Updating collections in your Threadless Shop is one of the items on my Store Maintenance CHECKLIST.
Create collections and keep them up to date so that customers can easily find relevant items. I have my Ridiculous Cat Collection, Dogs, Space, Best Face Masks, Forest, a collection with Best Gift Ideas, and also my collection with Black and White Cat Designs.
Now, I’ve added a collection called New Arrivals. I will make sure it always shows my 10 to 15 most recent designs.
These past few days weren’t the best. I’ve been tired and slept a lot, I was not very productive 🙁
But at least I was inspired to express my feelings through art:
I added it to my Threadless store.
Edit (2021 June 22): Design moved from my Fox Shiver store to my TRUFFLEPIG store.
This video is a reminder from Threadless that during March you earn double for every regular t-shirt sold:
If you want me to earn a lot of money you can buy t-shirts in my store 🙂
The dark side of freelancing is — unstable income.
I like being an independent artist and programmer. I wouldn’t want to work in someone else’s firm. But there’s one thing that people new to freelancing have a hard time dealing with. It’s the fact that income is so unstable that some months you might not even earn anything.
I’ve already written about the fact that February is a bad month for designers. For example, one of the websites just paid me $4.71 for my designs sold during the past month.
But unstable income also means that there are months when you earn way more than you would earn in your standard employment. Remember, it just takes a while to get to that point. Don’t quit halfway.
TeePublic is one of the best places where you can sell your designs.
I don’t earn there as much as I earn on Threadless but TeePublic has the best uploader — very fast, easy to use, you can submit your art and start selling on all products in minutes.
Until recently, I didn’t know that TeePublic had an Instagram account dedicated to helping artists:
There’s also TeePublic Blog with a lot of helpful tips about designing, selling promoting, and tagging.
And if you are already a TeePublic artist and are subscribed to their Artist newsletter you get useful emails about how to improve your store and get more sales.
If you sell your designs on Threadless you can get sales in one of two ways:
I wrote about it before and Threadless made videos about it too.
But can you even get organic sales or do you have to promote your store and find customers yourself? I downloaded my sales report from Threadless and checked.
Turns out over 99% of my sales are organic! That means people who buy my designs come from Threadless, not from my poor marketing efforts.
This is great news if — like me — you don’t have many followers on Twitter or Instagram, or if you are not good at marketing, or if you don’t like doing all that promoting stuff and prefer to simply create new designs. It’s still a good idea to promote your art on social media and slowly gain followers, but even if you don’t do that, you can still get sales — same as me.
Just yesterday I wrote about why you might not see your designs on Threadless. And now I see that Jake Nickell, who is the founder of Threadless, made two videos that explain it better:
They plan to post more useful videos, subscribe here.
You followed all the steps:
And yet, when you go to Threadless main page and search for your designs you can’t find them. You search by title, or by tags, or just browse all the designs, and you don’t see your designs anywhere. Why?
Your Artist Shop is separate from the Threadless main store. Your design can be added to the Threadless Marketplace but they are not added by default.
If you don’t see your designs on Threadless then the first thing to do is to make sure that you allowed your products to be visible in the Threadless Marketplace. Go to your Artist Shop settings and set “Allow my shop’s products to be considered in the Threadless Marketplace”:
However, even if you set that option and allow for your products to be visible in the Threadless Marketplace it’s still possible that your shop won’t be visible in the Threadless Marketplace and that your designs won’t be available in the Threadless site search.
Why? Because Threadless doesn’t show all the designs from all artist’s shop on their main page. They explain it best in their FAQ:
While each Artist Shop is separate from the Threadless catalog, designs may or may not automatically be included in the Threadless marketplace and search. Inclusion into the Threadless marketplace and Threadless search depends on a combination of design quality and commercial viability for the Threadless market, marketplace and Artist Shop sales and activity, product tagging, and search relevancy.
–About the Threadless Marketplace
So, if you want people to find your designs on Threadless, you need to create designs that Threadless customers might be interested in. If Threadless decides that your designs might interest people visiting the website then your designs will be visible to them. This is because Threadless is a curated store. If all the designs from all the artist shops were visible there, then it would be a mess.
It might be discouraging not to see your designs in the Threadless Marketplace — you added your designs, and yet the customers who visit the site don’t even see them and can’t buy them. But, if your designs are good, then Threadless will most likely add them to their Marketplace and then customers will see them.
My store is visible in the Threadless Marketplace. I wrote some advice that will help you get your designs noticed by the Threadless team:
I drew another space design and added it to my Threadless Shop. This is the first of two designs that I had planned for this week. Though I truly don’t know if I manage to draw the second one because tomorrow my whole family comes over and we are making pizza.
I write a lot about my successful designs. I mentioned my most popular design a few times, and other designs that earned me a lot of money. It might seem that whatever I draw sells well and brings me regular income, but that’s not the case. Far from it. A lot of my designs don’t earn even a few dollars. There are about 30 designs that so far haven’t earned anything.
This is a design that earned me just $10 so far:
It was supposed to be a cat that did something silly like chased a raccoon or stayed up all night at a party when they had work in the morning.
Yet, apparently, people don’t find it funny or cute, or maybe they just don’t like it. I don’t know. I never know anything. I just keep drawing. And sometimes a design gets popular, and I earn money.