5 weeks ago, I opened my new store, Trufflepig.
There are 41 designs in the store so far. All of them have cats! I have plans to add other animals but I enjoy drawing cats.
You are probably curious how much the store has earned so far. In total, I earned $52 🙂
My best-selling design is SAY NO TO ACTIVITY.
My plan for the next few weeks is to make a lot more designs. I want to have at least 100 designs in my store.
When people buy things in my Fox Shiver store, these are the most popular apparel colors:
The “Other” group consists of: Green, Yellow, Oatmeal, and Purple. Surprisingly, Pink is way more popular than Purple.
Cut & Sew T-shirts are t-shirts that can be printed all over, like that:
Threadless recently wrote an article about different types of Cut & Sew designs. Read it here: 6 Design Ideas for the Cut & Sew T-Shirt.
Of those 6 types, I mostly have one type in my store: all-over patterns. And only 10 of my designs are available on Cut & Sew t-shirts. These are the most popular in my store:
Cut & Sew t-shirts are, of course, more expensive than usual t-shirts, so they are rarely bought. Only 67 people bought Cut & Sew t-shirts with my designs.
For example, this one has only been bought 3 times:
I will likely never meet anyone wearing it 🙂
I went back to the sales data that I exported from my main Threadless store. Out of curiosity, I queried how many of all the sold clothes are men’s, women’s, or kids’ clothes.
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:
Today I saw this tweet:
Stefan von Imhof wrote that 97% of all blogs are defunct after 3 years. I tried to check if it’s true but the only data I found was that 95% of blogs are abandoned.
The main reason that people give as to why they stopped blogging:
I guess the odds are against me, there’s a 95-97% chance that I will stop blogging within the next 3 years. We will see.
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:
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.
I plan to share sales data of all my designs. Everyone always asks how much you can earn. Today, let’s see sales stats for “Spacing Out”.
Average Monthly Earnings: $16
Total Earned: $655
It earns me only $16 per month. Not much. But that’s the thing about passive income — you make a design once and then it keeps earning you money without you doing anything else. And when you have 30 designs, or 50, or 100, and each one brings in a small passive income — well, you do the math.
As with many of my designs, when I drew it, I wasn’t sure if I should publish it. But I did, and now I have an additional $655 that I wouldn’t have, had I not submitted it to Threadless.
I started this blog a few weeks ago and, at first, no one read it. Now, that a few people read it, the increase in page views looks promising.
It’s a challenge to stick with something when there’s no feedback, when it seems that no one cares and no one reads what you write. Same with art — in the beginning, when you start drawing or making designs, it’s difficult to get noticed. But, as with everything, you have to be consistent and stick with it for a few weeks or months to see results.
I think it might be interesting to share how much each of my designs has earned. For today I have selected “Zen Maze”.
“Zen Maze” is a moderately successful design, which means the sales are somewhat in the middle among my designs.
Average Monthly Earnings: $58
Total Earned: $755
It took me 2 hours to make and another 1 hour to modify it for different products.
The design on apparel is slightly different than the design on most other items. I didn’t want it to be a regular rectangle when printed on clothes, so I erased some parts and made it irregular:
But on other items it looks best when it takes up all the space:
