Finding profitable niches is important. There's a direct correlation between the number of people searching for your design, and how many sales you make.
My approach to designing print-on-demand products is typically three-pronged, in that I either:
- Recreate designs that I see influencers wearing/promoting
- Recreate designs that are already selling
- Create my own batch designs
I'll also take this opportunity to remind you that I don't infringe on protected designs - always make sure designs are not trademarked.
Allow me to expand on each approach to find profitable Merch niches.
Recreating Influencer Designs
The word "influencer" refers to any person in the public eye, and includes people with massive a social media following on platforms like Instagram or YouTube, as well as TV show stars.
It's crazy that more people haven't caught on to the fact that any t-shirt you see someone wearing on TV can be recreated & sold online if it's not trademarked.
My first 2 big successes on Amazon Merch were sports related.
My first big success: The Quickie Shirt
I found my first big success because I had the Bleacher Report app installed on my phone, and saw an NBA player wearing a soon-to-be trending shirt in a push notification (I uploaded the first recreation to Amazon Merch).
I ended up selling about 75 of them over the month of June, helping my month-over-month Merch sales jump from just 22 in May, 2017 to 141 in June The royalty jumped from $99.57 to $996.89 (a 1000% increase).
My second big success: The "Thumbs Down" Shirt
I have a TV mounted above my computer monitors, and I often keep it muted while on a sports channel. I'm not a big baseball fan, so there must have been nothing else on one night in October 2017, when I saw New York Yankees player Aaron Judge wearing a t-shirt with a thumbs down on it.
I decided to throw a recreation of it up on Amazon, figuring it would get a few sales. The last thing I expected was that it would take off the way it did!
This screenshot was taken on 10/18/2017, showing 100 net sales for $691.35 royalty (I actually ended the day at 103 sales and surpassed the $700 royalty mark).
After each Yankees postseason win, I would see a spike in sales of the t-shirt. Instantly, I was a fan of the MLB + the New York Yankees!
The best part is that I was in no way, shape, or form committing any infringement. It was just a t-shirt with a thumbs down on it.
* note: In January, 2018 Amazon Merch restructured their royalty payouts. A $19.99 sale price would now net $5.38 instead of $7.19.
My third success: (DESIGN PROTECTED)
In August, 2018 (My first $20,000+ profit month) I stumbled upon another niche design that lead to me making a boatload of money via the Printful + Amazon/Etsy integrations.
I've gotta keep this niche secret for now as it's still bringing in decent revenue. It's also being trademarked by another person, so at some point I'll have to delete my product listings for that niche.
Recreating Designs That Already Sell
This one is almonst common sense - when you're unsure what to sell, look at what's already selling for ideas!
While I was still in lower tiers, I used Merch Informer to help find niches with higher demand & low competition.
Their software will cost you a monthly fee. In order to work it requires regularly running scripts that scrape Amazon's front end t-shirt product listings and indexing their niche + BSRs, then algorithmically determining the average demand + average # of listings within that niche.
If you're not looking to drop any money on software tools, no problem!
My go-to method involves performing a basic keyword search on Amazon + "t-shirt", and then using DS Amazon Quick View Chrome Extension (free), allowing me to easily check BSRs in the search results.
Lower BSR = higher sales (highlighted in yellow)
Etsy is full of great product ideas.
When searching, remember that it functions similar to Amazon where the top row of results are typically all paid placements, via the Etsy sponsored products advertising module.
The best sellers are typically in the SECOND row, under the ads.
Knowing what designs within a choice niche people prefer is valuable information.
Redbubble doesn't give any indications that I'm aware of about which shirts within a specific niche are selling better than others.
That said, it's still a great way of grabbing ideas for designs within any niche, thanks to the normalized thumbnail displays.
On other (non-Amazon Merch) marketplaces, sellers can change thumbnails at their discretion, which makes scanning the SERP take longer. Because Redbubble functions similar to Amazon Merch where the mockup images are generated for you, they all end looking similar.
Creating Unique Batch Designs
If I just want to crank out a big batch of designs & focus on quantity over quality, I'll spend some time designing a nice template for designs that contain interchangeable pieces.
The design above is a perfect example. The "I <3 my" text within a dog bone will remain constant, while the dog breed can easily be swapped out. This approach allows you to easily generate lots of designs in a short period of time.
Here are a few common approaches for creating bulk designs with interchangeable niches:
- Relationships (Grandma, Mom, Sister, Girlfriend)
- Pet Animals
- Professions
- Geographic Locations (Country, State, City)
You can even niche-down further and combine the interchangeable pieces to create double-niche designs:
This can also help your product listings get indexed across multiple high-traffic keywords! "Gift for Engineer / Gift for Dad / World's Best Dad" etc.
My Present Day Design Strategy
Amazon Merch has evolved over time. In its current state, it seems to favor sellers that choose to post quantity over quality, unless you're able to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle like I was able to a few times.
Having gotten lucky with trendy designs 3 times in 20 months of Merching, I can very confidently say that you can't forecast the ability to do so reliably. You will seldom be able to reliably "know" that your design will rank well amongst competitors on highly trafficked keywords.
In the future, I will write a post about what you can do to give yourself the best chance possible of having the highest ranking organic design in a trending niche, outside of just pumping up your sales by overspending in AMS.
I don't spend as much time using the 2nd method of recreating designs that are already selling right now for Amazon Merch, but I do use it for Printful + Amazon/Etsy hats.
For now, my recommendation is to use the "batch design" method to generate many designs, while also keeping an eye out for hot trends that you can get ahead of (i.e. from TV or social media influencers).
