Justyna Dorsz

Advice

Welcome new people

My website statistics tell me that there’s been a 29% increase in traffic in March. That’s — wow — that’s a lot. Reader, what is the reason for your visit?

I wrote a few posts about creating designs for Threadless and other websites. If you are a new artist trying to make a living, then those might be useful to you:

However, in real life, I am not often asked about details of my work or how I earn money, or anything like that. People are more interested in my story: how did it happen that I quit my job? weren’t I scared? is it really possible to earn money on your own? what if I fail? People tell me — and believe me, this surprises me every time — that my story/life is inspiring. That they too would like to be so independent. But, for various reasons, they can’t.

I like the idea of inspiring people to quit their jobs and do their own thing. If you read my blog then I hope you at least get that much out of it — an inspiration, a little push, to quit the job that you hate, that wastes your health and time, and to put effort into finding a creative work that you like, be your own boss. If work for others, then only until you learn enough to work for yourself.

Update your collections

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.

New Arrivals collection in my Fox Shiver store
New Arrivals collection

Why you don’t see your designs on Threadless

You followed all the steps:

Step 1. You opened your own shop on Threadless.
Step 2. You made sure to set your store to Published.
Set your Threadless Artist Shop to Published.
Step 3. You added your designs.
Step 4. You made sure to publish your designs.
When you add your new design to Threadless, make sure to toggle "Publish Product".
Set Publish Product in your new product’s settings.

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:

That was a mistake

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:

That was a mistake

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.

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.

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.

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.

Making a children’s book – some notes

A few weeks ago, my brother and I started working on our first children’s book about cats. This is a good time to write a bit about the process and why we decided on this project.

From the start it was a challenge:

  • Both my brother and I are artists, but we make designs for apparel and 3D art for our games. We are not illustrators, we have never illustrated a book before.
  • We don’t have a publisher yet. We don’t know if we are going to find one.
  • We have never done anything like this before. We have no experience in making or publishing books. So if we are doing something wrong, we don’t know it.
  • At first, we wanted to make a simple book but soon decided to draw rich and beautiful illustrations — and that takes a lot of time.
  • From what I know, books don’t bring a lot of income. At times, it feels like we should be working and earning money instead of making a book.

Why make a book then? Our time would be better spent making a new game or starting another apparel store. We have experience with those so we would know how to make them profitable. But that would mean working on something that we are familiar with and staying in our comfort zone. That’s not good. It’s better to challenge yourself, work on something difficult, and learn in the process.

There’s another reason why it’s a good idea to have different projects — income diversification. If you have just one income source, then you are vulnerable. If that income source dries up, then you have to scramble to find work and might be forced to accept unfavorable terms. But if you have two or three income sources, then you are in a more secure position. Even if you lose one of your income streams, you are not going to be desperate. You will have time to figure things out, search for other opportunities.

You never know how successful your project is going to be. It’s a risk to work on something new, it might not work out at all. We had some failed attempts. But we worked on so many things that at least some of them became profitable.

There’s a risk that our book won’t get published or won’t get many sales. There’s also a chance that it will get published and become another passive income source.

One more reason to sell your art on Threadless

Photo by Parker Burchfield on Unsplash

It’s not a secret that I like Threadless. They are my favorite company, you can earn a lot of money, and there are even more perks.

I’ve just noticed that for the entire month of March Threadless runs an additional promotion for artists. For every regular t-shirt sold in your Artist Shop, you get double earnings. This means that you earn $10 instead of $5 for every regular t-shirt sold!

If you don’t have an Artist Shop you can open one here for free. And then add your first designs. I wrote some tips that will help you.

Check out my store if you want.