How to Sell Shirts on Teespring

What’s going on everyone? I hope 2017 has been going well for you so far. It’s been cool for me so far. This year I plan on taking my side hustles to another level. One way I plan on doing this is by creating and selling more shirts. I use two websites to do that, which are Teespring and Sunfrog.  Today, I want to show you how easy it is to get started with Teespring.

What is Teespring?

Teespring is a platform that makes it easy for people to create items such as t-shirts. Teespring is a free service to use. If an item sells, you get a percentage of it. I love Teespring because you don’t have to put any money down. Let me repeat that. You don’t have to put ANY money down. You also don’t have to worry about inventory or buying things upfront. I’ve taken some losses in the past by making shirts and then not selling enough. With Teespring, I don’t have to worry about that happening ever again.

Create Your Account

Getting started with Teespring is very easy. I’m going to go over the basics today. You need to create a free account. That should take less than 10 minutes to do. After you create your account, you will see the words start designing. Click on those words.

Design

After you click the words, you will be directed to the design area. The design area is where you will create your shirt. The box to the left of the shirt has a place where you can enter text. You have the ability to change fonts and colors. On the second tab on the box, you can add artwork. Teespring has different artwork that you can use for your designs.

You can also upload your own. The box on the left has different styles and designs. Teespring offers more than just basic tees. They have tank tops, hoodies, v-necks, totes, mugs, and more. When creating a tee, they will give you three separate options. There is a budget-friendly tee, a premium materials tee, and a top of the line tee. You can also choose the color of the shirts that you want.

*Update 2020 

Teespring has added a lot more products since this post was originally published. Some of the other items that you make are socks, phone cases, stickers, face masks, fanny packs, pillows, towels, blankets, and more.

For today, I’m going to upload my own artwork. If you’re good with photoshop, you should have no problem creating your own images. If you’re like me and struggle with making designs, you can find a designer on a site like Fiverr. I’ve used the same designer for the last few years. He’s great and his turnaround time is usually less than 48 hours.

Now that I have my image on the shirt, I’m going to click the green tab that says sell this and move on to the next step.

Sales Goal

On this page, you can set a sales goal. For most shirts, if you sell three, the campaign will print. If I sell 50 of these shirts, my estimated profit will be over $243. In the area titled apparel options, I can add more colors to the shirts. I can also change the selling price as well. It also shows you how much profit you will make off of each sale. Once you decide the price and figure out the colors you want to offer, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and click next.

Title & Description

On this page, you create your campaign title and description. I’m going to call this campaign Dabbin Beer St. Patty’s Day. Below the campaign title is the description area. Then you can choose a category. For this particular shirt, my category is occasions and events, annual events. Next, I choose the length that I want to run the campaign. For this one, I will let it run for 22 days. Below that you will see the URL. If everything looks good, you will then click on the green “launch” button.

*Update 2020

I know longer set a specific day for my campaigns to run. All of them are now set to be always available. They print every three days. To me, that’s better than how it used to be. Having to stop and start campaigns in the past was kind of annoying. You now have one less thing to worry about.

Above is what your campaign looks like after you launch it. The shirt will be on the left. The product info will be on the right. It also shows the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left on the campaign. It shows your potential buyers how many are needed to print as well.

As you can see, it’s easy to set up campaigns. You have to put in some work with getting your campaigns to tip. Tipping is when you have the three sales so that it will go into production. It took me eight campaigns before I had my first one tip. I’ve had a few more tip since then, but they can be hit or miss. You have to have a niche or a proven market. Don’t allow yourself to get angry if your first few campaigns bomb. Just keep at it. Test some things out and figure out what people like.

*Update 2020

You no longer need three sales for a shirt to tip. If someone purchases one copy of your design, it will print and you will make money on it.

Check out this video I made showing you how to design your first shirt.

I’ll probably post a couple of more Teespring videos in the near future as well.  You should now be ready to start selling shirts on Teespring. Check out some of my designs here.

What I’ve learned about Teespring is that most designs probably won’t sell. You have to test out different things. You can do some keyword research or figure out what’s popular today in society. Good luck!

Have you tried Teespring before?