Choosing the right Print On Demand company ~ for artists

[Music] hi everyone in today's video I'm going to be talking all about principles among companies so if you're an artist or designer and you really want to have your artwork printed as prints and on different products like books and t-shirts and greetings cards but you don't necessarily have a whole load of extra money lying around that you can spend all all these products and you don't really want to have a whole load of boxes in your bedroom then print-on-demand companies might be something to look into um I already have a red bubble and a society6 shop to be honest I don't really use them that much and I really wanted to find out what alternative print-on-demand companies there were so I thought as I'm doing this research I may as well make a video about it and share what I've learnt so I'm quickly gonna explain what print-on-demand is and then I'm going to share some different companies and tell you my thoughts and if you want to jump around I will leave some timestamps below to the different companies so if you don't know a print-on-demand site is somewhere that you can go and upload your own artwork and designs and then you have the option to print them on a whole range of different products like notebooks mugs t-shirts flip-flops even that company will then print those products and fulfill the orders and ship them all off for you and they also deal with any kind of like customer complaints returns if that's something that they offer as well the only thing that you do is to upload the artwork you're not necessarily going to be making loads of money as if you do make a sale the company takes the base price out of this so basically that's just covering the price that they charge for their products which is fair enough but your margin my not be enormous if you went to the manufacturers directly you could get better price per item so there is the potential to have a bigger profit but then you do have to pay all that money upfront to begin with then you have no guarantee whether or not you're going to sell that product yeah so you need quite a lot of money to invest in that and you might end up with too much stock as well I have definitely had this happen to me before when I've thought oh well it's so much cheaper if I just get more of an item and then you've got a whole load of products and maybe if you're in the beginning stages you might not have so much of an audience or an item might not just be very popular so a print on salons service could be something to look into even if you have maybe an Etsy shop or your own shop just to use it as a way of testing products out before you then invest your own money into it yes let's have a look at some of the print and demand companies that are out there I'm going to start off with red bubble and society6 just because I've used them before and then I'm going to be doing some research into some new companies so starting off with red bubble it's a very popular website so there's a lot of traffic going there this could either be seen as a good thing or a bad thing the more people that use the website the more competition there is but on the other hand there's a lot of an audience base there and people are going there wanting to buy something they do feature people on their front page and I was actually featured once which was very exciting and yeah I was featured for this B design yeah I don't really know that I got a lot of sales from it but it was quite a nice compliment to be featured they offer a very wide range of products the one thing I would say is it can be quite to literally put your products on every single item that they offer and I think going forwards this is something that I want to consider a little bit more yeah I'd really like to create designs with a specific product in mind and yet let's let me show you some of the products that I have got on my RedBubble shop and so I've actually ordered a couple of things and so they do these they call them studio pouches you could use them as like pencil cases which is what I use them for this one is empty at the moment but it just has some pencil shoppings in it no yes so this is the bead design that was featured they do these in different sizes as well bs you could put pencils in their makeup whatever you really want to keep tidy so I've got one with my be on one with this mermaid on which if if you've seen my mermaid pins this is actually the same kind of design and I actually did this one first before I did my mermaid pins yeah that's what that looks like I also have the mermaids on a cushion I feel like I should maybe go for the back one so it fits in and to say that you don't notice any cat hairs that might be on these cushions yes there's that and and then I also have a bee cushion as well I went for a different color in the background for this one and B I think I offer this one in three different colors and yeah these cushions also come in different sizes I actually just got the cushion covers and then I got my own cushions to fit inside yeah I think it is a good idea if you're doing a print-on-demand shop to buy just one of each of the products that you're selling maybe not get everything yeah just to double-check the quality and before you start telling everybody about it and then also it means that you can take your own photo like set things up with like your sort of aesthetic or brand or whatever so other things about red bubble and they have global sort of printing and shipping which is really good so they can ship internationally without sort of charging the customer too much one thing I have found about my shop is it seems that some of the items are a little bit hard to find yeah you have a menu on the sides with different categories and sometimes it seems to be a little bit difficult to find the particular product that you're looking for the other thing about red bubble is that they have a twenty dollar threshold for their payments which means that if you make a sale but it's lower than twenty dollars you have to wait to get paid until you reach that threshold and then if you don't reach it it just goes on to the next month's payment and then if you still don't get it it just keeps rolling over and they do pay you eventually and so they pay you in January once again but yeah that's something to consider so next up is society6 so I ended up getting a society6 as well just because I was really excited by some of the products they had which went on red bubble and so they have so many different products they have like actual curtains they've got yoga mats and I've seen on the website they even do furniture now so they do like printed tables and benches and things the only problem is that you can't adjust the artists margin it's set at 10% so you're not really going to be making a whole lot of money on that and the only thing that you can adjust the price is on is on your prints yeah so while they have a whole range of products I don't think they're one that I want to be investing more time in just because there's not going to be much return on that yeah they're base in the US and that's where they ship from as well so international customers might have to pay like some custom tax or like extra shipping to get their order so that's something else to bear in mind so moving on to some other companies now art of where is a company that I heard of from watching Holly done designs channel she's been designing these amazing scarfs and she did an unboxing video which I will link in the description yeah I was really excited by the quality of art of waste products and their website looks really amazing it doesn't look like they have the biggest range of products in comparison to some other print on some on sites but I think though that is actually quite refreshing and yeah like I said the products that they have looked like they're really good quality I think their tote bags look really good and they do basic one or you can have lining inside it they also do something called an origami tote bag which is basically like a scarf but then you kind of fold it up in a certain way and attach handles and then it comes a bag and B I think that looks quite cool I also really like the look of their notebooks and the fact that they've got like rounded corners yeah like the little details there so they're based in Canada and they ship from Canada and the US as well and again international customers might have to pay a bit of like custom tax or something something the art of where offer which is really exciting is they integrate with Etsy and also and Shopify I haven't is it called Shopify shop effets I haven't used it I think basically you can use it to then link to your own website if you have a shop on there and I just think this is really great because it means that then your customers don't have to be going in onto loads of different websites to buy your stuff they can just go to one place and get it all there and also I just think it then keeps use of aesthetic and just makes it feel a bit more like personal as well so if you do use the integration when the order goes through the print on Zaman company will then still print the order and ship it out I think other companies may offer this service as well but it was very obvious on the art of wares website that that was something that they offered the next up is a company called kites which is based in the UK in London they have actually got global printing and shipping so you don't have to worry about customers having to pay customs tap they don't have the widest range of products there's a few items of clothing some home where staff and some prints they are a bit of a different print on demand service as well as there isn't a shop on their website so unlike red bubble you can see everybody's shops you might not necessarily be getting that traffic instead they they also do integration so you can use their own app and then the egg you can connect that to your own website so I like that aspect of it another thing is even though they do ship globally you have to actually set the shipping prices yourself I think it would be really nice if they could just put that in for you one of the whole ideas of having a print Entenmann's service is that they saw all of those things out for you and whilst they do I think suggest what the pricing could be if you weren't aware of that you might end up being out of pocket [Applause] printful is a company that's best known for its t-shirts but they do also offer home wear and like other accessories like phone cases and things like that out of all their products I'm really excited by their backpacks their aprons and also they have a heat changing mug as well which i think is quite exciting and not something that I've seen on other websites yeah so a new term that I have come across is white labeling which is basically where a company doesn't put their own labels in the items so it's blank and then you can put your own labels like logos or whatever inside it so I have your branding so this is something they're printful offer there is a fee for it but it's something that you might possibly want to do just to sort of have that overall something and brand identity that's what it's called yes something else they offer which is a free service is you can actually put your logo on the packing slip and you can also do a custom message which i think is a really nice idea especially as somebody who has an Etsy shop I love writing like the personal notes yeah I think having that just reminds you that it is from like an independent artist as opposed to like a very big company there another company that also integrate with like Etsy and your own website and they also have global shipping so lots of pros for printful contrato is a company based in London in the UK they also have a US and Japanese international website they do ship around the world but again not from loads of different locations so there may be custom charges they've got quite a large selection of clothing and home where I'm really excited by the range of handbags they have they also have the option of printing on vinyl if you don't want leather and which yeah it's good if you're looking for like non animal-based project they also have Diaries as well which I think that would be a really good product to test on a print-on-demand website because if you're printing anything with dates on then you have to sell those items quite quickly so I think calendars and Diaries would be something that would be really good to sell on a print on demand yeah another cool thing that they do is they offer printing on fabric so you could print meters of fabric and then do whatever kind of crafts or sewing projects you want to do from that one thing to note is that contrato is actually an invite-only website I'm not sure how hard it is to join as I haven't attempted it myself but there is a form to fill out and you have to say sort of how many sales you regularly get on what type of products you sell they seem to really value quality over quantity and when you start out you're limited to just ten I think it's ten items or tender products and then they give you feedback based on these items and then I think you can sell some more stuff they also really value sustainability so they print with like eco inks and they also they offer free bundles of like sort of scrap material and stuff which you only pay for the postage speaking of printed on fabric the last company I'm going to talk about is spoon flour yeah so this is a print onto barns company that specializes in like surface patterns so they print on fabric wallpaper gift wrap they do also prin on some like sort of home where things like cushions and bedding and curtains and BA it's lots of things that would work really well with like surface pattern design they're on their website they offer different repeat options so you could either have like it your pattern tiled or it can be like drops down or you can even do like a sort of mirror thing where like flips so there's lots of different options there and they have a huge range of different fabrics that you can print on if you're not sure what type of fabric you want to offer and they actually do samples for like three dollars and in it they have like different fabric samples of their whole range of fabrics and also like their paper wallpaper and their gift wrap as well and then you can test how like stretchy it is and just like how it feels they also have a magazine which it's only available in America but they do have like an online version which you can see quite a few pages of and everything is clickable on the online magazine which is why you might be able to see some of these little boxes I think the spoonful I would be a really cool place to go to if you were into like costume design or cosplay or something like that because you could create your own custom fabric so if you want it like recreates a question from like a film or something and I also just really liked the idea that you could create fabric and then other people could make things with it and especially for somebody like me that's not very good at sewing and I think it would be really cool if I could create something but then other people could turn into some kind of amazing masterpiece or something so that's all the print sentiment companies I'm going to be talking about today and there's obviously a lot more that I haven't thought about and let me know in the comments if you use any of these or if you have any others that I haven't mentioned I really like the fact that lots of them integrate with Etsy because I love my Etsy shop I love being able to write notes to the customers and like package things and I wouldn't wouldn't want to miss out on having that personal touch so I'm definitely going to be keeping my Etsy shop and I'm going to continue continue to sell like my pins and my prints there but having a print-on-demand site to like test out other products and i really like that idea yeah I think at the moment I'm leaning towards printful like the fact that they offer a custom message and also the fact that they ship internationally just means that the customers then don't have to pay as much for shipping costs yes so those are my thoughts let me know what your thoughts are and if you liked this video please give it a like also don't forget to subscribe if you want to see more illustration videos I do studio vlogs and sit down chatty videos so if you want to see that and yeah subscribe and hit the bell and I will see you in the next video bye I've been talking so much I feel like as the video is there in the end I'm forgetting how to talk because I've been talking for such a long time I hope I'm still making sense

Channel: Emma Carpenter Illustration

Views: 59,788

Keywords: print on demand, pod companies, sell your art, selling your art, print your art, running an online shop, etsy, redbubble, society6, art of where, contrado, spoonflower, printful, custom products, advice for artists, review, how to, selling tips, freelance illustrator, Emma Carpenter, international shipping, best print on demand, print on demand for artists, print on demand 2019, pod, passive income, make money online, dropshipping, print on demand tips, print on demand for beginners

Id: J0RWF4_6NF0

Length: 20min 39sec (1239 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2019