Threadless

Can you get organic sales on Threadless

If you sell your designs on Threadless you can get sales in one of two ways:

Organic sales from Threadless, e.g. Threadless promotes your designs in their Marketplace.
Sales in your own Artist Shop that you have to promote yourself.

I wrote about it before and Threadless made videos about it too.

But can you even get organic sales or do you have to promote your store and find customers yourself? I downloaded my sales report from Threadless and checked.

Download your sales report from Threadless

Turns out over 99% of my sales are organic! That means people who buy my designs come from Threadless, not from my poor marketing efforts.

This is great news if — like me — you don’t have many followers on Twitter or Instagram, or if you are not good at marketing, or if you don’t like doing all that promoting stuff and prefer to simply create new designs. It’s still a good idea to promote your art on social media and slowly gain followers, but even if you don’t do that, you can still get sales — same as me.

Threadless explains

Just yesterday I wrote about why you might not see your designs on Threadless. And now I see that Jake Nickell, who is the founder of Threadless, made two videos that explain it better:

They plan to post more useful videos, subscribe here.

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:

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!

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.

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.

One more reason to sell your art on Threadless

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.

Existing

Recently Threadless added one of my designs to their store. I wrote about that here.

Now, Threadless selected another one of my designs:

"Existing" by Justyna Dorsz — One of those days

It’s a cat that has no motivation to get up. So, it’s relatable.

It has already been for sale in my Artist Shop. Threadless adding it to their own store means that more people see the design and more people buy it.

It’s good to have as many designs as you can create in your Artist Shop so that Threadless can browse them and select something for their store.

Also, when your design is selected, you usually get a $250 gift code, which is a nice bonus. I keep spending them on hoodies and t-shirts for my friends 🙂

Get “Existing” here.

What is this madness?

One of my designs has been added to the Threadless store. Yay! I received an email a few hours ago.

Now, what exactly does it mean that a design is added to the Threadless store?

First, what you need to know is that there are two ways to sell designs on Threadless:

One way is to simply create your own Artist Shop. For example, I have my Fox Shiver Artist Shop. You can add any design you want to your shop. You can have hundreds of designs. But, at least in the beginning, those designs might not be visible in the main Threadless store.
The second way is for Threadless to select one of your designs to add to their own Threadless store. Every time there’s a design challenge, a few of the best entries are selected. And sometimes Threadless might select a design from your own Artist Shop.

My first design that they selected was “Not Today” and it was one of the seven designs selected from the Black and White Design Challenge.

When your design is selected and added to the Threadless store, it means better visibility and a higher chance that someone is going to see it and buy it.

That’s why it’s so important to add all your designs to your shop. The more designs you have, the better chance that one of them is going to be selected. Same with challenges — submit your designs to challenges and you get a chance that Threadless likes them and wants them in their store.

And remember, you never know what is going to be popular, so submit every design. I very nearly deleted one of my best-selling designs because I thought no one was going to want it.

Oh, and one more thing, usually when your design is selected to be added to the Threadless store, you get a $250 gift code to be used in the Threadless store on anything you want.