Justyna

How to get a $250 gift code from Threadless

I have a lot of designs and all of them are uploaded to my Artist Shop on Threadless, and sometimes I submit them to Threadless competitions. Every once in a while Threadless selects one of the designs to add to their main store and then they send me a $250 gift code.

What do you need to do to get your own gift code? Follow these steps:

Upload a lot of designs. And by “a lot” I mean A LOT. At least 30, but aim at 50. The more designs you have, the higher chance that one of them is selected by Threadless. Submit them either to your Artist Shop or to Threadless competitions.
Wait.
But don’t do nothing. Keep sending designs.
One day Threadless will accept one of your designs to include in their main store and they will send you a $250 gift code and you can spend it on whatever you want on Threadless. And you also get royalties for each item sold with your design.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Don’t overthink it — just draw something and submit. Repeat.

Good luck!

The most incredible book you have never heard of

My favorite book of all time is “Little, Big” by John Crowley. I bet you haven’t heard of it. I have never met anyone who read it or even heard about it. And that’s crazy! The book is so weird and unique and amazing that it should be as popular as, say, “Game of Thrones”. Yet, no one knows about it. I blame the cover — look at this:

It’s like the publisher doesn’t want to sell the book. The cover brings to mind those Jane Austen’s or Bronte’s novels about a heroine living in the victorian era and trying to get married. It’s completely not what this book is about. Though, it is a love story. In part.

The book’s genre is, I think, magical realism. It can remind you about “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in places but it’s very different.

On one hand, I want to recommend this book to everyone. It’s a beautiful story, I loved it, it’s a book like no other, I want more people to know about it. On the other hand, the story is strange and difficult. And then there’s the ending — I think I still haven’t processed what actually happened there. It makes me feel like I recommend something I don’t understand.

Try it, read a chapter or two. I knew from the first chapter that I wanted to read the whole book.

Sabotage

Recently someone asked for opinions about their designs. But they insisted on receiving “positive feedback only”.

What do you say to that? My standard response is, of course, to stay silent. If they haven’t asked for honest feedback, then it’s pointless to impose my opinion on them.

But I can’t help feeling that they are sabotaging themselves this way. They could ask for honest feedback, consider it, learn from it. If they don’t want to hear any criticism, how are they going to improve?

Sales are worth it

Websites, where I sell my designs, run site-wide sales every few weeks. Everything is discounted, sometimes as much as 50%.

I know some artists complain about it. When there’s no sale we earn around 25% of the price of an item. When there is a sale we get less, often as low as 10%.

But sales bring in more customers, so more items are sold. In fact, we all earn more money during sales, even though we get paid less per item.

Unfortunately, none of the apparel websites show sales graphs so we can’t see clearly that sales are worth it. It would be great if they implemented it. But for now, I can show you a sales graph for games sold on Steam.

This is a graph showing units sold of all our games:

Steam Sales Data for Manic Hyena games — Manic Hyena games – units sold

Each spike is during a sale. The first spike is the Summer Sale – it’s one of two big events during the year. The smaller spikes are during less significant events, like Weekly Deal. But even the smaller sales bring in a 5x increase in the volume of sold games.

A graph for apparel sales would look similar. I will see if I can export the data and create my own graphs. Stay tuned.

Don’t Panic

I see a lot of artists worried about low sales these past few weeks. Don’t panic! That’s completely normal this time of year. I’ve been a designer since 2012, and it has always been like that. February and March are just very, very slow months.

Maybe this year is a bit slower than the previous ones. The pandemic impacted people’s finances, no one really has spare cash to spend on art and clothes. That being said, even if this year is worse than the last one, it’s not that much worse. I expect sales will pick up in late March.

Speaking of March, have you heard that Threadless will pay double for every regular t-shirt sold during March? That will certainly be a boost in earnings as t-shirts are the most often bought product.

If you don’t have a Threadless shop, you should start one now and start earning money. Sign up here. And read more about double earnings during March on Threadless Blog.

I hired a law firm (Update #2)

One thing that’s been on my mind recently is this whole situation with illegal sellers.

In December, I hired a lawyer and we sent requests to 19 people to stop selling my designs and pay me compensation. Recently, we’ve sent requests to 17 more people. But I’ve already found more. The most stolen one is: “Not Today”, followed by “Overthinking and also hungry”. Lately, people have been stealing my “All These Feelings” and “Vaguely Aware of Social Norms” too.

This feels like it’s not going to ever end. As soon as we deal with illegal sellers, new ones show up. Some of the people contacted by my lawyer didn’t remove the listings with my designs. One person removed the listings, paid the compensation, and then started selling my design without permission again. All those cases will need to be resolved in court.

We have selected a few companies to sue first but one of them unexpectedly paid part of the money that they owed. That was a nice surprise — if they pay the rest, then it’s one less person to deal with.

Of all those people, the most upsetting is one company. I don’t want to say the name yet because it’s still possible that they will make it right. I used to buy clothes and shoes from them. I liked them! They are really huge — during Christmas when I visited my mom I saw their TV commercials. They can afford to hire artists and pay them. And yet, they stole two of my designs and didn’t pay me.

Store Maintenance CHECKLIST

I have a few stores with my designs. My main store is on Threadless but I also have my Teepublic store and a few smaller ones. I could leave them as they are and I would earn some passive income from them. But my stores would decline in popularity if I didn’t maintain them properly.

Here’s a list of things that I do regularly so that my stores are always up to date.

Tags
I go through all the designs and make sure all the relevant tags are added. When I know of a new phrase that people search for, I check my designs to see if I can add it to the tags. E.g. recently, due to the pandemic, people searched for “social distancing” designs. So I added it to those designs where it fit.
New Products
Every time Threadless, Teepublic, Redbubble add new products I go through my designs and enable them on those new products. Or if they are enabled by default, then I make sure the designs look good on them: that the image size is correct and that the best background color is selected.
Descriptions
Most of my designs have descriptions. But when I have time I try to come up with something better.
New Variants
If I have a white design on black background added to my shop, but it would look good as a black design on a white background then I add it too.
Collections/Albums
Most stores allow you to create collections of your designs. Whenever I add a new design I make sure to add it to relevant collections. And when I have enough designs that have a common theme, then I make a new collection for them. 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.

Featured Tee of the Day

Threadless featured my design “This is a disaster” 🙂

Here is the design.

What do people buy?

I’ve written a lot about why you should open your own apparel store and sell your designs. But opening a store and uploading your art is just the first step.

When I started, I rarely got any sales. Once or twice a month someone bought a t-shirt with my design. The more designs I uploaded, the more sales I got. But there’s one thing that you can do from the start to increase your sales: enable your designs on all available products.

I checked the recent 40 orders in my Fox Shiver Threadless Shop. Do you know what people bought? Here’s a list:

Most people bought t-shirts and long sleeve t-shirts. You probably have those enabled in your store, so that’s good.
Leggings – did you add them to your store? They require more work as you need to submit a specific file. But it’s worth it. I sell a lot of leggings.
Face Masks
Stickers!
Cut&Sew – again, a specific template is required. Not all of my patterns are added on Cut&Sew but I intend to change that because people do like them.
Magnets
Hoodies – they are as easy to add as t-shirts so no reason not to have them in your store.
Beach Towels

As you can see, if I only had t-shirts in my store, I would miss out on all those other sales. It takes time to add designs on all those products, but you do the work once and then you don’t have to worry about it. You are most likely going to have your store active for years, and now and then someone will want to buy a beach towel or a blanket or another of those less popular products. Give your customers that opportunity.

Justyna

Footer

Newsletter