One of the biggest myths about Amazon Merch & print on demand in general is thinking that you need to be a good graphic designer to succeed.
That myth needs to be dispelled immediately!
It's simply not true - I am proof!
I absolutely don't consider myself a good designer. While I qualify as "better than average", the amount of time it takes me to produce quality designs alone is a huge limiting factor.
Remember that time is money! If it takes you forever to produce a few designs, your business will suffer.
As my regular readers know, my #1 rule of print on demand is that "the more online real estate you occupy, the more money you make".
While I was climbing the early ranks of Amazon Merch & my daily uploads were capped a 1, 2, & then 5 designs, I had time to spare to slowly create quality designs.
My daily upload limit is now 800 products per day, so obviously my approach to producing designs had to change.
They don't (currently) sell pre-made designs. Instead, they sell custom-made design elements that you can easily use in conjunction with text to quickly & easily produce print on demand designs.
RYANHCS10
- Doesn't expire
Consider Buying Pre-Made Graphic Bundles
There's a negative stigma surrounding buying pre-made "Merch ready" designs in the print on demand community, and for good reason.
Some people go to Fiverr where you can buy almost anything for $5 and load up on pre-made designs.
The issue with doing that is that almost no designer is making a profit by selling unique designs at $5 a piece - often times they're STOLEN from websites like Amazon & Redbubble, and if you buy them & upload them to your account, you risk receiving a pixel-for-pixel copy strike.
no bueno
There's also always the chance that the person you bought designs from is a terrible designer... read my article about the laughably bad designs I got after paying $150 to a Merch Facebook group admin.
If you go the route of buying design elements, you'll be able to quickly & easily create high-quality designs at will!
Also don't overlook the value of rearranging graphic elements & then mixing in variable text to create designs in "batches".
In the examples below I used the Merch Science July 4th vector pack.
It's currently available for purchase @ the extremely affordable price of only $15.
When you buy it, here's a sneak peak of what's included:
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It couldn't be easier to use, as it includes:
- 50 design elements - all unique, July 4th themed
- The Adobe Illustrator source files
- Font files that can be installed & used in conjunction with the graphics
- Sample Designs
included below - 50x designs in PNG (bitmap) format
- 50x designs in SVG (vector) format
The possibilities for designs to be created are endless!
To show you what's possible & spread a little inspiration, Donald (the creator of the designs) included some sample designs:
My Design Process
To show you how easily designs can be created using pre-made elements from Merch Science, I spent ~20 minutes using Merch Informer's Product Research Tool in conjunction with the pre-made designs.
I seeded Merch Informer with keywords related to various design elements from the pack, & then created similar designs to the ones from Amazon Merch that came up in the search results.
Seed #1: "July 4th Drinking"
After seeding Merch Informer with "July 4th Drinking" (based on the multiple beer graphics available in the pack) I saw an easy-to-replicate design that had a few sales under it's belt:
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I like the idea... Enjoying an ice cold beer on Independence day is an American tradition!
First things first though - before I start designing, I need to make sure it's not trademarked:
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After a quick visit to tmsearch.uspto.gov/, I was good to proceed!
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It didn't take long at all for my to come up with this design, which I created both a normal & distressed version of:
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Distressing your existing designs is a simply way of increasing sales potential that usually looks great & takes only a few seconds to do!
Check out my walkthrough on how to disterss designs ».
It looks great on Merch by Amazon navy blue colored standard t-shirts:
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Also, it's completely fine to upload two very similar designs to Merch, especially when targeting competitive niches like "July 4th" as this will increase the odds of Amazon's algorithm displaying at least one of them on page 1.
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(just make sure not to submit it in youth sizes, per the updated content policy)
Design #2: "July 4th Fireworks"
* Note: this is NOT the type of design I would typically go after as it's so broad & extremely saturated. But for the sake of this demo, lets go for it!
I seeded Merch Informer with "July 4th fireworks" & really liked this (funny) t-shirt result:
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USPTO cleared the search terms "Fireworks Expert", so I was OK to move forward with some "Fireworks Expert" themed July 4th designs!
In the drinking shirt example I showed that you can drop a few graphics around some text to create a design & then distress it to create a second design.
For this one, I want to highlight how you can swap some text out to create multiple similar-themed designs that can be indexed on various (different) search-terms, increasing the likelihood of a sale.
I pretty effortlessly cranked out 4 designs:
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Here's an outline of my various approaches:
- Changed the subtext to "If you see me running ...get out!"
- Mirrored the subtext to the original design text from the Merch Informer results
- Changed "Fireworks Expert" to "Fireworks Director" (which a similar shirt said, slightly further down in the search results)
- Added some running silhouettes, using free vectors available on the website Public Domain Vectors.
The result? 4 ready-to-roll designs that should sell well on t-shirts, tank tops, coffee mugs, + more!
Here they are on Amazon Merch standard t-shirts:
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Amazon Merch tank top designs use the same dimension designs as standard t-shirts, so uploading to them couldn't be easier - just use the Create (BETA) uploader, which is currently the only way to upload to tank tops.
And if I caught you off guard when I said they'd work well on coffee mugs also, no, unfortunately Merch doesn't support mugs (yet), but you can easily sell additional POD products (like mugs) off of Amazon Merch using POD production partners like Printful.
The entire dropshipped print on demand portion of my website is dedicated to helping you maximize your ROI from your existing Merch designs...
I want to make sure you believe me, so I always try to provide as much proof as possible :)
Here's a black, 11 oz coffee mug with one of the designs:
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My Upload Process
Without going into a tremendous amount of detail, I want to be fully transparent about the steps that follow creating designs using the Merch Science July 4th design pack.
First, I'd create an excel file with the data points describing each design, & the local file paths from my PC to each file.
Then, I'd use the Merch Titans Automation app to automatically upload them to Amazon Merch products:
- Standard t-shirt
- Tank top
- Hoodie (it will automatically convert the file to hoodie dimensions)
Second I'd push them to my Etsy store via the Printful integration. Guess what - the uploader supports pushing to Printful too!
Third, using the same excel file with the data associated with the designs, I'd run the uploader again and prioritize making them for sale on Redbubble - an e-commerce website very similar to Amazon Merch that gets tons of organic traffic driven from Google & Google Shopping.
Fourth, I'd push the products to the remaining POD platforms currently supported by the Merch Titans Automation app:
Last, I might upload them to Gearbubble mugs & sell them through the Gearbubble + Amazon Seller Central integration.
Unfortunately I can't automate this step. It doesn't take very long to create Gearbubble campaigns though (maybe 45 seconds - 1 minute per), which is a plus.
Another big plus of using Gearbubble is that you can pre-create products/campaigns & push them to your Amazon seller account from your phone with the push of a single button.
The reason I don't usually recommend using them is that they charge monthly fees per-integration, whereas Printful is 100% free to use and you only pay them when you use them to fulfill an order.
That's it!
If you're interested in the July 4th pre-made design elements, check out the preview of all 50 below & imagine the possibilities!
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Or if Independence Day isn't your thing, they also recently released a "Fantastical Unicorns" themed bundle that little girls around the world are guaranteed to love:
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Readers of my blog save 10% off the extremely affordable price of $15 on either - check it out!
