Justyna Dorsz

Justyna

The designs I am most proud of

Over the years, I’ve created hundreds of designs. A few days ago, I went through them all and selected my 10 favorites. Even I was surprised by the results, but more on that later. First, the designs:

Space Botanica

Black Sands

Zen Maze

Space Painted

Wild Flowers At Night

Among Trees

Dark Woods

Get Your Own Pizza, Human!

Saturn the Cat

Galaxy

Conclusion

One thing that you probably noticed immediately is that they are all rather dark. My store is full of funny designs with ridiculous cats, but the designs which I consider my best are not like that at all. Most are either about space or nature. 9 out of 10 are on black backgrounds.

Recently, I opened a new store with cute designs because I had a lot of ideas for designs like that, and I didn’t want to add them all to my main store, which already has a bit of everything. But now I think, maybe I should create a store with nature or space designs since it looks like those kinds of designs I like best?

Fun fact: only 3 of my favorite designs are in my top 10 bestselling designs.

My most summery design

It’s so hot outside. Here’s my most relevant design:

No worries

This is not a popular design — it has just reached $100 in total sales. That’s not much, but I like this design, it’s so pleasant to look at.

First Sale!

Someone bought a t-shirt from my new TRUFFLEPIG store!

To give you some context — I opened my store 3 days ago and have uploaded 11 designs so far. Of course, I know it is luck — someone noticed my design among thousands and liked it and bought it. But you might be just as lucky if you open your own store. The more designs you upload, the greater chance that someone will buy something from you.

It might seem like a humble start — one t-shirt sold. However, this is exactly how it was in the beginning when I opened my Fox Shiver store. I didn’t have huge sales from the start. But one by one people visited my store and bought something. I kept adding new designs, and earnings were increasing month by month. You can do the same — open an Artist Shop and add a few designs. Don’t get discouraged by a slow start. Keep making designs, and be patient.

Back to the Gym

If the person who bought the t-shirt reads this blog — thank you!

Best selling products

When you open an Artist Shop on Threadless, you will receive a bunch of emails with tips on how to: promote your store, prepare design files, customize the shop, and so on. Since I’ve created my new store, I’ve been getting those helpful emails too. One of them was titled “And the Best Selling Products are…” and said:

Tees, Mugs, and Totes! 
These are the three most popular products across all Artist Shops and could be in yours as well!

I got curious if that’s the case for my stores as well. My new store has been opened for a day only, and I haven’t sold anything there yet, but I sold a lot of products in my main Fox Shiver store. So I exported the data and calculated how many items of each product I sold.

Mugs and Totes are not selling well in my store at all. Tees — on the other hand — are the most popular products by far. I sold more t-shirts than all other products combined. Take a look:

Most popular products in Fox Shiver store on Threadless
Most popular products in Fox Shiver store on Threadless

TRUFFLEPIG

TRUFFLEPIG store on Threadless

Today, I opened my new store on Threadless. It’s called TRUFFLEPIG because I like pigs and it’s a funny words. There will mostly be cute and humorous designs there. The main reason why I had decided to start a new store is that my main store, Fox Shiver, has gotten too big and is a mess — there are all kinds of designs there, no consistency.

From now on, I will be adding most of my designs — if they match the style — to my new store. But designs that aren’t funny and don’t have cute animals I will submit to my old store. I am also planning on opening yet another store with a completely different style. But for now, I want to make more designs for TRUFFLEPIG.

Here is my new store: TRUFFLEPIG

And here is my main store: FOX SHIVER

My little cup

Two weeks ago my family and I went to a pottery class to make our own mugs. Then they were to be fired in a kiln and coated in a glaze. We picked them up today. Here is my little cup:

It’s uneven and awesome 🙂 Theoretically, I can drink from it, but I am afraid to break it so I probably won’t.

That should solve it

“I will sleep until my problems disappear” is my new design, and I will add it to my new store soon.

I am experimenting with different colors. Most of my designs used to be black and white, but in my new store, I plan to have more variety.

Create designs faster

The process for creating a design is:

  1. Have an idea.
  2. Sketch it.
  3. Draw it properly.
  4. Clean up the lines. Polish.
  5. Add text if needed.
  6. Export to a PNG file. Sometimes you need a few variants.
  7. Submit to your online store.
  8. Add tags and a description.
  9. Share on social media.

That’s a lot of different kinds of tasks. And it always takes a moment to switch from one task to the next one. Instead of making one design and then another one, it’s more efficient to batch similar tasks together.

First, I note down ideas. At the moment I have 9 ideas for designs that I want to create for my new store. Today, I’ve made initial sketches for all of them. Then I will draw them all. After that, export all the designs to PNG files. And submit to my store.

I know from experience that this way is faster. When I focus on just one design, I end up making only that single design during a day. But, when I work on groups of designs, I can make 3 to 5 designs a day.