever Tik Tok is introduced to someone is, “Oh, I don’t want to make content. I don’t know how to make content. I don’t I don’t feel like getting on video.” And this is kind of a truth bomb. And I’m I’m not trying to be mean when I say that, but get over it. Like, as not to sound in your face about it, but there’s no room for excuses in business. Okay? You don’t want to be on camera. Well, do you want to make money? Like, you don’t necessarily have to be on camera. Even even that $20,000 video, like I mentioned, was literally the shirt thrown down, her talking about it’s so important to order before the holidays happen and it’s going to sell out and it’s not going to sell out cuz we’re doing print on demand. But but creating content and working with affiliates, it’s so attainable. You just have to do the process and and work with affiliates, absolutely. But in order to work with affiliates, affiliates want to work with businesses that are making money. So you have to get those few initial sales. So you have to put in that work to create that content. Maybe it’s going live. That’s how I got my first affiliates because I got a few sales under my belt from going live. But you can also get sales on your own content. But what’s crazy about the affiliates is there are these people that are trained in sales psychology and making crazy money. Like like a a good affiliate, like just a standard good affiliates making six figures, which is crazy. And then you have like really good affiliates that are making seven, eight figures. And these people are making like six figures a month selling products. the girls that are selling you vitamins on Tik Tok are making so much money and so you’re leveraging that where the content that I make is not great. I get a few sales on my content. A lot of my content comes from the people that I’ve sent a free product to. But the people that are making the really good content know how to research, know the hooks, know the call to actions, know how to make every second of a video convince you further and further. And that’s what we should be studying as creators who are learning to make content is that kind of good performing content. Just like on Etsy, whenever you’re studying design and research, you’re researching bestsellers to try to make a good listing and what goes into a good listing, it’s very applicable, the process is very applicable to Tik Tok of you look at the top performing creators and the top performing videos and what exactly is it about that that made it get that sale. Is it how they caught your attention in the first few seconds? Is how they told you to buy the product at the very end, but looking at that top performing content and then emulating it on your own until you really understand the patterns. That’s such great advice. I think like the research process is so true for anything, product, design, content, is you look at what’s already working and then how do you apply something new and valuable from your product into the market? Cuz it’s not just like copying someone’s video verbatim that’s not going to do well. But seeing what’s working and then, okay, how can I put my own interesting spin onto this or my niche with my product or even make it even more interesting? Like the purple cow thing you’re talking about. Like you like I’m like gonna remember that. That’s like such a great I will say one more thing that I wanted to add to what John said um about how you used to have to reach out and like attain these affiliates by sending them a sample and giving them their own code and all this and then also collaborating that with how you you you can see how the the the ceiling on Tik Tok is just so unbelievably high. Well, the way that these these products um really catch fire is in combination with both of those things and the research of really good affiliates because as a product starts doing well and really good affiliates start making money, those other really good affiliates are actually researching which products are making money. And because I don’t have to reach out and find and acquire these affiliates, they can request a free sample and join my affiliate team directly through the app. So, it’s a domino effect that can create so much momentum so fast that like it’s just what’s special about Tik Tok. I want another thing too because Tik Tok gives you the affiliates too. Like you can see how many followers they have. You can see how much GMV they’ve done in the past month. If I ever wanted to do that on Instagram, I couldn’t see how much sales they’ve done before. And now I can see like, oh, this affiliate did 100K in the past month. They are getting 500 views. They’re getting a,000 views every single video. It’s like they give us everything that we need to actually see success with affiliates and then we just click on a button that says invite. I’m like that was really easy or approve like to be if you have a product doing really well once they are requesting to be on your sales team. You just pick from the best ones. And these are for the free samples not the refundable samples. There’s good creators will buy the product so that they can get it as soon as possible and not wait on you to hit approve. They’re buying the product if it sells. They get a refund and you can determine how many times it needs to sell for that refund. Yeah. And most people don’t understand that there’s 70 million people buying on Tik Tok every single month. It’s kind of crazy. I know my mom and my sister are one of them. They’re watching. They’re like, “Oh, shoot.” So, there’s 70 million people buying on Tik Tok every single month. There’s 5 million Tik Tok shop affiliates on the platform that want to promote all of our products and hopefully our viewers products as well when you launch. And then there’s only half a million sellers on the platform. And I I’d have to ask Profify how many print on demand sellers, but I know it’s a fraction of them. And so the demand is there and it’s only growing. So what you guys said earlier like we’re really bullish on it. I’m really bullish on it too. Yeah. And that was one of my questions you that I was going to actually bring up because I think that that’s also kind of something that people are concerned about when they want to start selling on Tik Tok shop is oh I’m a small seller. I don’t have anyone yet. How am I going to get affiliates? But there’s so many affiliates on the platform that are like waiting for the opportunity. And that’s a very common thing too is people think that they need a bunch of followers. My account’s been up almost 6 months. I have 500 followers. I’m sure these guys have a lot more, but I’m still getting daily sales. Like, it’s not You don’t need a million followers to get started. Your affiliates don’t need a million followers. The girl that sold my viral product, I think, had like 8,000. And that’s like not anything insane. Same with the views. Like, videos that are getting 3 to 500 views, which is average for a new video, can still consistently make sales. The ones that make a million views will get a lot more sales. But it’s not about you don’t need a million views to start getting sales on it. just start posting and be consistent with it because you’re not going to hit that million. You’re not gonna hit that $20,000 unless you are consistently posting and they’re gonna be bad at first. No one starts out. Even going Etsy 4 years starting Tik Tok, I’m still not the greatest at Tik Tok. I’m learning as much as I can and I’m really enjoying the process and I’m already seeing some success. But it’s because I’m consistent with it. Even when that consistency means learning and being bad at it, you just have to go through that phase. Yeah, I think consistency across the board is the most important thing. Like even if your products well even what you just said about not having followers that’s also a huge thing that people are like I can’t do that I can’t sell on a social media platform I don’t have followers but it’s actually completely separate cuz Tik Tok it’s not social media it goes back to the point this is interest media and so when you mentioned like you don’t need followers you don’t need views Tik Tok gives everybody an equal chance to see success on it like I we all had zero followers at the very beginning someone can start with zero followers today and can get more views more engagement than the videos that we post. It is a competition on marketing. So, no one has a leg up until you you have to possess the skills of course. Now, over time, like you mentioned, you possess those skills, you keep learning, keep growing, you keep wanting to learn. That’s who we see success on the platform right now. And I would way rather be involved in a platform where there’s a skill gap involved to be successful than just a a luck lottery ticket. I think there’s luck involved in everything, but clearly the better you get at Tik Tok shop, the consistently better you will do. And that is just so inspiring and encouraging because like for example, if you start learning how to sell just your product, even if you can’t acquire one of these top top affiliates, you can get any affiliate and tell them exactly the knowledge you have in order to sell your product and be like, if you do these things, it will help you make money. You can become a coach in the marketing and the selling. And I don’t know, it’s just it’s way different than any other platform. For sure. I’d love to maybe I mean, if we haven’t inspired people enough, I feel like this conversation’s been so great. But I would love to hear from all of your perspectives what you would tell someone that’s maybe nervous to start or that’s just like I don’t know like is there just a piece of advice that maybe you would give? Well, I want to ask the audience, if the if the lottery was free, let’s say if the lottery was free, how many tickets would you take? Most of us would probably be like, I’m going to take as many tickets as I can if the lottery was free. Uh, and what cuz you every single ticket could be a winner. Social media and Tik Tok is a lot like that. Every single video that you post is a lottery ticket that it has the chance to go viral and you can post as many times as you want. And every single time you post is one of those lottery tickets. And so what I tell people, of course affiliates, we can go down a rabbit hole and talk about all these cool marketing things that you can do. Uh if you post your own videos, every single one has a chance to change your life. I every single one of us up here, we posted a video that changed our life. And I know bunch of my friends, thousands of my students, like we’ve all done it and we’ve all seen that happen. And so for anyone out there, go take a lottery ticket today. Go pick it up and go try and cash it in. It might change your life. And I think it’s okay to be scared, too, right? I think sometimes doing new things in life is scary. I think about all of the things that I’ve done even at 25. I studied abroad in a new country. That was scary, right? Going to a country where I don’t speak the language to live for 5 months. But I think about the other side of all of those things that I’ve done in my life that is scary. And sometimes you have to do things that are scary to get results that you’re really proud of. And so if you’re willing to do it scared and do it anyways, I don’t know, like they’ve said, your life can just be changed. The potential that it has is is unheard of. Tik Tok, even at like what, 3 years in the platform, the potential is growing and growing consistently and there’s not like a ceiling to it. There’s new people on Tik Tok every day, there’s new people buying on Tik Tok. You just have to do it even if you’re scared. Yeah. Do it scared. Yeah. What I would say is really all you have to ask if you’re scared about joining Tik Tok, all you have to ask yourself is in 5 years, do I want to have a large Tik Tok shop brand? Do I want to be selling my products successfully on Tik Tok in 5 years? And in that case, you go back to the old wives tale of the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. So if you want to be like that in 5 years, why not start today? cuz every day you wait is only prolonging the growth. Especially getting into Q4 right now like you get so much momentum because everyone’s buying. Yeah. And people are like ready to buy. I feel like as soon as for me in my experience it’s typically like Halloween.

I want some clothes. I want some clothes for Christmas. Yeah. And you know people on Tik Tok dur of course any time of year they’re scrolling through and we all do it during Q4 people start scrolling with a list in the back of their head right on Tik Tok and that’s who we’re selling to. Yeah that’s a great point. That’s a great point. People are like and like someone like me I never know what to ask for for Christmas. I’m like during the whole year I’m like oh that would be like cool to get and then Christmas comes around and it’s like I’ve gotten the things that I was thinking about before and now I don’t really have any. But Tik Tok is like just a a wishlist creator. When when you’re scrolling through Tik Tok, you’re just seeing things. Oh, I’ll add that star. Oh, I’ll send that to my friend. I’ll send that to my mom. Like, oh, this would be great. It’s just a a way for consumers to build up that that holiday wish list. Yeah, I have an embarrassing Tik Tok shop cart. I’m thinking about I’m pretty sure it tells me like the cart is full. So I have to like move things to the favorite. I’m sure that’s me in my cart right now. Who knows? You know, we all sell such different things. We’re running out of time, but I would like to just leave with one last note. One quick little thing that you would um suggest to someone of maybe it’s a mistake that you’ve made that they can avoid and not mess up with. Does anybody have Well, you you should start that. Well, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. Is that why you say that? I’d say research your content. It’s so easy. We’re talking about how easy it is to make content, but if you just grab the shirt and then you stand still over it for 10 seconds and you hope someone’s going to buy it, that’s crap. Can I say that? Sorry. No one’s going to buy your shirt if you do that. So, just like you’re researching your designs and have good designs. If you’re not seeing success on another platform, just putting those designs on TikTok is not going to see success. Your design should be researched. every single aspect of your design, you should say, “I chose this font because I identified it. I noticed people are buying this. Chose this layout. I chose these elements.” Just like your designs, your videos should be researched. So, I say you can’t just stare at a shirt. You can toss a shirt down and point at the shirt in different places and talk about all the different aspects and be excited about it. Talk about the different selling points, its direction to garment, its comfort colors. And that right there will be so much more intriguing than just you hanging out with your phone waiting 10 seconds and hoping people buy. So research, research, research. That just comes from studying, watching videos over and over again, looking at designs over and over again, and noticing patterns. What are people doing over and over again that convert? That’s such great advice. That really is. I think so many people have learned so much. I know I have. And this has just been such a great conversation. I’ve enjoyed talking about this so much. And I really hope that we inspire people to get on Tik Tok shop. Start today. Do it scared. as we said, you know, even if you don’t know what you’re doing, none of us knew what we were doing and it works out. So, definitely something that I would recommend. So, thank you all so much for joining me for this panel and stick around cuz we of course have more discussion panels coming up that are really interesting and you’ll be sure to learn a lot more, too.

Welcome back upstairs, folks. With me today, I’ve got Michael Essic. How are you, sir? I’m doing very well, thank you, Jay. How are you? I’m doing well. It’s been such a ride and so much fun to be back here. Um, I got a couple questions though we want to get through so we can uh let you kind of explain a little bit about your POD journey. So, how did you first get started in print on demand? Well, I was uh newly married. I’d just sold a little business that I had and I was looking for a way to make some side income and I stumbled across this world of t-shirts online. And back then it was shirt day sites. It was places like uh uh Tfury and these others that would do quick sales and turnaround of t-shirts. And I thought maybe I’ll just create a few designs, see if this works. Uh, and I did and one of my designs got selected and uh, we made like a few hundred sales in like a day and I was like, “Oh, actually this this could work.” Um, so I kind of plowed into that. I uploaded to, you know, all the big t-shirt sites and got started and then realized that with companies like Printull, I could actually have my own store and I could list as many designs as I wanted and only when they sold would, you know, they be made and I could like test out all these crazy designs that I had in my head and uh yeah, it it just kind of grew from there and grown onto Amazon and Etsy and all these different places. That’s pretty interesting. I like that you mentioned that about print on a man and not having to house inventory. So my wife and I had our own print shop and we would have to kind of manage a turnover of inventory. So it’s a lot of work and you need dedicated workspace. Um you mentioned that you sold a business prior to print on demand. So what did that kind of entail and what did life look like before the freedom of print on demand? Yeah, that was just like a really simple blog that I’d made and uh sold it for not not a lot of money but it was just a little going concern. Um so yeah before it was I was working as a web designer and uh after prints on demand took me about two years to kind of grow the business to a point where it was matching my day job income. Uh so once that happened I had that great moment of going to tell my boss that you know I’m leaving. I’ve uh going to do something else and then uh yeah continued to thankfully grow the business from there and and keep going into art licensing into different routes and and ways to get these designs out there. And uh yeah it’s been great. That sounds like a lot of fun. And I know we’re going to talk about maybe the app that you built at one point, but was there a specific moment you realized that POD could be a real thing? Yeah, I actually remember being sat in a cafe uh with my wife and realizing that I could actually sell anything I wanted and use these companies to do the fulfillment and there was no real risk to me. The only investment was time and effort to get the designs up. But yeah, realizing that actually this dream maybe I’ve had for a long time of having my own brand, of having my own, you know, company uh could be realized with just a laptop and just me spitting out designs and testing things and testing the waters. So yeah, I still remember that feeling and realizing that and uh and it’s amazing to have it come to life. It’s pretty liberating in a creative way, right? That’s right. Awesome. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Jake. We are going to move over here and say what’s up to Riley. What’s up? Good to hear from you Jay. Uh yeah. So again, we’re going to kind of run through the same questions here because I think it’s really important to let the viewers know that we are just regular people, right? So like how did you first hear about and then get started with print on demand? Um okay. So I started when I was in college. I started four years ago. I was a senior in college and I was poor. Okay. Broke, broke, broke. I was on a semester abroad. Semester abroad paid for by scholarship. So, not like spending a lot of money to go on a semester abroad. Um, once a month we’re buying a big bag of rice. Once a week we’re buying some chicken. So, I’m like, I need to make money. How can I make money? So, I get on TikTok and I’m looking at some Tik Tok videos of what can I do for some income? And I come across print on demand. I’m really intrigued by it because I was studying media in college. I already had some experience with Canva. I do a lot of my designing on Canva. Um, so it was kind of like a natural next step for me. Um, started my shop, worked on it consistently, probably four to six hours a day for those first four months or so till I came back to the US and took a break for a month or so and then jumped right back into it. Awesome. And for those of you who didn’t know, Riley and I met, Riley was actually one of the Printify rock stars who won a trip out here for the first Amplified ever, which was 3 years ago. That So if I start talking about it too much, I’m going to get kind of emotional because it I don’t know. I literally was was 3 years ago posting on Facebook and being in the Facebook group and I get a message one day that I won a free trip to Europe. Are you kidding me? And and in that there’s a whole story which I’m sure we’ll all tell someday. But I had written a letter cuz I’m big into manifesting and what you put out there in the world is what you’re going to get. So I wrote a letter before I found out that I was going to the conference saying I got to meet all these big creators like Jay Duza and then I got the message that I won the free trip. And so then to be invited to come as a speaker and share my experience with it is just so full circle of like I was literally a broke 21-year-old college kid and now this is my full-time job. It’s just so so rewarding to be able to number one work for myself and number two to know that that’s something I’m capable of just because I’ve worked hard for it. Uh yeah, and I mean all the success in the world welld deserved. Thank you. Was there a point that you thought, “Holy cow, this could actually be a real thing?” I think it was my my hundth sale. So, big things always happen to me when I’m on vacation. Maybe it’s just cuz I like to go on vacation when I can, but I was I had just graduated college. I was, it was my birthday, and so I went to Mexico for a couple days. And before that, I had participated in a 30-day challenge that was listing five listings a day. And so because of that consistency, I hit my hundth sale and it was just kind of a lot because 100 different people bought from me and I saw that growth so quickly because I said I took that month off. I took that month off, got a second job and I’m like, man, I can’t do that. So I worked at a pizza restaurant for a month and then I said, just like I’ve said with Tik Tok, if I really truly believe in the potential of this business, why am I working a second job right now instead of spending this time building something for myself? And so from that April to May period, I think I went from 60 to 100 sales. That was 8 months into my journey. 7 months later, I was at 1,000 sales. Okay. Wow. It’s just exponential. It really, really is. And if you believe in the potential of it and you put that hard work in behind it, you really can see success with it, just as literally anyone who starts it and is willing to learn. I love that you said that because it’s about, you know, wanting to make sure that you are willing to put in the time to do this. So, thank you so much, Riley. We are now going to move on to somebody selling on a platform that I wish would allow Canadian sellers. With me now is Levi. How you doing, Levi? What’s up, everybody? I’m doing good. So, give us a little bit of history how you got into print on demand and uh where you sell. Well, to start out, COVID hit and I lived in Washington, which means I wasn’t in school. I was at home. And my dad told me and my brothers, he said, “If if you’re going to be at home, pick something that you can master. like take advantage of all this free time. My little brother said he was going to learn Spanish. I don’t think that really happened. My older brother um learned Python and my mom even learned how to play piano. I chose e-commerce. That’s was the birth of my print on demand brand. I didn’t start necessarily as print on demand. Um I was trying drop shipping, Amazon FBA. I was trying anything I could. I was learning as much as I could. When I got to college, um that was the outbreak of NIL. Athletes in college could make money off their likeness. So, I started doing batch designs for athletes and the best way to do it is print on demand because I live in a dorm room. I can’t house a bunch of inventory for these athletes. And then from there, um, I started making my making my own designs and eventually joined Tik Tok shop that same year, which really changed my life. That’s pretty incredible. So, just to all of you in college, maybe you know, maybe you love the program you’re in or what you’re learning. Maybe you’re looking for an early out or something completely unique to do. I mean, I would probably leverage the ability to Tik Tok shop if I was living anywhere outside of Canada ultimately. Uh, I’m going to keep going with that one, too. But, uh, was there a specific moment when you realized, “Holy cow, this is going to work and I’ve made it.” I mean, okay, I have three moments I want to reference. My first moment was right after doing NIL, I realized, you know, nobody’s talking about my college, nobody’s talking about these athletes. I need to figure out something else I can sell over the summer. So, I made my first like trend design shirt. And this was before Tik Tok shop was a thing, but I was using Tik Tok to market my designs. So, I posted this very first shirt and I posted a video about it. It got it went viral and I sold like 500 designs and I was like, you know what? I think I made it. But little did I know that less than a year later, I would be selling on Tik Tok shop. And the moment I realized that Tik Tok shop was going to change my life is I was starting getting so many sales from my dorm room that I would tell myself instead of like choosing how fast I should get ready. I’m going to get in the shower and I’ll get out when I make $100. And nobody knew what was going on. I I like kept it all to myself. But that was like life changing, especially when you have no job. And then just recently a celebrity, a NFL quarterback Caleb Williams, the cover of Madden this year posted on his Instagram account wearing my t-shirt and it’s actually pinned up top his profile if you want to check get out. Yeah. And I think that recently has been my new like, wow, this is like this is a this is the real deal. That’s an incredible story. Thank you so much, Leo, for taking the time here. I hope this inspires everybody to kind of, you know, maybe if you’re struggling with anything and not sure what you want to do, at least dabble, right? you were kind of forced into it.

Welcome to this session on positioning to win pricing strategies. In this session, we’re discussing pricing strategies to create a sustainable and a profitable business. Emphasis on the profitable because let’s be real, like you can make all the sales in the world, but if you aren’t pocketing any of that for yourself and all your hard work, what’s the point? There’s no point at all. So, we’re gonna jump right in. Let’s talk about Let’s just start with like our pricing strategies. So, I’m g I’m with John, Sarah, and Dom, and I’m gonna start with you, John. What is your core product and how much you sell it for? T-shirt Gilden 5000 is the main one, and we sell on TikTok for $18.99. $189. Okay, awesome. Sarah, what is your core product and how much you sell it for? Comfort colors 1717, so also a t-shirt. And with shipping included, just under $30, like 29 and change. Okay, Dom, what is your core product and how much you sell for? The same comfort code as 1717s. Um, we sell them for £26 British money, but I don’t know what that translates to off the top of my head. Really should have done some research, but uh, yeah, that’s my core selling product, you know. It’s really interesting. Well, I mean, my core product is actually hats. It’s funny, you guys are all apparel. I sell a lot of apparel, but my core product is hats, which I price between $30 and $40 based on the style. But apparel-wise, my core product is actually hoodies. Like I sell the most hoodies, which I actually sell for $60. But I mean, that’s kind of like, you know, branding through Shopify, one of one of like the big benefits. But, um, I’m interested to hear from you guys if you have any rule of thumb for pricing your products. Like what how do you come up with these numbers? Because they’re all very different. So, we got Tik Tok at the lowest and then we’ve got Etsy in the middle and then we got Shopify at the highest. And this is exactly what a lot of people have in their mind, right? And so, let’s hear from you, John. Yeah, Tik Tok is a impulse to purchase platform. People are running off of dopamine. They’re buying products. So, the number one rule is it has to be impulsively being able to make a decision that like, oh yeah, I can buy it. If it’s 40, $50, $60, it’s a little bit harder to get an impulsive sale. So, uh just testing around was how I land at $18.99. It depends on the niche, of course, right? Some different niches have higher buying power, right? A lot of t-shirts I sell, younger demographic, more in the Gen Z, so they don’t have as much buying power as someone who’s Gen X. So, that’s where we found our price just works the best. Cool. Sarah. Yeah. How about you? Um, well, I’m guilty of the impulse Tik Tok purchase for one. Um, yeah, on Etsy, it’s a little bit more of that like unique, one of a kind gifts that people are going for. So, you don’t have to race to the bottom pricewise. Um, but I do think first and foremost sellers want to maintain profitability. We want you to maintain profitability. So determine what your target profit is. And then um from there kind of look at your the audience and niche that you’re selling to and what that range is is typically what I do. And I like to try to aim for like mid-range, not the lowest, not the most expensive. And that’s always worked for me. Cool. Dom, how about you? How do you have a rule of thumb for pricing your products? Um generally because we’ve been in business for now eight years. The originally wanted to have the products as cheap as possible. Uh not just for like sales margins reasons in the amount that is sold but to also make it as as global as possible. The buying power of demographics from say poorer countries over ones that have like a higher amount of capital they’re they’re willing to spend. We wanted to make that balanced. And then over time with just things that come up over, you know, running a business, the prices have gone up with that, increased shipping costs, things like that. And after a while, we did reach a point where we thought to ourselves, are we proud enough of this product to put it at a higher price margin because we’re confident that people will buy it because we stand behind the art that we put on there. And by utilizing sort of our Instagram uh and to understand exactly what our does well before we even put it on an item, we’re able to sort of make a judgment call as to whether or not this is something that people are willing to pay a premium for. Right. For example, if I had to go back to something you mentioned earlier about the fact that your core product is hoodies, I noticed that your your uh prices are quite high as well. You must have found that if you price something, especially like a hoodie, at a lower price, people will question the quality of the item itself, even if they might be able to research the blank that you print on. It’s all about sort of selling like you and how proud you are of your item and how confident you are that you can sell it at that price knowing that you’re selling something that’s not, you know, flop basically. Right. Yeah. It’s so funny you mentioned that because I was really freaked out about having more premium prices at the beginning and I didn’t always have premium prices. I was actually trying to price where my competitors were kind of like mid-range or something like that. And there was a point in time like I was always hesitant about raising prices, but obviously everyone’s trying to incre increase their uh profit margins and I was targeting an affluent niche like one that has kind of like a you know higher income kind of bracket and so I felt like that was to my advantage and I was seeing other competitors doing it successfully with premium pricing. So that’s kind of at one point I was like you know what I just need to rip the bad off and try it out. This is the great thing like you can change your pricing anytime. Like you could literally go change your pricing today and if you’re like I went from a 100 sales today to zero tomorrow, change it back. Like you know like it’s it’s it’s like in real time you can be changing your pricing. But the crazy thing we did change one thing. We got rid of the uh uh manufacturer labels and we changed it out with branding labels. So no one knew it was a Bell & Canvas 30001 t-shirt or no one knew that it was you know this sweatshirt style that we were selling. And uh that was really the only change we made. And then we increased our prices significantly overnight. And what was crazy is nothing happened. Like the sales, the conversion rate was almost the same. Maybe a tiny bit less, but we were making way better profit margins. So, we were okay with that, right? Um, but, you know, that’s that’s one thing I really like about Shopify is like you have full control of the brand experience and there is like that, you know, debate between value pricing and premium pricing and a lot of people on Shopify want to be premium brands. Sorry to interrupt. I was going to say that that little touch of adding the um the tag to the back is a small price to pay for yourself. Yes. But it elevates the product significantly. Totally. And you’re also at that point as well when people look at the item, they’re not seeing the blank that you’re selling. They’re seeing your item. Exactly. Personalized. And it’s optional as well. So you don’t have to dive into doing that straight away. You can choose to do that later on if you want to elevate your product. Yeah, I 100% agree. I I call this price elasticity. And it probably I probably didn’t make up that term, but like it’s like the ability to like have a perceived value of your price. If someone sees Gilden, a Gilden tag on a t-shirt, they’re probably not going to pay $40 for it because they know it’s a Gilden. And nothing wrong with Gilden. Gilden’s awesome, but like there’s a lower perceived value of a Gilden something like a Comfort Colors 1717 where you can charge higher and people see the tag like, “Yeah, that’s that’s worth 30 bucks.” You know what I mean? Or even more. So, let’s get into um strategies. So we talked about kind of rule of thumb for pricing. I want to talk about the value versus premium pricing because we have such a wide array here. It’s kind of like premium somewhat premium and then middle of the range and then more value. Right? So when it comes to value versus premium one big question that I hear a lot I don’t know if you guys hear this as well um is that you know people are people are looking at competitors lowcost competitors and thinking they have to compete with them. Like how do I compete with someone selling a $10 t-shirt? Um, I want to hear your thoughts cuz I have a lot of thoughts on this topic. First of all, you don’t need to compete. But we’ll we’re going to I want to hear from you guys. So, what do you say to someone that says, “How do I compete with a $10 t-shirt?” And there’s a lot of those on Tik Tok. There’s a bunch of them who are selling five even $5 t-shirts on Tik Tok. It’s like a lot of people coming to me and ask, “How do I compete with these people?” One thing that’s just super unique about Tik Tok is that people aren’t going to the platform to compare. They’re going over to Tik Tok to get engaged and then they see only your product. If I want to buy a t-shirt, I go over to Etsy. I have to first I’m comparing. Okay, this design, this design, okay, that one’s cheaper. So, there’s more strategy that’s behind when it comes to Etsy. When it comes to Tik Tok, I can price my product at whatever price I want. Now, it’s just converting that person and what their buying power is to an actual customer. So, Tik Tok has leveled the playing field in so many different ways. In terms of actually pricing, you can price at whatever you want. There’s no pricing. There’s no price competition, there’s marketing competition. Right. That’s that’s really really interesting. And you mentioned that your niche is younger demographic, Gen Z, so they’re a little more price sensitive. And that’s how you came to your price. Exactly. Okay, cool. Sarah, let’s hear from you. So, value versus premium price. You’re kind of like in the middle, like you’re not the lowest, you’re not the highest. So, how do you what would you say to someone that came to you and said, “I’m selling on Etsy. How do I compete with these $10 t-shirts?” Which we know a lot of them aren’t actually $10. It’s like a sales strategy. But uh I want to hear your thoughts. Yeah. Well, to that point, I would say a lot of Etsy sellers will immediately be like, “What am I supposed to do? I see all these low prices, but I’m selling in the same niches.” So, exactly what you said. If you are brand new to Etsy selling, be sure to click into the listing to see what’s going on in that listing because a lot of times sellers are using a strategy to where they have a variation within their listing that is cheaper than all of the other variations. And so it’s possible that you’re clicking in and you’re not the cheapest uh the price that you originally saw isn’t even representative of the mockup product. And u so that’s for one. So, when you’re doing your pricing research, be sure to be mindful of what actually you’re comparing. You know, make sure it’s an apples to apples comparison when you’re doing your kind of pricing research. And then I would also just say like the the pricing strategies on Etsy can can vary. If you’re brand new, don’t worry about pricing strategies. Price for profit. That’s that’s my advice on Etsy. when you start to get those consistent sales, Etsy sellers do like to use the different pricing strategies and one of them can be to launch your prices at a break even um you know or even lose some money um at first and then once they get those sales rolling in they’ll gradually increase the prices. So just be mindful that that’s happening too, right? I I think that that’s so important because when I go on Etsy I do a lot of research on Etsy um and I always see those crazy low prices. is it’ll be like a comfort colors tee. It’s like $4.99. And I’m like absolutely not. No one is selling a comfort colors tea on Etsy for $4.99. You click onto list listing, you go down, it’s like digital print $4.99 and then like the actual cover colors is like $29.99 or $25.99, which I mean that’s that that’s a like really reasonable price. You know, I think about my high volume seller students uh all Shopify brands and they’re selling comfort colors TE’s between $30 and $35 on average in high volumes. And um so yeah, it’s yeah, I’m really glad you mentioned that because especially for those on Etsy, it’s like discouraging. You look and you’re like, how am I supposed to compete with a $4.99? Like that’s like half the cost of the blank, you know, before the printing and everything else. So Dom, I want to hear your thoughts. Uh you have like the most premium of pricing of the three. You’re iconic Shopify brand. Um so what would you say to someone that says, “How do I compete with $10 t-shirts, especially at your price point?” There’s um hundreds of websites out there that sell absolute cramp, right? And you cannot really in a way price-wise compete with that if someone wants to just spend $10 on a t-shirt. Mhm. I tend to find that people only spend $10 on a t-shirt like once and then they get it home and it shrinks or the design falls off and they can’t send it back or return it. So I think that instead of trying to compete necessarily with price, you got to compete with reputation, trust and build like a rapport with your customers to let them know that uh if you buy from yourself, then you can be looked after. You can have easy returns and also by uh harvesting reviews from customers, encouraging them to review your products, encouraging them to review your brand on something like Trust Pilot, people will come to the website, see that these are real reviews and know that it’s safe to buy from you and not feel like they’re going to get a poor quality product, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s so true. And the thing is like you’ve built this really cool brand with a lot of super fans who love your brand, love why it exists, and they keep buying from you again and again and they’re probably not even looking at the lowcost competitors. A lot of people when they look at a brand and they feel like this brand was made for me, that’s who they want to support. I have boughten t-shirts and paid more a lot more for the t-shirt because it was a brand that aligned with my values, passions, and beliefs. Even knowing there were knockoffs from that brand that I could have bought for like half the price, I didn’t want to support that personally. And you know, I would consider myself a super fan of that other brand. And so that’s the brand I wanted to support, the one that I felt like really aligned with my values, passions, and beliefs. So, let’s hang out here for a bit. I want to talk about differentiation and how you increase the perceived value because my thoughts on this are uh do not compete on price. You will never win. It’s a downhill race and someone will always be willing to sell for cheaper than you. So, it’s just not a good way to build a profitable and sustainable brand. But the good news is that there’s so many ways that you can actually stand out, increase your perceived value and charge those premium prices and get a lot of people happy to pay them, right? And that’s what it’s all about. So, uh, let’s start with you, John. Like, what would you say for how do you increase the perceived value? So, you sell your t-shirts for like pretty pretty low cost, but there’s way lower costs than you. So, how do you increase that perceived value? Yeah, the big thing on TikTok, as I mentioned before, is marketing. That’s the strategy behind how I beat other people and how sellers who are doing well on TikTok, they beat people because of the because of the marketing that they do, not the the actual pricing. So, one of the things that we do, we can talk about more in a second, is the the urgency value that I have and actually converting people uh that are actually seeing that product with a flash sale and actually focus on the urgency of the marketing. Other things that can be done more for the perceived value is also the quality that’s shown inside the video. Um, for example, just even showing it on a clothes hanger, different styles of the videos that present it on different people. One thing that we do with a lot of our creators, uh, me as a 23-year-old showing a t-shirt, I’m going to definitely attract 23-year-olds. Of course, I mentioned a little bit earlier, Gen Z is a lot of who we’re seeing, we’re also expanding into and going to millennials and also going over to Gen X. And so, it’s just about getting other people seeing the product. And the only way for me to do that is with other creators or we can talk about even more is AI. I can just get a 45year-old man or a woman to be wearing my t-shirt and I can just clone myself and that can just ultimately attract people through the marketing into my funnel who I’m actually looking to sell to. Right. Okay. I I want to get to them with their answers, but I want to hang out here for a minute because I think a lot of people listen like, “Wait a sec.” What? Like I open up a can of worms just like give us like the cliff notes on how this will work. So you’re a Gen Z. You wear a shirt for Gen Z’s or like hey that guy looks like me. I’m going to click and he’s wearing a cool shirt. Uh, and they’re more likely to buy because that’s the target demographic. So, how would you get like a millennial Gen X? Like, tell me how you’re using AI on Tik Tok shop to get these people like to stop the scroll. Let me reiterate and let me say it again cuz I probably went a little two steps too fast is meta and you you’ve noticed on meta. It’s all about messaging and targeting. If you are a if I’m a 23-year-old in the camera, meta is going to see like, okay, 23-year-old, I’m going to match this video up with another 20-year-old who’s going to be showing inside the content. Uh, and we see that all the time and inside of our feed. We typically see around the same age range of ourselves in the content that we see. Now, if I want to expand my market and get to a higher buying power audience, all I have to do is just switch into another PE person by using AI and I just snap into that person. And so that’s just what we we focus on right now. And it’s just it’s terrifying with AI stuff. How do you switch into another person though? I know I’m going to drag this on, but like I just feel like those listener are probably like wondering the same thing. Like how is there that you use like the main one is Higfield. So Higfield’s like the go-to. I’m not sponsored by them. I don’t I I just literally buy from them every single every single day. I use to make my content. So Higfield’s a go-to. And of course for prompting Higsfield and getting that content. Um, well, first I’m starting out with a reference frame and then I’m I’m just animating that video. So, I’m using Chat GBT just to make the images. Chat GBT is the best image generator right now out there with her GBT image 3 and then turning into that into a motion. All I’m doing is just getting a prompt, tossing it into Higfield with the reference image of let’s say a lady who’s 45 years old wearing my t-shirt and I just tell uh Higfield through Cense 2.0 or 2.5 is the model that we use. Give it a simple prompt. Please create a UGC style video that’s 8 seconds long that demonstrates my product in a very effective way. And I just click on generate. Now I got a video post on TikTok. There you go. With that target target demographic, more likely to stop the scroll. That’s awesome. Yeah, I I use KD to do something similar. They have like templates for UGC videos. Um, and you can modify those templates. But what’s nice is that the prompt is completely built for you and then you can just be like change out the age on the prompt and then it generates within a couple minutes and you’ve got a UGC style video that looks really realistic%. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you for that. Thank you for digging a little deeper on that. Sarah, how do you differentiate? Like you’re not the lowest cut uh no lowest price. So, how do you get capture those sales from the people that you know they might even be seeing that there’s something similar for lower price and they know it’s Comfort Colors? Yeah, I would say on Etsy, um, a majority of the sales do come from, you know, page one results. And so, um, when someone clicks into your listing, you want to be sure that, um, if you earn that click, your brand on Etsy, even though it’s not as branded as, you know, a Shopify brand, but you do want to have this cohesiveness because it builds trust, as Dom already said, like that trust factor makes a huge difference with just earning the sale, you know? people want to hand their money to someone that they’re like, “Oh, other people, you know, good reviews. Other people are liking this brand.” And so I think the reviews itself is great, but if you’re working towards those initial reviews as a beginner seller, having those listing images look like professional and, you know, have that cohesion is important because there’s a lot of people who are trying to get rich quick, you know, tomorrow. And so they open their shop and then they will just slap a bunch of listing images that don’t really, you know, help the buyer out, doesn’t even answer their questions. and that can just you don’t wanna you don’t want to hand your money over to them. So, I think in general that like trust factor and um makes a big difference. I think that’s so true. Like uh it’s so funny. Etsy has such an aesthetic and a lot of the high volume sellers are using the exact same mockups bought from Etsy, which hey, whatever is working is working. Do more of that, right? Like the best strategy is what works. And a lot of people are having success doing that. But you know what’s interesting is a lot of these people that throw up these mockups without intention that could be costing them sales because even though most of the time it’s the actual design that evokes emotion and relatability and leads to the sale. I I think of the mockups as an enhancer like this is this is likely to swing them. If someone’s on the fence they’re like and then they see this beautiful aesthetically pleasing mockup that looks like them. uh they’re more likely to buy it than if it was like a generic like white background mockup, right? So, um yeah, I think I feel like Etsy especially imagery is massive. Absolutely huge. For sure. And I’ll just add to that like you mentioned that you know it is the design and the product that people actually you know when they choose to make this the purchase but I think whatever platform no matter like if it’s a more of an impulse purchase or more of an intentional purchase it is always about how they perceive the value of the design whether it’s trendy and funny whether it’s very emotional and meaningful it is it comes down to that. So, the price, you know, I’ve heard Etsy sellers ask like, “What do I price this at?” It really does. It matters that your design is good and that your audience wants it um more than a specific like price. That’s so true. And there’s a really good quote that says, uh, bad products can’t be sold by great marketing and great marketing can’t sell bad products. Did I say that right? Bad products can’t be sold by Yeah, exactly. I know what you’re saying. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if I said that right, but So, there you go. But essentially the the the premise is that you know if the product is not good it doesn’t matter what you price it at. Like the best market in the world will not sell that product. If the product is good you can even have mediocre like marketing like not that good marketing and still make a ton of sales. Ideally you want both. You want really good marketing and you want a really good product. But Dom, over to you. I want to hear because of course you sell at the more premium pricing. How do you increase perceived value for your brand and get people to pay a little bit more? Well, benefits of running a Shopify store is that you have complete creative control to how that store looks, is perceived, and essentially you’re building it from the ground up. You’ve already differentiated yourself from sort of being next to over competitors on say um Etsy for example, and you’ve already got people visiting your website. So, how do you gain more value when them visiting you in the first place? For us, it’s um we have like a blog post. We have like several different meme pages where we push funny pictures and the art that we do. And we try and make more of a community vibe than just having sort of a web store. We want it to be a brand that happens to sell clothes. And that’s always been way more important to me than feeling like I’m a business boy. I much prefer to think of myself as sort of a community builder who just enjoys talking to people, right? like um one of the other things that we have is uh like a very large news newsletter following and I use that almost like someone would use as a substack and if you’re putting that extra work into it, you’re retaining customers because you’re constantly engaging with them in ways that they actually want to communicate with you. So you’re creating a kind of parasocial relationship with them, but in a way that’s healthy and not strange and they come knock on my door and try and kill me. So yeah. Uh yeah, it’s funny. I know that you have like a very unique way of connecting with your audience which we talked about earlier. Um so for me I hate customer support. I hate it. I don’t want to do it. And so whenever I start a brand that’s the first thing I outsource find someone to take over customer support so I can just focus on my zone of genius which is like you know brand creation, product creation and marketing. But you actually still do customer support as a high volume seller. Yeah. Uh I do. Um, I think it’s because because I’ve always done it and there’s a way that I communicate that isn’t really you can’t really teach it. Um, you know, just my sense of humor. Um, and I think that people when they review the website, they can go to the about page there I am and they can they can also directly communicate with me. So I mean if you compare it to say like a Twitch streamer has direct communication with their audience. the fact that a customer can know that when they email the company, they’re directly talking to me, right? And then that builds that level of trust again as well. And firstly, it doesn’t bother me cuz a lot of things in our space is quite automated. And there is elements where, you know, you might find something more fun than other elements. Like you said, you just hate dealing with customer service. Um, but the benefits of doing your own customer service is you can be as rude as you want to people and nobody can tell you off. But locally, everyone I communicate with is really really nice. I like it. It’s rewarding. And your brand is kind of a funny sarcastic brand. So like people are buying funny sarcastic shirts. So hearing like funny sarcastic from you if if it you know if you make some joke and the response like that’s what I would that’s why I bought this t-shirt. This is what I expect. Do you actually enjoy doing the customer support? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. cuz I was going to be like, “Oh, maybe you can train like AI to talk in your voice and give you responses and then, you know, end off with Dom.” Yeah, you can. But I think it would it would uh it would get to a point where I just I wasn’t really happy with with the output. I think Sure. Sure. I mean, as long as you enjoy it, that’s cool. Maybe that’s a part of your creative outlet as a brand owner because a lot of brand owners do really hate that and that’s the first thing that a lot of people outsource. That’s really cool that you do that and it like definitely uh brings in the human element which is part of like it’s very like aligned with like a brand, you know, the branded experience. So, all right, let’s talk about pricing strategies. I want to kind of shift gears because there’s so many pricing strategies out there. There’s like the price anchoring, you know, like I see this on Etsy all the time where it’s like $34.99 for this comfort colors t-shirt, but it’s on sale for $24.99. And then every day when you look at it, it’s always on sale for $24.99. You’re like, “Wait a sec.” like it is it’s like an evergreen sale, right? But obviously it’s to increase FOMO and scarcity and urgency to get people to buy right away. And most people to be fair are not looking at your products every day. Like they probably wouldn’t notice if they went in and saw that once they’d probably be like, “Oh, I should get it now.” If they go in in 5 days, see it’s on sale, they might not be like, “That’s still on sale. It said the sale is ending in like 24 hours.” Right? So, I want to talk about pricing strategies. The strikethrough prices, price anchoring, you know, having different tier products like maybe you have like a Gilden uh Gilden t-shirt that’s at a low price and then you have like a comfort color 1717 at a higher price and it increases the perceived value of the comfort colors. Gives them the option of paying more for a comfort colors but also captures the demand for the people that are a little more budget conscious. So, how about you? How do you use price anchoring or any pricing strategies? Yes, great question. So, it’s funny you mentioned like the daily flash sales on Etsy. I do hourly flash sales. So, people lands on a listing and they see maybe 45 minutes, 23 minutes until the price goes from $18.99 to $25.99. And so, that’s what I do on Tik Tok. And you can have AI just automate that entire thing on Tik Tok, which is really nice. We also do a couple other things. Of course, a uh you know, buy two get free shipping. So, it’s a big one. I put a threshold. So, if they get if they buy two t-shirts, it goes over $30 and the customer get free shipping. There’s other things that you can also do when it comes to of course we have Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Definitely a lot of brands right now should be focused on trying to at least anchor the price a little higher and so that you can especially if you have a more established brand so that you can really anchor it and then drop that price heavily. A lot of Amazon brands you’ll see in the weeks leading up to Prime Day or the weeks leading up to Black Friday, they’ll raise their prices a little bit and then they’ll just drop them all at once. So, we’re starting to do that right now. Yeah, it’s so funny. I’ve seen a meme about that where it’s like countdown to Black Friday t-shirt is $29.99 on Black Friday. The t-shirt is like showing that it’s like $49.99 and it’s striked through and it says $29.99. So, I was like, “Yay, it’s Black Friday. I’m saving, but it’s actually the exact same price.” I thought that meme was hilarious and like so relevant for a lot of like shops. It’s real. That happens. I know it’s a joke, but it’s like and scarcity and urgency are effective sales strategies. That’s the truth. They They really are. Um, okay. Sarah, what kind of pricing strategies do you have? Yeah. Well, I’m pro the sales as well. Um, uh, daily sales or weekly sales. I see that higher conversion rates for sure with a sale on Etsy. Now, not necessarily like this is the cheapest you’ll ever get it kind of sale where I’m still creating the the urgency and the and the FOMO for sure, but also maintaining like what Dom said about kind of like the mistrust someone has with just a $7 shirt versus, you know, a more expensive one. I think that um Etsy wanting to maintain more of that premium brand um you don’t want to, you know, price it too high in order to put a sale on that’s too low, you know. Um anyway, but I definitely recommend sales. And then kind of more of an indirect pricing strategy would just be listing within your same niches and audiences. Once you start expanding products, you’re going to, you know, increase your average order value with, you know, they bought, especially Etsy is very occasion and event focused a lot. So, you know, baby’s first Christmas, girls trip, whatever it is. And they buy the shirt and oh, you have a tote bag and oh, you have a mug for it, too. And that can be a great way you can Etsy has like a bundling feature to, you know, to add those in. So, people in your shop know like this is kind of niche you sell in. I know if I come back here, I’ll and I loved my purchase. I know if I come back here, you’re going to have more awesome stuff for me. Especially for the next year, a lot of like again these milestones and events, they’ll come back and shop because, oh, I’m going on the same vacation next year. I’m going to come back to this shop. Yeah. No, that’s that’s powerful. Uh Dom, what kind of pricing strategies do you employ? Um bundles are fantastic. Uh there’s a lot of options on Shopify for many different types of checkout experiences. So, you can tailor one to be what really suits for you. M for example with ourselves at the moment when you buy a t-shirt it will use AI to work out which t-shirts have been bought with those uh which have been bought together before and then advertise that t-shirt in the checkout for say 5% off tiny thing but it’s you know mentally puts the customer into that point where they’re like oh I’m getting a deal here and then what you’re trying to do is push them over the free shipping line because that will just even though you obviously you don’t get the shipping you you you’re massively increasing like the average order value. Right. Right. Yeah. I know. That’s that’s so powerful and I feel like a lot of shopify brands do that. You know, they’ll bundle. They’ll have the free shipping thresholds to incentivize people to spend more. Um that’s that’s all powerful stuff for making more sales and getting people to spend more. So guys, we are out of time. That was so much fun. I feel like we could definitely keep talking about this, but I’m going to send it over to the green room and I will hand it over to you guys. Buddy, welcome back to the Roman camp. My name is Levi. This is Crystal Lee. And whether you realize it or not, if you’re starting a POD brand, you’re becoming an entrepreneur. You’re running your own business. So, I’m going to be asking some questions to fellow entrepreneurs about entrepreneurship. Crystal, first I have to ask, are those glasses prescription? They are. They’re very prescription. I can’t see anything. Probably the coolest prescription glasses I’ve ever seen in my life. But back to entrepreneurship. Um, what is one thing that inspired you to become an entrepreneur in the first place? I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. My dad was an entrepreneur and he was like losing businesses. I hope he is not watching this by the way. And so I said, I’m never going to do this. And then I got a job and then they didn’t want to pay me. I think we can all relate to that. And then I had to do it. So here I am. Out of need she became an that that is not what you hear from most entrepreneurs. But I think that is true for a lot of people. And I think Crystal’s just someone who figures it out at the end of the day. Second thing I want to ask, what is a brand or something you look to for inspiration as an entrepreneur? This is going to be controversial, but those Kardashians, they know how to sell. They know how to market. They know how to market. They know how to get you to the product. So that Kylie, that Kim, they know what they’re doing. Yeah. For youngest billionaire ever, I think, is Kylie Jenner. Verify that. No, absolutely not. But what I say is usually pretty correct. Um, what about for like clothing, dressing yourself? What is your favorite brand on that side of things? Dang, that’s hard. Uh, I like Adidas. I got my little Can you see them? Cow shoes. Moo. We call those moos. I like Adidas. My mom likes Adidas, too. It depends on the day. Okay. And last thing about entrepreneurship, what is one skill you have that makes you a good entrepreneur? Man, I’m never giving up. I am never giving up. I have been on the like ends of like I don’t want to do this anymore and then I cry a little bit and then I get right back up. I would say resilience is something that you see or some people call it perseverance. Something you see in every good entrepreneur. There’s a lot of doors that need to be broken through in order to be successful. And she clicks. She’s got it. Okay, come with me. We’re going to walk to someone else. We’re gonna find someone else in the green room. Oh, Riley is over here. I’m going to ask Riley the next questions about entrepreneurship. Riley, um, introduce yourself. Tell us what you do as an entrepreneur. Uh, my name is Riley. I’m an Etsy seller. I’ve been selling for four years. Just started on Tik Tok. Tick tock. I do a lot. Etsy, Tik Tok, popup. I teach now in the sellers club. I just started a YouTube channel and put some teaching content on there as well. What do I do as an entrepreneur? Whatever it takes, I guess. What is one skill you have as an entrepreneur that you think makes you successful? I think I’m willing to learn. Obviously, you don’t know everything, but it when you’re the owner of a business, you wear all the hats, at least until you have some sort of employees. But most POD employees, POD businesses don’t have employees. So, being willing to learn and know what you don’t know, but figure out how to learn it is going to be what what makes the biggest difference. Those who don’t see success and they say, “Well, print on demand doesn’t work.” are not the ones that are really diving deep and paying attention and learning. I think something that entrepreneurs say all the time is like be a sponge. There’s always someone who knows more than you. Even if you think you know everything, there’s always someone that you can take something from. Um I’m going to ask you one more question, Riley. Riley, what is something you’re excited for coming up in Q4 as an entrepreneur? I think having started a new platform, it’s Tik Tok. and having heard like the potential of Q4 since the beginning. What they’ve always said is you can make in the last 3 months of the year what you can make in the first nine months of the year, which is completely crazy. Um, call me out on this, someone check back with me in Sellers Club come December, but I think I’m going to make six figures this Q4. And that’s like mindblowing to me. And that’s not like me as, oh, I’ve been selling for four years. That’s me. I started a Tik Tok shop 5 months ago. Like I’m I’m me and I I don’t know. The potential is just crazy for a normal person. Yeah, you heard it here first. Okay, let’s stay on the move here. It’s called the roaming camera, not the stagnant camera. Um, I mean, I think the next person I should talk to is Mr. John over here. John, um, looks like he’s we caught him mid work, but introduce yourself. Tell us what you do as an entrepreneur. John. Uh, my name is John Ryder. I run, of course, my own brand, Tik Tok shop. I also run a consulting company and an agency. Mr. Do it all, they say. John, what is one thing that you think makes you a good entrepreneur? Um, I would say it’s just thinking at all times. I don’t know anything. I’m like always wanting to learn. I never think I’m the biggest person in or the smartest person in the room and just focusing every single day on the things that are the bottlenecks inside my business. That’s a big thing. Like attacking the bottleneck every single day. So basically just called himself humble and he said that’s what’s good about me. I don’t know if that is humble. Yeah, being humble probably does make you a better person and a better entrepreneur. Um, John, another thing as an entrepreneur, who is someone that you’ve looked up to or maybe someone who inspired you to become an entrepreneur in the first place? Yeah, has to be my mom. My mom is by far she is someone she’s immigrated from Vietnam over to the United States after Vietnam war. She was a boat person and she grew up in America. Had a crazy story. Definitely one to make a movie about and for another for another one of these interviews. But she inspired me every single day to just push myself and just get to the next level of myself that I don’t even know is possible. Yeah. I think something that I enjoy about being an entrepreneur is the freedom. It’s there’s a reliance on yourself, but at the same time there’s a freedom where you can kind of do what you want and that’s a blessing and a curse. John, when you’re looking at entrepreneurship as a whole, being your own boss in a way, what is something that you value the most? Time. Time is finite on this planet. So number one thing is time. I know we were talking a little bit ago about just being able to outsource the things that you don’t want to do. Outsourcing an editor or being able to outsource media buying, be able to do all these things so you can actually buy back time. That’s all of our goals is to be able to leverage other things, systems, other people to be able to scale our business and buy us back time to spend with our loved ones. That was a big thing for me. I think right now we’re in an age where there’s a lot of change in technology. You mentioned something called systems. I think to the average person, they might not know how entrepreneurs leverage systems to become better at their jobs or to scale their business as a whole. Can you explain maybe one system that you use on a day-to-day basis that has made the biggest impact on your business? Yeah, has to be AI. So, in our last session I just did that just came back up and Levi’s already hit me up is uh the flash sales like having hourly flash sales and I have AI setting those up every single actually I started at the beginning of a month and I set them up for a whole month. So that’s one of the things uh systems when it comes to affiliate outreach. I know we talked about affiliates on the shop talk. We were talking about how it’s a volume game with creators. Instead of me messaging every single affiliate one by one, I have an AI bot that sends out thousands of messages every single week to creators. And so it’s a big one that I focus on to just get widespread net that buys me back more time to either focus on the business or be able to have a better life. Think about how much time it would take to message a thousand people in order to get on the same page and market your products. nearly impossible. But with today’s technology, it’s something you see almost every big player doing. I want to move on from just technology for a second and talk to you about a new currency we’re seeing every day, data. I think in pair pairing with technology being able to leverage such high volume of things like messaging and sales, we’re getting we’re getting access to more data than we ever had before. What is one way as an entrepreneur that you use data to enhance your business? There’s a lot there’s there’s a lot. One of the things that we look at is conversion rates on Tik Tok. Uh being able to scale content is one of those things is it’s so up and down. There’s so many different roller coasters and what do you read? How do you read it? So just reading data on conversion rates on Tik Tok. What is my conversion rate? How many videos am I getting posted every single day? Are creators posting enough videos every single day? Do I need to send out more samples to creators because they’re not getting enough videos out? Are those videos that those creators are we getting a lot of good videos out but they’re not converting very well? Is it the problem with the creators? Should I shift focus on to a different style of creator content? So, it’s really about the video engagement and the conversion rates that I look at that optimize the success and the scalability. Yeah, I think obviously Tik Tok shop is a content engine. So, a lot of the data we look at revolves around that content. But even if you sell on Etsy, even if you sell on Shopify, don’t think that data isn’t valuable. Data will show you what products to sell, what products to make more of, what products to promote more. All of these things can grow your business and help scale the winners. Um, one last quick question for you, John. How have you liked your time at Amplified? I loved it. It’s been awesome. I’ve just went for the past hour and a half. We had so much fun on T the Tik Tok one. We had a great one. The pricing, I’m having a ton of fun. I’m also learning a ton, too. And a lot of people look at me like, “What else could you learn?” I learn something every single time I walk into a room with people like this. So, I’m having a ton of ton of fun. And hopefully everyone out else out there is also having a ton of fun as well. As am I. Well, that’s it for the roaming camera on this time. We’ll see you in a little bit.

Welcome back to our discussion panel where we’re going to be talking about all things SEO and how you can improve your SEO regardless of what platform you are selling on. And for this discussion, I’m here with Jay and Nyla from dostore and we’re going to give you some tips and hopefully things you can do to get more traffic and sales by targeting the right people with your products. So, I’m so happy you guys are here joining me today. I’m going to get right into just talking about research because I think that that’s a really big part of finding who we’re actually selling to. So Jay, I’d love to know how important it is for keyword research before creating and listing products. How do you put that into your research process? So what I think a big mistake is that people do especially newer sellers is they’ll go and put all their time and trust and you know everything they’re doing based around search volume on specific keywords and now you can even do that right inside your Etsy dashboards with the marketplace insights for example. It’s great to have those uh numbers there so you know what is working and what is you know helpful. Um, but leveraging the high searched volume keywords for the sake of leveraging, you know, keywords isn’t necessarily going to get you the sales or eyes on the prize for the right customer if you don’t know the niche enough. So, I would dive into, you know, understanding the niche, use the idioms, the quips, the the lingo they use ultimately, uh, for your listing titles and your tags and things like that, right? That’s where I think that you’ll have the most success that way because you’re speaking the language of the customer who is inevitably going to be the one wearing the end gift, right? And then keep it a little bit more surface like go a little more broad when we’re talking to um the audience because it’s not always the college grad who’s going to be wearing the like who will be doing the shopping for example. It might be their parents that are buying them this awesome thing. and for them to be able to buy the item, they’re gonna have to understand what it is they’re searching for in order to buy that for their college grad kit. Such a good point. I think sometimes, especially for me when I first got started with listing products as I mainly an Etsy seller and when you’re posting things on a marketplace like that, you lose sight of what someone might actually be like typing into the search bar. Exactly what you just said. Whereas I’m selling a shirt with something on it, that’s what my mind thinks someone’s searching for. But maybe it’s a gift. Maybe it’s something for somebody that’s in that specific niche that you really have to have an open mind with that. So with your when deciding your keywords, would you say that you go about it looking at competitive listings at all or is it more so what you feel someone would type in? I I would go I would I would implore everybody to trust their gut a little more than they already do. Um, so there has to be a gut feeling, but in the beginning when you don’t really understand and you’re not entirely sure, you looking at competitor listings is a great way to see what they’re doing that you are not doing right ultimately. Um, you know, any big brand out there will tell you that they study the marketplace. They study their competitors. They want to one up the game and understand, you know, what their competitors are doing right that maybe they’re not or where they could improve. So yeah. And do you do you feel the same about that or is there something from the customer’s perspective that you think? Yes, totally. And I think I made that mistake when I started as well. So um I started this company called Maison Charm which is a decoding um cream business. Again this sounds very very complicated but what it basically means is that you put sort of decoding cream on um bases like a phone case or a photo frame or whatever and then stick glue on it, right? And then when I was selling um I realized that I was optimizing for keywords like decoding cream blue or kavai or you know the themes that um my products were based on but actually when you think about the customer what the customer is looking for is a solution to a problem that they have right um so mostly the the TG was uh parents or children children looking for just you know fun activities to do uh parents looking for you know cool activities to have on slumber parties for their children and that’s essentially what I should have been optimizing for and instead what I was trying to look at was look at product attributes, look at features, um you know look at technical things and I think uh that’s a trap that I I really really want to double click on. Um people generally, you know, start to think about how a seller talks to another seller. Instead, I think what works best is to think about your customer and how your customer is thinking about that problem. You know, what is the outcome that they’re looking for? What is the solution that they want? Um try to think about it from that perspective. And when you look at it from that lens, you realize that there’s a huge gap in between what it is that you’re um trying to do and what the other person is trying to to do to to make a purchase for, right? Um jewelry also has the same example, right? Um when you’re thinking about say goldplated or gold fil jewelry, I don’t think anybody understands that. What I’m looking for as a customer is, you know, jewelry that doesn’t get spoiled or lasts longer. So try and use those phrases in your keyword research. Um, I think a great way to also do that is to potentially just use the platform and the autopop populate on the platform that can help guide that research, right? It’s a free way to do it. Um, so why not just utilize that and type in maybe say jewelry and let the the platform, whatever it is, Etsy, Amazon, um, Google, let it guide you on what comes in next. I think that’s a free way to do it. I think that’s such a great point because if I’m shopping for jewelry, for example, for my mom, let’s say, or my sister or something like that or my wife, um I wouldn’t necessarily be looking at using words like goldplated or um you know, the the amount of carrot in the gold or the herring bone pattern. These are words I’ve learned over time, but I’m looking for, you know, a nice necklace for mom, a gift for mom, like the more broad overarch arching keywords, right? Because I I feel like the way we search naturally as buyers and not sellers is, you know, first we’re going to look, it’s an example I was talking about yesterday with somebody else, but we’re going to search for uh funny cat shirts and then we’re going to see a whole bunch of cat shirts that maybe now we’ve seen a black cat or a Siamese cat or a tabby cat and then all of a sudden we realize, well, oh, we’re actually searching for a Siamese cat shirt, right? So now you’re going to get into a little more technical. So, don’t be afraid to go broad with, you know, what it is, who it’s for, and then potentially the occasion, right? Answer the who, what, where, why, when, and you can’t screw it up. You can, and you can always update it later, which we’re going to touch on cuz I I have a whole thing about with especially selling on platforms like Etsy and how you need to give it a little time for the algorithm to really put the product in front of the right person regarding SEO. But with the research aspect, I think it’s very important, especially for somebody that’s maybe newer to selling or not sure how to structure a title of their product or a description. It is okay to to type these things in. Look at what’s coming up. Look at what other people are saying because it will give you a different perspective that maybe you’re not thinking about for adding and then even adding different SEO in for holidays coming up. I know we talked about that in sessions before if maybe like adding gift or a specific holiday, trying things out in your actual SEO can be beneficial too. And I guess knowing when to update the SEO as well. If when we have it to where is this actually working? you sell on Etsy. I’m sure you know what I mean by when you post a listing, it’s better to let it kind of have its time, see what works before updating it. And typically, how long would you say that you do that when testing out some SEO? Minimum of like 60 to 90 days. I mean, it’s no secret. Everybody will tell you that all the YouTube people out there are preaching it takes 60 to 90 days to have, you know, Etsy to kind of analyze, digest your listing enough to know when to surface it in search results. That said, it can take as quick as hours or minutes to get a sale if it’s, you know, what somebody actually wants. Flip side of that though is like at the 90day mark, a lot of new sellers will be, okay, well, we hit 90 days. I’ve got no views, no sales. I got to re, you know, revamp this whole title and tags thing. At the end of the day, what you’re doing is, you know, you’re resetting the clock on something that may only may have only sold in a few months from now. Like one of my best sellers on Etsy, it took six months to sell for the first time and then it started blowing up. So, what I would say is like don’t just rely on Etsy SEO in terms of titles and tags because there’s so much more to it. with Etsy. Now, you know, the the listing photo matters. Where the person is searching from matters. The time of day, their search history matters. Their previous purchase history matters. The attributes in your listing. You don’t have to have birthday shirt in there 10 times when it’s already selected as the occasion in there, right? So, uh, pump the brakes on making big changes, if I could put it in a nutshell. And if you’re going to test something that may get a little bit, that’s when I would say duplicate the listing and try a different set of, you know, title and tags. Absolutely. That’s something I do a lot is duplicating a listing, maybe even changing the first photo, too, to kind of see like, okay, is this something that’s more clickable and, you know, just testing out different keywords to just try things out? Especially on a marketplace. On a standalone website, I think it it can be a bit different because the traffic’s coming from where you’re bringing that traffic in. But just ultimately keeping it simple, clear, and concise, especially the newer updates we get on Etsy where it’s not the same as it used to be where they want you to fill out every single thing and it just needs to be relevant, short and sweet to what the product is. And then even adding in SEO and keywords that are helpful in your tags, in your descriptions, in your different attributes, and not overdoing it, I think is a really important thing. One thing you mentioned there is like not overdoing it, not spending too much time. I think it’s so relevant because no matter how many times you optimize your SEO and by way of titles and tags, if the design isn’t on point, you’re just making your crappy design easier to find by more people, it does not equate to sales. Absolutely. For sure. And I know we talked a lot about Etsy, so maybe we can put some knowledge for people that are selling on other platforms too. when it comes to selling on maybe a standalone store like a Shopify store. Um, do you have any tips on that on how maybe somebody can, you know, update their SEO to reach more people whether it’s in their description or their photos or even something like the name of their store or something that you can give some insight on? Yeah, I think um the base principles continue to remain the same whether you know you’re on a platform or you move out. I think the nuances obviously keep shifting um but the base principles are are still the same, right? Right. So I think one thing I definitely say is um look at what the customer is looking for and then target that. Um I think the second most important thing would be um like Jay said to try and look at high volume keywords but also try and look at high CPC and low competition keywords. Right? This is something that Neil Patel who’s literally known as the guru of SEO uh when it comes to at least platform based marketing. He’s the one who talks about it. um and this is quoted from him uh that you know you want to make sure that the the CPC is high enough because that means that an advertiser is actually willing to pay those dollars um for that particular product right and obviously you want to have low competition as well because it doesn’t matter if the the volume is high enough if the competition also continues to be high there’s no way that you’re going to rank um and another thing that I would say is that when you’re starting out you would try to get whatever advantage that you can um when you’re just in that phase of getting started and if that comes in the form of a domain name I would say grab onto it right um so I work for dotstore and using a dotstore domain does give you better SEO advantages dotstore is essentially just the um extension so instead of having your website end in a.com you can have your website end in a dotstore so www say for example amplifiedstore um would essentially be the URL and that can give Google a very very clear signal that this website is an online store and therefore it signifies that you’re selling something and that means better results. And of of course we’ll get into the data of this in a bit. Um but just wanted to say that you can literally sell more on a dot store. Ah that’s really great and it’s lets you know it’s a store you know versus just a website that maybe someone isn’t selling stuff on or you know there’s so many different websites out there and how who really knows if you’re selling products or not. And I think the overall key with SEO in general, we think, okay, yeah, our title, our descriptions, all of this, but also in aspects of marketing. That’s somewhere that I kind of struggled at first. Whether you’re running ads or you’re doing organic traffic, it’s also something you have to keep in mind that’s relevant to your product of if you’re posting let’s say on social media or on Etsy like or not Etsy, sorry, Pinterest, something like that to work the same way of, you know, getting those keywords that’s going to bring you traffic that’s relevant to what it is that the product that you’re selling. So definitely I I use it a lot in marketing, especially with Pinterest. I’m a huge Pinterest marketer, but I know that’s not Yeah. about if um you’ve got people in with a certain promise, just make sure that you’re fulfilling on that promise on your listing or on your website as well, right? Because that can be the fastest way to lose a customer. Bring them in with certain keywords and then not have that um particular, you know, uh benefit or the the outcome that they desire on your listing. Um so I think that’s critical as well. Well, that’s a great point and that when it comes back to keyword stuffing is what you know in the industry we call that when you’re just basing you know the keywords based on I guess buyer intent or search volume as opposed to what is actually a good fit for the listing because not only are you going to surface your listing in search results because you’re paying for the ad on it or the cost per click. Uh you’re going to get clicked on, they’re going to look at it, they’re going to realize that it’s not what they bargain for, it’s not what they intended to, you know, land on. Uh, and then now you’re paying to sync your listing in search results because if it doesn’t convert, it’s going to inevitably tank. For sure. Yeah. And that’s I think overlooked a lot too because as sellers, we have so much going on. There’s so much you have to pay attention to all the time, you know, and where exactly those words are going to. And when we’re talking about to I think you had a great point where you mentioned in the brand name that you had of maybe making it relevant to what it is that you’re actually selling. That’s a huge thing with searchability, especially if you’re on your own platform. If you’re selling on a Shopify store, a Wix store, if you can even put your brand name that’s relevant to the product you’re selling in there and then also have something like a domain that talks about a store, that’s that’s really powerful. Yeah, for sure. And I think um that’s what it is, right? With a dot store, you include a very very relevant keyword within your URL. Um, so that’s indication itself to Google to to even AI today and to your seller who’s sorry to your buyer who’s looking at it that this is indeed an online store and this is where I can make a purchase. Um, say you have a store that says artisalgift um.store that clearly means that this is uh obviously a store that sells artal gifts as opposed to a.com website which can practically be a blog, it can be an affiliate site, it could be anything under the sun. Um, so this really really helps and we’ve got data. We’ve carried out independent research that actually says that websites on a dots store do far better than a website on a.com. They do as much as 2x the impressions um organically. And that’s literally double the amount of impressions that you could have potentially got just by using a dot store. And that’s not the only thing, right? I think um there’s also nuances to making sure that your brand name is brandable enough. Um, so a lot of times we’ve seen people um just sort of use hyphens, use numbers, use misspellings just to sort of get the brand name that they want on a.com. And that um fixation with a with a.com is is almost bordering on unhealthy, right? Um you don’t have to sort of, you know, try really really hard to to get a com domain. Just get a dotstore, but get a more meaningful name for yourself, right? Get a stronger brand name. Get a brand name that means something. get something that’s um going to tide you in a in a longer period of time because you know you want to be doing this hopefully for a long period of time of course especially all the time and energy it goes to like creating a store in itself you know I mean that alone that’s such a relevant point too but think of it another like a big mistake that I see in terms of SEO is like calling it like Jay’s Crafts and more think of where you want your business in years from now and treat it like a business not like a perpetual hobby name yeah I think so too and I it’s hard to like switch that mindset when you first start out of like that this could go so far. I know I had that when I first started. I was like, “Okay, it’s like whatever. I’m just doing it.” But once you actually put the time and energy and flip your mind to think like, “No, I’m going to make this work. I want this to be a successful business.” That’s that’s really meaningful, too. So, I think that’s a great point of having that. You can always change the name of your store. You don’t have to have it perfect in the beginning. Nobody does. But, that’s such such a valuable and great tip for somebody that’s starting out, too. And I I had a store where Coette items sell really well for me. Always have. I’m just into like the little girly fun stuff. And on Etsy. And when I wanted to kind of branch out and start a standalone store, I messed up at first because what I should have done is included in that actual name of my store, Coette Cases, what I was selling. I was selling phone cases that were Coette Designs. So, it just makes sense to have a store of like Coette Cases.tore store or something like that where it’s like literally telling not only the customer that’s searching and sees that on Google or wherever they’re clicking it, but also for Google and the algorithms that are actually pushing it to people that are going to find the product. So, that’s that’s a great tip to I guess have your name that also goes for Etsy too, I think, to have maybe relevant name in the shop. Yeah, I think it’s crucial to at least speak somewhat to what you’re selling. If not the product, then the niche. If not the niche, then at least the aesthetic, too. Yeah, and we always say that have it pass the radio test, right? Uh if you were actually saying this on radio or saying it verbally to someone, would it clear that test? For example, Cassandra’s Natural Cosmetics is a great name, but it’s extremely long. It’s like literally 30 characters, and nobody’s ever going to remember that and type it onto um Google or anywhere else, right? So, make sure that you choose short, brandable names for yourself. Um use names that have some meaning to yourself, have some passion, right? like you mentioned, coette cases, they do really well for you. Um, so it has some significance to to what you’re doing. Um, so just make sure that it makes sense. It helps for brand building all together, too. And we’re running out of time, but I do I would love to ask if there’s someone watching that wants to improve their SEO. Is there one like big tip or something that maybe was a mistake that you had that you would just adjust whether they’re new or just trying to grow their store more? Jay, is there a tip that you have? Yeah, I think the biggest one and uh what I would have done in the beginning as well is like really get in the trenches. Go deep dive into the niches where your ideal customers hang out. We’re talking Facebook groups. Get in there, learn the lingo. If you’re not already privy to the niche and what you know it encompasses as a lifestyle, then really, you know, ask yourself, are you choosing the niche based on, you know, your own uh knowledge or are you doing it because somebody else is doing it and making money at it? Uh so get in the trenches and understand it if it’s something you like or enjoy, you’re probably going to be 10, you know, miles ahead of the next seller. So, you’re going to want to, you know, learn all the lingo. Use words that people are using in those Facebook groups. Use what’s hot, what’s fun, um, what’s trending in terms of, you know, I mentioned in the previous session, like if you got this like off-white, maybe this season it’s a crew, maybe next it’s taupe, you know, what monikers or names and idioms change seasonally as well. Just get in there and like be part of the conversation. Absolutely. Those like important little things that a lot of sellers miss that can get you an advantage. that little extra time of just taking the time to do the little deep dive of research to change your name to make more sense. I think all of those things do make more of a sense. But we are at a time. I think this has been so great. We’ve learned so much about SEO. I’m sure those watching have too. And thanks so much for being here for both of you. Thank you. And we’re about to go check out what’s going on in the green room because there’s a lot going on today. And come back to the discussion panel for the next one as well. Again, I hope you guys are all learning so much from all of our amazing speakers and soaking up as much as possible. If you’re here, odds are you’re selling print on demand, right? I hope we’re all in the right place. But if you’re selling print on demand, you have likely considered selling t-shirts. So, I’m here with three of our most popular t-shirts and John, one of our best sellers here on Tik Tok. We’re playing guess the tea. So, we’re here with John seeing if he can guess which t-shirt brand is which. We have Comfort Colors, Bella Canvas, and Gilden Tees. John, what do you think? Grab the stickers up there and put it on the matching T. We have T number C. T number C. Uh oh. C, B, and A. And then some matching stickers up there. Okay. Yeah. Feel them. Feel them. Touch them. Smell them. Whatever you need to do. Take a look at them. I look at them like I don’t know. They’re all white tees. They all have the tags cut out of them. So So we’re not cheating or anything like that. All right. All right, John. Let’s see. How do I do it? Which way do I take this? Pull it down and then put it on the Gilden T. The Gilden first. Oh, [ __ ] And if you can guess which one’s G if it’s Gilden 64, Gilden 5,000, you get bonus points. I think this is the Gilden here. I don’t I don’t really hold my t-shirts very often. I don’t really like make content with it. I think that’s Gilden. Okay, let’s Bella canvas. Bella. I don’t even know what a Bella’s canvas feels like. Um, this feels like a This feels like heavier. I think this is the comfort color. Okay, I’m going to go with this first. Which tea do you like to wear? Well, or do you wear t-shirts? I don’t wear t-shirts very often, but I sell Gilden, but I don’t usually wear Gilden, which is kind of hypocritical of me. I usually I like the comfort colors like this. I feel like this is a comfort color. It’s thicker. I like like the feeling on the top is really nice. So, I personally like the comfort color the most. I’m going to give that a shot here. I’m not very confident, though. How did you land on selling the Gilden if you prefer the comfort color? Well, just for pricing, like Tik Tok’s impulse purchase. Um, and so the margins just make way more sense selling a Gilden. I can get the production to seven bucks. I’m selling it for 18. So, I can make the margins work. If I’m selling comfort colors, my margins have to raise them a little more. I get into different demographics. So, I guess make the sale on the more expensive product for sure, 100%. And by process elimination, we’ll go with the bell. All right. Well, I can’t tell you if you’re right, but I do think these are good shots. One more question while we’re here talking about TE’s. So many people who are selling print on demand say number one print on demand is oversaturated. It’s not. Number two, t-shirts are oversaturated. What do you think? Are tes oversaturated or can you still make sales with TE’s now? Not absolutely not. Especially on Tik Tok. There’s not a lot of people like really on the platform and then let alone sellers who are doing print on demand on Tik Tok shop. So we sell a lot of t-shirts. I know a bunch of people who are crushing with t-shirts. And everyone needs a t-shirt. Exactly. People wear clothes every day, right? So there will be a ton of demand. All right. Thank you, John. and I’ll tell you soon if you’re right. Next up, we have Michael. Michael, I’m really curious on your experience here. Before we get into guessing, we already have a couple guesses up there. Do you sell t-shirts in your shop? Yes. Nothing but t-shirts. Nothing but All t-shirts all day, every day. All three brands. Uh, I like the Bella Canvas. Sticking with the Bella Canvas. That’s still a perfectly good t-shirt and the margins are a little bit better. Not as good as the Gilden, but yeah, I like the Bella Canvas. What do you say to people who want to sell t-shirts and think they need to sell all of the brand? Um, no, just pick one and stick with it, you know, and order a couple of samples, you know, you can get those discounted, order, you know, a few designs on a few different versions and have a feel yourself and say, would I be happy wearing that t-shirt? You know, it’s a t-shirt. You know, thousands of these are sold every single day. How how much could be wrong with it, really? But exactly. A t-shirt is a t-shirt. Even with the materials, they’re still t-shirts, right? So, having felt them, which do you think is which? Go ahead and pull some stickers and let’s see if we can label them. Do you think John’s right? No, I think John’s wrong on on at least one of these. But um at least one of these. Yeah. I think this is the Bella canvas. So, let me stick that one there. It’s going to be embarrassing if I’m wrong about it. Especially selling only t-shirt. Exactly. Yeah. Gilden, I think is this one. Oh, no. Here we go. Okay. I think that’s a Gilden. Okay. So that and process of elimination. I think this one is comfort colors right there. All right. So, everyone’s pretty confident on the comfort colors, but we have a little bit of a debate going here versus Bella Canvas or Gilden at home in the comments. Which do you think is which? I think some of us are pretty sold on the comfort colors. Do you think they’re right? What about the other two? We got a little bit of a tossup here. Let’s see it in the comments. All right, Jay is up next. Jay’s going to give us some votes on what he thinks is right. Jay has been telling t-shirts probably longer than I’ve been alive. Sorry, Jay. Not to age you here. Um, what do you think here? I was hoping that, you know, the camera wouldn’t add 10 pounds, but makeup took 10 years off, I think. So, uh, yeah. Um, when you start selling t-shirts, how Oh man. Uh, when I started selling t-shirts, I was selling t-shirts out of a backpack when I was 16. I was airbrushing, that kind of thing. So, yeah, riding my BMX around with my backpack. Was that before the year 2000? Yes. Then you got me beat. Okay. Sorry, I had to ask. Jay has so much experience and I’ve loved to learn from Jay. Print on demand I started at the end of 2012. Okay. Yes. I’ve been alive since then. I promise. Okay. Let’s go through these. We have C, B, and A. I’m curious what you think. Do you know what these brands are? 100%. Uh, and I can tell you just by looking at them. My wife and I had our own print shop as well. So, it’s easy for me to look at the neck here right here. That’s a comfort color 1717. This I would have said until before touching it that this might be the Gildan soft style 64,000. But touching it, it’s a little more robust. It is definitely the 5000. Okay. Uh, and this would be the Bell & Canvas for sure. Okay. Will you put some stickers on there so we have our stats up there for people at home to view? I know you got to peel them off. We’d be here for a minute. I didn’t mean to throw you under the bus. You’re just experienced. I know that Jay’s been selling for a while. As Jay mentioned earlier, we got to meet at the first Amplified 3 years ago, and I’ve heard about how much experience he has, and it’s so insightful and so fun to learn from him. All right, Jay, you have your votes. What do you think? I asked earlier, do you think t-shirts are oversaturated? Uh, yes and no. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter because you’re not selling a t-shirt. You’re selling the emotional hook you put on it. Any POD product you pick is just the vehicle to get that gut punch to somebody. And one more question. A lot of people when they’re starting out see how many colors we offer in Printify and want to sell every single color. Are you team every color, give people options, or just stick with a couple? I’m team almost no option. I don’t want when I walk into like, you know, one of the coffee shops that are out there now. I just want my coffee with like a little bit of cream and sugar. I don’t want 18 ways to make the same thing. So, give them less options. They’ll have less, you know, decision fatigue and they’ll add it to cart quickly and check out as fast as possible. Exactly. They call it analysis paralysis for a reason. All right. Thank you so much, Jay. You’ve done a great job. On to our next guest. All right. Eric, come on up. Eric, introduce yourself for the team, please, and then we’ll get into guessing some TE’s. Okay. Hello. I am Eric Kramer. I have a print on demand store called uh Sobervation that I started in 2023. And I actually sell all three of these on my store. So, I agree with Jay. I think that we got more up there. It’s okay. I think that this middle one is the Gilden. Okay. And I’m sure this one is the comfort color or not the comfort colors, but the Bella canvas. I was going to say controversial here. And how I can tell is it’s longer than this one. And uh the the Bella canvas is slightly longer than the Gilden. And uh this is the comfort colors. So you mentioned you sell all So you mentioned you sell all three. Do you sell the Gilden 64,000 or the Gilden 5000? I I sell both of them actually. Um the Gilden, I use those for my print designs that I can sell them for a little cheaper in my store. And then I use the comfort colors when I’m doing an embroidered design because you can’t see the backing through the design on the shirt. Okay. Okay. So, you sell t-shirts. What is your opinion? Are they oversaturated or is there still room for new sellers starting today to sell TE’s? There is still room for new sellers to make uh make a profit selling t-shirts. Um with the right design, anybody uh you could sell to anybody. What’s your favorite printing method? You mentioned you do a few. Whenever you go to on a new design, what do you think? Embroidery. And uh I do embroidery because it is like tactile and you can touch it and it just feels so premium and you can charge people more for it and the higher profit margins and that’s why we’re all in this business, right? All right. Thank you so much, Eric. So far, we have four for comfort colors. I think this is kind of a shoe in. This would be my guess as well. And this is what I primarily sell because of that double stitching around the neckline. I feel like I’m trying to sell you guys a t-shirt right now. The double stitching and just because it feels like that vintage tea. That’s why I love comfort colors. We have three for Gilden and John for Bella Canvas on this B shirt here. And then we have Gilden and three Bella Canvas on this C. So, it’s almost pretty much unanimous. I will say we’re going to go with the majority here. A is a comfort colors t-shirt because of that double stitching around the neckline. B is going to be our Gilden T. Let me make sure I’m right. Yes, Gilden T. This is our Gilden 5000, not our 64,000. So, this one is a little bit heavier. I think that’s why some of us were getting confused cuz the 64,000 is very similar to Bella Canvas. And then this last one is our classic Bella Canvas t-shirt. Thank you guys so much for joining me. We’ll see you at our next session.

Welcome to this session on advanced ads for serious players. This session is going to be all about marketing, which I personally love talking about. You guys do a lot of marketing yourselves. And we’re going to be talking specifically about how to reliably get your products in front of people, one to test, and then how to scale up your winning designs. If you have a true winning design, generally by amplifying your reach, you amplify your sales. And I think that’s what everyone wants. Of course, it has to be a winner. You want to be profitable, right? So, let’s get right into it. I’m here with Sarah and Levi, and we’re going to talk about running ads on the different platforms because the ad platforms are a bit different. Um, especially Etsy compared to like Tik Tok and Meta. So, Sarah, let’s start high level, like 20,000 foot, like someone who’s not familiar with how ads work on Etsy. What are they and how do they work? Yeah. So, um, paid ads on Etsy are pretty simple. you actually um when you click into Etsy ads, you’ll see the option to turn an ad on or off. And it’s at a listing level, so it’s not shopwide. You can choose which listings you want to turn an ad on or off. And then within that listing, once the ad is on, you can see kind of search terms that are leading the buyers to that ad. Um but it’s it’s pretty basic and simple for anyone who’s new to managing paid ads on Etsy. It’s it’s a userfriendly first, you know, platform. I I love that. I mean, it’s said that, you know, complexity is the enemy of execution. And these platforms, they want us to run ads. They make money when we make money, right? Like we run ads. Even if we don’t make money, they still make money, right? Like that’s how they make a lot of their money is for advertisers like us. So, they’re incentivized to get us to run ads. And the incentive is that ideally we make sales, but the the the guarantee is traffic. That’s all that’s guaranteed. you’re not guaranteed any sales, you know, and and that is just how it is. Like, we’re not entitled to sales, but if you do have a true winner, then you can successfully scale that very quickly with paid ads. So, um I’m glad you mentioned the simplicity of it because I think ads are very intimidating for a lot of people. And it does sound like Etsy is like I think all of them are pretty simple, but like Etsy is probably the simplest in terms of like you don’t really have many options of like what you can do with them. And that might be a good thing, especially for beginners that are just feeling a little freaked out. Yeah, for sure. And I will just add to the question of how do they work so that people do better understand uh when you turn your ads on on Etsy, you are guaranteeing that page one uh you know rank. So when you initially do your when you initially list your listings and you’re just relying on organic traffic, they at first are going to be on page 7 8 9 10 etc. And then once they get that engagement from customers, add to carts, favorites, sales, they gradually increase in rank. And how ads work is you’re simply paying money for that listing to be on that page one for the search results. So you’re essentially paying to skip the line. Yes. Exactly. And you’re like, I’m going to be on eight or nine and probably not going to make any sales because if no one sees your products, you can’t make any sales. And you’re like, let’s just pay to skip the line and hope that this works. I mean, there’s obviously very calculated risk approaches that you can take and I know you guys have those and we’ll get into those, but let’s talk to you, Levi, about what is let’s focus on Tik Tok right now. So, what are Tik Tok ads and how do they work? So, um I think Tik Tok kind of took a page out of ETS’s book in a way and so has Meta, both simplifying how ads are run. Um relying on algorithmic tracking based on conversions to decide who sees your content. Um but at a high level, what you’re doing on Tik Tok is you’re not necessarily promoting a listing like you are on Etsy. On Tik Tok, the goal is to get content behind your products, right? You want yourself and affiliates to make content, make Tik Tok videos that are going to promote your products. And once you have a base of content, you can start running ads for that product, which in turn boosts those videos that are linked to that product. And the way that GMVX, which is what Tik Tok ads are called, decides which videos to boost is based on conversion rate. So if like you let’s say uh you had 10 affiliates and yourself posting videos, you got a hundred videos and then you decide to run ads on a product. Mhm. It will train and test every single ad set, every single video within every link that is linked to that product. But if one of them gets for every thousand views only four people click on the link and one of them 114 people click every thousand views the one with the much higher conversion rate is going to draw a lot of that GMVX spending. So in essence that’s all you’re doing is relying on algorithms to test content and reward high conversion. Yeah, it’s super similar to Meta, of course, like exact same process where I think it’s funny for a lot of people when they’re new to running ads. They might, let’s say they run a $25 a day Meta ad and they’re running it to, let’s say, three different products and they notice that one product is getting 90% of that and the other two are getting a combined 10% and they’re like, “What is going on?” Like, that’s because they’re making the decision for you based on the data and what they think is most likely to get you sales. It goes back to these platforms are incentivized to make you successful because when you’re successful, they’re successful. You will run more ads and pay them more money if you’re making money, right? Um, but I want you to talk about uh, you know, Tik Tok, there’s kind of like two different platforms. There’s also like the affiliate platform. So, what would you say about that? So when it comes to marketing in general, I think the affiliate marketing engine within Tik Tok shop is probably the greatest breakthrough in ecom marketing we’ve I’ve seen in my lifetime easily. And ecom is such a new thing, too. So um but basically what it is is anyone can promote any product on Tik Tok shop as long as they’re part of the affiliate program. What that means they have 1 to 5,000 followers at least. Um, and you basically just opt in for it. What that does is it adds a showcase to your profile, which means you can add products as an affiliate to your showcase and then promote them in videos. You can request free samples and it’s obviously up to the selling party to decide if you get that free sample or not. But affiliates maximize like what I said earlier, if you were just posting videos by yourself, you wouldn’t have a hundred video. Like having a 100 videos for one product to run ads on would be very difficult. There’s not that much data to test. If you only post one video a day for a week, you only have seven videos that you’re relying on one of them to be a winner. Whereas introducing Tik Tok shop affiliates, not only do you are you introducing people whose only job is to market Tik Tok shop products, but you’re increasing the volume of content in your funnel that then can be trained using GMBB Max ads. And there’s something similar actually that has been introduced into meta. Meta was lacking this funnel. Um, as ads fatigue on meta, oftent times the only way to go about it was paying for new creators to make new videos and sometimes you are getting an ROI on that. Sometimes you’re not. And if you don’t have an inflow of ads coming, you don’t know when your next ad’s going to fatigue. There’s a lot of issues with not having a lot of content to run your ads on. And like I said before, pretty much if you ask any professional marketer, if you’re not scaling your business, they’ll say more ads. When in doubt, more ads. Well, you can’t have more ads if you don’t have more content first. So, and on Tik Tok, you’re you’re relying on these Tik Tok shop affiliates to make that content for you. In order to fix that problem, there is an external platform that can connect to Meta called Tribe. T R Y B. And tribe is exactly that. It allows creators to join the platform and connect with a seller. So let’s say like any let’s say Lululemon is on there. As a affiliate, I can join Tribe. I can join Lululemon and then I can request free samples or purchase their products, make videos and submit them to Lululemon. Then instead of Lululemon paying me to make a video in the first place, they ca they can if I have a if I had made a good piece of content elect to take that piece of content and run it as an ad. And every time that ad makes a sale, I get a commission based off it. Just like on Tik Tok shop, instead of paying creators to make content for you, you are leveraging them as salesmen and they are earning a commission based on how much they sell. So you only pay if the advertisement works. That’s awesome. It’s like having a sales team working for you. And I mean, isn’t that the dream? Isn’t that what we all want? We all want other people on our products, too. That’s a great scenario. And it’s interesting like Meta’s Meta’s interesting like anytime there seems to be one of their competitors doing something really well, they very quickly create something similar. Like I immediately think of Tik Tok and then reals came out, right? And like Snapchat and then Instagram stories. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like it’s so funny. And so it’s just funny that like though that like um I think the the big winner for Tik Tok is obviously the shop feature. Mhm. If you are buying something on any other platform like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, you have to go to a website to purchase it, right? And I think US regulation probably has a lot to do with that. But for that reason, they couldn’t even build like an affiliate system because they don’t have a way of tracking sales directly through Instagram itself. It’s actually through Shopify, which is external to Meta in a way. Um, so this is one of those rare times where a third party is stepping in and like filling that gap for meta, but it’s awesome because it gives us as sellers a way to replicate what’s happening on one platform on another like our own website through Meta. Exactly. Tap into the best of that other platform and have others selling for you, which is obviously hugely beneficial. And you know, it wouldn’t it wouldn’t surprise me if Meta figured out a way to replace that app uh in the future because that like they’re probably watching them get a whole bunch of business and they’re like that could literally be like I mean it is not I don’t think the the build of the business I actually know who started the business not personally but I feel like it’s not it’s one of those things where like I could vibe code something similar to Tribe in maybe a week, right? Everybody has access to basically explain what tribe is and have AI build something similar using code. Yeah. But I think it’s more the distribution that matters. Having the buyin of all these brands and creators as a network already at scale on this one platform probably has a value to Meta, right? And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Meta essentially just tried to take the entire playbook from Tik Tok. Like, you know, anytime you’re looking at competitors and you see them doing something really, really well, you’re like, well, should I be doing that? You know, like I mean, these companies like they’re both massive companies. It would not surprise me if in the future we see like Instagram shop look like Tik Tok shop. I mean, I’m just like, you know, guessing here. I don’t have any insider information. There have been rumors that, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Yeah. So, um, let’s talk about ad spend. So, you guys are high volume sellers. you’re spending a good amount on ads, but probably not what you’d recommend to a total beginner. So Sarah, starting with you, how much do you spend on ads, let’s say on average in a day, and what would you recommend to a beginner? Yeah. Well, first I would say um you know, I I have my ad budget maxed out as I think it’s $1,000 a day on Etsy. Um it has never even spent that um full budget, but if you are a beginner, I’ll reverse a little bit. I would not recommend ads just for the sake of trying to get sales. Um, if you are new to getting sales, we want to make sure, like you already mentioned this a little bit, but like it’s pouring gasoline on the fire. And so ads sometimes can feel like a magic pill to people, but if someone is not going to buy it organically, they’re not going to buy it just because, you know, it’s higher up in ranking on Etsy and they see it, they’re not going to like it still. So, um, definitely don’t grab a hold of ads as like a a magic pill, like this is going to fix your shop. Uh, first, if you’re once you do start to use ads, and I recommend doing so once you have um a listing that’s doing really well, selling really well, and amplify it with the ad. Um, you can start small. You can start with a dollar a day, $5 a day. It also depends on the type of seller and their approach to ads. Um, I think we’ve talked previously about a lot of sellers viewing it as an expense instead of an investment. And so for the seller who really is jumping into Etsy and like, I want this to be a business. I want to scale this up. and they understand that running ads is an investment in getting data and information that they can use to create better listings, then you can do it without having great selling listings because you’re getting that information and then you can turn the ads off at the appropriate time to use that information. For most sellers who might not be ready to have a marketing budget, per se, and invest in them that way, I would recommend waiting until you have those listings that are doing well. Start with just a couple listings, not your whole shop. And um let them run for a while. You know, 30 days is kind of um just a random number, but it it depends on your budget. You know, if you’re spending $100 in one day versus $100 over 30 days, you’re getting that data at a different speed. But essentially, it’s just letting them run long enough to get enough data to know what I’m going to do with it. Yeah. And to um not confuse the algorithm. when you although Etsy ads are very simple, toggling them on and off on and off on a listing um emotionally can really harm your listing in the long run because it’s kind of confusing Etsy of, you know, not not confusing Etsy in the sense that your buyers are still going to interact with that listing the same way, but it’s taking the algorithm is trying to learn how to push people in front of that listing. And whenever you kind of reel it back, push it out, reel it back, it can just kind of be harmful to your listing’s trajectory, I think, in ranking. So, but to answer your question, short, yeah, a dollar a day, $5 a day, it’s kind of how your your risk tolerance with it, right? I I liked a lot of things you said there, but I want to start with the strategy. So, you recommend that new sellers uh go the organic route, meaning no paid ads to start, and then they look for signals of success organically. like what would be some of those top signals that they’re looking for? Yeah, I love that you said that. In the Etsy mentorship group, we’re always talking about those signals because as much as easy as it is for any print on demand seller to start their journey and I mean they can grab a hold of all sorts of strategies that are out there and content. I am really trying to encourage people to stay the course of what’s working and until you see the signals which on Etsy is just in the form of um clicks into your listing uh favorites of that listing add to cart which you can kind of see in a reverse way and incognito you can see how many people are adding it to your cart and then of course sales and so looking at those signals on a listing level um is really helpful versus a shopwide level which I’m just going to say this is like kind of not ad related exactly, but the stats button on your listing dashboard is automatically toggled off when you’re a new seller. Toggle it on because that’s how you can like when you first log on, see exactly what listings are kind of building that momentum without having to look and find the favorites. Of course, you know your sales, but um it those signals specifically, the visits, the click or the clicks and the add to cards, favorites and sales. Yeah. You know, there’s so much value in the data and it goes back to something you said earlier where you’re like a lot of people think of ads as an expense. I totally agree and not an investment. And I was that person too. Like at the beginning, I was like, I can’t afford to run ads. But the thing is, you know, you look at the highest volume sellers, almost all of them are running ads. And the thing is, if you have a true winning product, you can run ads at high budgets. I’m talking like a,000 to $2,000 a day profitably. And I mean that’s really great for your growth. But even aside from the sales like at the beginning you might not get ads or you might not get sales but you’re gonna get data which is still super valuable. You can see I I mean I I’m speaking for meta here but you can see like demographics like age. Maybe you are way off on who you’re targeting in your ads for age and you’re like oh wow I was targeting Gen Z but I see that it’s all millennials buying my stuff or all millennials showing interest in my stuff. Um you know location all this different data. Not to mention like again talking from a meta lens, many times you’re going to organically get more followers on social media if you’re driving ads because they’re just being they they see your ad and then they go click on the brand and they want to check it out. Uh not to mention you can get email signups. A lot of people do not buy the first time they see a website or a product and it might take them a couple visits uh or a couple times before they convert into a customer. It’s not uncommon for people to join an email list or visit a website and end up buying like 2, three, four months down the road. Maybe they’re waiting for Black Friday, maybe they’re waiting for Christmas, maybe they’re, you know, who knows what they’re waiting for, but a lot of people will not buy right away. Um, Levi, I want to talk to you about ads. So, you have done $700,000 in sales from your dorm room. I imagine that wasn’t all organic. That was close to all. I mean, we’ve probably over doubled that now. Um, I’m a little past graduation. I graduated in May, but um I technically graduated in December. I graduated early and I worked a different job. Um but I will say I have watched the change in Tik Tok shop. Um the reason why I wasn’t running ads for the first whole probably year and a half of Tik Tok shop was because it was a subsidy based platform. All Tik Tok wanted was people to come onto their platform. They needed sellers. They still need sellers. They needed consumers as well. and their long-term goal is to be a competitor to someone like Amazon. Well, you need a lot of people buying and selling in order to build that trust to start. So, there was really no internal ads. There was only external ads, which means like driving people to your website. But promoting your products on Tik Tok shop was strictly like posting. Um, now the game has changed. It’s pay to win now, just like every other platform. And that’s kind of what you expect out of a maturing marketplace. Totally. Um, but in terms of how much I spend a day now is probably like you said, close to $1,000 a day I’m spending on ads um when I’m having good days. But how how um GMV Max works on Tik Tok shop is you’re trying to hit an ROI. And what’s special about Tik Tok is they actually ensure that whatever ROI you set, you will be paid out at least 90% of that ROI if you can hit 20 orders per day. So that’s called the ROI protection on Tik Tok shop. So if just to kind of put that in perspective, if you’ve never sold anything or maybe you didn’t take finance classes, when you’re setting your products to a two ROI, okay, that means for every $1 somebody spends on or I every $1 spend on ads, I should get $2 back in revenue, right? 2x what I’m spending on ads. So if I have a $20 product, that means I will be spending at most $10 per sale, right? Mhm. So Meta or I mean sorry, Tik Tok shop is basically ensuring that I will at least hit 90% of that. So I will at least have like $11 per sale. And if I’m not hitting that and I have over $20 or 20 orders per day, they will refund me an ad spend up to that 90%. That is wild. Now, that is a really cool thing because it allows you to scale and spend $1,000 a day because as long as it’s hitting my ROI, it’s I’m just making more money, right? The hard part is hitting that 20 orders a day on one campaign to start. And that’s why it’s a lot like Etsy where just turning up ads and raising your budget won’t really matter if people aren’t already buying your product. Right. Right. That that’s so interesting. And uh I know Meta isn’t listening to this, but it would be great if you came out with a feature like the ROI protection that Tik Tok has. I think every Meta I think I’m speak for every Meta ad seller. Uh that says that sounds incredible. We all love protections. So wait, let me add one thing though. Tik Tok shop isn’t all rainbows when it comes to ads. And one of those things is I feel like you don’t get the same data back in terms of what you’re actually spending to what it’s converting to on like a views basis. Um sometimes you’re kind of like throwing money into the wind and getting sales and it’s magically feels like it’s hitting your ROIs which is a little scary. Um the other thing that I wanted to mention is I mentioned not turning on and off your ads because it confuses the platform on Etsy. It is very similar actually on Tik Tok shop because every time you change your ROI or the selected products in a campaign obviously the training of the algorithm in that campaign has to change. So you lose that ROI protection for 24 hours. So a lot of people say something even I promote is starting your ROI a little bit lower somewhere closer to break even where maybe it’s not your end goal profitabilitywise but it’s gaining momentum on a product and then slowly raising it based on the data you’re seeing. So, if you’re setting it at a three and you’re hitting like a 3.7 consistently, well, then you can slowly like move it up. But know that every time you change it, you’re losing that ROI protection for 24 hours, which usually isn’t a huge deal because it’s still they if you’re going to hit 20 orders, it needs to be hitting that ROI for it to continue to spend. If you set a $100 budget with a 25 ROI, you’re it might it’ll probably just spend like a very minuscule amount because as soon as it realizes we are nowhere close to hitting this ROI, it’ll just stop spending. Right. Right. No, that’s that’s very very interesting. And what you said about the toggle on both platforms goes the same for Meta. Same thing. You are not advised to turn on and off. It messes with the algorithm. Mess it messes with the optimization. So, not not a great strategy. But let’s talk about I know you use meta as well. And I know a lot of Tik Tok shop sellers also use meta. So, for example, if you see an ad doing really well on Tik Tok shop, you’ll throw it over and turn it into a meta ad. And I know other people who are doing that successfully as well. And many times if they convert well on Tik Tok shop, they will convert well on meta as well. So, what’s your experience with that? Okay. It’s funny you say that. Um I do think like the halo effect itself on Tik Tok shop is very real which means like people say for every dollar that is spent on Tik Tok shop another 50 cents will be spent somewhere else in the ecosystem of your brand. So whether that’s Amazon, Shopify or wherever else people can find your products wherever they else they’re probably seeing it next like bottom of funnel. Um but when it comes to well what was your second part of your question? Yeah. So, talking take the Tik Tok ads from Tik Tok over to Meta. So, it’s funny because often times what works on meta almost always works on Tik Tok. So, going from if if somehow like you sourced an ad on Meta and you tried it on Tik Tok and it’s a video, it will almost always work. I think going from Tik Tok to Meta is a little bit more difficult and that’s because of how you buy things, right? I think a lot of the ads are catered on Tik Tok shop towards a impulse buy call to action based on like the little orange cart at the bottom of the video. Whereas on Meta, the process in terms of buying something takes a little bit longer and it’s just a slightly different funnel in terms of how you purchase. So although you you definitely can just take those creators from Tik Tok shop, granted you have the rights to the content from the creators like affiliates and run them as ads on Meta. I think they are still a little bit different and um it’s not like a for sure if one’s killing on this platform it’s it’ll work on the other, but it is great to be able to test, right? And I think having that content available is like the number one savior for keeping ads successfully running and healthy. Have you been able to do that successfully? Take a winning ad from Tik Tok and then throw ad spend behind it from meta and and see results. Yes, for sure. Um I think like a lot of the same tactics apply obviously. Um, I actually market a lot of different products from Tik Tok to Meta, which is kind of interesting. On Meta, I focus more on premium products and then on Tik Tok, I’ve everything. Um, and the reason that is is because premium products usually have a slightly higher margin. And so changes in spend um don’t affect profitability whereas like on Tik Tok I’m doing much higher volume and so my statistics are usually a bit more consistent dayto-day. Yeah. I’m I’m curious like so you’ve got Meta and you’ve got Tik Tok. When someone is purchasing from Meta, where are they being routed to complete the purchase? Is it a Shopify store? Yeah. So I do have a Shopify store. I also have an Etsy now. Um, I think like my products have begun to kind of pop up in the wild and when people see them, I need the ability for them to find my products, not necessarily the knockoff version of them. If you look up Launch Club products, you can probably find a million different people selling them. You can find them on Walmart. You can find them on Sheen. You can find them on T-Mu. You can find them wherever, but I only sell them on my website, Tik Tok Shop, and Etsy right now, right? I’d like to unlock every marketplace eventually. But yeah, I I I’m major majority of everything meta is is directed directly to Shopify, which is just my website and then everything Tik Tok is native within the platform. Okay. Very interesting. All right. I want to talk about beginner mistakes that you guys see. You both coach uh a lot of newbies, a lot of new sellers, and I want to know what the most common ads mistakes you see from a platform perspective. So, um, I know for meta ads, a lot of people have this illusion. I’ll call it an illusion. I I was one of those people. They’re like, I’m going to make sales if I run ads. And if I’m not making sales, something’s wrong with Meta, like, oh, my ads are broken or something like that, right? That’s not the case. Like, you actually have to have a product that a product that evokes emotion and relatability for the target audience to build that connection. And many times that does lead to conversions, but many times that’s only like a small percentage of your actual designs that you roll out, your actual products that you roll out. And so it, you know, it’s important to expectation set when it comes to running ads. I feel like, especially at the beginning, many people will not make a single sale running ads at the beginning because a lot of times they just don’t have a winning product. And that’s okay. All of us started without a winning product. So, um, Sarah, what are some of the most common mistakes you see from Etsy sellers wanting to run ads? Yeah, I think um one being what’s already mentioned, which is just trying them too early, you know, trying to use them before you have winning listings. Um the whole toggling on and off. And then the other mistake I would say is kind of like um ignoring the golden nuggets that is are given to you with those Etsy ads, not really knowing how to use the information that it’s given. So, with um Meta, I ran ads with those a long time ago, and I know with the, you know, the demographic and the location, it gives you so many um metrics to pay attention to. With with Etsy, the only thing you get are search terms that bring shoppers to your listing. And so, why that’s helpful is because a lot of times you are learning SEO and phrases and kind of audiences sometimes that are bring that are coming to your listing that you didn’t think of or find in your own research. So majority of the time your SEO that’s in your listing is within those search terms that you see in your ad. But a lot of times through the algorithm knowing that hey this person who you know this group of people who use this group of SEO to find these types of listings also use this SEO. We’re going to try to show this ad when this person types this phrase. Even though Sarah didn’t put it in her listing, I’m going to give it a shot. Right? And so then I can then see and open that listing and see what were the search terms that brought people to my listing. It helps you optimize your listings within that niche and that audience moving forward or um you know editing a dormant listing that might be getting a lot of signals besides sales, you know. So sometimes you’re getting that traction of favorites and visits but it’s not converting. And so sometimes, you know, uh, understanding the buyer’s process there, adding some of that SEO that you might see in that’s drawing them to the ad. So, yeah, I think the other beginner mistake is just kind of ignoring the precious data that Etsy gives you with within those ads. Uh, that that’s that’s gold. I mean, common beginner mistakes to avoid. This can potentially save people a ton of money in the beginning, and I feel like I made every mistake under the sun when I first started. Um, and I wish I had the beginner mistakes avoid playbook like put right in front of me when I was starting because I was that person. But Levi, real quick, we’re almost out of time here, but I want to know like what’s the most common mistake you see with people on Tik Tok shop who are running ads? I was actually going to say not looking at your data. Um, I’ll go really quick, but when when you’re running ads, you’re actually you’re purchasing buyer information. So, what that means is you’re seeing on Tik Tok shops specifically what kind of content is working, what products are working, and what it costs for you to get a conversion. That is golden information. And if you’re getting information showing that a product’s not working, you need to be able to look at it, realize that this is what my data is saying, and know to turn that product off, make some sort of pivot. Yeah. In the same way, you need to do the opposite when a product is absolutely killing it. So, I think You don’t just turn on your ads and say, “Okay, make me a million dollars.” It’s let’s look at how things are performing and what changes can I make to continue optimizing my ad set, right? I I I love that. You know, intuition is great, but data always wins. And I think that that’s it’s really easy to get emotionally attached to our designs and even to see some signals, maybe some ads, maybe some clicks where you’re like, “Oh, wow.” Like, there’s interest here. But if you’ve spent $1,000 and you haven’t made a sale, I mean, if you haven’t even spent $25 and haven’t made a sale, um, you know, then then like I think you need to take the emotion out of it and look at the data. It’s very, very important. It’s easy to burn through money. So, with that, this was an awesome discussion on marketing. Thank you so much for all your insights, guys. That was gold. I’m going to send it back over to the green room. Over to you.

Hey, everyone. We are in the green room here and I have the pleasure of talking to really great people that are in our communities for both Printify Rockstars and the Printful Insiders. Here I have Robin and Eric. I’m so happy you guys are here and I really want to talk to you about just your journey with print on demand because it’s so inspiring especially I’m sure people in the community as well. So I’d love to just jump in and ask you a little bit about your stories with print on demand and the communities too. So Ramen, where where did you get started? How has print on demand changed your life? Yeah. So, I got started about two years ago. Um, my son was just born. Um, he was born really tiny. And so, we had spent quite a bit of time in the NICU. Um, just as a a new family, and it was at that time we decided I needed to step away from a 17-year career in nonprofit. Um, I love being at home with my son, but after a few months, I was itching to try something new. and my husband read um an article about a guy that was selling candles using Printify and it just kind of went from there. My husband said, “You should do that.” I went on the Printify website, looked into it. I have a background in graphic design as well. So, I started designing and trying out things. Um and we when we made the decision for me to stay home, we had planned on just having one income, right? Um, and so we had made that plan, but uh, after my first year, we had to make a plan to go to back to two incomes because what turned in what started as like 2 hours a day turned back into what I was making in my full-time job. So, after the first year. So, yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Congratulations. So, and that’s probably a huge reason of why you’re in the print or printify community and helping others, which is such such a cool thing. Yeah. I’d love to hear your story about print on demand and how what it’s done for you. Okay. So, my story um print on demand actually came to me as a result of a change that I had made in my personal life. Um in July of 2021, I got sober and quit drinking alcohol. Um and the my brand Sobervation is a result of that. When I had gotten sober, one of the first things that I noticed is I had all kinds of extra time that I used to spend consuming alcohol and ending up in bad situations and you know um made for some funny videos online but uh you know not not where I wanted to take myself. So when when I was sober, I had all this time and I started as a blog and just to kind of get the feelings out onto onto paper or on my blog, but but um so I I got my feelings out in the blog and uh I I identified my triggers and I identified what it was that was pushing me to the alcohol. And once I had gotten past the triggers, I was looking for something to um fill my time with my creative side. So, I had started making myself a couple hats to wear that one said, “I’m sober because dot dot dot.” And I had made that because I wanted people to know that it was okay to talk to me about my sobriety. I didn’t want them to think, you know, if they saw me out that, hey, it’s hush hush. This guy quit drinking. we can’t ask him any questions about it. So, I wanted people to know that it was okay to talk to me about it. If they had questions, I would talk to them. And I put that I put it on my store after people started asking me about it. I turned my blog into a storefront and I added the hats first and I started selling some and people liked it. So, I started making shirts and I started making other designs and it’s just transitioned more from a personal blog into the store now. That’s so inspiring. and so cool. I I love to hear when people can take something that they’ve been through in their life and apply that. That’s something I did with the mental health niche and selling on Etsy. And that’s how I got started in it. And it’s it’s just so nice to spread things that you’re actually passionate about. And then be able to like sell products, make money, and like build your own community through that. I think that’s so awesome. And I’d love to ask you guys both about the community itself and maybe what it’s done for you. Has it helped you in a way? Have you learned something? like any specifics that you would love to share to maybe entice people that are not in the communities yet to join because I think community is so valuable especially as online sellers. We are constantly at home in front of a computer screen in front of whatever device you use and it’s like lonely. There’s not a lot of people to talk about things with or learn from. So Robin, do you have an experience with the community that you want to share? Yeah, that’s kind of where I started. I was kind of creeping in the background watching what people were asking. It was like coming up on Q4 and I it really opened my eyes to the successes and also the things that people struggle with in print on demand. And so I kind of already had an idea of what to expect. Um and like you said, it’s the print on demand world. If you own your own business doing this, it is pretty lonely. But what the community does is it it helps lift you up. And I’ve made friends. I there’s people I talk to every single day now that I met in the community through print on demand. Um, yeah, it’s just totally changed how I look at, again, this is my business. This is something I built. Um, and I’ll continue to do that. But it’s really cool to have others lifting you up at the same time because there is room for all of us in print on demand. And yeah, I love that. Yeah, people people don’t think that. They’re like, it’s too late to get in and this and that. No, that is not true at all. There’s room. There’s so many people constantly buying products and the amount of products that are available with print on demand now is crazy. You can make so many. What about your experience with the community? I’d love to hear about it. Sure. So, I have a Shopify store and um you know, Shopify has a bit of a learning curve. It’s not something where you can put a bunch of products on and you’ve got an amazing store. It takes a lot of work and for me the uh insiders community was invaluable when I first got started because if I was running into a problem on my store, then chances were someone in the Printful group had the same problem. So, I’d go to the the insiders group and I’d ask questions and, you know, people were kind enough to answer my questions at the time, which really helped me get my store together. So, I kind of pay it forward. You know, I I in turn when people ask questions that I knew the answer to, I was the first one to jump in and give my experience on how I handled the situation. And uh I feel like coming off as a know-it-all sometimes, but uh you know it’s really helpful to people in the group that because sometimes they’re afraid to ask questions and just they don’t know how to ask it. And they describe it in the group and you know we all oh this is what you’re talking about. You’re not really talking about that. You’re talking about this and it’s just we all learn from each other and it’s uh it’s really fun. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think what’s cool too in the community is it’s kind of like you’re encouraging each other through wins, through losses as well. And then there’s also different things that come up like certain prizes or giveaways to like really help keep that momentum going. And if you’re somebody right now, speaking of giveaways, we do have a bit of an amplified merch giveaway going on. So make sure that you put some emojis in the chat with your favorite emoji to get ahead and enter for that giveaway, too. I would just love to say I loved chatting with both of you. I think this is so inspiring hearing people’s stories and so much about your community and I think it encourages other people to join. So if you’re not in a community yet definitely something that I would consider because you know why not be in a community after we’ve heard these beautiful stories, right? But thanks so much guys. And next up we have another panel that’s going to be sharing some really cool stuff that you should definitely check out.

Welcome to master level AI moves. In this session, we’re going to be talking about I think one of the biggest problems people are trying to solve with AI. That is how to save time and make more sales. So, I’m here with Michael, Sarah, Jay, all high volume sellers who have a lot of experience leveraging AI in their business. So what I want to do is I want to you know it’s interesting with AI because I think that it seems so easy and in theory it is like how it can help us but it’s also very easy to get overwhelmed by it. I feel like there’s a bit of AI fatigue right now and I also feel like for people who are new to AI um they end up spending a lot of money a lot of time working on it which can make it feel overwhelming time consuming and even expensive like regenerating a bunch of images because they don’t come out the first time right and there’s a lot of ways that you can prevent that you generally use AI tokens whenever you are regenerating these images but we want to solve those problems so I want to talk to you guys and I want to start with you Michael, let’s start with timesaving. So, how are you currently leveraging AI to save you the most time? Like, what task is saving you the most time now replaced by AI? Yeah, I think the first thing you got to know is that there’s things AI is good at and there’s things AI is not so good at. And if you try to use AI for those things it’s not so good at, you’re going to actually end up spending more time and getting more frustrated than if you just, you know, did it the oldfashioned way or a different way. Uh, an example is like coming up with new ideas. AI is not good at being funny out of the box. It’s not good at giving you original ideas that haven’t been done already. So, you need to find ways to do that. Um, I built some software to help me do that. It doesn’t actually use AI for the ideas part because we found that it’s not that good at that particular topic. What it is good at, if you’ve got a problem you need solving, if you’ve got repeat uh workflows that you need doing, uh, the newest models are great at browser use. So, anything you can do on a laptop, you can get your AI to do that for you. I’m thinking particularly of listings, you know, I’ve got 100 listings here to go on Etsy. It’s going to take me a long time to do that manually. Let me get AI to do it. And particularly some of those difficult tasks where, you know, you got a lot of listings to get up, but you don’t want to use these automated tools because there’s something in your process. For example, I like using custom mockups. That makes it hard to kind of do that with Etsy. So you can ask AI to do that and then it’ll go back and you know upload those custom mockups and things like that which require more of a human interaction element in a browser or something like that. So yeah, anything like that where you are doing something repeatedly and where you’ve got a problem you need solving, you can just ask the AI to help you with that. Yeah, it’s so nice like when you can use it successfully to save you time because many times these these tasks that are bogging us down uh a lot of us are solopreneurs or you know one two people businesses and we become the bottlenecks in our business and to be able to unlock that time and re redirect it to sales generity can be a real gamecher for a business. So Sarah I want to hear from you how are you leveraging AI in your business? like what would you say is the single most effective way that you’re using AI to save the most time right now? Yeah, I think that what’s been most helpful for me with Etsy has been utilizing it with like customer service and operations. And so it really is basic like I’m I I have not built my own software, you know, but um I’m just using it like in the way of hey, I have um you know, this these customer service messages that are sometimes four or five different questions from a customer. You know, that’s not the the norm. But on Etsy, you have these like canned responses you can typically use to speed up that workflow. But if you’re selling custom items on Etsy and there’s a customer that just has 10,000 questions, I’ve been loving using it to do like the voice to text and training AI to say, “Hey, this is how I like to greet my customer. This is how I like to sign off. This is how I like to format the message.” And so, and you know, that’s its specific thread. So, whenever I go to do the voice to text, it automatically knows to give it back to me and I just copy it and send it to the customer. very simple, but it really does speed up um the time. I’m a I do a lot of typos, so it really does speed up my time. And and then yeah, like in an operations level, like kind of I know that a lot of new sellers, they’re like gaining momentum and then there’s new pricing updates, which is just the name of the game, but it slows you down. And so even just telling AI, hey, this is these are the products I sell. This is the price. This is my target profit and profit margin. now these are my new costs you know help me kind of you know repric everything and you know you can still have the final say of course but it just helps speed up some of those things right no I think that’s really helpful especially the customer support element like it’s not only timeconuming especially the higher volume sales you do the more customer support questions you’re going to have but like for me it’s just soul sucking like we’re entrepreneurs we’re creators we’re doers we don’t want to be doing that $10 $15 an hour admin task stuff like put a computer in front of us and let us cook on our businesses. You know what I mean? Like take that off our plate. So I really like that you mentioned that. I think that’s like kind of like a unsung hero in a in a way to use it. Especially like if you can find ways to like create templates. It’s like you know use AI to create a canned response because most of the questions you get like 80% of the questions you get are going to be the same questions from people and many times you can have a canned response where you might only have to change one or two words um like the style or the product or whatever it is. So that was that was really helpful. Jay, I know you are loving AI, which it’s cool because you are a graphic designer. You have like a long graphic design background and you know there’s a lot of debate. A lot of graphic designers don’t like AI and that’s okay each to their own, right? But like you come from an AI or a graphic design background and you’ve really embraced AI to the point that you’ve created your own software. So, why don’t you tell us how you’re currently leveraging AI to save you hours, you know, on things you were doing before? One of the things I just want to cap on what Sarah was talking about with uh the um you know, customer service scripts kind of thing. I had to build them over like 14 years of POD of the it’s the same over and over, but then I could, you know, you could save it as a snippet in Etsy and then make it kind of little bit go a little bit faster that way. Had I had an AI to help like back then, it would have been, you know, a game changer, right? Uh that said, how am I implement so I’m going to take a page out of your book on that end, but um how I’ve kind of, you know, started to leverage it for our business or or my community is that like you said, you know, soul sucking that to me is creating mock-ups, listing the mockup, uh getting the title and tags right, and then syncing it to the pod, pushing it to my shop, my Etsy, and now going to go to Shopify, but then having it to actually sync with the catalog be it, you know, print a fire, print full, uh, and then have that all work. Now, you can drag and drop that onto the app interface, and it’ll tell me like it’ll give me options to pick for what colors I want the mockup on. Typically, I’m three or four max. Uh, you we don’t want, you know, analysis paralysis, otherwise known as decision fatigue. Pick the four colors. It’ll upload it. It’ll drop it on the mockup, create the mocket, upload it to the whatever platform I’m selling on, and then sync it on the back end. So, that is like such a timesaver. I get to do the fun part which is design. I I love that. I love that. And I mean that that is your zone of genius. And you know like most people are are you know best when they’re in their zone of genius as much as possible. So I really I really love that. And I want to kind of stay on this topic. I one thing I do want to mention is I think a lot of people don’t realize that AI is working for them even if they aren’t aware of it. For example, a lot of ads platforms use AI now to analyze data very quickly to make decisions to optimize. And so like you might actually be using AI in your business and not knowing it and you’re benefiting from it. And the reason I brought up ads platforms was because we all want to find ways to use AI to make more sales. Like I love we all love time saving, right? Everyone wants to save time and that allows you to focus more time on sales or activity, but how can I leverage AI to actually make more sales? So, I love knowing that a platform like Meta Ads has built-in AI and they’re using it. I don’t have to do anything and it’s being used to make my ads better, more effective, get in front of the right people. So, I want to know from you guys, are there any ways that you’re currently or your students are currently leveraging AI to make more sales? That’s a great question. Yeah, I think um coming back to what you said about ads, that’s obviously happening behind the scenes. Um, AI is so good at the analysis part, especially, you know, you give it a CSV or we talked about browser use. I’ve been pointing uh Claude at my Etsy ads and just saying, “Hey, look, here’s our Etsy ads for the past two weeks. What’s working? What isn’t? What would you advise?” Not necessarily that you should take everything AI says, uh, but it’s a good idea to just, you know, it can do that massive data input analysis in a way that a human never could, right? And it can break those things down into categories and say, “Hey, actually, you know, these kind of designs are doing well for you. These ones not so good.” Uh, for example, it pointed out to me that we were spending an awful lot on a design that just wasn’t selling. And, you know, to find that in the data would have been quite difficult to scroll through. I’ve got something like 700 designs on the Etsy store, so it’s quite a quite a task. So yeah, anything like that where you’ve got uh big amounts of data you want it to analyze that’s, you know, that’s already seeing an improvement in sales for my business, right? Yeah. No, I really like that. That is like a very like like very tangible benefit. And what I like about that is that it’s essentially looking at the data for you and it’s making decisions based on the data so that you don’t have to. It’s essentially empowering us to make better decisions. Like they know more than we do. they’re analyzing it unless you know you’re you’re doing it all yourself which will probably take a lot longer but that is going to you know hopefully lead to more sales like that’s that’s the outcome. Um Sarah are there any ways that you’re leveraging AI that you would directly tie to helping you make more sales? Yeah, I would um say the same similar with what Michael was saying in that um with Etsy I’m typically listing for similar like events or occasions throughout the year. Holidays are obvious like you know when the day of the year it is but for some kind of like vacation spikes and you know family reunion spikes these these things are happening there’s like spikes in the year’s calendar can get away from me and so I’ve loved using it to you know download the data from my Etsy shop from previous years to to inform me like make sure I’m on track with my listing. I think that’s been really helpful and I’ve made the mistake in years past of just listing way too late and that’s kind of a big thing on Etsy if you’re listing for certain events and occasions to be early with that. So that in general and then otherwise for me I haven’t had experience with any AI. Um I’m still you know learning to where it um has directly led to sales but more than ever it’s just saving time right and what I’ve seen for myself and other sellers. So, um, the ability to work on the things that actually move the needle and, you know, revenue generating activities kind of thing, AI can free up some of that time. That’s what I’ve seen, right? And and to your first point, like that there is like a direct tie to sales there, right? Like if if it’s reminding you about an opportunity that you would have missed and potentially miss out on thousands of dollars on sales, that is a way that AI is helping you make more sales. So, I think that’s awesome that you’re doing that. And especially, you know, if if you are on Etsy and you are big on capitalizing on all the occasions, all the milestones, there’s so many there’s so many like it would be so hard to remember all that stuff. You need like a calendar, like a physical calendar by your computer, just like looking at all the time. What am I what am I planning for now? And then you want to be like way ahead of those, too. So, like you actually need like the reminder way in advance. So, that’s really good. Uh Jay, I want to hear from you. What are some ways that you’re leveraging AI to help you make more sales or or your students are? Yeah. So, going back to what I was saying originally with the the app I’ve kind of built, that’s available inside my community, uh, one of my own communities, my inner circle. But on the shirt head side where we do level up redesigns with a good buddy of mine, and a few of you know him, Junah Duncan from Detour Shirts. Love Jun. Um, we call ourselves the shirt heads cuz it’s funny and it’s easy and it’s memorable. Um, you know, a lesson in branding there, right? uh in there, Junah decided to, you know, this is his baby. Uh he he wanted a phrase generator because funny phrases, you know, even just text on shirt, words on shirts can sell for days. So, we wanted a phrase generator. And to Michael’s earlier point, some most of the stuff you get if you say, “Hey, give me 20 phrases for a dog mom niche, funny phrases, you know, to put on a shirt.” 80% of what you get is going to be garbage. 2% maybe usable of the 20, you know, maybe 90% if you’re lucky. And then you’re going to say, “Give me 20 more. give me 20 more. And then so what we did is kind of give it uh a bunch of phrases that are what everyone’s calling AI slop. We just kind of refer to it as AI crap. Uh because it is what it is. Um and then tell it what we don’t want. And then now we’ve got it to a point where it’s making you know rhyming. Uh chat GPT Astra shout out there because claude my cla hates me. And don’t feel like you know if you are having trouble with designing with one and not the other then or creating something you know an automation or something like that don’t be afraid to just shelf it and try a different AI um because my cloud hates me I don’t understand m in my community said gave me a playbook to literally build my own mockup generating app and my cloud said nope screw you don’t want to do it your way we’re going to do it my way and it didn’t work chatbt Astra no problem in 27 minutes I figured out why claude was ignoring me and we built this kind you know, got on a path. So, like that goes from the mockup generation to the phrase builder. I mean, what’s left after that, right, is the SEO titles and tags. I also built the listing optimizer. You can drag your URL from your Etsy shop or link your Etsy shop via API. So, three separate apps. They solve three separate problems, but that can give you like from front to back without having to guess at, you know, what will work and just the amount of time spent. The only thing I’m not going to ever implore AI to do automatically is the design part. And I think that’s that’s the heart and soul of what we do. It’s a creative business. And if we outsource absolutely all of it, I think that is the biggest nemesis and the biggest reason buyers right now are craving an element of humanity. You’re seeing like a rise in like uh more organic designs, little off-hilter, a little less perfect, you know, fonts that uh maybe don’t look like they were an actual font, right? something that is a little more organic or off filter a bit to a point Michael and I were having a conversation yesterday where you said like you know it’s a beautiful time to be alive because you know you can get a a drawing or a phrase from your child and then have uh AI create or assist in illustrating a design about that based on the phrase right and have it look like it was created by a child so uh yeah all kinds of ways and at the end of the day it’s all about making more money otherwise we wouldn’t be doing what we’re doing right right you made you made a lot of really good points there and I think like the design element and you know being able to improve on designs or leverage AI not fully but like to help you prove on improve on designs there’s like a direct correlation to sales there because at the end of the day your designs dictate your sales and the the phrase generator I think that’s super underrated because uh there’s data to show that the majority of uh products of designs that sell is very simple very simple so I was actually looking to at a Printify blog article recently with 2026 stats and they were saying that 80% % of designs that sell have one to two elements. That means either they’re purely text based or they have text based plus one sorted design graphic on there. So like that shouldn’t be lost in translation. It’s so easy like AI has made it quicker, easier, and cheaper than ever to to pump out designs, but there’s a ton of AI slop. And I think a lot of people, you know, when it comes to like fully text based designs, you don’t need AI for that. You could do that in like a couple of minutes. And the other thing I like that you said is like there’s kind of like we’re kind of leaning there there’s a craving for imperfect designs and I’m seeing that too and it reminds me of actually the KD design trends report for last year. They were predicting the trends for 2026 and they specifically had a trend called naive design trend and literally it it was like designs that look like a 5-year-old drew them. And I went over to Etsy and actually found some bestsellers that literally looked like a 5-year-old drew them. It was very imperfect. And I’ve seen quite a few of those naive style imperfect designs really crushing it. And you know, it’s funny because you could use AI to make an imperfect design, but like I I agree with you that uh a lot of people are craving that. And uh it’s you know, it’s it’s kind of ironic. It’s almost like before it was all about perfection, like making sure everything looked perfect. Now it’s like imperfection. It’s like the opposite, right? But I want to talk about actual tools because a lot of people are probably wondering what AI tools are using. Now, I know you guys made a couple yourself, which is super cool. Um, and we can definitely hear about those. I also want to know any other tools that you guys are using to save time and make more sales. I personally love Claude. Um, I use it for a lot of things. And I It’s too bad it hates you. Maybe maybe it’ll come around, but it sounds like CHBD came over to your side and now you guys are kind of like buddied up against Claude. So, just tell Claude. Tell Claude to Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. as long as the problem’s solved, you know, like, you know, chatbt stepped in and solved the problem for you. So, so, so that’s really cool. But I actually really like Claude because I don’t consider myself a prompt master. And there are so many times where I don’t know what to prompt the AI for to create the design I want. And the more you mess it up, the more generations you do and the more tokens you use and the more it ends up costing you and time it takes you, right? It can be super frustrating. So, I use claw to come up with like to actually help me create a design prompt that I could put into like a GBT image 2 image 3 um or into KD or something. But I want to talk about to you guys about your favorite AI tools. So, Michael, I’ll start with you. Yeah. So, my favorite is the one I built. You probably got to but basically, you know, AI’s allowed us to build tools the way we want to build them. Like a tool for me, which is exactly what I’ve done. It’s called Ideally.app with one L. Um, but what it allows me to do is I’ve got all my favorite graphic styles in there. We’ve got the different AI models. And what it allowed me to do was just that streamline process of, you know, once you’ve been doing this game a while, you know, there certain styles you’re going to be using over and over again. And you can almost, you know, know immediately like, oh yeah, that idea needs to go with that style. So, let me just, you know, make use of the AI for what it’s good at, which is replicating some of these simple styles that we know work really well. Obviously, there’s going to be stuff the AI can’t handle or it can’t do a great job of or, you know, you need to bring it into Photoshop or do whatever you need to do. But for a lot of that stuff, you know, AI is the uh the missing piece that’s allowed all of this to come together much more quickly. So, yeah, I use obviously Chat GPT uh Claude use Hermes agent to do some of that stuff. I’ve got that set up on a laptop at home so I can, you know, message it and ask it to do things uh when I need to. Um, so yeah, all the stuff that people are familiar with, but I think um, if you’re looking for something to streamline the process, uh, you can obviously ask AI to build some software to help you solve that solution. Um, or you can come over to my app or or Jay’s and, uh, we’ll help you solve some of those solutions, some some of those problems as well. Yeah. And it makes sense that, uh, your own app is your favorite, not just for that sake, but because you scratched your own itch. Exactly. And I think like when people solve their own problems, it’s usually a problem that a lot of other people have. And so there’s probably a lot of other people that like, “Oh, thank God. I’m so glad something exists to solve this problem. I’m so glad Michael created this.” Um, but that’s that’s awesome. Sarah, what about you? What are what are like specific AI tools that you’re using in your business? Yeah. Um, for kind of the operations, customer service stuff we’ve talked about before, chatbt and Claude. And then for design, I’ve really liked playing around with the KD AI, you know, flow workflows. I’m still kind of new to figuring that out, but um because I’m new to figuring it out, I have played around with the prompts a lot, too. And there’s so many different versions and models. And so if you’re new to using AI um with design, it has been nice for me to kind of test around with using the same prompt for each model so you can kind of understand which models are better at what. That said, um I think we’ve talked about this previously and kind of are on the same page with, you know, wanting to encourage newer sellers to be able to do these more higher skill set like passing off a mundane task to a software is nice and easy and frees up your time. It’s amazing. something like design and understanding how to do market research and those actual skill sets that if you know those softwares went if AI went down you know you still can know what you’re doing. Um so it can be with KD you know with the the design workflow it can be really helpful. Yeah. Um, but I’ve also made the mistake of not being, you know, kind of understanding it fully yet and being a little impatient and then, you know, I’m trying to reprompt things and then I’m downloading it and I’m editing it on a different on Canva, bringing it back in. And you really have to be patient with whatever you are going to use with AI. understand that it will save time and make you more sales um in eventually but at first like obviously they both built softwares and it’s freed up a ton of time and made them more sales but it took a lot of time to probably build those so whatever you are going to lean into AI wise and I’m trying to lean into KD um it does take some time and some testing I think that’s really good I use KD a ton myself and I just want to kind of clarify a couple things you said for anyone who’s not familiar with it so first of all KD is a graphic design software with built-in AI and they have essentially all the best models built in which means you don’t have to have like a chatbt subscription. You don’t have to have a cloud subscription. Well, actually they don’t have cloud yet, but u chachi bt seed dance like you know nano banana these are all built in and um so you can use all these all in one place which is really nice for time saving and then having all those subscriptions but the nice thing about AI workflows which you touched on is essentially it takes it a step further. They are pre-made like done for you templates for common tasks that we do. So this could be for like creating UGC generated content. Content that looks like a real person is like wearing your product uh you know for uh designs. There’s a lot of different ways that you can use these AI workflows. I like to think of them as promptless AI. And as someone who admittedly doesn’t consider myself a prompt engineer and not very good at prompting, I love that. I love that. Like the prompting is done for you. All you have to do is answer a couple really, really simple questions and then it comes out with something. Is it perfect every time? No, of course not. It’s AI. Of course, it’s not going to be perfect every time, but it gets me like a lot better of a result than I did before because it gives me a reference. It shows me like this is kind of the style you’re going for. This is what we’re creating it for versus like having to start from total scratch and trying to like explain in the prompt like I want it to look like this and that. You know, even sometimes with your own reference images like you can like be like banging your head against like the computer, right? Uh so that’s all I’ll say about that. Jay, I want to hear from you. What are some of your favorite tools? Um, I mean this is turning into a kiddo plug here, but as a designer like you said, so the AI, you know, it’s using all the best image generation models and some of their styles and their workflows and things and it absolutely is. But what I love what KD has done is they taken the best parts about all the traditional tools. So for me, you know, um, photo filters that they now have, I don’t need to use Shopify for that anymore. You can just select a color with the eyropper tool if you want to remove the black out of a shirt out of a design so the black shirt shows through. That creates what’s known in design industry as white space. Contrary to popular belief, that is not negative space. Negative space is where you use the empty space to create an actual imagery. So, the best way I can describe it is like the FedEx logo between the E and the X. That makes that’s negative space creating an arrow. That’s probably the most, you know, if you’ve never noticed it, go look at the FedEx logo and you’ll see. Um, but yeah, so it allows the shirt to show through and gives you a little more white space or empty space that doesn’t feel like a hot patch of rubber on a shirt. what would you know to fine-tune that in Photoshop would take you a lot longer than just eyropping the color and turning up or down the saturation removing the color entirely. Um and then on the the illustrators of the world for example KD now has um just taken all the best parts like you can use their pen tool and instead of switching between tools to do different things you just have to double click into things and then you can double click off it and you’re right back where you started. So for me I like using you know leveraging the AI styles that we kind of talked about. So, um, those different kinds of like the there’s a naive whatever it was called the style. You can just type in like two words or three words that you want and then it’ll make it in a different aesthetic. Uh, and then you can always add I’ll use it for imagery and then I’ll add my own text and manipulate the text with the pen tool and it stays editable. So, you’re not stuck and having to redo something. You can go in and now make it for if it’s like a birthday shirt and it says 1966, you can go make a 1956 version without having to reworp and reshape everything. Just double click on it and edit the type. So, it’s bringing it down to like absolute basics. Um, and then you mentioned the workflows, uh, or I think you mentioned the workflows, man. It’s crazy, too, because they got you’ll see the the bootleg shirts that are super popular. They’ve been popular for I mean, literal years. Uh, and they’re kind of resurfaced in the last two years. And I thought it would be something that would fizzle out by now, but it’s just getting better now. And KD has the workflows ready where you can just make a bootleg shirt. So, I have a picture of my dog, Tonka. He’s lying on the beach. There’s a blue fence in the background, palm trees, coconut on the ground in front of him. Upload the photo. Drag and drop it literally again. Um, and then I just wrote his name, Tonka, for the only text on the entire thing. And then it just created in under 60 seconds. It was literally 52 seconds. I made a video uh on YouTube about it. So easy to do. It positioned his face in seven different directions. One of them even had him walking down with like a coconut in his mouth, which is completely crazy because he does that. He fetches coconuts now. Something I never thought I’d say. Um but you know, the privilege of POD, right? Moving and living on a Caribbean island now instead of cold Toronto. But uh in 52 seconds, this thing created this bootleg shirt where I would have normally needed to have, and Michael knows this, seven different photographs of that dog. And you’re going back and forth with the customer saying, “Please, can I get a better quality photo? Can I get it on a, you know, a solid background to make the background removal easy?” KD did it all in 52 seconds. One photo, seven different locations. Got the lightning in there. Got the chrome look for his name. Done. Like you like this is literal hours down to under a minute. So, it’s print ready. Yeah, it it’s funny you mentioned that. I’ve played around with that, too. And I mean, bootleg was always tough to design for because you need customers to send you all these photos and, you know, they need to be good angles and they need to be high quality. And you’re totally right. Like, when I was playing around that, I was really happy with the experience. And I was like, “Wow, this is this solves a huge problem.” Because they’re still crushing those t-shirts, especially on the comfort color 1717 in like the color pepper. Oh, man. They crush still to this day. Uh, so it’s funny you brought that up. That is a very trendy design style. Uh, all right. Let’s kind of shift gears here and talk about you guys all have students and I’m sure some of them are using AI in ways that you would tell them not to or uh are making mistakes that maybe you made before um and that you don’t want them to make. So, what are some of the most common AI mistakes that you’re seeing from your students? Starting with Michael. Yeah, I think the the most common is just assuming that AI can handle everything and it can do the whole design process and we just hand everything over and let the robots do it all. I think um you need to understand the fundamentals, especially if you’re a beginner, you know, looking at AI thinking, well, this this is a designer. I can just ask it, you know, give me a funny dog t-shirt and away it goes. Well, it’s not good at the idea side. it doesn’t come up with concepts typically that are actually usable or or great or especially uh for my type of business I’m like no you know okay that might work but it’s very generic and it’s been done a million times before and that often times I’m like well that just doesn’t make sense at all so it’s not good at that so don’t be relying on it for those kind of things um you know people who have been in the space for a while will have tools that work better for particular things and on the design side I would say yeah think you want to use AI where it’s useful for example my typical use case would be I’m using AI for inspiration for layout purposes for giving me some some options and ideas I’m rarely using it to do a complete design from A to Z. So, it’s cool for, you know, doing that custom illustration that I’m then going to bring into Photoshop and add my own text cuz I want to use this font and, you know, all those kind of things. So, yeah, thinking in terms of using it for what it’s good at again, rather than thinking this is a solution for for everything, you know, right? Yeah. No, you made a good point there. And I think a lot of people think that that is the way to go. They’re like, “Oh, AI has just made it quicker, faster, and cheaper. Quicker, easier, and cheaper than ever before. I could crank out a thousand designs just like plug plug plug in the prompt, it comes out and then throw it on a shirt, slap it on a shirt and get it up. And many times those designs do they are not print on demand ready. Like the the graphics, they’re blurry. They’re pixelated. There’s like weird edges around the colors and little weird pixels and all these things you have to do and you can create a lot of AI slop that way. And we’re seeing that. We’re seeing a ton of AI slop, but not all AI designs AI slop. I like what you said because you said essentially you use AI to create like a version one and then you iterate on you improve on it. So it’s like you’re you’re using it for version one and then you’re which is going to save you time and do what you want to do and then you’re going to improve on that with your own kind of eye and details. It’s a tool. It’s a tool, isn’t it? Like it’s a tool to get you somewhere. It’s not the solution from A to Z. It’s going to be using it for part of that process. Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. Sarah, how about you? What are some of the most common AI mistakes you see your students making? Yeah, I agree with um Michael and saying just the full you know handing it off and relying on it too much. And I would say that if you are wanting to start to use AI to you know speed up time, make more sales, this is very practical advice, but I would recommend you know when you have many POD sellers, especially in the beginning, they have very small margins of time to work. have, you know, your time to do your normal workflow of work and then set aside a different time to just learn and play around with AI. um from my own mistakes. I would like get too excited about it and oh maybe I maybe AI could help me with this idea and then I try and then it ends up being an hour that’s lost that I was planning on you know listing X number of designs and now I didn’t because I just got excited and impulsively you know and AI is fast but it’s not always good. It can be good, just not the first time, right? So, you have to be patient with it. And that’s why I recommend kind of carving out a separate chunk of time to learn it and play around with it. I really like that because as entrepreneurs, you know, a lot of us are ADHD and we are like, give me dopamine now. I want dopamine. And so, like AI has been like a kid in a candy shop. We’re like, whoa, I can do all these things I couldn’t do before. I can look like a graphic designer when I didn’t know how to graphic design before. And it can be really easy to suck up your time with AI and you’re like, “Wait a sec, this took longer because I was like dillydallying with this AI. I could have like created this myself manually faster.” And I like that because like I think a lot of uh entrepreneurs, you know, with all the bright shiny object syndrome, it’s very easy to get distracted and to like go on a side quest. It’s like, “Oh, this side quest brought to you by ADHD.” Like I’m an entrepreneur. This is so many of us, right? And so, yeah, I I I think that’s really important that you kind of like rein it in because I definitely have spent way too much time on on AI and like not got like tangible like results for like the time investment. So, um Jay, I’d like to hear from you with your students. What are some common AI mistakes that you see? I’m going to sound like a broken record here if anyone remembers what a record is. Um yeah, somebody made an old aging comment earlier, but uh no, it’s going to sound the same. It’s literally people out farming the entire thing, alcohol, to AI and like, you know, trusting that it will have your best interest at heart. It does not. It does what it’s programmed to do. Um, and sometimes it doesn’t do what you want it to do. Like my battle with Claude, it explicitly ignores me and says it thinks better. So um yeah that said I mean like if you are entering a creative business and you are not prepared to have at least some kind of human element in there involvement then maybe this isn’t for you. And I think that’s what’s different with a lot of uh really good successful POD sellers is that we know whether you’re a graphic designer or not. You know that you need to have the final say and final touch and only you can resonate or create a design that resonates emotionally enough where a robot cannot. And that’s going to be the thing. So if you rely on that robot to get that emotional hook across, it’s just not going to work. It could look like a beautiful piece of art, but at the end of the day, if it’s got these, you know, the telltale signs, the whiskers or a weird hyphenated place or like a a giant shade of beige, you know, people are wise to that now. And people don’t want that. Less is always always more. And I mean, that’s the same idea with the principle what you talked about of having some kind of like icon or iconography inside of a a design with a majority text. I think sometimes text will always sell. Illustrations can sell. uh text with illustration can sell, but for me, the majority of the sales I see is largely text based with like little bits of iconography in there. So maybe um it says something like awesome uh but on in inside the E or on the end of the E it’s got maybe I don’t know a heart on it and and you know for a mom or something like that or it has like a the medical cross and now you’ve you’ve exclusively made this word awesome for somebody who might be a paramedic or in a medical field, right? uh without having this ornate kind of design that maybe mom thinks that’s a great design for her daughter. But will her daughter wear it? I don’t know. It’s a lot, you know, it’s a lot louder than just something that says awesome. Right. Right. I I like that you said that cuz again it goes back to simple cells. Like the data shows that simple designs sell better. Like and the way that I kind of think of it too is like the more elements that are added there’s the more room for error and the more that people be like I just don’t like that little heart there. You know what I mean? It’s like there’s there’s hearts, there’s stars, there’s lightning, there’s all these things. I mean, there’s certain examples where that works really well, like doodle art designs that can work really well, but for the most part, like when you look at the data, simple wins. It’s like one to two design elements and many times like you don’t even need AI for a lot of that stuff. Uh, but I I do really like what you said, you know, using it to evoke emotion and relatability, but like not relying on it to do everything for you. Um, so I kind of want to stay on this topic because there’s a lot of talk about AI slop. Uh, we’ve all heard the term, I’m sure. And, um, a lot of AI designs like the V1, the version one, it’s not optimized to be put on a t-shirt. And some people don’t know that, understandably so if you’re new, like I didn’t know that at first, right? But then when you actually put it on a shirt, it it looks terrible. Like it’s like you this is not optimized for this t-shirt or whatever product you’re putting it on, right? So, what are some ways that essentially we can avoid designs looking like AI slop? Michael, over to you. Yeah. Well, this is not uh an exclusive solution that I have because Kettle has this and and Jay has this as well, but you know, we have an app that allows you to bring that that AI artwork in. We can upscale it. We can knock the background out, not using AI, but using, you know, kind of pixel method like you would in Photoshop. And then you’re going to get that crisp design that you can upload. So, that’s kind of a solved problem. Now, you know, it was an issue in the early days of AI. it’s only generating a 1,00x 1000 image. It’s too small. And then we had some advances. Now we’re getting bigger images and stuff like that. But yeah, generally it’s um it’s a solved issue for for the AI imagery. We can now use that. And I think as long as people know that that’s out there, you’re pretty much solved, right? No, that’s a great great great example. Um Sarah, how about you? So what are some ways that you’re using AI or what are some ways that you’re aop Yeah. Um, I think sometimes my visual aids to AI are better than my written prompts. And so sometimes just adding some inspiration images are helpful. Um, that’s not always it can still produce AI slop. Um, but actually I have found some experience and now that um, Jay’s mentioned the kind of the phrase generator where I don’t want these phrases, I kind of want to play around more with the whole like reverse training AI because I I do feel like I have more success with that where it’s like this is what I don’t want. I don’t want it overcrowded. I don’t want these, you know, and sometimes I think that that can be a little bit easier than over typing your prompt. M um maybe the more complex the prompt for me sometimes the more complex the image and I’m not even going for a complex image but anyway so yeah that’s what I would say. Cool. Jay, how about you? Um basically if you’re going to use AI for the any kind of design here like what I would say first and foremost to to avoid like what you said mentioned something before like maybe it works on this but not on this color and it looks different. Make the artboard the color that you intend to list that design on to start. So, if you’re going to list it on like a a comfort color is pepper, right? So, make it like a, you know, a shade of a darker gray and then start designing on that and you’ll know immediately if the contrast works. If it works on black, then list it on black or navy or like a military green or maybe pepper. But if you have some grays in there that will stand out on the black, they might not stand out enough and there might not be enough contrast on that pepper. So, the whole thing is that you don’t want people to It’s kind of funny because I’m going to say a phrase here in a minute, but it’s like I should put it on a shirt, but it’s like it’s suck in bold. So, if you’re gonna suck, suck loudly. Yeah. Because if you’re gonna have like non-contrasting colors on a listing that shows up in somebody’s search results, for example, and it’s or it’s too crowded like an AI slop design, you people are going to click on it so that they can see it bigger, then they’re not then they’re going to realize they don’t like it. Doubly worse if you’ve paid for that click now by advertising it. So, now you’re paying for them to click on a listing to realize they don’t like it. Yeah. tank the conversion rate on that listing because they’re not adding to cart and conversion is the best driver. I don’t care what platform you know that’s the beall end all and then you they’re not converting so inevitably that design just will will stop surfacing. So be intentional about every step of the way regardless of how you’re using AI in it I think is you know ultimately um and again it just comes back to you know knowing the niche and stop farming everything out to AI. More is not better. Would you rather be like, you know, a mile wide and an inch deep in 100, you know, in a hundred different things or would you rather be a mile deep? Always, always a mile deep because that’s where the repeat customers come back. That’s where, you know, the email blast makes sense because people are waiting for your next drop. If you’re trying to, you know, spray and pray, yeah, it’s not going to work the same way. So, yeah, I I really like like the the tip there about the canvas. A lot of us create our designs with a white background and sometimes the designs look really good and then you remove everything and you throw it on like a Comfort Colors t-shirt and pepper and you’re like, “Oh, that looks terrible. I got to go back to the drawing board and fix this.” Right? So, that was that was great advice. Uh, we’re out of time, but this was such a fun discussion. AI is such a hot topic and I think we’re all in agreement that there are ways that can help us save time and make more sales. Uh, it’s a somewhat controversial topic, so I’m glad we got to kind of dive a little deeper. Um, this was a bit of a longer session, but guys, thank you so much for your valuable insights and we will send it back to the green room.

What is good everybody? It’s Levi back on the roaming camera to again with Crystal. Crystal, um, these are going to be some rapid fire questions, so I just want you to be ready and answer two. First of all, what is your brand and tell me a little bit about it. All right, so my brand is Girl Plus God. This is actually a brand that I acquired from somebody else. So, this was not my first t-shirt. Okay. When when you say acquired it from somebody else, is that a like Shopify store transaction? Remember they had that Shopify marketplace? Is that how you acquired it? No, it literally was like, I really like this brand. I want to buy it from you. Can I ask how much you paid for it? You want to know for real? I’m going to give you the real tea. $3,000. So, $3,000. You acquired a POD brand. It wasn’t POD. What was it at first? Was it like bulk orders? Like you did you get some inventory or did you just get trademarks and like styles ideas website? So the original owner uh she would just like print it get get it print somewhere and like ship it out and then I kind of came on and was like, “Hey, I know I can take this brand to like six, seven figures. Let me just buy this. Let me take this off your hands.” And then I actually had my own warehouse. So I used a warehouse and I used POD. But using POD will be me for life because it’s so easy to like maximize your brand using it. So also you’re not taking that risk where if you don’t sell out of your inventory in the warehouse at that point you’re kind of just stuck with it. No. Did that ever happen for you? Absolutely. You’re giving me nightmares like buying stuff and you’re getting it like from China and you’re spending so much money and then you just have it on hand and you have to discount it. which is why I love print on demand. When I say please get something from print on demand, it works. Not to mention now ordering things overseas, you have the the chance of losing an entire inventory order, which can be thousands and thousands of dollars or things getting stalled and missing drop days. There’s just so much involved that Printify just takes care of for us. Tell me about Girl Plus God. The person that owned it before, did you know them personally? So I actually started as a brand ambassador for the brand. They reached out to me and they were like, hey, can you wear it? I was like, I love this. Why didn’t I think about So a model really? Yeah. You know, a little something. And then I said, you know what? I love this brand and so let’s partner. And then I figured like, let me just take it over. But it’s a faith-based brand just for women who love God, whatever that looks like for you. I have an amazing community of women, about 200,000 across like social platforms, and it’s been great to build it with print on demand and with my own warehouse. I think one cool part that I see from an outside of your brand is such a specific niche and like you know exactly who you’re selling to. I’m not a woman, but I love God and I love women. So, can I still buy your products? You can’t. And then we have like me plus God. We have mom plus God. We have like wife plus God. So, I’ll get you a me plus guy or maybe even a Levi plus guy. Can be a model sometime, too. It was great talking with you, Crystal. Let’s keep going over here. Oh, I see Sarah. We’re going to sit down with Sarah, and she’s going to be our next person to get interrogated. Sarah, can you can you tell me what your store is called? St. Joo. What does St. Joo mean? Um, it’s inspired by where I live, the area in which I live, which we’re going to keep that gate cap. Somewhere in America. It is in America. Yeah. And St. Jooko, is that your only store? Uh, good question. Yes, I’ve dabbled in Tik Tok. I’ve not I’ve not done enough in it, but like do you call it Staint Jooko on TikTok as well? I did. Yeah. Okay. And And h how did you come up with that name? Did you Did you Was it somewhere you were already living or somewhere you moved to? Moved to. So, it was kind of Oh, manifestation almost. Yeah, it was kind of happening at the same time. So, it’s starting my shop and moving. What was your very first product to get a sale? A mug. What did the mug have on it? Um, I will tell you what the mug had on it. It had um something that it shouldn’t have had on it. It got taken down because I didn’t know. Um it was like a TV reference. And so, no, don’t do any of that. Don’t do your TV movie show. I was an amateur. But yeah. Okay. A a mug. Very different. I think a lot of us sell t-shirts here. I think t-shirts are the easiest thing to mock up, sell, and market most importantly because everybody has to wear clothes preferably. Um, but not everybody needs mugs. Do you use mugs on a daily basis? Are you a coffee drinker? Oh, I use mugs on a daily basis. 100%. Yes. But I primarily sell shirts more now. Yeah. Okay. Get on the shirt train. Shirt train is definitely the train you want to be on. But when I’m thinking about using mugs, are you a coffee drinker? Tea. Coffee. Iced coffee or hot coffee? Both. Mostly hot. Do you drink coffee? I do. I’m iced though. Iced everything. Iced tea, iced coffee. In the winter? Yep. Even in the winter? Wow. With milk or without? Um, it depends on how I’m feeling that day. Either black or with milk. I’m not a cream. No cream. I was hoping she was going to be like, I like all the sweeteners and cream stuff. That way I so that way I could feel more manly like Oh yeah. Usually I like it black with sometimes a little cream and sweetener in it. But okay, Sarah, great talking to you. Let’s see who else we can find over. Oh, Mr. J, can you tell us about yourself, J? Hi, I’m uh Levi Younger and I sell on Tik Tok. No kidding. I’m Jay Duza. I’m Canadian and I’m not allowed to sell on Tik Tok. And he wears really cool hats. Thank you. And he has cool earrings which I cannot pull off. Uh yeah. I think you’d be able to do it. How old were you when you got your ears pier first? Oh man, I don’t remember. Probably 14, 15. Seems like about the right age. What’s your favorite product to sell on your stores? T-shirts. Um, I actually have a community with another graphic designer buddy of mine. It’s called the Shads. Um, tell me about learning how to be a graphic designer probably a few years ago, at least one or two. How has that changed from then to how people graphic design today? Wow, great loaded question. Yeah, right on the spot, too. Kind of just came up with that one. Yeah, I I appreciate the one to twoyear guesstimate there. Um, yeah, it has come so far with the introduction obviously of AI, you know. Um, I think that’s in every conversation almost now when it comes to design in some capacity. Uh, gone are the days where I would spend four hours illustrating something or designing something that or or creating like an illustrative element in a t-shirt design. Now I can kind of farm that part out to AI. I like to play with text myself still. So there’s a lot of it that I’ll keep, you know, old school if you want to call it, but I think having that human element in the design is always going to be paramount. Um, but it has come so far. Uh, yeah, the the early Adobe Creative Suites came on a DVD probably before your time. I uh yeah, I haven’t seen a DVD for probably 90% of my life. That said, we were able to like burn them and rip them and like Dang, that’s awesome. And wait, you didn’t have to pay monthly then for it. That would be sweet. No, it was a one and done, but then we would burn copies and hawk them on the deal. Yeah, allegedly. Allegedly. Um, what is your favorite creative tool that you’re using today outside of the Adobe suite? Outside of the Adobe suite, my favorite tool is absolutely KD. I don’t even use the Adobe suite anymore. It’s allowed me to kind of cancel that subscription. So, uh, yeah, again, AI fueled on one half and then they’ve taken the best parts of, you know, the Adobe kind of suite and put it into one sweet, sweet tool. I think one thing when it comes to design, people frown upon the use of AI a lot, but I think one thing that AI can do that nothing else can is bring ideas in text format to life. And when you learn how to bring an idea to life and then go ahead and edit it into an optimized t-shirt design, that’s I think how a lot of people are finding winners today. How do you see people using AI effectively? Uh effectively, honestly, is is kind of the way I was talking about, right? So, it’s having a little bit of a human element in it and then not farming the entire thing out to AI. So using it for things as a tool to speed up the workflow but not relying on it entirely. You heard it here first from a graphic designer. That’s it for us today. We’ll see you again later.

Welcome back to the discussion stage. I’m so excited to talk about this because social media is something that a lot of people are really getting tripped up about in marketing their products, creating videos for their products. So, I’m here with Dominic and John and we’re going to go over basically everything that you need to know with discussing content or creating content in social media, whether it’s for marketing or for your business. So, thanks guys for being here on this panel. I want to jump right into product creation. I think that’s where a lot of people do kind of get nervous and how to create a video or photos of their products, especially with print on demand because we don’t actually have the physical product. Well, sometimes if you order a sample, but could you tell me what goes into your process of creating a short form video if I were to hand you a product right now? Yeah, absolutely. And the first thing is actually not think about the camera setup or anything like that. It’s doing the research. So, a big thing that I always tell my students is number one, if a video has gone viral in the past, it can go viral again. So, I want to first understand what content has worked of maybe a product or something similar inside my niche. I want to understand the audios. I want to understand the sounds that are being used inside those videos, the style of content, and I really want to examine what’s worked. After I’ve understood that, now I just have to use what I call the 8020 rule. So, I take 80% of what worked in that first video and just tweak in that little 20% with my own creative touch. Whether it’s a different shot of the the content or maybe it’s a different background in the video showing the product, whatever it could be, I just want to twist up in my own creative way. So, number one is the research process. and then it’s just duplicating what’s worked in the past. Wow, that’s really cool. I think research does have a lot to do with it because if you just go and try to like make a random video, it might not convert for what you’re actually, you know, selling. And for Dominic, I’m curious if you have a specific way that you make content or like what you feel makes a good short form video. Um, we use a lot of sort of very silly kind of videos. Um, we have always seen ourselves as quite a lowfi brand. Okay. something that we try and use and make content as cheaply as possible but in a way that resonates with the customer because they can say to themselves this is something I can do and it’s also feels a bit more genuine because like if you think about the rise of Tik Tok and short form videos and what’s popular on those on those um platforms is it’s not overly produced content. It’s real people in their rooms trying their best and people appreciate that because there’s a realness to it. Many times if you watch any kind of like advertising on television, your brain instantly just switches off. You’re like, “It’s an advertising. I know it’s an advertisement.” So having when you’re making something, try and make it feel natural, feel like it’s you. Otherwise, you’re going to be trying too hard, failing at making something that’s good and kind of getting burnt out on the creative process. So, I know that’s kind of kind of a little vague with what I’m saying, but what I’m trying to say is that you don’t really need a lot of money to make a short form video that works. You’re right in the sense that 820 rule works. You’ll often find a lot of content creators have very repetitive videos. And the reason why those work is because people like the repetition. If something works, tweak it a little bit, try it again. Once you’ve got a winning format, you can basically run that into the not into the ground, but you can run it for quite a while before people get really tired of the content. So, yeah, the A20 rule definitely applies as well. It’s a really good way of putting it. Yeah, for sure. I I personally like I’ll look up a product that I’m selling, like let’s say it’s like an embroidered hat, and I’ll look that up on multiple platforms. Like I’ll check out Pinterest. I’ll check out and see if it’s on pretty much anywhere, you know, Tik Tok. and I see the videos that maybe are being clicked on are performing and I take that into consideration with the video that I’m making too. So that way kind of like what you both said, seeing what’s working and not having to overly produce it either. Just sometimes it’s like really basic stuff that works really well. Also, if you don’t do the research, you’re not going to know your audience. Because if you’re doing the research and you’re thinking that works for me, then you know that the product that you’re selling should sell to the people that are like you because you’re making things that hopefully you like and you’re selling it to people that relate to yourself as a person. Absolutely. And for content, there’s a lot of ways to actually create it, right? Whether you want to order a sample or if you want to use AI. Is that something Well, that’s a broad question. what what is your favorite ways to make content if if you were to tell somebody that’s maybe new and starting out? What’s something you could suggest for them to do? Yeah, so every single piece of content that I make, uh especially if you’re selling any sort of product has to have three things in every single video. Number one is the hook. It’s the most important part of any video that’s posted. People are scrolling through their feed rapidly. We have to grab their attention immediately. So having a parent interrupt and every single hook can be broken down in three simple things. Number one, it has to have a text on screen hook. It also has a visual hook being shown within the content. And then thirdly, it has to have some sort of audio hook. It has to have some sort of sound happening. And the hooks that work are typically the ones that have a cliffhanger. Um, something like for a t-shirt would be like, I just got this off the Tik Tok shop. That would be something that’s like, oh, really like, oh, this guy’s coming off sales. It’s not much of a hook. But saying something in the realm of check out what my dad just bought for me. And now something’s like, “Oh, what did this guy on my feed? What did his dad buy?” Oh, he bought he bought me this t-shirt. It’s this thing I got off and he off the Tik Tok shop. It feels more natural when you have some sort of cliffhanger in that hook that holds people through the first 3 seconds. From there, it’s called the meat and potatoes. So, that’s where you actually hold the viewer longer. So, uh it’s typically some sort of change. Mr. Beast calls it uh the two to three second rule. Every single time you see a Mr. beast video, there’s something changing every 2 to 3 seconds where it’s a frame, there’s a color, it’s a new character, whatever is being shown, there’s engagement happening. That’s the meme and potatoes of the video. And the goal is to retain your viewer as long as possible. And at the very end is called the CTA or your call to action. That’s where basically you’re taking whoever made it to your end of a video, I want to make sure that they actually buy whatever product or at least clicking on the link to buy the product, whether it’s in Shopify, it’s on an ad, or it’s through Tik Tok shop. And so there’s four things I always tell people that needs to be included inside of every single call to action. Number one, it has to have FOMO. It has to have a fear of missing out. Number two, has to have urgency. There has to be a time frame to actually buy. Number three, it has to have the Jones effect included inside. The Jones effect is idea keeping up with the Joneses. We all want things that other people want to have and they other people are buying. And the last part is the indifference in it. So if I was to put a call to action, I’m selling this t-shirt. It’d be something like, I just got this off the Tik Tok shop. If you guys want to grab it down below, everyone in their mothers has been trying to get it, but they keep selling out. So, I click the link down below and grab it while you still can. Has every single piece of it inside that call to action. I provide urgency. Everyone else is buying it. I also mentioned the Jones effect. Keep going with the Joneses. Everyone in their mothers has been trying to grab this off Tik Tok, but they keep selling out. Fear of missing out is that it keeps selling out. So, that’s super important. I tell every single creator who whether it’s an affiliate or myself making content all has to include. Wow, that’s some really great advice. That’s that’s really cool. I think that can be applied to so many types of videos. It’s kind of just like you follow that framework and whether you want to do a video of you with the product or someone or even just showcasing it. That can be something as simple as a voiceover, right? Like order. A lot of people do that on TikTok. They literally will just do it faceless. Maybe they even have AI doing the voice over. If they’re like, I’m a little bit afraid to film my t-shirt on this table right here. They can just plug it into 11 Labs is like an AI software. You can just literally have it say something and you just send a voice over or of course naturally you can just say that script out loud. Right. And that’s even like you said faceless. I think that’s a good topic to kind of like move over to it for a second because so many people that want to sell online might not want to create content. And I know when I first started I was like I don’t really want to do content. I don’t think many people you either have that urgency or you don’t. But you might not necessarily have to show your face or even yourself at all. You can use stuff like that or AI in general to create like an AI video of that. I mean, one of the things that we did once uh that worked really well as a Tik Tok Tik Tok advertisement was u a series of just simple mock-ups put together in Cap Cut. Maybe a little bit of uh editing with the way that the transition, but like you said, keeping the attention. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And what that did was it it kind of in a humorously lowfi way, like I said earlier, showcased all the t-shirt designs that we had in a way that was quick enough that it didn’t insult the audience’s attention spans and kept them around just long enough to ask what the hell did I just watch? And that like confusion, it’s like you said when you were saying the hook, it’s like what what is what’s it’s a natural curiosity in people that wants them to find out more and you can use very simple techniques to acquire that. And you said um just to confirm that you used photos like I guess a photo slide. We originally just used the mockups and we had them spinning around on the screen and we just it was so kind of childlike and childish that it naturally made people want to buy the product because it had um sort of a realness to it. Yeah. And what we found is that just using the tools that are available to you and the skill sets that you can, but being open and honest about how you’re using them, you can be very creative because sometimes the limitations of what your own abilities are can make you then be more creative because you’re forced to. For example, I say to people, if you if you struggle with what to put on uh a design, why don’t you just stick with words until you’ve worked out the imagery that might go with those words? And you can come back and adapt the t-shirt later at a later date once you feel more confident or if you’re working with somebody who’s better at graphic design than you initially were. Yeah. And you don’t have to be like an expert at everything right away. It’s kind of like you can master one thing and then move along from it. I think uh with the photo um aspect with mock-ups, that’s something I do a lot is I’ll take mockup photos, whether you know it’s the ones that I download from my print on demand store and either use AI to create that into an image or something that works well for me is just photo slides, which is not even like that hard to do. It’s you can do it on, you know, Instagram they perform really well. I believe they’re called carousels, but then on Tik Tok it’s like a little photo slide and you could just include keywords and such with a trending song or a saying like this is about to sell out. You know, there’s a lot of cool different ways to do that. The the trending song in itself is a hook if you think about it. It also allows you to be connected to things that people are searching for. For example, if people are looking up that trending song because they like the videos that are associated with it, you can get your brand in there in a more subtle way than sort of being too overly obvious that you’re advertising a product in the first place. Very cool. And I’m curious if we can talk about AI. Yeah. And AI and editing because there’s obviously a lot of ways to use AI in that. Is it something that you use a lot in your video creation? Absolutely. Especially right now, it is scary what we’re seeing. If we look at models three years ago, if anyone remembers like the Will Smith eating like spaghetti, I don’t know if everyone’s seen those, but that was like three years ago and we could tell like, oh my goodness, that’s kind of spooky though AI. And then a year ago, we’re like, oo, that’s that’s pretty interesting. And now we’re at the day and age where at least on my feed, 30% of my feed is AI. What’s it going to look like in a year where we’re not going to be able to tell who is an influencer and who is fake? And so we do a lot of AI stuff right now. Um, it’s first understanding how to use AI. That’s kind of the first step in the process. Which models you should be using. They’re evolving all the time. I’m switching models all the time because they’re getting stronger. Each one is competing against each other. So, it’s first understanding how to use Claude, how to use Chat GBT, how to use Higsfield, how to use KD, and understanding the platform and understanding prompting. Once you’ve done that, then it’s going into diving into actual creation of it. So, a lot of the AI stuff we work on is very UGC style videos. uh showcasing a creator who’s not real, showcasing that product. And you can do that volume, right? It’s just is kind of like when it comes to the carousel, those slides. We do a lot of that under our shop. And the reason why is because photos are easy to create. You can take them in a second if you’re taking them yourself or you can take photos off the internet or you can take a photo of your product and just reproduce those so many different times. And with AI, it’s kind of the same idea. Anything on social media when it comes to what’s working is a volume game. And I mentioned earlier in one of our one of my the talks I was talking about like volume is the game and with AI it’s one of those things that you it’s truly limitless what you can create because it can just be made with a couple clicks on your computer. Yeah. And then you can like create one thing and then just keep going off of that. That’s what I always do with prompts is like I just get closer and closer and then I’m like, “Okay, now change the angle or do this and that.” You can just create so many different things all off with like one image and one prompt that starts out. Exactly. Exactly. And and for those viewers out there who are like, okay, you just talked about your process for, if you go even deeper, the process that if I’m making, like, for example, a photo mockup, I first want to get the mockup that I have from Profy. I toss that into uh into either Higsville or Chad CBT. Chad is probably the best one right now for image generation. And then I also throw in maybe a character who’s being maybe a character that I find on Pinterest or I find on Google. And maybe I’ll change the look of her face, the different hair, the color, skin tone, and I’ll just have her wearing my product, and that’ll be my mockup image. And I I send in that prompt to chat, and that’s what I use. And that same process of taking a reference and putting in a prompt with your product, is the same thing when it comes to video creation. Really cool. I do something similar where I’ll take inspiration from other mockups, whether I find it on something that’s trending on Etsy or something that I see on Pinterest, and I’ll use that photo and ask I usually use chat GPT for it for an im or a prompt for an image generator to create something similar with my product with a transparent background and that that works so well for me. And then I go a step further on KD and I make it into a video and it’s just like a whole process. So it’s really valid point of understanding what works for you and what you understand with AI and just kind of play around with it, you know. How do you use AI with your video creation? Uh we don’t. Okay. Yeah. For photo at all or No, we use everything in house. A lot of Photoshop. Oh, that’s really cool. Apart from maybe um Photoshop’s ability to generate uh photo generated in within Photoshop. Um, we really like to keep it more uh like in-house more lowfi like I said uh utilizing creators, utilizing people that work in video and photographers as well. So instead of sort of trying to lead into the AI thing, trying to keep it as real and as like understandable as possible. You are right that there does sometimes feel like how long is that possible in a world where AI is getting more and more harder to to understand and spot. Um, but at the same time, we enjoy working with individual creators and photographers and videographers to create content that we feel is sort of unique and real to ourselves. I love the power of that. It’s It’s interesting cuz I think we’re going to see a big movement of people like going back to analog. Like I have a digital camera, which is really nice. I think people are going to be getting in. We’re already seeing like a big boom in film making now. People want to use film cameras because they want that energy. Yeah. It’s tough though because it’s like you said I mean it’s um on one hand you’ve got a tool that lets you generate so much in so little time for so little money versus a more longer form uh more it it’s a more of an investment. So it depends on if you want sort of the quantity or the quality and whether or not you want to differentiate yourself from from say other brands that can do the same. So I know that there is obviously creativity in trying to get the prompts and trying to merge the images within Chachi PT but in my opinion there will always be sort of a level that it it sort of creates like a it gets rather nuanced it gets quite similar. So we try and avoid that but whether or not that’s the future I mean I agree with you there is people going back to analog as people try and get uh try and fight back against like the death of physical media. Um, but you know there’s future, there’s past and who knows what might work and what might not. I I’m curious for you mentioned you work with UGC. Is that through creators? Like do you work with creators that um maybe fit like your branding and you have them create content for you? We do. Yeah, we get a lot of people that reach out wanting to work with us and we’ve also used affiliate partners before. Um what we tend to do is find um affiliates that uh we like their content. will reach out and say, “Would you like to work with us?” Or maybe we’ll say, an easy win is to say, “Would you like a free piece of merchandise?” And don’t ask anything in return. And what you’ll find is often a creator will wear the merchandise, and you will get hits back to your site without having to really, you know, do anything other than say, “I really like what you do. Here’s some free merchandise, and hopefully it’ll come back to you.” You know, it’s really cool. That kind of brings me into a topic I want to talk about with branding and following on social media cuz you know sure if you have a big brand on social media and a following it it can seem like you can get more, you know, engagement and stuff, but I don’t feel that sometimes that number really matters for if you really find your people that are looking for your product. If you can really build that community regardless of what platform you’re on, those are the people that are going to buy from you. And I’d like to ask if maybe there’s a way that you feel you can take that traffic from social media and kind of turn it into more of a community. Whether that’s creating content that makes people want to subscribe to an email list or wants to just follow you in general. Is is that something you do? Yeah, absolutely. Branding is is really important when it comes to scaling. At the very beginning, I I don’t I always recommend people like don’t brand your products. There are some benefits that some people do really well, but my general recommendation is focus on the branding when you’re scaling. And I if there are some tips when it comes to building community, it is around your brand. Um, you have to draw a line in the sand who the product is for and who it’s not for. Because if you cater to way too many people, then there’s going to be people that like aren’t really passionate about it. And then there’s on the whole flip side of things, too. If you’re too tight, you’re going to have too little of an audience to market to. So, it’s really important about understanding there’s that balance of drawing line of sand who product is for, who it’s not for. For example, we’re seeing like Bloom Energy Drinks is a massive brand. They just crossed 500 million cans sold. And their branding is totally different from like a Celsius or a Red Bull, but they come in and they have like this healthconscious awareness product and that’s how they market very very well. Um, so that’s how you first build a community is with your branding and then you’re investing back into that community. You’re asking them for reviews. you’re taking their the content that they’re making or they’re leaving uh in the reviews and you turn those into pieces of content that you can maybe run as ads. And so there’s a lot of things that you can do when it comes to building a community. And on the flip side too, there’s not just a marketing and customer community. There’s also what’s called like a creator community as well. That’s something huge we focus on Tik Tok shop is our creator group who’s making all the content. All these UGC creators, I want to put them into like a basically a big old group chat where they are sharing their wins. They’re sharing the videos that they make. finding out what styles of content work and they’re learning from each other. And also, one thing that’s really fun is competing against each other. And I’m okay with putting affiliates against each other. They be create content for me if they’re competing because they’re helping me make money. So, there’s a whole rabbit hole we can go down on that. But, uh, community is everything when it comes to scaling. Yeah. And I think with two, people that are interested in your product will naturally kind of join your community. And I think like especially if you’re on like multiple platforms or a very like niche specific store that’s pretty easy to grow in that way. Yeah. I mean I want to go back to what you saying there about whether or not to go with branding first and then the products. You are right. You need to work out what you are wanting to achieve. Find products that are actually selling and then you can move on to branding afterwards. Otherwise, you might sort of create a brand, create products that don’t really match the brand identity that you’ve just created and you’re working backwards at that point. Um, and also what you said about um making sure that you are tight in what you were trying to achieve without being all over the place, but not being too tight that you’re stuck because you don’t want to be a website where or or a store that just has so many so many products that it becomes overwhelming for the customer to complete their sort of sales journey. And you want to make sure that the products that are on the store have at least a tiniest bit of like resemblance to each other. It’s a it’s a a vibe. Your brand has a vibe that is identifiable and also relatable in a way that people will want to talk about it. So they’re talking about not just say one product on your on your side. They’re talking about your brand as a whole. Like everything you sell is something that they might like and it might resonate with them. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think one thing that I think is important for viewers to understand too is you don’t go into branding first. to understand and you don’t even go into the product first. If you’re thinking about branding, you think about who you’re selling to first. Like who is your ICP for it means ideal customer profile? Who are you selling to? What age are they? What are their habits? What are the things that they engage with on social media? I want to go really deep first into understanding who I’m selling to. I want to put my literally my shoes into their shoes and understand what they’re looking for and then I can understand what products they’re looking for. and they got to understand what I can sell them, what kind of content I can make for them. So, it can we branding is like one of the things I love talking about because it’s so fascinating and I study some of the coolest brands in the world that I love. And it’s important to understand that it all started with the customer. It wasn’t about the product. It was always about the customer, right? It’s about like researching what they want versus maybe what you want to create sometimes, which can be difficult to comprehend, but it’s it’s true. We want to create products that they’re looking for and that they’re interested in first cuz that’s what’s going to overall convert. Yeah. And it’s it’s some one of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of new beginners just do is they like, I want to sell this cuz I I want to sell K-pop demon hunter t-shirts on TikTok cuz I love K-pop demon hunters. Number one, I want to understand maybe there’s research behind it that did work, but also I want to think like does it have the the community on the platform? Does that customer really want to buy K-pop Demon Hunter t-shirts? Maybe they do. I haven’t done a research on it, but I first want to understand that ideal customer profile before I ever sell anything. And so when you’re thinking about what you want to sell, I think those are great things to think about like what do I align with? I always tell a lot of my students like look at what you bought on Amazon or on Etsy or in Tik Tok recently. What have you bought inside of there? Because there’s other people that have bought it as well. Maybe there’s an identity behind you that you can tap into what you sell. So it’s understanding you first. What kind of niches do you like? What are some habits, some thoughts, some things that you’ve bought in the past? And then think, do consumers and customers out there want that as well? By looking through data, it’s a lot easier to sell to an established market than it is to try to create something completely from scratch, especially if you’re a beginner and you don’t have that experience. Obviously, once you, you know, have more experience in building brands, then go for it. But I always tell people too, start with something that you’re familiar with because then it also makes the process like more enjoyable too cuz you actually like kind of know what you’re talking about. Well, it’s something that if you enjoy it, you know, people are you’re not the only person on the planet that enjoys it. So, you want to be able to find an audience that resonates with yourself. Some people that you know, you’re trying to sell something because you know to sell it because you like it yourself. You mentioned with the um going through your Amazon list and looking at what you’ve been buying and is there is there like a theme there? Are you say passionate about this is gonna sound corny uh grilling and barbecuing? Maybe you could think about well what does grilling and barbecuing people want to buy and is there products out there in print of demand stores that you could then design that would I don’t know be a funny grilling and barbecue t-shirt for example. I mean, that’s like the most base level I can think of, but it’s an example of playing within what you understand. And then once you’ve once you’ve got to the point where you understand how to run the business, you can then expand out there and think, what’s my next venture? For sure. I want to talk about trends because with social media all all the time there’s new trends popping up everywhere. Sometimes it can be hard to figure out if it’s a trend that you should jump on, especially if you’re trying to keep with a pretty, you know, strict branding. not strict, but do you try to keep everything involved with trends? Where is the fine line of like should I really get into this trend or even holiday just things that are happening? Yeah, it’s it’s such a difficult question because it depends on what stage you’re at. True. Right. I I think right now for a lot of listeners like there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be getting on Halloween right now. People are wanting Halloween products right now. Huge opportunity. Same thing with Christmas. We have a big opport Thanksgiving. There’s lots of opportunities for you to get on right now. Um, it’s just understanding that your time frame for capitalizing on that has an end date, right? There’s an end date to Halloween. Now, Christmas is one of those things that giftable products can be sold all year. For example, we sell a lot of like greeting cards on our store, like like simple greeting cards. Now, some of them say are like Christmas cards, like they were Christmas, so I get one chance at that, but I also have some Christmas cards that are just gifting for your mother. So, I can sell that all year round. If it’s her birthday, I can also sell it during Mother’s Day. So there’s a evergreen effect to some products I sell and there’s also some that are very like capturing a viral moment or has a time frame at the end. Yeah. Okay. And I think like if you see a trend like let’s say you’re a newer seller and you want to create a video for social media and you see a trend that pops up. Is it something that you think you’d encourage someone to try or is it kind of like H? There’s some things it it really is very unique cuz audios for example like like trending audios are something we use all the time because those are kind of a make or break for a video and for a lot of viewers out there that might not understand. You’ll see the same videos pop up in your feed and they have the same audio in the background because they’re getting pushed out really heavily like people are swarming around it. And so trending audios are a big thing that we definitely jump on virally. That’s that’s a given. Um, when it comes to styles of content, sometimes it just doesn’t blend with your product that you might be selling. Um, typically trending are just a go-to, but sometimes trends that are popping up can’t always be something that can be copied. Yeah, I I tell people not to like jump on everything. It’s true. I mean, if you jump on everything, the chances of you creating something that could be considered controversial is quite high. And also, you can age a product really hard. So, I mean, maybe you can get a quick win, but then maybe you’re selling something that is completely outdated in the cultural zeitgeist. Yeah. So, we are slowing down on time here, but I would love to just see if maybe we can give some tips and something that you feel maybe that sellers tend to over complicate and how they can simplify. Is there any suggestions you have with that? Yeah, it’s just going back to the core idea of looking what’s worked in the past and not having to recreate it, right? You mentioned earlier like most people and you recommend people to not go out there and sell like a unique product or build their own brand unless they have that background experience. Same thing when it comes to content. Maybe I’ll play around with new ideas and try and create my own viral moment or my new trend. But typically, I’m just taking things that have worked in the past. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel and just take that what’s worked and just post it again. And it’s also like focusing on the inputs is a big thing. content. When we post a video, especially on Tik Tok, it’s going to get 200 views almost every single time. I’ve not I’ve posted so many videos that have not gotten traction and it’s just focusing on the inputs every single day. Uh, one thing I I come from a swimming background, so my swim coach at the very beginning of the year like told us like, hey, if we just think about the end of the year, the our NCAA, our final meet of the year, and we think about that every single time we come to practice, we’re never going to make there. We’re never going to have progress. It’s just showing up every single day, getting 1% better, and just focus on the inputs. The outputs will come eventually. And the for us outputs is the money coming into our bank account. But at the very beginning, it’s just like getting a little bit better every single day. The consistency. That’s very true. Even with you know, you’re if you’re creating your own content on your own platform, say that’s Instagram, for for reals or for uh Tik Tok, you can’t expect to just be winning straight away. You really do have to throw yourself at it. Be passionate about it and say to yourself, “This is what I do now. And I’m going to keep going and get better and better every day until you never know. Something that you never thought would work explodes, right?” And then when you get those moments, you’d be shocked by just how much it translates to sales and to your store. But it doesn’t happen overnight. it is something that requires you honing sort of whatever your theme or your your vibe or like your style or even if it’s a repetitive thing that you’re doing. It you’ve got to hone it. You’ve got to work on it. Take time. Just appreciate the fact that it’s not going to be an overnight thing. And it’s understanding too like once you do start winning, it’s impossible to get tired. I don’t know how it is for you. Like once you start winning, I know for a fact I used to just beat myself every single day when I went to bed like, “Oh, why isn’t it going viral? is nothing working. Once you get that first little bit of a taste, you’re never going to want to quit and you’re never going to get tired. And so that’s the beautiful part about business is most people never get to that point. They usually give up. I’ve we I’ve seen it. I know all of us have seen it time and time again where someone says they want to do this and they will just quit because it got too hard. And at the end of the day, every single one of us felt that way at the beginning, but we push past that point and we once we start winning, he just doesn’t stop because you have so much momentum and so much commitment to it. Exactly. Just one other thing I want to say is uh don’t be scared to keep things simple. You’d be surprised that you can spend a long time creating some kind of video content to find out it flops and you will be disappointed, but you can spend 2 seconds with a really silly idea and it will it will be way more successful. So try and find that balance. Don’t sort of break your back trying to be very like high-end already. Just do what you can with what you know. That’s such a great tip and to just try because you really never know what’s going to happen, especially with social media. It’s a toss. It’s there’s a little bit of luck involved in it, but it’s all about putting the inputs and I kind of mentioned earlier like taking out those lottery tickets and one day it will cash in. Absolutely. Thanks so much for talking about this. I’m sure that everybody has got some good tips. Hopefully, it makes social media not feel as intimidating hearing all this. But thanks for watching and we’re going to go check out what’s going on in the green room and we’ll be back for another discussion here on the stage.

Thank you. All right. So, I want to ask you a couple of questions. Explain Amplified in a few words. So, Amplified to me is all about the community, right? I think it’s wonderful what these guys have managed to build and it’s just so cohesive. It’s a lot of people. It’s a marketer’s dream out here. So, really, really love uh the community that’s coming out of this. I could not agree more. I feel like it’s so cool to have so many amazing, ambitious entrepreneurs hanging out with us. Everyone like it feels like everyone’s here, you know, everyone has a seat at this table and it’s just such a cool event. No gatekeeping. It’s like amazing. So, let’s hear about your biggest takeaway. I want to know what’s your biggest takeaway from this event. I think for me it’s just realizing that the opportunity lies literally anywhere, right? We’ve heard from some very very young entrepreneurs, 20 year olds who’ve made like a million on TikTok in a month. And to me, that’s just mindbaffling. It just shows there’s so much opportunity if you only um sort of try and make sure that you’re giving it your best. Um so I think that’s going to be my one message to people. Just keep trying. Don’t give up. Right. That’s that’s really good advice and I maybe you’ll have a similar answer for the next question but I want I want to know what you what’s one lesson that you want the viewers to take away from this event. Um so listening to some of the stories that people had right um I think the one lesson to take away from is is really sort of trust your gut trust in yourself um trust that the products that are coming out of your store are really really the best ones and then sort of just just try just give it your best and keep trying. sort of stepping on the toes of my last answer, but yeah, just keep trying. Yeah. No, I think that’s a really good answer because all of us in the beginning like it’s not easy. You know, everyone started at zero and some people figure it out, some people haven’t. But I do think that staying power that long-term mindset is extremely important. You know, entrepreneurship in general, right? It’s just so powerful. And you know, we don’t we don’t talk about mindset too much because people want to hear like the the data back like give me the stepby-step back of the napkin strategy. But like everything starts with belief. Everything starts with belief. And a lot of these entrepreneurs, the high volume sellers, when you talk to them, you can see that like they’re believing in themselves. Now, it might not have started that way, but that’s one one thing that’s nice about once you start getting the results, it almost reinforces the belief even more. So, thank you so much for your time. I loved your answers. Sarah, what is going on? Our 1% Etsy seller, Sarah, I want to know, explain Amplified in a few words. I mean, it’s been so much fun and um genuine or honest. I just love how honest every seller has been because um I know that it can be easy as a newer seller to just feel like there’s a missing key and they’re not sharing the good stuff with us. But I feel like everyone’s really been honest about this is what’s worked for me, what hasn’t. Um and just inspiring. Like I always leave these kinds of events motivated myself. Yeah, you’re right. And the word I think of is authentic. Like people have been so authentic here and you know we’re not just talking about the good like you know like it’s it’s great to talk about wins but everyone I feel for every win we’ve had like 10 losses and I that isn’t talked about nearly enough. So to get like the human element the kind of unfiltered where people are getting a little more vulnerable and raw and saying like yeah I I failed at this or I wasn’t good at this or I’m not still good at this. I think that’s really important. So I want to know what’s one of your biggest takeaways from today? Yeah, I will kind of like go off of what we just mentioned when it comes to being honest with our failures. Like what I take away from today is that you can never stop learning. Um, and at first it can feel discouraging, especially when you’re getting all this content and information. But knowing that all of us here are still learning something from each other um every, you know, session, it’s encouraging. It’s fun to learn. you you grow from it personally and I take away that there’s just like there’s there’s so many different ways to be successful too which is really encouraging. Yeah, I really like that. Like I think it’s so important especially as entrepreneurs to have a growth mindset. Like a lot of us are doing this at home. We’re doing this with full-time jobs. We’re doing this with families. And there’s a quote I really love that says it’s what you do in the dark that puts you in the light. And you know being honest about that and being like this wasn’t always easy. It’s still not easy, right? We’re still having lots of struggles as entrepreneurs. So, all right, final question. I want to know what’s one lesson that you want viewers to take away from today. Yes. Okay. So, I would love viewers to take away. Um, everything that you learned, of course. So take your notes, go back to these videos, but I I would like everyone to identify the one thing that they want to take away to start with first that will make like the highest impact for their business. Everyone’s on different platforms and different stages of their growth. And it can be super exciting to like hear all of this and like I want to do it all because I’ve been that way too. And just taking one thing and committing to I think this will be the highest impact for me and then going from there. Yeah, I actually really like that piece of advice because it’s very easy to get overwhelmed even from this event. Like you learned a lot today. We talked about so many different topics and some of you might feel like you’ve been drinking from a fire hose. I I I totally relate. Like there is a lot discussed and know that you don’t have to go apply everything today. Like it’s inhuman to apply everything today. But I like what you said like take one thing and and grow on that. So take one big learning and say, “Hey, what can I do today or tomorrow to improve my business?” What’s one learning? So Sarah, thank you so much for all your insights. The panels is great. Thank you. All right, Crystal, come on over. Our media mogul, CEO of Girl Plus God, you have just such an incredible past history in media. It’s wild. like some of the biggest names in media and then you create this incredible merch store. Um, I just want to know I got a couple questions for you, but let’s start. Let’s start like simple. All right. How would you explain Amplified in a couple words? I really don’t have words. Number one, I’m exhausted. Okay. I have poured it out today. All right. I want for people to take what I have and to go execute it. And so, I think this was just the platform to do that. I love working with you guys. You’re incredible. I have met some amazing people. This was like again, no words. I don’t have a word. Thank you. The feeling is mutual and I I kind of know what you mean and and tired. Yeah, it’s been it’s been a long day. My eyes are a little bit bloodshot. I’m not going to lie. But yeah, you did you put it out all on the table. And I think that was like the the point, right? Bring bring people who have like, you know, high volume sellers, people have a lot of experience to come here and just put it all out there. No gatekeeping, unfiltered, and that’s the way it should be. So that that that’s an awesome answer. I love that. I I totally relate. Okay, next question. What’s one lesson or what’s one takeaway that you have from today like that that you learned? It’s time to try some new things, right? I have mastered Shopify in a way, but I have learned from each and every one of you and I can’t wait to get back home and like execute. It may not all work out, but I’m going to certainly try because I have heard some great stories today. So, uh, catch me on Tik Tok shop, catch me on, uh, Pinterest, catch me, uh, with whatever Adrian is doing. Like, just catch me cuz I’m taking it on. I I love this. That is a growth mindset of an entrepreneur. It makes me so happy. And like, you know, the fact that you’re here as a speaker saying, I’m taking things and I’m going to put them into action. But like that is it, the growth mindset, like action takers. I do feel like the quicker you’re able to take action, the more likely you are to succeed. So, uh, yeah, very good stuff. One more question for you. I want to I want to know what is one lesson that you would like viewers to take away. I want you to know that you are going to mess up. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to fail at some things. And I would want you to do it fast. Get it out the way. You don’t have to be perfect. Just be yourself. Amen. Amen. No, I I completely agree. I think that failure is part of the process. And I I I’m a big believer that like failure is is not necessarily a bad thing. You know, I’ve heard before like fail forward, right? Many times our failures lead to some of our biggest successes. And it’s funny, the path of entrepreneurship is not linear. I think a lot of people look at high volume sellers and they just think it was just upward spike. It’s not like that for anybody. It’s more It’s more like this story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There’s there’s pain. There’s pain all along the way. Let’s keep it real, right? And so like it’s more like it’s more like this. That is the common path of a Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wait a minute. That is the common path of entrepreneurship. So if you feel like that, if you’re experiencing that sort of thing, like do not feel discouraged and do not feel alone. Everyone in this room, I’m sure, can relate because still to this day, we continue to put out fires and we know that that’s never going to end. So Crystal, you brought so much great energy to this event. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for your insights. And uh we’re going to hand it back down to the panel. Thank you.

Welcome back to our final discussion panel where we’re going to be talking all things designed. And I have two of the best people with me to talk about that. Two pro designers here. I have Michael and Jay. We’re going to be sharing some tips on how to make better designs, maybe some design process that you can take to your print on demand businesses. Thanks so much for being here for this last panel, which is so exciting and one that I’ve been anticipating. It’s been so much fun here. It really has. I would love to start off with something that I think so many people get caught up on, which is the actual design process. I want to hear maybe what’s the first thing that you do? Is it researching? How do you actually get into that? So, is there a process that you do, Jay? Yeah, I think it kind of changes and evolves depending on, you know, what’s how stimulated I am. So sometimes I’m a guy that I have like incessant amount of voice to text to myself or ideas. Uh cuz my brain, you know, sight order of ADHD in there. I’ll forget if I don’t put it down somewhere. Uh and sometimes that’s the best and most creative ones. Like we were talking about maybe you’re having a drink somewhere like I’ve written down design ideas literally on a napkin at a bar and they’ve turned out to be awesome, right? So that’s the kind of thing. Uh, but if I am starting fresh and I know I need to get out another design for somebody and I’m looking for a new angle, like going in cold, I’ll probably hit up Pinterest first, uh, and then I’ll use like Google Trends to see if there’s any kind of search terms within that niche. But I’ll just start with a niche word, like one or two words in Pinterest to get a visual cue. And then I just like copy paste all around my artboard. it’s a giant mess kind of like my brain with like a little singular focal point in the middle uh of all kinds of colors and influence and and different things like that. Uh and then I’ll just try to, you know, see if there’s something worth uh investigating in terms of what’s showing maybe on a Google trends or what’s surfacing. So I’ll start there. I’ll come up with some phrases using like one of the tools that, you know, Jun and I have built as our phrase uh builder there. Cool. Um and try to place some words together and see how they look. So, it’s not even like if you can make five or six phrases with a few different words and then seeing how they fit together. I’m very uh visually type oriented. So, I like type first and sometimes the entire design can be just type and you can make a beautiful looking design with just words on a shirt and not just two words stacked on top of each other. So, yeah, there’s a lot to it. Um, but it’s fun and I think that’s the biggest thing that I don’t think people allow themselves the ability to have fun with it anymore. They want to do more faster, but more doesn’t equal better. For sure. I I actually resonate with putting a bunch of photos just like on an art board. That’s something I do. I take like all these different things for inspiration and then I just start kind of like pulling pieces whether it’s like the colors or the different elements or, you know, all things like that. Michael, how is your research process with design? Yeah. So, typically I will, you know, ideas will come at me or I’ll overhear something or mishar something and think, “Oh, that could be a funny pun or whatever.” And I’ll just make a note of these and, you know, I’ll come back to them later. And then, uh, it’s usually that kind of process of I’m taking those initial sparks of ideas and then I’m analyzing them and kind of filtering down and seeing, okay, has has that been done before? Does this already exist? Is there some kind of market for this? uh not necessarily that I’m looking to see that there’s a market, but oftentimes I’m actually going I want to do stuff that’s not been done before because that gives me an advantage, a leg up, you know, I’m ahead of the competition there. So, I’m looking for ideas that haven’t been done before and where I can have that advantage. So, I’ll often take those ideas and then if I see, yeah, that’s not been done, we’ve got a a clear runway, if you like, then I’ll start brainstorming how we’re going to then take that and turn it into a a design concept. And obviously that depends on the idea. It could just be a phrase where it could go in almost any direction. It could any font, you know, any color combination, but often times you kind of have a feel, especially when you’re as experienced as we are now. You have a feel for the direction that a design should go in or the the the concept should go in. And I really like thinking in terms of I tell people to think concept first, like idea first. That’s the primary most important thing. Your job should be to create the design that just elevates and carries that idea to a to a buyer. However that you know, however that is done. So if it requires fancy graphics, you go for the fancy graphics. If it requires text only, you go text only. But the most important thing is that the idea is the paramount thing. So that’s often how I work. And then obviously the design process could be AI, could be Photoshop, really depends on uh the idea and then we take it from there. Really cool. You said something that’s interesting to me. You look for something to do that hasn’t been done yet. And I think a lot of people go from the process of like this is trending. I need to do this. So that’s that’s kind of cool to of like a mindset shift to think about is like what can I see what’s working, but then what other concept can I add to this that hasn’t been done yet? Yeah. Yeah. I think exactly like that there’s so many ways to make prints on demand work. There’s different strategies. You know, not everyone needs to do it the same way, but what works for me is having a new idea that hasn’t been done where there’s a blue ocean where I can put that out there and I know that anyone who looks for that design is going to find my design and my design only. I’m going to have an advantage over copycats who might come along later. I’m going to be snowballing and making sales before they can. And so that’s a strategy that’s really worked for me is original ideas, you know, in blue oceans where where there’s not competition. Absolutely. is now let’s talk about the cuz that’s more like our research and our idea process right for actual creation of designs. Do you use a lot of different platforms because there’s so many options out there now whether you want to draw something on like maybe something like Procreate or physically draw something and then bring it into you know an app to create it with art or things like Canva or KD. There’s so many options to create designs. Jay, how do you go about that? You said you use a lot with text first. Is there a specific place that you do that? Yeah, honestly, um, like I said before, like I keep plugging KD, but they’ve done it right in my opinion. They’ve taken the best parts of traditional design tools, put them into KD, so you don’t need 800 different ways to achieve an outcome. You need one or two of the fastest, easiest ones, and they’ve done a good job with that. So, I’ll manipulate text and it keeps it editable. You know, gone are the days of having to outline something and then put a warp effect on it. Um, and you can just do it over and over and you can do all the same things. Outline a text. Uh, use their even their styles now. Uh, sometimes are coming out in vector too, which is nice because then you can scale them to any size. You don’t have to worry about upscaling or anything like that. Uh, so yeah, I mean tech embrace texton designs please. I implore everybody because that is the fastest way to get your idea out there if it’s not an ironic image only type thing. Um, but then, you know, play around with the text and have fun with it and just see how letters fit together. Yeah, for sure. And even with I love KD, too. I I really think they’re such a great platform for all design levels. Like if you’re a beginner, you can figure it out or if you’re a pro, they have a lot of features that I feel a lot of design tools don’t have or like relatively expensive design tools that you have to use. So, I definitely love that too of being able to like warp text manually. Michael, what is your process with that? Do you draw for for first? She’s a long day. I can’t even say words anymore. Depends a lot on the on the concept. And obviously text only. That could be, you know, that we say text only. That could mean so many different things. That could mean, you know, I open Photoshop and I type out two lines of text. It could mean, hey, I want this to be like a heavy metal black letter design. So, am I going to draw that from hand? A couple of years ago, maybe I would have had to do that. Now I can ask AI to give me seven black letter options for this text. Usually it’s going to be an ironic phrase that doesn’t shouldn’t really be in that text. And that’s going to be the process there. So yeah, um I have my own app. It’s called Ideally.app and it allows me to do a lot of those AI um uh brainstorming stuff really quickly and you know pick a few styles and just get back something really quick. So that’s usually my process now is unless I’ve got a really clear concept to where I’m like I know exactly where we need to go with this one. Then I’ll open up my app. I’ll, you know, put my text in there. I’ll pick a few styles and that will be the beginning of the brainstorming process. And usually this is what AI’s I found it to be really useful for is that process of filtering out what doesn’t work and what does and you can really see hold on a minute I hadn’t thought about that idea in that design and that puts a spin on it and now it’s ironic or whatever and and now that elevates the whole concept that’s an that’s a new concept essentially that I I didn’t come here with and AI’s allowed me to find that. So yeah, those kind of processes are are so much different now than they were a couple of years ago where everything was Procreate or you know, I used to actually physically draw on paper with a pen, scan things in. Those days are long gone. We can do a lot of things faster now. But yeah, that’s my process. I think that’s really cool though and a great point to because you’re an artist, you know, you know how to illustrate, but you’re still open to using different AI platforms because I think that sometimes people that, you know, do have this art background, they’re like hesitant maybe to use AI or they’re not sure exactly how to use it or how to prompt it correctly. So, it’s really cool that you kind of brought it into your own art. And I I like to say that too of using AI as a tool, not like replacing yourself. Like I like to bring things in and then ask an AI to make it better, to change the graphic style, to add color or make multiple variations of that design, change the text. For me, I think that that’s really valuable. Mhm. Yeah. There’s so many situations like that where, you know, you’ve got an idea. Let’s say it’s a going to be a skeleton set at a computer. That’s the idea to get that physically visible. You know, that takes a, you know, you’re going to sketch things out. This used to take hours of, you know, filtering. Give it to AI. get five options. Here he’s in this angle. Here he’s in that angle. You’ve got the lighting all right and stuff and you’re like, “Okay, that is really a genuine time saver.” And I don’t care how much water this thing is using or, you know, how many data centers it takes. This is cool. It is cool. That I I totally agree. And then it we’re coming to a point with on the illustration end like you said, instead of, you know, spending the hours to make sure it’s just right. If you kind of tell that skele like the AI that I want the skeleton at a 45 degree angle looking over the right shoulder kind of thing. I mean it’s going to give me let’s say we get five generations. Two of those are like probably pretty bang on to what I had in mind now, right? We’ve come so far in like two years. Uh it it’s mind-blowing. But yeah, it was the same hard hardcover black sketchbook uh drawing for sure. So uh it’s nice to leverage something to just speed up the process and allow me to focus on the other elements. you know, an ironic type font. Same idea. Yeah, we’re also juggling so many things like as like print on demand sellers, you know, it’s constantly looking for trends and then SEO and posting and creating mockups. It’s a lot. It’s a lot. So, I feel like anywhere that you can bring in that extra help that can create faster is so valuable and it’s like time is money. Like the more you can free up, the more you can create, more money you can make. Even if you don’t use that image generation, it allows you to get that image idea in your head onto something concrete and tangible that you can see with your own eyes and then you can kind of, you know, you’ll at least have that there for reference around that artboard again. Right. And you can often immediately see this doesn’t work, that doesn’t work like that, you know, this idea has not got legs or there’s a there’s a massive hole in there without having to spend three hours. Exactly. Because I’m looking at something visually rather than imagining in my head, you know, this great idea. Oh, that’s a funny idea. Well, actually, you know, put it on paper now, it’s not a great idea. So, right. What would you say to somebody that’s maybe new and doesn’t have a lot of experience and that is intimidated by designing? Maybe just encouragement, like words of something that can help them feel more inspired. Cuz as you kind of just mentioned, we’ve all had an idea and we make something and we’re like, “This is really cool.” and then we post it online for sale and it gets no traction and you’re like, “Oh, that actually was not good.” Well, I think this this AI revolution is um it’s great for the people who actually can’t design in that sense because there is now, you know, this is kind of weird. I know I’m playing both sides. I am a designer. I recognize the value in quality design. I recognize the stuff AI can’t do. Having said that, there are ideas which you now don’t need to hire a designer to do. you can get AI to do it. And if you’re the ideas person and you have a strong enough idea, then you can, you know, AI can execute it and you don’t have to, you know, know all the ins and outs of Photoshop and this and that and the other. So, it’s a it’s a great time for the ideas guys. You know, we’re seeing that with AI video and stuff. You know, people are creating little animations and stuff which would obviously have been impossible for them. If you have a genuinely good idea, which is going back to what I said about the idea is first. The idea is the most important thing. everything you do serves that. You know, you can use AI to spit out these ideas, turn them into something good. And if you’re communicating that idea well through the AI, then you know that’s valuable. That is truly valuable. You don’t have to handdraw everything. You don’t have to learn Photoshop. You know, you can genuinely produce some good ideas that way. Yeah, it’s definitely lowered the barrier to entry, I think. But in the same time, if anyone’s farming out the entire process or the entirety of the design to AI, like that’s what’s creating the AI slop that everybody talks about, right? So, I think there’s a fine line between like leveraging it as a tool and then relying on it to do the beall endall because this machine that is smarter than you created it, therefore it must be amazing. Not always the case. And in fact, more often than not, I’d say is not the case. Yeah. I mean, there was there was slop, you know, before AI, right? We just didn’t call it that. But there was a there was a lot of human slop created before AI came along of people just doing generic designs, you know, boring stuff, just the same same old same old. And we know that and we, you know, we’re we’re just banging the drum for, hey, do something different. Yes. Use AI if it helps, but you don’t have to. You know, I know have a lot of artists and designers who follow me who are using um not using AI. You know, they’re handdrawing everything. They’re doing stuff their own way. So, it’s not either or. It’s not, you know, you have to choose. It’s what works for you. Yeah. I always like to incorporate both. Um, especially on Etsy, they have some, you know, rules and stuff that they want to keep you in because they are originally a handmade platform, but now they’re allowing, you know, different types of tools. And that was something and something I talked to a lot of people that I help is like bring in your creativity first. You know, whether that’s starting with text in an element and then just again, as I mentioned earlier, asking the AI to improve it for you. I think that there’s a lot of value in that. And even if you don’t have design experience, if you’ve never designed anything before, you can look at something for reference that’s maybe working in your niche or selling and then change the phrase around. Something I love to do with research on Etsy in specific is I’ll look for a trending phrase, whether that’s on a t-shirt or a mug or whatever, and then I’ll look for design elements that are trending. and I’ll kind of take from both of those to combine my own new design that’s new and valuable to the market versus just like ripping off someone else’s design, you know? So, do which is a problem on Etsy. I’m sure we’ve all had stolen designs on multiple platforms, but that’s really cool. And then being able to do something like that plus using an AI, I think, is a great thing for somebody that’s a beginner. Yeah. And I mean, this is kind of in the same realm where there’s there’s a book called Steal Like an Artist from Austin Cleon. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Um, it’s the idea that even though you’re saying you’re creating absolutely something completely unique, it’s the idea that no matter what we create, we’ve been we have a lifetime of influence. We’ve been inundated with ads, advertisement, marketing. Um, so that it’s it’s the idea that maybe there is almost nothing 100% completely unique. Everything has had an influence on us at some point in our lives to some capacity. So don’t feel like it has to be so out there that it’s you know so far removed from the idea or the niche right like so uh to your point like you can mix and match a little bits of pieces but as long as you understand why the design sold right so like if you’re going I try to think of an example if you’re if you’re doing a a fall y’all shirt for example just a popular design out there but then you tried to do it in like Christmas like red and green instead of the fall colors well the core of that design is because of the aesthetic of the color palette. So, like you have to be conscious of what you’re trying to switch and pick and mix accordingly. I think having the experience in that, is there a tip maybe that you can give? I mean, obviously it’s broad. Everyone’s looking for different types of designs and stuff, but is there a way to know whether it’s a design you create or a design that you see that you want to make something off of? Is there a way to kind of like know maybe what’s going to work about the design or something that people can keep an eye out for? Um, an easy one, and this is again going back to what I was saying uh earlier panel, like going into the trenches. So, really knowing your niche inside out so that you get in there and you can just say in groups, let’s say, I don’t know, it’s a a Great Dane group, for example, like my wife and I have a Great Dane. Uh, she makes some really funny Great Great Daneesque or centric shirts. Um, and it’s just knowing the nuances in those Facebook communities. So, you can just post in there and say like, “Hey, what do you guys think about this design or this design?” Not post a listing. you’re going to get kicked out of the of the group, but you can ask them and they gauge the interest in that niche community. And I mean, they’ll give you feedback what they think, what they don’t like. Uh, and then, you know, by the time you kind of iterate on the suggestions they give you and post again, okay guys, I took your suggestions. What do you think? By the third time you do that, they’re going to feel like they’ve had a hand in your design and they’re probably going to start asking you for the link to that design when it’s ready. So that’s the kind of thing that you can, you know, ask the community. Ask the people who will be the, you know, the end users at that point. That’s so smart. That’s really cool. It’s almost like you’re AB testing it before you even create the full design. Also free. Wow. That’s a really good tip. And niche specific, too. Absolutely. Wow. Okay. Is there any tips that you have with the design eye that things that maybe you look out for with, you know, trends or just design in general? Yeah. Yeah. So, like I said before, my process is idea first and then I will kind of work back from that. Now, of course, I’m 10 years into this. So, I have some kind of experience of what works and what doesn’t, you know, and and obviously if you’re starting out, maybe you don’t have that. So, it is going to take time for you to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Um, but yeah, in my experience, it is that the idea that connects with someone is usually something that makes you snort, that makes you laugh. It’s usually going to be something that kind of really rubs, you know, that humor thing of something kind of controversial or spicy or something like that is the thing that creates that, you know, that joke in the first place. So, it’s hard to it’s very hard to say, you know, ahead of time what that is going to be. And often it is a guttural kind of instinctive reaction. So I actually I remember one time we had a lot of designs. We were trying to filter them down for a brand deal that we were doing and I just had me, my sister and my dad and we just pulled up all the designs and went through them one by one and uh you know the ones that we all laughed at or snorted at or you know I remember one one in particular that my dad just like spat his coffee out and I was like okay that one’s going in. You know it’s it’s that kind of reaction that you’re looking for. And I know that’s that’s not particularly helpful when you’re on the other side of this, but you need those ideas in the first place. That’s why you need, you know, a great big pipeline of ideas. That’s why I built my tool. Little plug there. That’s what it’s for. You know, give yourself that pipeline of ideas cuz not everything’s going to work. And you need to be on the lookout for things that really, you know, pop. That’s really cool. I I think you you made so many good points there about just kind of knowing that. I I think the idea first is so important first trying to like just come up with something and then having a design that has way too much going on and as you your point was Jay like sometimes like the simpler stuff can sell too just having that like text on a a page that someone finds funny. Exactly. I have a shirt that I wear on the island and so it’s like kind of like niche specific. It’s just says sorry for what I said when I was docking the boat. It’s just straight sans s of text. It’s not laid out in any particular way. It’s on four or five lines. It get it gets laughs all day. I’m a graphic designer. I didn’t create it. I bought it. Found it funny. So like you don’t have to get convoluted with your designs. You don’t have to make a Picasso or a Mona Lisa. You just have to make something that somebody says, “Holy crap. Where’d you get that shirt?” You know what I mean? Exactly. And and that’s an idea that you can say cuz that’s a framework you can use for other niches. Sorry what I sorry for what I said when I was X. You know, sorry for what I said when I I don’t know, burnt the toast or burnt the coffee backing up the RV. You know, if you’ve got phrases like that, that’s one of my methods is build yourself a bank of these phrases that you can then just scroll through and go with a niche in mind. Oh, what would, you know, what would that niche do with this phrase and what would that niche do with this phrase? And you’ll see things popping out and uh one of my all-time bests sellers is exactly from that method. It’s like a a phrase that everyone knows just with a bit of a twist on the end uh for a particular niche and it, you know, sells daily. It’s incredible. So, if you can do something like that, it goes back to what we were saying, not everything’s 100% original. I’m not talking about, you know, some new combination of words that’s never been done before. It’s often going to be a joke that, you know, it has that setup and then it has the punch line. That’s what a joke is. You know, you need to have the setup in the first place. Otherwise, there’s there’s no punch line there. So, yeah, you’re not looking for something that’s out there and completely crazy and no one’s ever going to get. It’s got to be something, you know, it’s usually going to be something that follows a kind of pattern. So, if you can learn those patterns, it’s really going to help. Yeah. Do you tend to kind of like AB test designs? And what I mean by that is like maybe you have a phrase that you really like, but you want to add elements to it, whether it’s for a niche or a trend. Do you do multiple variations of one design and test them on products? Is that something you do in your store? Very rarely, personally. me. I mean, it was something I played around with a little bit in the early days, but once you begin to see, you know, the elements that make a design work, you begin to know exactly what it needs. You know, there’s a graphic, there’s some text. Um, as long as you’re not doing something incredibly wrong in your design layout or something, then people are either going to get that or they’re not, and the joke’s going to either land or it’s not. And there’s no, you know, no amount of switching the text around or changing the font is going to change that. So, I don’t AB test to that extent. Maybe you might want to do something on two different colors and things like that. Um, but usually I’m pretty set on this is how it should look and then put it out there into the world, see what happens, move on to the next one, keep things going. I’m, you know, going to sound like an echo chamber here, but absolutely the same thing. Um, I’m, you know, you’re at a point now or I’m at a point where I know the niche, I know the market I’m designing for, and I make that like that’s absolutely paramount. That’s the number one goal is to understand what the market wants. Uh, and then that’s going to lead you down aesthetic avenues. So, like you don’t have to veer too far from that to have an idea and oh, that’s going to work. Um, but that said, it will get you, you know, some time to get yourself into that situation where you can just see an array of designs or aesthetics or have ideas and then and just know something will work. So, don’t feel like just because Michael and I can not have to AB test something that, you know, that’s the way it has to be. Like, we all started from zero. We started from nothing. And we I I wouldn’t say I AB tested. I probably ABCDE E tested. You know what I mean? Oh, different colors, all kinds of different layouts and like all of a sudden what might stick might totally surprise you. But when you have that and it sells more than one time and all of a sudden it’s selling maybe three or four times a week going back to, you know, starting then it’s like that aha moment. You got this epiphany like, oh man, now I’m going to try this idea in that same kind of aesthetic and see what happens. You’re crossing your fingers. If it works again, now you know you’re on to something and it’s not luck anymore. That’s such a great point. I my first best-selling design on Etsy, I still remember like I was trying so hard. My the first niche I was in was a mental health niche and I was creating designs for mental health and I kept doing what I saw everyone else was doing and trying to play around with phrases. And then finally I figured out what worked and all it was was taking the same phrase that I was using on all these intricate design shirts where I was like trying so many things. All I did was change the color of each individual letter was three colors. That sold. It sold like crazy. And then I just took that same design element because I’m like, “Okay, this is what’s working.” And I applied it to multiple different phrases and that ended up being what grew my Etsy shop and made me realize like the power of selling print on demand products. So I feel like sometimes it’s like simplifying it, but to find what works takes time. like your first design. I know for me, my first million designs were so bad. When I look at them, like when they fall off on my computer, I’m like, we need to get rid of that. I mean, this is evidence that I don’t need on online or anywhere. And I’m sure you could probably say the same when you started designing. Absolutely. But I think there’s a beauty in that, right? Because it’s not only like it’s not about celebrating how crappy you were once. It’s about seeing how far you’ve come. uh and you know, you went from like a couple of views and maybe a a sale a month to maybe now you’re selling, you know, a few hundred a month. And then you compare those designs from 5 years ago or whatever. like even as a a lifelong designer like 20 yearsish. Um I’ll stress the ish but like looking at how that’s evolved in terms of like going just from you know writing graffiti or drawing in a sketchbook to airbrushing to putting it on a shirt to using graphic design tools to uh now strictly designing for t-shirts for DTG getting hyper spe uh specific with everything and intentional. It’s it’s night and day compared to what was what I was designing in the beginning to now knowing what I know. Us it takes forever sometimes, but that’s the beauty in it is learning. And you know, as soon as we think we have a good grip on it, there’s like a new aesthetic that pops up or there’s something else. It’s like a new idea to try. Um, algorithms change all the time. So, the one thing I would stress is like don’t wait until don’t just consume. And I think that’s the biggest um misconception is that people feel like they need to consume, consume, consume, watch videos from maybe you and I both on how to design, how to get this right. Um just get the design out there because sometimes some of the simplest stuff will sell and you have to implement what you learn or you’re going to forget it by the time you watch that six YouTube video, right? Yeah. And when you’re like spending all that time trying to be perfect and create the perfect design, like you’re kind of wasting time in that sense. It’s almost better to just like create something that’s like learn something, implement, then you only then can you sell it, right? Yeah. And even if it’s like not that great, but you’ve done a little research and you know that things are selling in that way, just try it. Like especially with print on demand, like we’re not wasting any money by like creating products, you know, that’s part of the beauty of it is you really do have that space to try different designs and to mess things up and to move on to the next one. But yeah, as long as you’re thinking in terms of I think that was a big thing for me early on. I was like, “Oh, I’ve created five designs when I started out. I’m going to upload them to Redbubble. We’ll see what happens.” And then I was like, “Oh, a few of these have sold.” And I thought, “Whoa, maybe maybe I could make 50 designs.” And, you know, everything was like in terms of like blocks of like I’m going to make this many and this many. And what I should have been thinking was factory, you know, production line. This business, a business is a factory. Inputs, outputs. Things come in and things go out. And if the factory stops, the business stops. So, you need to be coming up with new ideas all the time. Keep them going. That’s the way to think about it. And then your process and your business improves by improving what’s going on inside the factory. And yeah, it’s not thinking like once I reach this many designs, then I’ll be done. It’s hey, you’re a business, you’re a factory, keep producing and and you get better. And that’s that’s what it is. Just remember to do it sustainably, right? Don’t do it in a pace that you’re going to burn out. Because a lot of people try to hit, you know, uh I want to get 100 designs a month for 12 months. And you got 1,200 designs. If they’re not any good and you don’t know what you’re doing or the fundamentals, they’re not going to sell. It’s just 1,200 that are now 1,199 that are burying that one that you might want. Yeah. You wouldn’t start a factory until you’d sold some products in the first place. You know, you wouldn’t be able to convince someone to give you the money to start it in the first place. So, yeah, I I you know, you prove it first and then you you grow it. It’s also like quality over quantity. I say that a lot on YouTube. People are sick of hearing me say it, but it’s it’s true. It’s like if you it’s better to take your time, do your research, make a design that if you’re not sure about it, that’s fine. But rather than just like putting a bunch of like slop on a shirt and like posting on your store, it doesn’t really benefit you. It’s not very long term. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think one way too that uh we see a lot of new sellers do this is like if they have maybe more of a general store, for example, and maybe you’ve got like, you know, a couple of different niches in there. you’ve got this one uh cat mug that is selling like 20 times a week or something to that effect, right? So, it feels like you’ve got this like this is the number one seller in your shop, but you’ve got five other um maybe nurse shirts that are selling five times each. They don’t surface the way that one kind of spikes, but that’s where you should be focusing because you’re making more sales. You’re making 25 sales versus that one unicorn product. And I think a lot of people would just focus on that and try to iterate, make new designs based on that one unicorn product when really you’ve got the makings of a, you know, a foundation of a business here. You got five unique designs that are selling multiple times a week. How can you improve on them? That’s where I would focus. So like, yeah, I I mean, and that comes with learning. And the fastest way to do that is download on Etsy anyway. You can download your CSV of your order items, put them into an AI, a cloud or a chat GPD and ask it for an unbiased opinion of where you should lean in that kind of market. and then, you know, ask it why it thinks those designs have sold versus that one. That’s really cool. Well, we’re just about out of time, but this has been such a cool discussion. Like, I feel I feel inspired. I’m not a designer, but I I try, you know, and I’m sure everybody else can. Definitely drop in the chat if this was helpful to you or any just tips that you learned from this. I think it’s it’s so cool. And so, thank you so much for being here and talking about this. Amplified has been so good and this is our last discussion panel. I know. We have to go check in with everybody and find everybody and hopefully. But thanks for watching and we’re going to have a little bit more exciting stuff. So yeah, we’ll see where everybody is.

Wow, what an incredible event this has been. I hope you guys have enjoyed this as much as I have. Uh I have learned so much today myself and I think that goes for all the all the creators here, all the sellers here. Whether it’s talking about AI, I feel like we covered so many hot topics. We talked about ads, we talked about platforms, we talked about AI, and you learned from a lot of high volume sellers. These are people that are actively seeing results. So, you’ve got John, the Tik Tok wiz did millions within the last two years. You’ve got Levi making $700,000 from his dorm room. He’s made a lot more than that since then. You’ve got Sarah, the 1% Etsy seller. Crystal Girl Plus God. You’ve got uh Dom from Doge Core, an iconic Shopify brand. So much gold in this episode, in this in this in this session, in this event. And I hope that you guys feel like it was as valuepacked as I do. And I’m curious, what was your favorite session? I actually really want to know what was your favorite session because we had a lot of different sessions with a lot of different topics. So I’d be curious to know like let me know in the chat. uh what your favorite session was today. And uh I do want to mention too, we’re gonna be doing another giveaway. So, we’re going to be doing a $20 store credit giveaway for 10 of you guys. All you have to do is uh uh interact in the chat. That’s it. And so, shortly, I’m going to have those names populate of individuals and I will read those out to you. A couple things I did want to say too is if you were late, uh, if you missed some, I mean, I know it’s been a very long event, so I don’t expect that you were all here the entire time. You might had to pop in, pop out, totally fine. But I want you to know that if you did miss any, uh, not to worry, the replay is going to be available to you very, very shortly. So, uh, what I want to say now is kind of in closing here, I want to say like I I heard a Tony Robbins quote that really inspired me a couple years ago and I want to share that with you guys because I think it’s really relevant for this particular event. There’s been so much knowledge like knowledge, proven strategies, unfiltered filtered advice from high volume sellers that you can take and you can apply to your business today. But if no action is taken, do not expect a result. The Tony Robbins quote that I want to reference that I’ve always found really inspiring is knowledge is not power. Knowledge applied is power. And so I want to challenge everyone here. Don’t just, you know, like this. This was great. You probably learned so much. I hope you’re all being sponges and just sucking it all up. And I hope you guys are really excited to go and put this into action. But the action needs to be taken. Nothing happens without that action. So I want to know what action are you going to take in the next 24 hours. Right? It’s very important to I feel like be quick with delivery because I don’t know about you but I find that many times if I let something drag on it eventually just slips away and gets away from me. And in a very distracted world where there’s so many bright shiny objects I wouldn’t be surprised if by this time next week you forgot everything you learned today. Luckily, there’s going to be a replay available, so you can always reference back to it, and I recommend you do because there were so many different strategies for different individuals here, right? Like, if you want to sell on Tik Tok shop, there’s there’s something for you here. If you want to sell on Shopify and use meta ads, there’s something for you here. If you want to sell on Etsy, there’s something for you here. If you want to find ways to leverage AI or that high volume sellers are leveraging AI right now, there’s something for you here. But I want to know in the chat, what’s something that you’re going to promise to yourself? Um, I can’t hold you accountable because I won’t see you tomorrow, the next day, but something that you’re going to promise to yourself that you’re going to apply in the next 24 hours. That’s what I’m asking. I think in 24 hours, uh, you know, that’s a good amount of time to go and implement at least one of the learnings from today. So, I’m just seeing here if I have the names of the um, winners. I want to announce these these winners here. Uh let me let me just It’s not coming up yet. So, let me pop back in and see. They’re uh they’re inputting the names in real time after we announce the giveaway. So, um I just need to wait for them to populate. They have not populated yet. I’m not seeing the names populating, but um not to worry. We can I’m sure we can have the moderators announce the winners in the chat if you are sticking around. Um so yeah, there’s there’s there’s no names here. So um I guess we’ll just kind of move on. Uh so let’s actually you know what? I’ve been informed that apparently there are some names here. So let’s let’s find those names. I don’t want to I would love to be the one to announce you guys. So let’s see here. Uh, okay. I think I found some winners. Jovita Benson. I don’t know if that’s a name that was announced already. Um, that’s one that I’m seeing. I’m just going to see if there’s any others. Make sure I’m not missing anything here. Okay, I’m going to I’m going to announce these names here. So, Annie Fontinez, Benjamin her, Linda K, uh, Shelby Renee, Cheryl Derkott, Jovidita Benson, Ismmail Omar, Alex Everett, Irish Roberts, and Mini Bloom. I love that. Great name. Uh, so you guys have won prizes. So, congratulations on uh winning store credits. Uh hopefully you guys are all still around and you can uh apply those and you can get those. So, congratulations. But, you know, it’s interesting. I’m looking around right now and I’m realizing it’s very very lonely here. There is no one else. I kind of am starting to hear my echo in the room. I do not see anyone else. So, why don’t we go find out where everyone is? I’m sure they’re all together. I have a feeling they’re all together. Wink wink. So, let’s go find everyone else. And while we’re doing that, I want to know what one of your what one of your biggest learnings of was today. So, uh I know that there was a lot of different uh lessons for a lot of different sellers. And so, some of the stuff may not have been totally relevant to you and that’s totally fine. Right? We’re trying to talk to a large group of print on demand sellers, not of all not all of which are selling on the same platforms. So the goal was to try to create, you know, sessions that were relevant to all of you guys. So I hope you guys feel that way and I want you to drop in the chat like what was one of the big learnings, one of the big lessons and maybe that’ll be the takeaway. Maybe that’ll be the thing that you go and you put into action, right? I hope so. So I see everybody. All right, here we are.

Wow, there is where everyone is. Mac, we were looking for you. Well, here I am. Mac, how are you feeling about the event? I think I can speak for everyone to say it’s been so much fun. There’s been so much knowledge, so many incredible speakers and things we talked about. So, it’s just been great. I feel amazing. How do you feel? Oh my god. I totally agree. everything you said. Yes, lots of that. The energy has been amazing. I hope that came through for the audience. We love having you guys here. It was so fun. It feels like everyone’s in the room, even the audience. So, um, the vibes have been really high. And that is a wrap for Amplified 2026. Thank you so much for tuning in.

Y

good job everybody.

Thank you love. Thank you so much.

Mhm. It was like an example design for I was making like a merch line. That’s a fake merch line for a video. Okay. Funnily enough, this is also uh from from a video. Okay. Totally geared out. Did you do this illustration or did you um No. Is it like a Canva? Okay. You can probably imagine. I mean, this was years ago. So, at that point, my design skills were virtually non-existent. Uh, but it’s okay. I’ve I’ve grown and I’ve learned and it’s been what like 5 years now. Yeah. Well, this is a design style that we were talking about in another one of the live streams or like in planning for one of the live streams, I I suppose. Yeah. I kind of can’t wait. Um, I’m excited to see mostly what you have kind of picked out. Yeah. Um, let me

Yeah. So, I have all of mine lined up. You’ll see. Uh, I might have overdone it a little bit. Uh, you can already kind of tell, but it’s fine. It’s fine. I got excited about it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s about like a minute and a half before we go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m like more nervous than I think I usually am. Really? I guess it’s, you know, when people create big designs, they really care about Yeah. the product. Yeah. Totally. I don’t want to go. And this is not good. But yeah. Well, I was uh uh saying as we were getting ready that I was feeling a bit a bit like kind of jumpier than usual, too. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s up, but whatever. You know, too much coffee. It’s possible. That’s always on the table. But too much coffee, I say as I sip my energy drink from my I was looking for an energy drink, but I wound up with a Dr. Pepper. Do you like Dr. Pepper? Have I ever tried Dr. Pepper? Is that Do I need to write my No, it’s I mean Dr. Pepper is a soda that has a a lot of fans, but a lot of people are like it’s kind of gross. But I don’t know. I like it. I think it’s pretty great. Okay. And but I also I I rarely drink it, you know, but when I do, it’s pretty good. It’s kind of got like almost I don’t know. it. I I feel like people might say it kind of has a cherry coke like flavor, but I think that even that is a little bit like people who love Dr. Pepper are like, “No, it’s not cherry coke.” Fair. So, I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m a very like Coke Zero girly through and through. Uh almost to a fault. Uh the the the amounts that I drink are kind of crazy a little bit. It’s like liters plural a week. Yeah. I need to drink water is what I need to do. Yeah. Okay. Let’s see. I’m kind of excited to get into it. And I think we are live now. Uh so, hi everyone. Uh thank you so much for joining. My name is Liz. This is Zach. Hello. Hello. Uh and we are here to do a bunch of design reviews. Now, if you didn’t get a chance to submit this time, we might do another one of these. But for uh this specific stream, we actually got over 200 responses. Uh which is wild. We obviously will be able to go through all of them. So I picked five and Zach picked five. And uh I haven’t seen yours, you haven’t seen mine, so it’s going to be a surprise for each of us. Uh and we’re going to give a little bit of advice in terms of design. It’s obviously not going to be this color isn’t pretty. Choose a different color. Uh but it’s going to be driven a lot more by what is good for the design guidelines uh that work for the products that that you guys have picked specifically for these designs. I know is there anything that you’re going to be more guided by in this? Well, definitely. I mean, this is kind of a topic that we return to anytime that we do one of these live streams, I think. But, um I mean, you mentioned the guidelines. That’s kind of specifically where I’m coming at it from like um and from the things that specifically me and my team look for when we are uh checking designs and I’m actually going to be using some of the uh the the the files that um they’re like templates that we actually use when we are uh analyzing things. Um, but I’ll also be showing you a little bit about how to set up your own um if you uh don’t have access to such a uh or the well you wouldn’t have access to the exact same templates that we have set up. But um I mean it turns out you can do a lot of this stuff on free software as well as um the software that I’m going to be using which is the Adobe uh suite. Mhm. So, uh, in that case, I think we’re going to be covering several different software, uh, options that you can use cuz I’ve actually chosen to use KD specifically for this cuz I wanted everything to exist in one pane and just go artboard by artboard, which this was immediately uh, my pick. So, let’s make sure that we can cover as many uh, as we can today. And if you have any questions throughout this, drop them in the chat. uh you they’re either going to be answered by a who is moderating today or uh we are going to gather all of them and try to answer them at the end. So without further ado yeah do you want to uh show me your first one? Yes. Yes, I want to. Uh okay. Uh so I have KD open over here and what I’ve done is I’ve created like an artboard for every single design. Um and can I actually interrupt real quick? Yes, go ahead. Um I’m not super familiar with KD. Can you tell me what KD is? Yes, I can. So, uh there are a bunch of different types of uh design software that you can use. Um you’ve seen us use a like I think at least five over the years on the channel. Um what uh I like KD for is it’s kind of a perfect blend of several features that I really enjoy. like I have uh a real I used to have like this real affinity for like Canva elements specifically because it’s a giant library of stuff but uh the design tools are a little bit lacking uh like when you can’t really vectorize anything there uh and it’s a lot more it’s very beginner friendly uh but I was missing some small things and then I would use something like or try to learn Illustrator or I would use like a Figma Uh, and what I was constantly missing is that I have to build every single element from scratch where I have to like find someone who already made it and downloaded and uh, in KD there’s this giant library of stuff. I can actually maybe open something up here. So, let’s say I am creating a design. I’m like, ah, I’m missing this like this corner is a little wonky. I need a triangle to put in there or something. Triangles may be a little too simple. But let’s say I for fun want to do a little banner underneath my text and I need it to be like squishable and movable and editable. So I can’t really just go and download some kind of SVG. Uh and I see like banners in here or I could just go in and type banner and maybe I want it to be look like it’s made of paper. And so there’s like 2D stuff. there’s a bit more complex things, you know, a bunch of these different elements that you can really move and and use. And some of them are paid, some of them are free. Uh so you don’t necessarily have to have a paid account to use a lot of this stuff. Um and um yeah, the other difference specifically for this demo is that uh you can have art boards like that. Uh so much like in Figma if you have used it before you can create these frames uh where everything you don’t have to have every single layer of the design in in the layers pane and have to organize it. It’s all immediately you know in the layers pane based on what artboard you have. Nice. Sorry to get you off track right right immediately uh at the start but um you know I thought that uh you know I don’t know a whole lot about KD and I was kind of thinking that maybe some of our viewers might um want to know about some of these uh softwares that we’re um using. Yeah. And I’m going to ask you to explain some stuff as well about whatever you’re going to be using. Uh but yeah so the very first uh design that I picked from the 200 plus submissions was this design by Moren. Uh so hi Moren I hope you’re watching. Uh, and what we have here is this hoodie with a front print and a back print, both using DTG, which is going to become important. Uh, and the color variations are also over here, but I’ve just picked this one to be the main one to show you guys both prints. Uh, and so what it is, let me zoom in real real real real real close so you can see it. And is like I really like this design and I picked it because it was so relatable. It’s introvert energy conversion, meaning that every single social interaction takes some energy from you. Uh, and uh, the concept was really cool until I was like, let’s let’s do this. Let’s cover it. Uh, and I’ve added some notes for myself so I don’t forget anything that I thought of. And the very first thing that jumped out at me when I was looking at this is I think there is a slight bolding issue here. So, let me actually turn off this so you can see for yourself. As you can kind of see here, the I isn’t bolded or it’s maybe less bolded, like a semi- bold compared to the other ones. Yeah. Compared to like the T, it’s not it’s not as thick as the T. Yeah. And to double check, I kind of lined up the front uh design to the back design. And you can see that it’s like also a little bit thinner. What I think or assume that happened here is uh the star was a little too juicy looking. And so you selected it to remove the bolding from that but also accidentally removed the bolding from the eye. Not a big deal but a tiny detail. Uh and then let me bring that back. And then the other thing is this is potentially like nitpicky. Uh but the dots kind of like this dotted line don’t really line up very evenly. So there are two ways that you could do this. uh when using these kinds of dotted lines is you either line them up exactly uh at the same point so that it’s the same kind of edge or you can line it up depending on how thick the element is at the end of that line. And in this case, if you can kind of see on my screen here, uh it’s neither. So, uh, if that was the case, the these dots, for example, would be a little farther than in this case, and, uh, both of the 11% ones would be exactly the same, which they are not. They’re also not lined up perfectly like that. So, ideally, I wouldn’t want to see them completely lined up so that the last dot is the same dot. And if that that means that the spacing uh on this side is maybe a little different, I think that is going to be way less noticeable than uh the spacing here. And then the uh last kind of thing that I wanted to mention in this design specifically is that you’re using DTG uh which is probably like a very good choice, but in that case, I would increase the size of this text right here. Mhm. So, it’s it’s a fun text, but relative to everything else, it’s going to be very small. As you can see here, it might get a little bit blurred out just because the fabric is quite thick. It’s going to absorb some of the ink. That That’s what I was going to say. Especially on the fabric of the hoodie, like a thick thick fabric. Yeah. So the difference between something like a a direct to film or DD flex print and a direct to garment or DDG print uh is that uh when you’re printing with a direct to film technique, there is kind of a barrier that prevents that ink from being absorbed by the fabric. So let’s say your fabric is here uh and uh it gets pressed on as one layer. it doesn’t necessarily get spray uh sprayed on and absorbed, meaning that you are going to get crisp edges and you’re also not going to get much feathering around the design versus for this uh I think the size of the font is going to make it a little bit less legible than you would prefer. I would also say that it might be tricky even if you did DT flex to be honest because I’ve seen um situations where very small text doesn’t even adhere to the fabric. Yeah, it’s too small. Right. So, it would like peel off as the teeny tiny detail. So, the fix here is just to make it larger and and you’re fine. Uh, but overall, this is such a fun design. I really want this hoodie. And what I wanted to point out, because this is actually an issue that comes up a lot uh in people’s designs, is that in every single variant or like color variation of the hoodie, uh the contrast is great. So, even in something like a brown or a gray or a red, uh the white is enough to stand out. And we’re going to come back to this as we go on to some of the other designs that I picked out. Uh but the the contrast is very very helpful. And another kind of small thing that I wanted to point out is this is not necessarily an issue at all, but uh Moren, if you’re watching, I want to prompt you to think, do you need these bullet points? Because to me, this it it’s not necessarily serving much of a purpose. You can they’re already very clearly split by the lines. I think it just makes the design a little bit busier. If I were you, I would remove them, but if you think they look cool, keep them. Um, I’ll say, Moren, I kind of like those bullet points. Um, but I I see your point. Um, especially since you have the bullet points. Um, and then you have the dot uh uh grid bringing your site to the percentages. Um, so there’s just like a lot of dots. Um, I see what you’re saying. I got to think that they’re cool, but it might be um worth thinking about. um like it kind of seems like you’re sort of trying to evoke the um like design language of like a invoice or Yeah. Yeah. receipt or invoice or something like that. And I wonder if maybe you could um look at what invoices uh typically do um and like copy that same style. I think Yeah. And then the last thing that I wanted to say which is a good job because this is my immediate thing that I looked at the design. I wanted to make sure that the percentages add up to 100% and they do, unless I did my math wrong, but I think I did it right. Um, so, uh, overall, I need this hoodie. I want this hoodie in every single color cuz I like every single color. These are just the teeny tiny details, uh, that if you’re going to be selling a product, I would pay attention to. So, that’s my first product. Now, it’s going to be your turn to do your first product. Um, okay. Let’s So I’ I’ve done this um quite a bit different than you. Uh I uh it seems um so um my first one that I picked was um by Lauren. Um Lauren submitted this design for um a vintage cap. Um it is actually this is one thing that I had some difficulty uh understanding when we were looking over the submissions whether this was a DT flex or embroidery. I’m going to assume that it’s embroidery but I think that the things that we can uh talk about kind of apply to both. Yeah. Correct. Um so I like this um I like this logo like design. I like the um I like the center element. Um and I I love a circle text. Um and I think that it is uh it it like when sewn it could be a nice um stark design. Um but I do want to say um that it does seem to have a lot of the um um guideline issues that we uh that we often talk about in our um team. Um, so this is the vintage cotton twill cap. Um, I’m going to show Sorry, I didn’t have that. Yes, I I have them all pulled up here. Um, so this is the vintage um cap. Um, and you can find the guidelines and the print area size um by going to the product and then clicking file guidelines. Um I uh since we are located here in um Europe, I have all of my uh things set to centimeters. Um but you’re if you’re in another part of the world that uses um inches, it will should pop up in inches. Um but when uh but I also have the um I went ahead and downloaded the guidelines also. So when you download the guidelines, you get a PSD file, an AI file, and a PDF file that are all formatted for the print area size already. Uh can you tell us what each one is? Yes, I can. Um so um AI and PSD are Adobe Illustrator or sorry are Adobe um formats. PSD is the Photoshop format and AI is the uh Adobe Illustrator format. Good. because I feel like when people hear AI these days, they don’t immediately think of Adobe Illustrator. True. That’s good to know. Um, but yeah, so you can uh well, I’ll show you the preview here. So, the preview shows you what the size is in inches. Um, it has the minimum resolution. I will say for an embroidery resolution is less of an issue because you’re literally designing elements to be sewn with thread. You’re not going to see the pixels. Yeah, exact. Well, there aren’t any pixels when they’re sewn. So um uh what’s more important is line thickness and actual size in the actual um print area. Um and of course when you download these templates it gives you uh our critical guidelines which um maybe uh if you’re reading these guidelines you might kind of start to see what the issue might be. I’m seeing some stuff already. Yeah. Um, so the text should um at least be 0.25 or a/4 inch uh tall and lines should be at least 05 um in thick. And so what I have done is um I’ve pulled up this design in our template for uh for measuring um uh designs and design elements. Um, this is the actual template that I use. Um, this is something that you could create yourself if you wanted to, but you can also do this when you are creating your design, too. I mean, these are literally just line segments that are 0.05 in. Um, I yes, we can see my screen. Um, so these are literally just line segments that uh match the the guideline um requirements. So what I do when I measure a design is I will literally drag these onto the design to see if they meet the minimum requirements. Um I have found that um whenever I’m making a design for myself, usually I actually don’t use this template. I will um create a um design that is um like 5.5 in by 2. Um, and then when I’m creating the design, I can create like a line segment and then I click it and let’s say let’s uh angle is 45 in or 45° right now. I don’t want that. I want uh zero so that it’s flat and then 05 uh in. And then you’ll get a line segment that is um that minimum thickness that minimum thickness. The other way that I uh we used to do this in my team too. Um there’s no reason why we like stopped doing it necessarily. Um but um let’s do 0.25. Um uh if you do a circle um then like the circle can kind of measure the tops, the bottoms, the sides, you know. Um but we just particularly use line segments. So I I normally when I check uh the the sizes I think I do a circle kind of intuitively because it you know fits in anywhere. You don’t have to turn it around. So I’m going to measure the text here. And as you can see the minimum size for text in embroidery is 0.25 in which is about a quarter. Well it is a/4 of an inch. Um, and you can see all of these um, letters are quite a bit smaller. And if we go for the smaller text, you may notice these are quite a bit smaller. Um, woof. And that’s that I I’m kind of imagining what that is going to look like on the final product. And it’s just all going to be one single thread going through just trying to attempting to create some kind of text there. I mean, anything that is below 0.25 25 in in height. Any text that’s below 0.25 in in height is going to need to be sewn with run stitch, which if you’ve seen another one of our um live streams about embroidery, you probably know run stitch no bueno. No good. It’s a single line uh of um thread and they can kind of give uh lowquality illeible outcomes. Mhm. And then also this uh is a kind of sneakier guideline. Um all tax has to be at least 0.1 in tall to even be included to even be considered. Um basically the reason for that is because.1 in anything smaller than that like isn’t even as big as one complete stitch. So like you can’t even physically form the the letter with that. So I actually don’t I I don’t know. I kind of suspect, yeah, we’re looking at um text uh with both um the name uh of the state and the date and the um coordinates are below 01 or so sorry um 0.1 in. So in this case um both because the the bigger text is smaller than 0.25 25 and then the smaller text is smaller than 0.1. Um, this would probably be done in run stitch and then these would probably be removed completely. What would happen if uh this design gets sent in? I’m assuming your team would pro like would it get flagged or or what would happen? Yeah, it would get flagged. Um so what would happen is like we are kind of set up to to well okay so digitization files which is what we call the file that tells the machine how to print something digitization files need to be created manually. Um and so when we notice something like this there’s not much we can do besides um flag it and um send you an approval sheet. Mhm. And an approval sheet will tell you basically like what we did, what kind of design, you know, um what’s the word? Like concessions or like um you know, things that downgrades. Well, I suppose you could say that, but I mean like um things that had to happen in order to even get to a printable like final version. Um, and if you approve of that, you can just simply click approve in your Printful dashboard. Or you can send my team an email and we can work with you um to try to find something that will work for you. Whether that means increasing the size of the text or like helping you um helping you understand our guidelines so that you can um fix this on your end and re-upload a new graphic. Um but yeah, as uh as you can see um oh and then sorry, I threw another um guideline in here. 005 in is how thick lines segments need to be. So that is also another issue. Yes. So for both the text and these little lines in the lighthouse, um it would be below that. And I actually did just notice one more thing. These windows are made with negative space, which negative space and embroidery doesn’t go so well. Basically, this shape would have to be sewn with tatami fill, which is a chain-like structure that fills an entire area with color. And then these would probably have to be done with like a different stitch. Like the areas between the window would have to be done with like the stitch that we do with uh uh that we make lines with. Um and so basically, um there would be some issues with uh that. Um, so yeah, uh, I basically just want to say I I like where we’re going with this, but um, also I would say um that we should check the guidelines and um, work on the sizing of the text and some of the lines. Nice. And it’s so interesting cuz I’m I don’t think I’ve ever seen you go through the actual process of of using a template to check a design. So this is illuminating for me and I hope for for everyone there. Um, so and now we’re going to jump over back to the designs that I picked out. Uh, and my next one is by Lee. And this one actually, uh, from what I can tell was created in the design maker itself. So without like an external software, just on the Prull platform. Uh, and this is a custom knitted crew neck sweater. This is the relaxed fit crew neck sweater. Uh, and I picked it in part because I was like, “Ooh, this is really cool.” And then my next thought was, “Wait, what does it say? What What is this?” Uh, so my first initial thought when I saw it kind of like from afar like this, uh, I thought it was nope. And then as soon as I saw it closer, I was like, “That’s not an O. Is that nape?” Like the nape of the neck. But then the the design is on the front. Is it? It could be nuke. What is nuke? Maybe it’s a play on the word nude when D is like turned upside down. Point being uh I am not sure if if nuke is the brand name. Uh even in that case, I would say this needs to be moved slightly down or um the the text needs to be adjusted so that it’s clear what the second letter is or what the overall text is saying. Uh but the actual design itself, I would honestly wear it. I I might not even care what it says. uh in part because the color combination is one of my favorites that you can create with knitwear. Um I’ve uh taken liberty of of picking out the ones that I think these are. It seems to me that this is burgundy and mellow and these are all the colors that are available with knitwear and I would struggle to pick out a better color combination to be fair. It is both colorful and not overpowering and has great contrast and I just they’re complimentary colors. I really like it. Uh and uh lastly, which I think is cool, uh it is not immediately like obvious when you look at it, but the placement of the letters is very creative. Like it’s quite fun. So the fact that the letters don’t exactly line up uh makes it and and also the fact that the letters are quite bold means that with the solid um uh color selection mode uh this is going to be a very striking design uh and it’s going to look very cool. I would just advise to slightly move around the letter so it’s clear what it says. Yeah, when you first pulled that up I thought it said nope too. Um uh one thing my question would be is I wonder what the back looks like um like do are the letters in a um like do do the letters line up uh in any way in the back as well? No. So this was the only design placement just the this front section uh that I could see in the template. And you can also kind of see it in the mockup as well that like only goes I can really zoom in here cuz my artboard is so big. Uh I Oh, I see. But yeah. Yeah. It it only comes up to the seam of the sweater. Um I mean that would be difficult to line up anyway. Yes. Near impossible. Yeah. Um so yes, this is one of those that I’d probably wear, but uh if someone asked me what it says, I would not be able to tell them. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh this is uh my my second piece of advice. This one was kind of a quick one just because I really wanted to point out that like even this kind of small issue that would be so easy to fix could be something that could be hurting your design a little bit. Uh now it’s your turn. Yeah. But I I I do want to say that I really like the um the placement and it’s a good use of uh our design maker and everything too. Yeah. The the font looks really cool to me. Yeah. So the second one that I picked out um was from Imani. Um Imani actually this is another hat. So, I think that this one will be quick as well because uh it does seem like there are um a lot of the uh same issues. Um so, I actually I have this pulled up already. It is in a different size of a hat. Um, and I mean I do want to point out again that in all of these um you can go to the uh file guidelines to check um and like that’s really important when you are creating the design because as we’ve seen um the size of the design within the print area really matters for embroidery. This actually is another one where I’m not sure if it is embroidery or DT flex. Um but I am just going to be quick about this one. It looks like these letters are actually um big enough, the word handyman. Um but I will say that the um negative space text probably won’t work so well with embroidery. Yeah, I would assume that whoever would be digitizing it would just fill it in. I I don’t see this working any other way. it. Yeah, almost definitely would just be a a a solid text and you would probably get uh an explanation in the approval sheet saying we replaced uh a texture with a solid um text. That’s what we would call it. Um but let’s see if these these letters are even big enough to embroider. And it doesn’t look like they would be, especially the smaller like not capitalized ones. Yeah. Yeah. I suppose these would probably be need to be removed. Um and then let’s just check. I mean same thing with these letters. I mean the lines are way too small in uh if we are leaving them as uh uh the negative space but they are also too small um for uh they are below the 1/4 in um height. Um uh these lines are thick enough the border which is uh which would come out really well. Um, but uh the te these this small text this small text would not work out so well. We would probably be able to embroider handyman, but this would have to come out in run stitch and this would have to be removed. And then I’m not really sure about the wrenches either. I think that that might cause issues with um how big they are too, but this might be able to be uh it is a bit smaller than it should be and especially with this negative space here. that might be a little bit tight as well. Um, so I’m not sure what we would wind up doing with this element. Um, we probably have to increase it if we remove this or, you know, did run stitch or remove this or something. Maybe this could be made a little bit bigger to be more um, solid. But, um, we would have to we would definitely have to make some concessions with this. Mhm. Um, but I also just wanted to just throw out real quick, um, I wanted to mention that you can do a lot of this on Canva, which is a free software. Um, there are paid plans to it, but all the stuff that you would need to do for this would definitely be free. So, I get a lot of questions like, how would I do this like if I don’t have Adobe Illustrator? Um, this is how you would do this. Um, so if you are creating something in Canva, you can always uh you can create the custom size. Um, this one was actually 5.9, but I have one pulled up for 5.5×2, which again you can find on our um, uh, product page. And then you can do the same things as you can do in Illustrator by grabbing a um, line segment. And then when you click the when you generate a line segment and then click it, you can click on position. And then in position um you can um uh change the size change the size um which uh in this case it um I did have to figure out like how these positioning uh ones work to get it to point uh 05. Um but I assure you that I did that before I set up. And then same here. This one is actually a bit easier. So maybe in Canva it makes more sense to use circles because as you can see here it is 0.25 um in for the circle. Um and like if you were to measure this um clip art, you would see like it is too thin also. So I mean this is how you would do it in a free software. I just happen to use Illustrator because I’m more familiar with the software, but you can do it in this, you can do it in Photoshop, you can do it with um any of the like free alternatives to Photoshop. Um but yeah, that was my second design. All right. Okay, that was a very cool one. And from what I could tell, it was a company, right? Company merch. Uh, I have uh another company merch example example later. And I feel like when we’re talking about merch that is going to represent your uh brand as promo for it, that should definitely be something that you make sure uh looks as good as possible. But let’s uh move on. My third design that I’ve picked out uh comes from Brent. Uh, and I did have a a lookie at the store as well. Um, so this is part of a lineup of shirts that are themed uh after different what would I even call it? Uh things in the orbit. Uh so there’s planets and and then there’s also the moon and stuff. Um and they’re all dripping. Uh which is very cool looking especially as a design. Um, and so this is the big back print right here. And then this is the smaller kind of uh left chest front print. These are also DTG. Uh, and these are the other colors that are here. You can already kind of see some of the smaller shoes that I’ve uh uh flagged in this. Uh and I think the most obvious one to me immediately and why I initially picked out this design was the contrast issue. Uh so the design features very dark elements like the moon and the drip and very light elements which is white text meaning that there is virtually no product color that this is going to have great contrast with. Uh, so I picked this blue as a very clear illustration of this because the white text really does not stand out as much as you would like it to. Uh, but uh, you can also see this issue coming up on some of the darker shirts like this uh, gray moon on the gray uh, shirt might work out okay because of the darker border, but it’s still like will not be as contrasty as you would like. And it’s definitely an issue on this very dark one because the drip kind of will almost disappear into the shirt. Uh so what I would advise is picking either a dark or a light approach to whatever you’re designing and then applying that to the correct variance. So, if you want two variations of uh a shirt design that is going to go on two different like either lights or darks, uh you can invert the colors essentially. So, for something like this, I just went with a very quick example. Uh I just cut out this this moon uh and applied some effects on it in KD just to show you. You definitely have the original uh graphic for this. But so this is that moon with the background removed. And I’ve just pulled the brightness and the contrast up and slightly like reduce the saturation to show you the difference between something dark on dark versus keeping everything light. It doesn’t have to be white the same way as the text. It can just be, you know, a little bit brighter. And then this is a much more contrasty design as a result. Uh some of the things about this that I found really cool immediately was of course the concept of everything dripping. Uh but also as these smaller things I really like the fact that the moon graphic comes out in front of the text a little bit that gives it dimension. Uh I like the style of the moon illustration quite a bit. Uh and also the the font choice like this looks very epic to me the Luna. Um, so there are a couple of smaller issues that I want to just flag for you outside of the contrast. Uh, one being, well, I don’t know how small of an issue this is, but I don’t know if, uh, you necessarily have the permission from NASA to use it, but I did look it up to use the NASA logo. It’s not in the public domain. You do have to get permission from them specifically, like send uh, a letter for merchandise approval. they have a lot of information, but I’m hoping you have it already, but if you don’t, uh, then do keep that in mind. You could just have a satellite without the NASA logo in it. Um, and then another, and this is getting really nitpicky thing, uh, is when, you can see this picture as well. When water is drip dripping from something, especially if it’s completely circular, there is some surface tension that exists on the outside of it. meaning that when these drips appear on the sides, they are very sloped and come out from the very outside of the object. Uh now what happens here and let me actually turn off the light thing that I have uh to illustrate this. So in this original design, it kind of looks like the drip is coming from behind the moon rather than it’s something dripping off of it. And you could really fix it very easily by adding slight shapes to the outside. These are just triangles, so it’s it doesn’t look quite as good as it could, but you could add like slightly curved shapes around here. And it would instantly look like something is, you know, dripping off of the moon rather than outside from behind it. Um, and maybe slight alignment things like I don’t think this Luna text is exactly centered. And then also uh the spacing right here is maybe something that I would look into. Uh because this drip is exactly at the very center of the design. Uh these differences in spacing make the text look like it isn’t even if the overall uh text from Moonrip volume 1 is centered. Uh but overall very cool. I love the fact that there’s like information about this these different celestial bodies. That’s the word that I was looking for. slash bodies in it. Uh so it’s a very very cool concept just once again small tiny details that I would refine. I also think that it’s interesting that you picked two designs that have um the dots leading to uh information. That is true. Yes, I did not think about that. I’m sure I I know for a fact that I’ve definitely also done designs that are kind of inspired by that. Uh but curiously actually to compare it to that very first design that we looked at uh these dots line up to where the um numbers end. Meaning that uh they’re not lining up in a straight line like this, but they make sense with where the numbers end. Also, I think importantly, um it looks like all of the dots sort of line up with each other. So, it kind of looks like the uh uh uh this the same line spacing um text spacing is applied to uh all of these lines, which um wasn’t the case in the first one, I believe. Yeah. So, great job. I do want this t-shirt. I just uh would like for it to be either contrasted light on dark or dark on light. Um, I also wanted to say uh if you are curious about um the question of whether you can use the NASA logo, um we do have uh printful.com/policies will tell you all of our specific guidelines um including you uh your intellectual property and content guidelines which would be relevant in this case. Yes. So please if you don’t have permission from NASA, don’t use the NASA logo. Okay. Good call out. Let’s keep this going. Uh we are about what? More than halfway through. About halfway through. Uh so let’s take a look at your third picked out design. Awesome. Um, so I this one I hope will be a a quick review because um I picked I saw companies um all over print um unisex hoodie and um I will show you what it looks like. Um, we have a very contrasty um, one side is black, one side is white. Um, hoodie, very stark, very cool. Um, with the logo uh, as the branding. Mhm. I think that this is a very cool design. I would wear that 100%. Yeah. Uh, I could see you wearing that. Um, and then you can also see they have included uh because you can do this with uh all all over print, you can choose what color the stitching is. Um, they’ve gone with the white stitching, although I imagine that the black stitching would look equally as cool over here. Um, but I like the contrast of this white stitching. Um, the uh few things that I just want to call out with um all over print are some things that we’ve talked about before. Um, one, I’m guessing that this person designed this with our design maker. Um, which I’m a big fan of using our design maker for all over print stuff because, um, the print files can be huge for all over print. Um, and making them in Photoshop or Illustrator can sometimes, you know, if you have a slow system, it might not load so good. Um, it might not upload to our system very well. Um, so doing the work in the design maker can be a really good option. Um, and especially if you’re doing something with a pattern or like um a solid color, but then your logo on the chest or something like that, you can do the the color in design maker and then just take your graphic file and put it on the chest. Yeah, I’ve never thought of like combining uh methods necessarily. I always either do design maker or I do external software. But yeah, adding the color or the pattern uh or the the I don’t know background squiggles or whatever you’d want to add uh through the design maker is a great job. Um but if you uh do want to design in a design software, um same thing as everything I’ve mentioned so far. Um you can check the file guidelines and we even have print file templates for these. Mhm. Which I haven’t actually opened them yet. Um but they come in a zip format uh a compressed format. So when you double click them they um uh they unzip they um compress the same um but uh in this case we have uh PDFs which give a whole guideline of how to do this. And actually it looks like um our uh did something fairly similar to what we have in the design um guidelines. Um, and then you can see like this is a 40in x 40 in um, print area where you would be doing 150 dpi or like 150 to 300. As we’ve talked in other live streams, I would not recommend doing 300 dpi. That’s massive. Uh, yeah. So, I mean, if you multiply these numbers out, it’s a big file. Um, but if you did want to create the templates, you know, we have them here as well. Um, but I always say it’s always a good thing to be using the design maker. Um, but I wanted to say about um this the the the one thing that I kind of wanted to call out about this design specifically is um I wonder if the um person who created this design wanted these lines to line up perfectly. Um I would assume so. Yeah. Yeah. Which and we’ve kind of talked about this in uh in the past. So Oliver print is um Oliver Print and like cut and sew. kind of use those uh terms interchangeably sometimes. Um but it is like cut and sew literally is you’re cutting out fabric and then sewing it together like by hand. Um and so there is a margin of error and where the like seams line up um we can’t guarantee that they are going to line up perfectly everywhere. Like this pocket this hoodie pocket like if you order 20 of these bless you thank you. Um, if you if you order like 20 of these, you’ll probably see like 20 different slight variations um of the of the placement. Um, but that’s also I mean in this case it wouldn’t matter all that much, but that’s also why we have this safe print area. Um, safe print area basically says anything within this area is going to print successfully. For sure. Yeah. Anything outside may get cut or sewn. It’s not a guarantee that it will get cut and sewn. Um, it’s not going to for sure give you a bad outcome, but it might. And if you got a bad outcome from putting something outside the safe print area, it would be considered an expected outcome. Mhm. Um, but beyond that, I like this nice stark design. Good use of our design maker, which I don’t know, should I show what design maker looks like in this moment? I I feel like let’s get through the designs. Uh I think that that’s uh why I asked him the question. Yeah. And then if if we have time at the end, we can, but I doubt it. Um so let’s let’s keep it moving. Um I have a design number four, which is that um kind of it’s not really company merch, but it’s kind of is company merch uh that I mentioned. Um so this is and uh pardon my literal French. I do not speak French at all, but mondroville.net. So, what this is, and I just found it so sweet, uh, is a, uh, website, uh, where you can see all of the different things about the city, which is Drummondville in Quebec, uh, in Canada. And, uh, it’s a bunch of like local events and businesses and and stuff like that. And honestly, looking at that website made me want to immediately visit. It seems like my kind of, uh, sweet place. Uh, and what this is is a promotional t-shirt for that website for from my what I understand trying to translate this through Google Translate is for businesses to kind of be more visible and show up and and be discoverable by the community. So, uh, what I kind of wanted to flag in this is really really nice that there are three placements here. So there’s the front and both sleeves and also the I believe the outside label as well with the with the logo. The first thing is immediately since it’s uh promotional merch, it’s very nice that the branding is all over visible everywhere. Uh and uh to me when kind of people uh do this kind of thing where they put the logo everywhere, they use the same logo variant across every single uh placement versus here there’s this shortened logo on the sleeves and then there’s the longer one on the front on the back. Nice choice. Uh and the one thing that I well the couple of things that I wanted to flag about the actual design was first the uh spacing. I’ve kind of created a border around this actual print file to show you that there is less space on the right than there is on the left. And there is quite a bit of space at the top. Meaning that what it does is it puts this horizontal design kind of lower than you would expect on the actual t-shirt. Uh I if I was creating a horizontal design in a vertical space, which to be clear, I normally wouldn’t, uh I would put it up higher so that it comes up to right about the middle of the armpit right here. So on the actual design file that you’re creating, it would come up to maybe half up this space. The other thing that I wanted to point out is that this has clearly had a white background initially and the background has been removed. I’ve kind of tried to zoom in as much as possible. Uh the background removal, however, is incomplete. On a white t-shirt, that might not be too much of an issue, but uh on any other color. If you wanted to put this on a beige or a light blue or something, you’re definitely going to see that. And lastly is uh kind of like a comment about this right side illustration, mainly due to how many things there are. Uh so if I kind of just like take some time to go through everything, you can see that there are 1 2 3 4 five gears. There are one two three kind of graph style arrows going up, but also there are 1, two, three arrows kind of pointing up and to the right in general. Uh and then there’s a phone being held by some hands. And then there’s this kind of uh award. Yeah, like a ribbon. Uh I guess this golden ribbon, which I’m assuming is some kind of certificate or something. Uh and then some uh a map with a bunch of different businesses and and landmarks on it. Uh, so something that I would do in general when it comes to illustrations, but especially if you’re putting it on like a t-shirt that you need to use as promo for it to be immediately recognized as something, uh, I would just go ahead and remove a bunch of these things. They’re not conveying any essential information about what your business is like. Uh, and I’m just going to really quickly show you how I would do it. So, I’ll click remove background right now just to get rid of some of these white things. And then I’ll click on edit cutout here in Kable. And I’ll start going at these small individual things so you can see. Is it big enough? Am I in the right space? There we go. Erase. And I would literally just go ahead and erase all the stuff that we don’t need. So in this case, it would be the arrows, these kind of funky looking gears and stuff. So point being, you can go through and you can be really meticulous about it. you can restore some of the things that are lost in here like these whites. Um, but I would not put as much stuff into one illustration mainly because it loses the viewers’s attention and if you’re trying to promote your business or in this case your website, uh, it’s going to take away from the point. Uh, and lastly is a comment on this kind of ribbon. usually and this is something that I’ve seen my friends who try to promote their businesses do. Uh they put the every like important certificate and and and thing on the merch even though that is something that comes up when somebody visits the actual website. And putting uh this kind of ribbon on here that has this 3D texture and golden uh look takes away from the premiumness of the design. it makes it feel less premium just because it looks disjointed from the styling of the rest of the illustration. These are kind of like the the general like comments on something that I probably would do and I would change. Uh but it is up to you if you feel like these uh gears and stuff let me actually bring this back to the way it was. Uh if these gears feel very important to the context of of your business, keep them. If these arrows feel very important, keep them. But I would just minimize. Whatever it is you minimize, it is up to you. I really like this map, though. I mean, I think that I like the vector look of the map. Um, and but I think that that is a very good note about the uh the award. Um I it uses a complete different like style than the map. Um and it is a bit jarring. Um and I also think that it’s uh such a great point that you make about the u background removal. Um, like you can even see in the award that like the bottom of the award um has uh like been affected by the background removal tool. Um, and I think that this is just a really great example of like the reason why background removal tools aren’t always going to be the best solution. I mean, in a pinch, they’re usually pretty good. And in fact, you uh when you did it with KD, um it seemed to remove more of the background than whatever tool was used um before. But uh it’s it’s a really good note that I mean you probably have this text in a separate like PNG like transparent file and even if you don’t you can create it in design maker directly. Yeah. Um although if they are using a specific font for their branding we may not have it in the design maker. Um but uh I’m not sure. This looks like a fairly common font. So it it is likely that they could find a font that would work in our design maker. Um but yeah that I think that that’s really good point. All right. So that was my number four. Uh and then now it’s time for yours. Yes. Um so I actually have a DTG now at this point. Um this one would be the unisex garment dyed heavyweight t-shirt um comfort colors 1717. My favorite blanks always. And this one um was uh submitted by Dana. Um for uh Dana, this is what we’re looking at. We got a um velociraptor looking uh dinosaur guy. I’m glad you know your dinosaurs cuz I do not. I mean Jurassic Park kid, you know. So um uh I mean who knows? Could be a T-Rex. I don’t know. But we all we know now dinosaurs really don’t look anyway, you know. Um I don’t I don’t have time to get into it. Um uh but um so the uh thing that jumped out to me is that this looks like a really really light print um even in the mockup. And so I kind of suspected that there might be um some uh semi-transparency issues going on which semi-transparencies infamous semi-transparencies. Yes, we talked about this a lot. Um semi-transparencies are not really recommended in DTG. Um that basically means like anything that is a see-through pixel. And um it’s because it kind of wres havoc with um any sort of the underbase layer that we put down to kind of um pop the color out from um the the the shirt. But I’m going to open this in Photoshop um and just like take a look to, you know, confirm my suspicions. Oops, that was the wrong one. I’m so sorry. Um this is the one I want to open up. Um, I do see that it is already in um, uh, at the right size. It is 12 in x 16 in at 150 dpi. That’s what we like to see. Um, but I’m going to start zooming in and you can see like this checkerboard background um, indicates something is transparent. Oh, and so if I zoom in, I can start to see that almost all of these pixels are some form of semi-transparent. Ooh, yeah. And if I open up the info um panel in uh Photoshop, I can actually see if I hover above these pixels, this OP number here is the um opacity. Yes, the opacity. Thank you. Um, and you can see 64% 60% 52% 23 16 10 8. Um, so you can see all of these pixels are semi-transparent, which I will admit, um, we, you know, we always are improving our the way that we handle files. Um, it’s gotten a lot better over the years, um, how we handle semi-transparencies, but it is definitely not the recommended um, format and I suspect with such low opacity that a lot of these pixels will come out really really light, especially on um, a color like this green. A light meaning very white pale. No, like not visible. Oh, I see. um like very difficult to see. And I mean, if that is what you were going for, that’s probably fine. I mean, it look you can tell that it is going to look fairly light in the um in the mockup, but at the same time, um I suspect that that when this is printed, you’re probably going to get an even lighter print. Um, but it also looks kind of like this may have been I mean, you can see these dark pixels in here, which kind of suggests to me that maybe there was some sort of background removal happening here as well. Um, but I’m not 100% sure. Um, but, you know, I I uh love a dinosaur shirt. Um, but I I think that I would improve this by um having more solid pixels. Um, and like I mean I could experiment. I mean, if you just like copy and paste it. Yeah, just copy and paste it. you can make it a bit darker. Um but I mean you will still see these um semi-transparent edges. Um but um also on a design level I think that um um would you want to see like the dinosaur’s name on here or something like that? I don’t know. That’s just a thought that I have. Um I mean it’s just the dinosaur, right? Yeah. It it could be if you know you know. Yeah. But I I quite like the idea of it being this kind of like faint design, but I think in general you can’t fully rely on mockups to show you exactly the colors and how they’re going to look like in real life. Meaning that it’s faint now and with the semi-transparencies and with the like maybe slight difference in in color from from print to screen, you might barely be able to see what the design is. Yeah, I I had the same thought with um your uh Luna drip. I’ve seen colors similar to that moon on like a trib blend, like a kind of darker gray that are just the same color and it’s really hard to see. Yes. So, do uh keep contrast in mind because uh if something looks okayish on your screen, it might not still look okayish in print. All right. Uh let’s try really quickly to knock out a couple more designs. Uh and I’m going to move straight into my number five, which is actually this one by Miss Pix. Um so I could not resist uh this cuz I feel like anything that is like a black and white or black and white and a and a red is very much uh my cup of tea. Uh, and this in particular I quite liked because, and this once again is one of those things that isn’t immediately obvious, but some of the elements are larger, some of the elements in here are smaller, and it creates a lot more of a dynamic pattern than if these were all just the exact same size. Yeah. It’s like filling in the gaps. Yeah. Yeah. It’s very, very like fun looking because of that. Uh, and I have kind of twoish notes, uh, but one really important one. So let’s start with the less important one which is on this inside label. I don’t have the exact like print file for just the inside label and this logo. But looking at this, there are two things that are clear to me. One being that there is a white square background behind this. uh which is not necessarily a problem, but it might look cleaner if uh you had like maybe removed a couple of these elements or maybe put a white circle behind them just to hide them. H and that way it would look cleaner like the element of your logo exists in between everything else. And the other thing is I would just say that this is probably a little too small especially because I cannot read this text on on the mockup and I would assume that you would not also be able to read it very well in real life because you know printing is still printing. It is not like a perfect vector eternally scalable and movable thing. So you can see that it would benefit from being maybe the size of at the very least this spade, but maybe even this hard. Something like this. And then the bigger thing uh that I wanted to point out about this shirt is the non-tilable quality of the actual pattern. So, I’ve added these green lines just to show you, but you can really see it in here when you zoom in. The tile of the template, even though it is quite large, it’s probably put right here in the center like this. But this tile isn’t tileable. So, it has these harsh edges that are going to be very obvious when you wear the shirt. and and something you know ends and and uh this diamond like begins abruptly. So the solution to something like this would be to either uh create a and this is probably the less recommended way to either create a really really big pattern and just have it uh as a large enough file to cover the entire area of the print or make it smaller. Make sure that uh your elements line up perfectly. So if you want um this uh heart for example to line up exactly, it would need to come out the exact same amount at the very top of your tile here. So whenever uh you are creating a pattern, consider that when you’re putting elements in the corner or on the bottom. I normally just to keep it safe split the elements like in 5050 so that one half is at the bottom and the other half you just take it from the bottom and move it to the very top and that way it’s going to be perfectly tileable and seamless and nice. Uh but other than that it’s a very cool shirt. I would absolutely wear it especially this you know summer. Uh and thank you so much. I to me this is in general great use of AOP because of the like white background and the fun pattern. Um, and I don’t know. I I feel like every single design that I picked out I would wear and I would find cool. I just wanted to make them even better. Yeah. And I think that when you talk about tiling, you can also like trying to make them line up is often a challenge. Um, but another way you could just remove the elements that are overlapping completely. Um, so that is kind of a quick and dirty way to do it, but um, it would it would it would work. And uh I also suspect that this person used our um design maker the the tile the tiling feature in design maker um which again uh you know really good use for all over print because um you can put down something. I mean we did we literally did this in a previous live stream where we um got a tileable graphic and then used the tiling function um in uh all over print and uh it came out pretty good. So yeah. All right. And now let’s get into the last design of the day. Uh we are like quickly running out of time, but let’s make sure that we can actually get the 10 that we promised at the beginning. Um so uh Suma uh submitted this one. Um I wanted to look at it just because it is a a pretty cool allover print design. Um we have uh what looks like some kind of a dark elf with a bunch of bugs um all over moths. smart. Don’t call them bugs. They’re special. I mean, fair to to to uh gothically inclined people. I would say they are. Um uh or you know, it’s that kind of gossamer wing type of like kind of the fairy wing type of thing. Um uh I think that this is a pretty cool looking shirt. Um, and I I just kind of wanted to like open it up because I am kind of even sort of wondering like how it was made. Um, because well, as we talked about with all over print before, a lot of these files are going to be pretty huge. Um, 26 in x 33 in at 150 dpi. And it looks like this is a single image. Um, now I want to say I am not sure. I hope that I’m not um uh uh slandering your artwork, Suma, but I kind of think that this might be AI. Um Oh, yeah. I’m looking at some of these curls and these elements, and I’m wondering like what this is. Mhm. Um and same with some of these twigs. They don’t seem to go anywhere. um very detailed face, but then some of these bugs kind of gel together in a in a way that like there’s an extra wing here um that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Um but you know, I I kind of wanted to just mention that because I I noticed it upon investigating it. Um yeah, I wouldn’t have immediately said that at first, but now that you say it, it tracks. Yeah. Um, but I I’m wondering how this like I mean if if this is AI, I want to know what prompt uh created this. And I mean like especially because if we open it in Photoshop um uh and look at the image size, I mean it is 26×33 at 150 dpi. Wow. Um so it is like one this is this isn’t like how we were talking about with other all over print where it was um created in our design maker uh with tiling or whatever. This is one big image um that is put onto a um put onto a shirt. So I think that this is a very cool use of um some sort of like uh the entire print area. Um and I mean if this was done by hand I am you know very impressed. But even um even um if this was generated I uh I think that um like the details are pretty cool looking. Mhm. Um, and I mean I would imagine, you know, seeing somebody wearing this at like some metal festival and being like, “Hey, cool shirt.” Yes, absolutely. And I feel like a big part of it for me, the reason that I’m immediately drawn to it is the metallic texture, I guess, that you get around the headpiece isn’t the kind of bright gold that I you would immediately imagine. It’s this brassy goldy type of thing that to me really is reflected in the wings of the moths. I don’t know. It just makes everything look super cohesive, which I’m a big fan of. And with the really like pale almost greenish skin tone, it it really matches the color palette. I quite like it. And the other thing that I wanted to check um was color gamut, which is something we haven’t really talked about in this. Um, so I’m going to turn on gamut warning, which gamut warning tells me like if something is within this area of the color spectrum, this gray area of the color spectrum, it may not print too well. Now, let’s actually grab like a bright purple and just take a brush. Um, and I’m so sorry for uh this design, but like um as you can see, I’m drawing it and it is coming out gray. That is because I have the gamut warning set up as gray. Anything gray will or anything that with sorry with my gamut warning turned on. Anything that is out of gamut will turn up gray. So I can turn off the color the gamut warning and you can see that it’s that bright purple. But when I have the gamut warning on it’s gray and that is because um or that is telling me that this is not going to print out very well. Um because a lot of the stuff in here is kind of gray anyway. I can’t really tell um if things are out of gamut. You can actually change the gamut warning color in Photoshop. I don’t know if I want to go into all the details of that, but um I also can just drag the um color picker through here and I can see like it doesn’t look like many of any of these colors are noticeably out of gamut. They all seem to be within um the color spectrum that is printable. Um, and just to say because I realize I didn’t say color gamut is the space of colors that are printable by our printer. If any color is out of gamut, um, if you use out ofgamut colors, our printer can’t print it and it’s going to come out looking funny. Um, I mean funny meaning like just not what you see on the screen. Yeah, it might not be crazy like if you pick a bright red, the printer is not going to pick a bright blue to replace it with instead, but it is not going to match the expectation that you have created for yourself by creating a design that’s out of gamut. Yeah. Is that accurate? Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. And uh and it’s also based on an algorithm. So if you use the it’s not random. So if you use the same color again, you’ll get the same output. But um so you’ll have consistent output. It’s just not going to match your screen whatsoever. Um, and we actually have guidelines on our website. Um, uh, uh, um, I believe it’s called the color matching. Yeah, that’s what it is. It’s called the color matching guide for print on demand products. This is a very good guide because it talks not only about um, color gamut. Um, but like it kind of goes into color theory and like how the same design on two different colored shirts uh might look different even though it legitimately is the same color. Um, and about like the, you know, color context and, you know, gamut and types of fabric and everything. This is a really good read. I recommend anybody who is submitting designs, uh, that are printed with ink uh, read this um, page in our blog. Nice. I will be reading this as I fall asleep today just to, you know, not because it’s boring, but because I like reading before bed. Um, we have like a couple of questions that I really want to get into real quick. Um, and then we will wrap up, but uh, some of these are are I think useful. So one is if it if I design a hat in Printful uh DT flex it will be embroidered and is that uh the only feature that allows removal of the background uh that your design is on? Um there’s a lot of questions within this question and I’m not 100% sure I fully understand. I mean I it sounds like there might be a misunderstanding somewhere. Um but uh embroidery and DT flex are two different printing techniques and um a lot of our hats offer both. There was a time that we only offered um embroidery for our hats, but we started um adding uh uh uh uh DT flex because it is a bit more well flexible um uh than embroidery. Um that being said, a lot of the designs that we looked at earlier um that wouldn’t be suitable for embroidery might also not be suitable for DT Flex because of those small letters that we talked about earlier. um small letters might not adhere when like adhere with the glue that we use to put it on. Um so, uh it is more flexible like you can do more complicated designs. Um but um it so it’s more flexible. You can do more complicated designs, but when you print something on a hat, it doesn’t look as premium as embroidery. Um and also you still have some design uh uh limitations that you need that um but the other part of this question was and is that uh the only feature that allows removal of the background um your design is on. So um the design maker has a background removal tool. Um I would say uh it works in a pinch but I wouldn’t rely on it necessarily. um the background removal and that’s I think to me the case with any background removal tool right it’s it’s not necessarily that oh the design maker one don’t use it but in general if you can create a design in any way without having to then remove a background after do that yeah that thank you for thank you for pointing that out that is exactly what I’m trying to say like um uh background removal tools aren’t perfect um the best way to not have a background is to not have it in the first place yeah uh and uh kind of tied to this previous question. So you talked about if uh the two techniques that we offer on hats, DT flex and embroidery. Um on the subject of embroidery, is it possible to replace the smaller letters with just print and if the font size is too small? So I’m assuming if you’ve submitted something and our team flags it as hey the these letters are too small, can you then say hey can you switch the technique to printing? Uh you can. I actually uh heard this um question a bit differently I think than than you did. Um I heard uh is it possible to combine the DT flex and embroidery techniques which the answer to that is a strong no. Um that isn’t something that we offer. But if if there is if we do flag something as not embroiderable um depending on a few factors which I could get into um you you should be able to edit your order and change the technique from embroidery to um DT flex. Um those details are like if you ordered like something that is split into two shipments and one shipment has already shipped, your order can become locked. And there are other reasons why your order can become locked. But I mean that is why you would want to reach out to our excellent uh customer support team um with uh help figuring out why uh your um order is locked and uh how you can replace the graphic or change the technique. Yeah, but in general very helpful to know. I had no idea that you could uh change it kind of retroactively after you’ve already sent it to be digitized. Uh but it is a great I guess solution unless your letters are that small that they can’t even be printed with or other small details too. Um we don’t really recommend uh being much smaller than like I don’t know a we say a few pixels but like five pixels or so. Anything smaller than that, you run the risk of um of uh not adhering. Um and um also I did want to say it might be a good idea to edit your um product variant or your template in your store after you uh edit the the the specific order as well. Or you could always just like cancel the specific order and then you know edit your template or your variant order again. Mhm. Good to go. And then kind of last question that we’re going to cover today uh is going to be if you create a t-shirt with a design on the back when it is printed uh is it scaled to the size of the shirt? You know, so if uh you create a design uh in the print file template and is it going to be a different size com with a small and then an extra large? Um yes. Yes, we do. Um let me pull up the shirt. Um so can we see my screen? Yeah. Um so basically um in our file guidelines we show uh the max print area and you can see that this is um you know uh disclaimed with an asterisk here. Um basically the maximum print area is going to be um for gra uh for shirts that are uh a certain size. I believe that the uh that the um level where the scaling happens uh is slightly different from shirt to shirt. Um and um uh but basically um the way that you want to design your graphics is printing for the maximum print area and like like don’t try to you know scale down something for a small uh if you’re thinking like well I’m putting it on a small shirt like it’s I have to make it smaller myself. Uh it will become smaller when you print it. Um uh so you uh when you are putting it into the design maker you want to design it for like the maximum possible size um so to speak um and then it will scale down for for smaller sizes and it’s always better when something gets scaled down than when it needs to be scaled up. Uh but yes whenever you are designing a t-shirt you can always assume that whatever you’re designing in if you’re using the sizing of the uh template uh you are designing for the largest shirt available. Mhm. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s the best and safest safest way because if you scale it down trying to compensate for the uh if you scale it down yourself trying to compensate for a smaller size, it will then get scaled down even smaller and then you might come out with something that is uh unexpected but we would consider it expected because that is um described in our uh yeah in our final guidelines here. Yes. Uh this does only apply to uh shirts with a print like area specifically. I feel like uh for um correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe for all over print apparel or for knitwear, you needed to design individual sizes separately. Knitwear. Yes. Um and that’s because each stitch is a pixel and so you kind of have to be specific about your pixels. um all over print um you design for the largest size and it does get scaled down um as well. Um also uh hoodies have a different scaling than um than uh shirts. Like usually shirts have like two print areas like one for like triple XL to like um L I want to say and then M to XS is a different size. Um it it does depend on the shirt. Um uh this is not something I believe is written in the specific guidelines here, but this is something um that you could uh like ask our um customer support team um to help clarify. But I mean the it like the better plan is to plan your graphic for the biggest size and let our system scale down anything that needs to get scaled down. Cool. Uh and I think with that we are going to uh end this. I hope this has been helpful. Even if your design wasn’t chosen, if you applied uh at least maybe some of these tips are applicable to something that uh you have designed before yourself. Uh and if you really like this and you want us to do this again, do let us know. We might look into uh doing another one of these uh things in the future. So stay tuned, subscribe to the channel and we will see you next time. Thank you. See you.

You’ve seen those designs, the shirts with a huge print covering every inch of fabric, the leggings that make you stop scrolling, but how can you actually make these products? Maybe you’ve been waiting to add these to your collections, or perhaps you just want to make one for yourself. Either way, same roadblock. How do I actually design them? Whether you don’t know how or didn’t even know this was an option, I’m going to show you how to design your first all over print product in Photoshop, Adobe Express, and Canva using Printull’s print guidelines. Just a clean design file ready to upload. Let’s get into it. Before we open any design app, there’s one thing worth understanding because it’ll change how you think about designing these products entirely. Not every shirt is created equal. A regular direct to garment shirt has fixed print areas. The chest, the back, and often the sleeves. You design inside that box, and everything outside, it’s just plain fabric. But an all over print garment, the entire thing is your canvas. Front, back, sleeves, even labels. There are no boxes. That’s what makes all over print products or AOP products so exciting to design and why the file needs to be built differently from the start. Printful has two types of AOP products, synthetic and cotton. All over synthetic prints on polyester fabric. Bold, vibrant, ideal for active wear like leggings, bomber jackets, and athletic shorts. Colors really pop. Allover cotton, also called directive fabric, prints water-based inks directly onto cottonri fabric. It’s softer and more breathable. Think premium hoodies and everyday tees. Both require the same design process, same templates, just a different feel on the body. We’re focusing on all over synthetic apparel, but the workflow is the same for cotton. So, whatever AOP product you plan to make, you’re covered. Now, every AOP product, be it synthetic or cotton, has its own print guideline file with its own dimensions. And that file is the difference between a design that fits perfectly and one that doesn’t work at all. So, don’t skip this next step. The design maker is great for quick edits, but when it comes to building an AOP design from scratch, most brand owners design with tools like Photoshop or Canva. They work on the apps they already know and then upload the finished file to the design maker. That’s exactly what we’re doing here. And the key to making it work is Printull’s print guideline files. Let me show you where to find them. From your Printull dashboard, go to the product catalog and find the product you want to design. We’ll use the all over print yoga leggings as our example. Click here to scroll down to the file guidelines tab and download the placement files by clicking download. Once you unzip the folder, you’ll find a PSD file, that’s the Photoshop file, and a PNG version, that’s an image file. So, you can use either depending on your app. Dive into the design apps. Let’s talk about the most common mistakes people make when designing AOP products. Trust me, knowing these upfront will save you a lot of time and frustration later. On products made of thicker fabrics like backpacks and fanny packs, designs tend to print darker than they look on screen. This means colors that are close to each other on the color wheel, like dark pink and red, can end up blending together and losing definition. The fix is simple. Increase the contrast between those colors so each one holds its own when printed. Always delete your print guideline layer before exporting. Sounds obvious, but it’s genuinely the easiest thing to forget, especially when you’re excited about a design and just want to get it uploaded. And yes, if you forget, the guideline will show up in the final product exactly as it looks on your screen. Grid lines, labels, and all. Use the sRGB color profile when working in professional apps like Photoshop. sRGB is the standard Printful works with, so starting here means no color surprises when your product arrives. Don’t overlook the stitch color. White for light designs, black for dark ones. Quick decision, but it makes a bigger difference than you think, especially up close on the finished product. If you’re designing AOP bags, the stitch options are a little different. Instead of white or black, you’re choosing between clear or black stitching. Fill the entire print area, and I mean all of it. Every corner, every edge, all the way to the borders of the print guideline. If any part of the print area is left uncovered, that’s exactly what you’ll see on the finished product. Bare fabric and on an all over print product, it’s impossible to miss. And finally, don’t try to match your design across seams. All over print products are cut from printed fabric and then sewn together, which means even a perfectly aligned design on screen can shift in the finished product. If your pattern is supposed to continue from the front to the back or onto the sleeves, there’s a good chance it won’t line up. Keep each placement independent and lean into abstract or repeating patterns instead. That way, there’s nothing to misalign. Keep these in mind as we go through the design process, and you’ll see exactly why each one matters. For the leggings, I’ll open the PSD file in Photoshop. This is your design blueprint. It makes sure everything goes in the right place. The template that shows you exactly where the print areas are, where the safe zones are, and what size your design needs to be. From here, drop in your design elements or design from scratch and start building. You can see exactly which part of the leggings you’re designing. The right leg, the left leg, the front, the back. For this leggings design, I approached it as if I were running a yoga brand, targeting yoga practitioners and wellness enthusiasts who want something bold and colorful. So, I went to Adobe Stock and found this pattern that I loved and knew I could turn into a repeating tile in Photoshop. The plan is simple. Take this pattern, turn it into a repeat tile, and cover the entire print file with it, going all the way to the edges and beyond. Abstract repeating patterns like this are perfect for AOP because there’s no precise alignment needed, and nothing important gets lost in the seams. That said, if your design has any key elements, a logo, text, anything you need people to actually see, make sure those stay within the safe print area. Anything outside it risks getting cut off in the final product. From here, I’ll scale the pattern, duplicate it, and fill the print area, copying, pasting, and merging the flower layers until it’s all covered. It’s a fairly manual process, but I’ll speed through it so you get the idea. While you’re working, keep your design layers below the template guidelines in the layers panel. That way, you can always see exactly how the print will sit on the leggings in real time. One important rule, always cover the entire print area, including the bleed area just outside the safe zone. That’s where the seams get sewn together. Leave it blank and you might see white fabric peeking through when the garment is stretched. Not a good look. For the background, I went with a color gradient, a simple rectangle covering the whole garment created with a gradient tool using a linear gradient going from a warm brown into a dark pink. And just like we covered earlier, notice how I’m not trying to match the flowers from the right leg to the left leg. Perfect alignment across panels is never guaranteed, so it’s not worth designing for. Each placement is independent, and that’s by design. When you’re done, make sure you hide or delete the template layer. You don’t want to upload your design with the guide layer. It will turn out like this otherwise. Now, do the same for the rest of the print areas. For the yoga leggings, that means the front waistband, back waistband, and inside label. Each one gets its own file. Each one gets its own design layer. Before you export, a few things to check. Check your design resolution. Your file needs to be at least 150 dpi. Anything less, and your print will look blurry on the actual product. Nobody wants that. The print guidelines we’re working with already have the correct DPI set, but you can always double check in Photoshop by going to image and image size right here. Set the correct color profile. Work in sRGB, not RGB, not CMYK, sRGB. To check it in Photoshop, go to edit, then assign profile, and make sure sRGB is selected. If you’re working in other color profiles, your colors will look different on screen than they do in the final print. SRRGB keeps what you see consistent with what you get. Now, export the file in PNG. Go to File, Export, Export As, and select PNG. Then hit export. That’s your file done. Then in the design maker, upload your PGs to each placement. Legs, front waistband, back waistband, and label. And that’s it. Our yoga leggings are ready for fulfillment. Not super comfortable in Photoshop yet? No problem. You can use an online tool like Adobe Express. Think of it as a middle ground between Photoshop and Canva, which we’ll get to shortly. For this example, I’ll use the Oliver Print unisex athletic long shorts. Same first step as before. Download the file guidelines and grab both the PSD and PNG files. From the Adobe Express homepage, click the plus button to start a new project. Then select custom size. This is important. You want your canvas to match the exact dimensions of the print guideline file. Adobe Express supports files up to 8,000 by 8,000 pixels, which is plenty. The shorts file I downloaded is 7,922 pixels wide by 4,650 pixels tall. So, I’ll enter those dimensions here. Now, click upload and select the PNG file for the front placement of the shorts. See how it fits the canvas perfectly? That’s exactly what you want. To add your design elements, click add content.

If you have your own design files ready, upload them by clicking upload. You can also browse elements for ready-made design assets. And don’t sleep on the background section. It’s useful for finding patterns and textures that cover the entire garment in a few clicks. You can manage your layers in the top right corner of your screen. And here’s an important habit to build. Keep the print guideline layer at the very top at all times. That way, you can always see how your design sits underneath it and how the final product will actually look. I also recommend locking the guideline layer so you don’t accidentally move it. Click the more options button on that layer and select lock. Done. Your blueprint stays in place while you design freely underneath it. For this design, I’m going with a dark baroque skeleton style. The kind of aesthetic that speaks to goth and alternative communities. black background, gold baroque ornaments, dramatic and unapologetically dark. I found this readyto-use skull pattern on Adobe Stock that works perfectly here, but I won’t upload it just yet. In Adobe Express, you can go to add-ons and add a tool called motive. Motive lets you generate seamless patterns from shapes or uploaded images, which is exactly what we need. Since I already have my skull image, I’ll click upload image. Open it. Then scroll down to settings, find spacing, and drag the slider all the way to zero. No gaps between repeats, just like you see in the preview. Then click add to page. And just like that, the pattern is done. I’ll close motive and expand the design to cover the entire front placement. Once your design is ready, select the print guideline layer, click more options, and unlock it. Then in the same options bar, click the delete icon to remove it. Almost there. To export, go to file, then download, and make sure PNG is selected as the format. You’ll see the dimensions we set earlier, exactly what Printull needs. Click download. Now head to Printull and upload your front shorts design to the front placement. Look at that. The design covers the entire garment perfectly. No extra steps needed. These shorts also have a back placement. You can design it separately in Adobe Express following the same steps or use the duplicate feature in the design maker to mirror your front design to the back. Your call. One step you don’t want to skip, choosing your stitch color. This is the thread color used when the garment is cut and sewn during fulfillment, so it affects how the final product looks up close. Go to the product section and choose between white and black. I’ll go with black since it matches my design best. Once you’re happy with everything, save your design. Now, let’s do the same thing in Canva for those of you who live there in that app. And honestly, same. One thing to note before we start, Canvas’s maximum file size currently is 8,000x 3,125 pixels. And some AOP products have guidelines that go beyond that, especially larger items like hoodies or dresses. But before you switch apps, there’s a workaround worth trying. If you’re creating a seamless pattern, the template size doesn’t actually matter. As long as your pattern tile is square and truly seamless, Canva can handle it just fine. Here’s how. Create a new design in Canva at 3000×3,000 pixels.

Build your pattern using elements or pick one from Canvas’s library and download it as a PNG. Then upload it to the design maker

and use the pattern feature, specifically the block mode, to tile it across the entire product. Just make sure the spacing is set to zero and you’re good to go. If that doesn’t work for your specific design, it might be worth jumping into Photoshop or Adobe Express instead. But for most AOP products, like the ones we’re working with today, Canva does the job perfectly. For this example, I’ll be designing the allover print women’s crew neck t-shirt, which has a print file that’s 3,900 pixels wide by 4,950 pixels tall, well within Canvas limits. To get started, open Canva and click the plus button to create a new design. Select custom size and enter the dimensions of your print guideline file. In this case, 3,900x 4,950 pixels. I know it feels like an extra step instead of just uploading the PNG straight away, but matching the dimensions first means you’re designing in exactly the right space from the start. Click create new design. Now upload your front placement PNG. Go to uploads, click upload files, and select your file.

If needed, expand it to fill the entire canvas. And now, let the creative juices flow. For this t-shirt, I’m taking it back to the 2000s, which we can officially call that retro now, right? Fluid shapes, liquid metal, colors bleeding into each other. Somewhere between a Windows XP screen saver and a Sony Ericson ad from 2003. No hard edges, no sharp lines. Head to elements to browse shapes, graphics, or even generate images using Canvas AI tool. There’s a lot to work with. For this design, I wanted a stripe pattern that covers the entire garment. Canva has plenty of options here, but I’m going to bring in my own artwork using uploads, something I’ve used in previous designs that fits this Y2K vibe perfectly. I’ll apply a filter to make it pop in the meantime. Then expand it until it covers the entire canvas. Once you start adding design elements, you’ll want to keep your layers organized. Right click one of the layers, go to layers, select show layers. From here, drag your print guideline layer to the very top. And now it’s just about placing your elements, adjusting them, and checking how everything looks under the guideline. Keep going back to show layers to make sure your guideline stays on top. That’s your north star throughout the whole process. For the background, I’m going with a gradient. I’ll select the background layer, choose the colors tool, and head to the default gradient color section. This purple orange gradient is immediately catching my eye. It’s giving 2000’s tech energy, which is exactly the vibe we’re going for. From there, I’ll go up to the document color section, open the gradient for more options, and change the style to vertical, just like this. Then I’ll go back to show layers, select my stripes layer, click edit, and remove the filter I applied earlier by clicking file options and then remove. Oh, and one last thing. If you look closely at the top part of the front placement print guideline, you’ll notice there’s a collar section. You have two options here. You can extend your design into it just as we see here, or you can fill it with a solid color that complements your design. Either way, it will be cut and sewn together as the collar of the finished garment. Just design it directly in the collar section at the top of your print guideline file. This front design is looking pretty much done. So, this is the point when I’d move on to the back and sleeve placements and repeat the same process. When you’re happy with your design, open the show layers panel one last time and delete the print guideline layer by right-clicking and selecting delete. Then go to file, download. Make sure PNG is selected and click download. A quick note on resolution. Canva doesn’t have a manual DPI setting, but with the canvas dimensions we set at the start, your file will be right at 150 dpi, exactly what Printull needs. Back on Printull, find the all over print women’s crew neck t-shirt and upload your design to each placement. See how it fits perfectly and hits Printull’s quality requirements. Just like the leggings earlier, this shirt is also cut and sewn at the seams. So, avoid trying to match elements across placements. Either here on the design maker or on Canva. I’m keeping each placement design independent. Nothing that’s supposed to continue from the front to the back or from the body to the sleeves. And don’t forget to check the mock-ups tab for a preview of how the finished shirt will look. And that’s your first all over print design. You’ve got the guidelines, the workflow, and the mistakes to avoid. Now go actually make the thing. Curious about what happens after you upload? How these products are actually made? I’ve got a video on exactly that. See you there.

Every time a new season comes around, trend forecasters drop their fancy fashion reports, and they’re always full of phrases like maximalist sportsware energy or handmade collage aesthetics. And look, it sounds cool, right? But then you actually sit down, you open your laptop, and you just stare at the screen because what does maximalist energy actually look like on a t-shirt? That’s exactly what we’re fixing today. Hey everyone, I’m Elizabeth and welcome to our YouTube channel if you’re new here. After digging through some 2026 design trend forecasts, I picked out three of the biggest t-shirt trends of the year and I’m going to show you how to build them from scratch using Canva. No Photoshop, no design degree, no artistic talent. Seriously, I don’t have any, so you don’t need any either. And stick around until the end because I will show you how to upload your designs to real Printful products. Cuz a pretty file in Canva is great and all, but it’s useless if it actually doesn’t look good in a real t-shirt. Let’s just dive right into trend number one. Naive design. Naive design draws from art brute, which is this idea that untrained spontaneous creation is just as valuable as high art. on a t-shirt in 2026. That translates into slightly childish flat doodles with thick wobbly outlines and bold text that looks like handwriting. So, for our naive design attempt, specifically in Canva, I’m going to look for some inspiration first. Canva actually has a lot of these templates. Let’s say you’re just looking for illustration. I like this doodle. I’m going to paste it in here. This is a cute illustration, but it’s a little bit too polished. I feel like when we’re talking about naive design, we’re looking for messy. So, these are just some things that we have as inspo. One of Kim’s bestkept secrets accidentally, I think, is that if you like something, there is a way to find similar stuff to it. One way, if you see an illustration like this, you can click on the three dots that say more. Go down and click on info. You are either going to get to click see more like this which is Canva looking for similar things on purpose or sometimes things are part of collections. The same artists upload a whole collection of images and in this case we have a collection. So I can click here and I can see a bunch of similar style illustrations right in here that I can also utilize. So, let’s say I’m looking for an illustration that has this kind of watch here. Clicking on it, changing its color. It’s going to be super easy. Make it bigger, smaller, flip it, rotate it, do a bunch of stuff to it. But you have a lot of great material on Canva that you should be utilizing. Now, what I want is maybe a particular theme because in this inspo image, we have this homemade bakery thing. I sort of want an illustration with bread in it. So maybe if we go into this elements tab, you click here, search elements, and I’ll write down bread illustration.

This is actually cute. I’ve taken this cute little doodle of toast. The second major part of naive design is text that is kind of handwritten. So let’s click on text and let’s see what kind of fonts we have in here. What you can do is you can browse this way or you can go into one of these categories at the top. Click through them. I like the handwriting category for this particular choice. Something like that could totally work. And then let’s say I don’t know bread lover. So these are the basics that we want to be designing around. And I want to show you another Canva hack. This text looks great, but I want it to be slightly differently shaped. Now, what people usually do is they click on this and they click on effects and they go into curve and they just make it a very even curve and that’s about it. Which can work, but I feel like if you want more control, you might want slightly different tools. And this is where one of my favorite Canva apps comes in. So, I already have it down here, but if you don’t, you would go into apps on your very left and find it that way. So, if I click on TypCraft and I write in what I want, bread lover, I get to pick a font. And it’s not going to be a one to one of the fonts that you have available in Canva overall and the fonts that you have here, but you can upload your own custom font into TypCraft, which is helpful. So, we have Breadlover in here, and what I’m going to do is warp the text slightly. So, there’s a bunch of different effects here. You can click through them. I want it to be just a little bit warped. Just slightly a little bit uncanny. And you can get this slight warping. If you wanted it to be super warped, you can do this. You could do this. This is actually kind of fun. But I want a slight wave. And I want it to maybe come up like right here. So it looks like handwriting. And then I’ve picked my color, which is just going to be black in this case cuz we’re going to be adding some elements to this later. And then I’ll add this to design. And so you can see the difference here between these two texts. One is a little bit straighter and one is a little bit more curved. What I’m also going to do is instead of bread lover like this, I’m going to separate it into two. It’s all right. Bread. Pick my goi hand font. Pick my warping and slightly adjust it. Add it. Next, I will also duplicate this. Change the text to lover. Maybe slightly adjust the curve and update the element. All right. So, we have two slightly improved pieces of text. And I’m just going to position them where I want them. I want them to curve around the piece of bread. And let’s say this is going to be the base of my design. It is not perfectly centered. It’s not supposed to be. I’m going to actually just make it all bigger. Put it in to here. You can see these purple lines. Those are your Canva guides for where you want things placed. And once I’m happy with the overall composition of things, one of my favorite things uh is drawing on top or underneath whatever illustration you have. So on your left in this bar, you’re going to go into tools and you’re going to pick whatever you’d like. So there’s lines, there’s shapes. I’m just going to click on draw. I like this kind of secondary marker. So this one you can see is transparent which might be a problem for print on demand. And then this one is not transparent. That is what we want. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to find a color that complements your lines. In this case I might go for this like medium brown. See how they look kind of. Yeah. And it’s going to add a little something extra to our design. So let’s make the weight a little bit higher. Up to 40. And what you’re going to do is you’re just going to trace the whole thing, including the text that you created. You could trace it and leave it like this. But what I feel like that creates is a slightly jaggedy edge. We can actually see what it looks like. So you change your draw tool to select tool. Click on this. Move backwards. And you can kind of see that it’s like a little bit jaggedy. Another style that you could create with this type of drawing. Let me close this. Pick the drawing tool and draw lines like this.

And what that’s going to create, let us actually go into position layer so you can see how many different lines we have here. And I’m going to grab this and I’m going to drag it all the way up. put it on top. And you can see how it looks way goofier immediately. Now, because it’s going to be the background, I’ll actually take all of these lines. You can hold shift and you can select every single line layer. And I’m going to change the color to be maybe lighter. So, this is just one way to make it look more like a drawing than just an illustration. And what I would do, I quite like this color, especially if it’s going to be, let’s see, on a lighter t-shirt. You know, it looks a little bit fun. So, what I’ll do, same thing. I’ll pick the same color. And if you’re not sure which one it was, you can use the eyropper tool and just click here. And so, we have the right color now. And I’ll draw the same way over all of the text as well. And it does not have to be perfect. In fact, the less perfect it is, the better it’s going to look in my opinion. Make it not match. You know, do that on purpose. So, here once again, we go to the very bottom to get our text, move it to the top, and see what that looks like. So, this to me looks as childish as I can get it. This looks messy. And don’t worry if you don’t like some of this. You can erase things, right? But I quite like this. I can also select individual things, maybe move them slightly. That is also very helpful. So, I have my design. And this is naive design. But I’m going to call this one done. And we’re going to move on. Our next trend is collage design, which is kind of an analog rebellion to anything clean and digital. To replicate that feeling, you’ve got to create as much texture as you can. Paper, ripped edges, mixed media, like combining photos and illustrations and all of that with a bunch of layering. So, let’s get into it. So, what we’re going to do is look for stuff like this, paste it in, and then stay on the page and see what else similar comes up. This is a little bit too clean for me still, just because it’s all a collage of images, right? What we want is mixed media if we can get it. Okay, that is a little bit better. It’s a bit more layered with doodles here. I know this is not exactly what we want, but I do like this kind of cutout of a mouth. So, let’s keep that and see if we can create something a bit more punk inspired or I don’t know, 2000’s pop punk maybe. I quite like this graphic. Let me just paste it in. friends bow. Also see what else we can get that is similar. So this is one of those examples where we don’t have a collection, but I can click see more like this and I will see things of a similar style. I quite like these headphones and I’m just going to go through and paste a bunch of stuff in. I really like this. It’s a little bit cringe in the way that 2014 Tumblr is cringe, but it it is it is my era. It is the stuff that I used to really love. So like Canva first tries to create something that’s going to be of a similar style and then it goes into the same subject matter but in a different style. So let’s see what comes up when we click collage in elements. And you can click on see all to just see the graphics. And so these stars are kind of cool but they’re on this letter paper. What I am wondering is if I can change the coloring of this slightly. Okay, that is actually very responsive, which doesn’t always work with all of the photobased images that you can get on camera, but since this one works, let’s keep it. I quite like these exclamation marks as well. I kind of want a cassette tape as well. This one’s a good example because it is a photo. It’s not really an illustration, which is kind of what I’m looking for here. And then what I’m realizing is that I have quite a few of these photo-based elements, but I don’t have enough of these types of illustrations. So, what I’m going to do again, click the three dots, click info, see more like this, and then we can see a bunch of similar stuff. So, I quite like this. I like this star. I also want one of these, which is kind of like a semi-transparent tape corner. Remember that with these kinds of semi-transparent files where you can see stuff through it, you have to make sure that you put it on top of a solid background. So, I can put it here and print it and it’s going to come out okay. But I can’t have no background behind it once I’m exporting. So, let’s just keep this for now and play around with it.

I like this, but I don’t like the fact that it has this hard cut off edge because if it was a poster, it would be very cool to just put it on here. But since we’re going for t-shirts, I really recommend keeping that outside area of the design a little bit cleaner. So, we’re going to have to find a way for this to poke out of somewhere else.

Let’s grab this. Use it in the background. Grab the cassette tape and we’re going to make it our center piece. If it’s hard to align it because there’s so many different elements that this is snapping to, click on your element, click on position, and then just use align to page. So, center and middle. And then we have this. Let’s put it somewhere maybe here. have this which I’m going to put right on the cassette tape somewhere right here. Move this out of the way a little bit and put it over top to front. Then I love this tape. Actually going to maybe make it a little bit bigger. So, these headphones are cool and they’re kind of light, so they could go over this part of the cassette tape. All of these illustrations should be smaller so that we can have a little bit of focus on the main thing. And let’s say we’re going to put it on here. Let’s make sure that this tape is in the right spot. You can see there’s a lot of layers. So, you can go in here and just drag things where you want them. Then, of course, our mouth element, which I still really enjoy. And you can see that with something like this, I don’t have the color appearing at the very top, meaning that I can’t really recolor it very easily using the tools. But if I want it to be a bit more red, there is a little hack for that. For these kinds of photo elements, I go into edit and I go into adjust right here. And you just get these adjustments of of photos, right? So, this has already been adjusted as you can see cuz it came from a template. What I’m going to do is I’m going to make it warm and red. You can see that this kind of creates a tint over here. So I like this and even warmer so that we can match it to these colors and the stars. We can also do something similar with this tape. You can see that there are colors at the top and you can switch them but they’re not going to completely recolor everything. So this background, this green background, let me actually zoom in is light. I won’t be able to make it super dark, right? None of this will really make it black. But I can adjust it to fit the colors that I have. So this is quite pink, but maybe a little too pink. So let’s move it here. And maybe make it a bit more orangey. Like that. All right. What else do we have? We have these super silver headphones. Once again, it’s a photo, so I can click on adjust and just make the temperature slightly warmer. Now, it’s still silver, but it’s less aggressively silver. And then we also have this hand. We have to figure out where it’s going to be poking out of. I think I can use this tape that I really liked for that. I just need to figure out where it makes sense to do it. It’s a lot of messing around with these individual elements and finding a way that this is actually going to look good.

What I like is that we can see the lines at the top of the cassette tape where you know you would normally write down what you recorded on it. What I will do is I will create some fake handwriting on here as well. We’ll click on text. If we want to lean into the cringe energy that I exhibit all the time, we could do angry girl music. Let’s call it that. Change the font. Maybe something kind of like this. And if I bold it, I think it looks like pen writing. So, let’s make sure that it’s multiple lines. And let’s try and fit it in.

The gap between the lines is a little bit too big. So you could either click on this T with the two arrows to go into advanced settings and make the line spacing a little bit smaller or and this is something that I usually prefer doing is I just make those lines separate elements.

just because you get a little bit more control in placement and you can really, you know, play around with it. So here, for example,

let’s zoom in. I’m going to grab this, hold down control so that it stops snapping to everything. Put it right here. I feel like that looks like it makes sense. And then I want this eye to not touch any of the longer letters. So I’m actually going to once again hold down control and put it right here. What we’re going to do is try to make this blend in a little bit more. And you can do several things with it. You can uh use any of the effects that are there, right? But, you know, it’s not something that is really going to create this written feeling, at least in this specific case. So, what I want to do is I want to make it a little bit transparent, just a tiny bit. And then, as far as color goes, I’m going to make it not a true black. I’m looking for a black blue somewhere along these lines. you’re not like really going to see it that well on your screen, but once it’s printed, I feel like that makes a big difference in avoiding just that straight up black look. So, our last thing that we’re going to do is just make sure that all the colors that we want are in here. So, for example, this is a slightly different shade in the back here than this and this. So, I want a bit more more cohesion. I will take this, click on the light color at the top and adjust it to be whatever I would like. So in this case, I think this kind of very light beige is my favorite. You can see the color code here. And if you click on it, you can also copy the color code down here. Going to go in here also change this to the color code I just copied. And I’m going to do the same thing with this as well. Go into the light color. Change the color to something I just copied. Right. So that is all more matchy. And I’ll go in here, pick the red, and make it a little bit less orange. Just maybe here. Yeah. So it matches the tape

and make it stand out a bit more. just so it balances this tape out because I feel like it’s kind of this very bright bright splotch of color over in in in the corner. Another thing that we can do to counteract that is also edit adjust and then take down uh the vibrance or the saturation of the colors slightly. You know, it’s not going to do a lot, especially when it comes to vibrance, but you could do a lot of damage with saturation. So I’ll just take it down just a touch and then leave the vibrance as is. So I would say that this is my quick attempt at a collage design. You can see that the semi-transparent elements that we have which is this tape and this text are on top of a solid background which is very important when it comes to printing. And it does have this mixed media idea of illustration and photo and paper and texture and tape. So, I actually quite like this. And if it was printed in the middle of this kind of boxy tea, I feel like that is something I would definitely wear. Lastly, we’ve got something called maximalist sport. Over the past couple of years, people have been into wearing distinctly athletic clothes in their everyday looks. We had the long boxing sneakers, big basketball shorts, and frankly me saying that sportsware is trending is like saying water is wet. But this is a more fashiony take on sportsware. It takes the football jerseys, stripes, player numbers, varsity fonts, and crashes it into unexpected colors, tropical florals, and bold patterns. So, for my take for Maximalist Sport, I’ve actually decided to go for something that’s not a standard t-shirt, but an all over print sports jersey t-shirt. I just downloaded the design files that we have, the the print file templates for the all over print unisex sports jersey and imported them into Canva. So, this is what it looks like. It’s just the semi-transparent image with just sections clear. You can see if I change the color, the clear sections is the stuff that is going to be visible and then the white sections is not going to be visible on your final product. So, we’re going to use this front template and a similar looking back template with just a, you know, a different color to create our jersey. So, something that I’ve been seeing a lot is these very bright, vibrant colors and checkerboard patterns. I really like a checkerboard. So, let us just find a checkered pattern. This one is cool just because it’s not symmetrical. So, if you compare it to this one, it has a center and clearly two symmetrical sides versus this one is a little bit less symmetrical looking, especially if we’re going to apply it slightly at a diagonal. So, let’s go for it. Let’s switch it to a bright color. I kind of want to go for a yellowy orange.

So that’s going to be our base. We don’t want the background to be white. We want something a bit more interesting. So we’re just going to use simple shapes to change the background color uh more easily. You could just, you know, go into position and and find this and change the background color this way. But you can also, and we are going to need simple shapes anyway later, go in to elements, close this search, and then you have a bunch of sections over here. I go into shapes, which is a category, and I pick just a regular basic rectangle. A slight tip, especially if you’re not super new to design tools, you know that there’s always uh different shortcuts for things. If you just press R, it’s going to create a rectangle for you. Similarly, if you want a circle, you can press C and it’s going to create a circle for you. They are going to be uh one by one and then you can change the shape of them later on going forward. So let’s just make a rectangle for first for the bottom part. Just fill in this bottom part and pick a color that is going to be dark like a maybe like a dark brown. Something along these lines like not black but chocolatey. move it to the back and we have a very nice pattern in my opinion. Then I think we can play with the player number idea. Go into text. Just pick any type of text you want. Let’s go for, I don’t know, number 12. I don’t know. Do you have a favorite sports player that is number 12? Let me know. And I’ll actually stick with this light yellow color for now just so I can see what I’m doing and look into something that is going to be more of a varsity font. So you can either go through the categories at the very top right here and look for something that is going to match the idea that we have. There’s the sports section for example. Or you could just type in into the search bar something like varsity and see what comes up and you would get a lot of the same results. But I quite liked the stuff that we had in sport and this actually fits exactly what I’m looking for. There is also this yearbook solid one which is better for this tall long type of number. And then also we have boxing which looks promising. You know what? Let’s stick with this just because it’s not completely straight at the very top and at the very bottom of the one. I like it. I’m going to stick with that. So, we are going to place this in the very center of the page. Once again, if you’re not sure where the center is, look for either the solid purple line or click on position arrange and then make sure that it’s centered on the page. Uh, we are going to be a number 12, which is going to be right here. And I also want some kind of maybe motivational phrasing in here because it’s not going to be a real sports jersey. We can kind of play around with it a bit more. And we should probably go for some extra text. Not necessarily something sports team related, but always picked last could be good. I know this is gigantic. We’re just going to make it way smaller in a second. Or you can just go in here and type up, I don’t know, 70, and it’s going to be way smaller. So, you can see that in the middle there. I just made it all caps immediately. But something that is important to pay attention to is this line right about here. What that indicates is the fold line. So essentially where your torso folds around is going to be right where this dashed line is. So, I would genuinely recommend taking both of these elements and making them smaller and then centering them that way just so you can make sure that it really fits well on the product. I’ll also create a bit more space around that 12 so I can make it a little bigger and, you know, move things around. I don’t like how

starkly pale all of this is. So, let’s see if I can make it a little bit. So, if I just pick the same yellow and move that yellow shade lighter to see if something like this could actually work. Yeah, that could be cool. Um, I also might want uh an outline on this. So I will go into effects, click outline. It immediately creates an outline. And then you can really play play around with the thickness of it all. Yeah, I think that looks good. And you can also change the color of the outline. I think this is a little bit too dirty of a brown, but I also can’t make it the same dark brown, otherwise it’s going to blend in. So we’re going to move it a little bit up. Kind of like this. I’m also going to pick this outline, choose the same color for it, and then make it thicker just so it’s visible. You can see also the little spikes here, which become way more obvious with the outline. I think those are very cool. Can make this a little bit bigger. And maybe make this three lines. Reduce the line spacing. Just make this larger just so we can really see those spikes as well as possible. Something that you can also do that might be fun is creating uh a fake logo. I’m just going to create a fake smiley face logo, especially with this kind of message. So, we go back into elements right here. We write down smiley face

and look into graphics and see if there’s anything that matches. And let’s say we want something fairly symmetrical, be along these lines, but also a little bit more interesting. Sad smiley face.

This is, I think, exactly what I’m looking for. And then I’m going to switch the color to the same color of our text or the same color of our background, whichever I think looks better. I think this is nice. And then match it to our

entire idea. So that goes in there. Might be a little bit small. We can move things around. We can see where we want everything. You can use these armpit sections here as your guide uh just to see where things are going to be located. So you can imagine that the numbers are going to start right around here. And then we have this smiley face. I want to make it look a little bit more like a logo. So I’m also going to add a circular background behind it. So let me just add a circle. I pressed C just like we talked about before. Make it maybe in this big position. Layers. Move it behind this. Make it yellow perhaps or this kind of same color.

Make sure that it’s centered with the element. And then also maybe give it an outline.

Make sure that you’re selecting outline color. Change the color to match. Change the thickness if you want. And then this is basically a little logo that we’ve created for ourselves. I know it’s not a real logo, but good enough. You can also group it, position, arrange, and make sure that it’s centered on the page as well, just like our other elements are. So, let’s say this is the front, but we are not completely done yet. We also have the collar, the back, the two sleeves. The logic is going to be pretty much the same. What I’m just going to do for this section here, use the two colors that we have in the background, which is the yellow and the brown, and create rectangles. If I go into layers, I have this background layer here that is brown. I just copy paste it and move it to where I want it. So in this case, I think I want the outer edge of the collar to be dark and the inner edge to be light. So I’ll leave it here and I’ll copy another line. And then that is going to be our yellow line. We move all of this to the back behind our template but in front of the pattern that we had right here. So, we have an outer part of our collar, an inner part of our collar, and the whole front of the jersey. We are going to fast forward through me creating the back because it’s going to be pretty much the same. I’m just going to keep that number bigger and in the center. And the sleeves are going to be all colored. So, give me a second. So, I’ve created the the front here. And then the back section as well. Just kind of always pick last never first. That kind of idea. And I’ve also created the sleeves in a similar size right here. And they’re exactly the same. This one is the right sleeve. This one is the left sleeve. I’ve just added the logo in here as well. What you’re going to do next is you’re just going to delete all of the guidelines that you have everywhere. And then you’re going to export these files the way that they are and go into the Printful product catalog. So right now I’m in the Printful product catalog on the all over print recycled unisex sports jersey page. I picked my size and I’m just going to click start designing. We’re going to enter the design maker. It’s going to auto select all of the sizes. I just want the large so I deselect everything. And that is it. And we have just the one. You can also have your choice of stitch color, white or a black, depending on what color your design is. Mine is a little bit darker. So, I’m going to go with black thread. And I’m going to add all of our placements that we created. So, upload or drop your designs here. Yes, we understand all the terms of service. Save and close. And then upload. Once all of your files are uploaded, just apply them one by one. So, we have them. I’ve named them front, back, right, and left. Apply the front to the front placement. And you can see how it lines up perfectly and how it looks on the right. We move on to the back placement.

Apply the back placement. And you can immediately see what it looks like. It might not be perfectly aligned right around the edges, but looks great either way. And you can see that collar worked out as well. And then we go into right sleeve. Apply right.

Left sleeve apply left. And you can see how there’s going to be the smiley face logo over here and no logo over here. So, as you can see, it’s super easy as long as we did the work beforehand because we designed within a print file template. It all fits perfectly. And you can really see how it paid off. So, this is just a 3D rendering on the right. But if you click on mockups in the top right corner, you can also see what it’s going to look like when it’s all sewn together. I love it. Looks great to me. This is how you upload your designs. You can then save them as templates right here or just push them to your store. And that’s it. Three trends, three designs, and we did the whole thing in Canvas.