Justyna Dorsz

Threadless Artist Shop

Ink Tuesday

You might remember that a few weeks ago I wrote a blog post for the Threadless blog, Creative Resources. My article was about how I earn money on Threadless. I shared everything I knew so that you could start and grow your store, too.

Another artist, Ink Tuesday, wrote a blog post for Threadless too. They opened their store recently and also posted a lot of short videos showing how each design was made to TikTok. It’s a very inspiring article — it must have taken a lot of courage to write it when they are just starting out and have no idea if people will like their art.

Ink Tuesday mentions me and that my blog post “lifted their spirits” which I am so happy to hear! I am glad that what I wrote helped even one person.

5 weeks of Trufflepig

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.

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.

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!

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

Finding a niche

Everyone always says you should find your niche. But it’s not easy.

Years ago, when I started making designs, I couldn’t identify just one theme to focus on. I named my store Fox Shiver because I wanted to draw a lot of foxes. But then I also drew cats, and dogs, and gloomy birds, and space. Now my store is a mess.

I’ve been thinking, it’s possible that in 10 years I will still be making designs. I like drawing, I have a lot of ideas, I have sketches that I want to turn into designs. If I keep adding all my designs to my main store, in a few years I will have, say, 500 designs. It will be difficult for anyone to find what they want. For example, if someone who loves cats searches for a cat shirt in my store, they will have to go through 350 designs of dogs, space, trees, pigs, and other topics that they have no interest in.

I’ve decided to make a separate store for some of my designs. It will be focused on cute and funny animals. I will maybe even move some of my existing designs from the Fox Shiver store.

Now I am in the process of searching for a name for my store. I am using random word generators like this one, and this one, to search for interesting and unique words. I also check word combinations using a portmanteau generator. I write down all the words I like and look for connections. Something will jump out at me soon.

Edit (15 June, 2021): My new store is TRUFFLEPIG!

Is Threadless worth it?

I know how it is. Every few weeks, you hear about yet another website where you should be selling your designs. And you wonder, Is it worth my time?

If you have ever submitted your designs to any Print-On-Demand websites, you know that it takes a lot of time. And sometimes, after all that effort, you see no sales. Worse, some of those websites may disappear after a while and stop paying out royalties to artists. It happened to me twice.

It’s understandable that you ask yourself, Should I invest my time in yet another website? Is Threadless worth it?

If you are scanning this article to find the answer, then here it is: Yes! You absolutely should submit your designs to Threadless.

I have been selling my art on Threadless for the past 5 years. No other website has brought me as much money in passive income as Threadless. The beginning was tough — I wasn’t making much money right away. It might be the same for you. But don’t get discouraged, keep making designs — the more you submit, the more likely it is that you will be successful.

8 Tips for Selling on Threadless.
Open your Threadless Artist Shop
What happens when Threadless selects your design?

Almost passive income

It would be great to have a truly passive income — you work on something once and then it keeps generating money forever. But that’s of course not the case. Passive income is never truly completely passive. However, it’s almost passive. That’s still good — it keeps generating income while you sleep — but it does require some maintenance every now and then.

My brother and I made a few games. They are being sold on Steam. Every day a few people buy them. And so we keep getting paid even though we are not actively working on them anymore. But sometimes there’s an elusive bug that someone reports, and we need to fix it. Or people keep requesting new translations. Sure, we can not respond, but it’s better to patch and update the game so that players are happy.

Same with an apparel store. You could make a lot of designs and add them to your Threadless or TeePublic shop and you will keep earning money. But there are things you should do if you want to maintain the same level of profits. For example, suddenly people start searching for specific themes like, say, “social distancing”, so you could check which of your designs can be tagged with those keywords. Or new products or colors are added and you should enable them in your shop.

In fact, Threadless has just added new products for all Artist Shops — Classic Fleece Pullovers and Hoodies. So if you have a shop, you could go there now and enable your designs on those new products. It’s worth your time because the classic fleece colors are very nice, I think they will sell well. If you are unsure how to enable those products I wrote a mini-tutorial. And Threadless wrote a blog post about it, too.

For new artists

I’ve notices that Threadless published a useful article in their Creative Resources section: Get Featured on Threadless.

One of the questions that new Threadless artists often ask is whether they should opt into the Threadless Marketplace. I think it’s really worth it to opt in — most of my sales come from the marketplace. If you are a new artist then most likely you are not very good at promoting your art yet. If you don’t opt in you will have a difficult time getting people to visit your shop. It’s of course up to you. You can read Threadless’s advice here.

One other topic that Threadless mentions is that you should submit 1-2 designs a week. I admit I haven’t been designing much recently. I wish I could submit more but I’ve been swamped with other work like preparing our game for releasing on new platforms and migrating the manichyena.com website to a new server. But that’s all behind me, I plan to draw more in May.

Go read the whole article, it’s full of good advice 🙂

New products, new colors

When Threadless adds new products everyone who has an artist shop should go through their designs and enable them on new products and colors. It’s what I do regularly.

Threadless recently added Women’s Scoop-Neck Regular t-shirts which they wrote about. It also looks like there’s a new kind of hoodie: Classic Fleece. I don’t see them mention it anywhere so maybe it’s not yet available in all artist shops. I remember that when Threadless introduced face masks there were not available in my store at first so maybe they haven’t added Classic Fleece to every shop yet? I don’t know, but it’s probably a matter of days.

The easiest way to enable new products on all your designs is to go to your Shop Dashboard, and then in the Artist Shop section hover over Products and choose which products you want to edit. You will see a list of all your designs and just have to choose colors for each:

Scoop Neck Regular T-Shirt
Classic Fleece