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.
Hey,
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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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.