CREATIVE FABRICA STUDIO IS HERE!

I love using Creative Fabrica - there are literally hundreds of thousands of graphics, illustrations and fonts that you can use to make awesome designs for print on demand. I have used Creative Fabrica for years and it has not only been a huge time saver—the graphics looks amazing and help me make print-on-demand sales on sites like Redbubble, Merch by Amazon and Teepublic. 

Creative Fabrica has a new comprehensive online graphics solution called Creative Fabrica Studio. You can try it out here: https://www.creativefabrica.com/studio/ref/810893/

You don't need to install anything - just start creating! 

Creative Fabrica Studio has templates, graphics, fonts and even Spark AI (artificial intelligence, so you can spend more time creating and less time trying to figure out how to work the program. 

When you first go into Creative Fabrica Studio, you will see a screen that looks like this: 

You can select your art board size from standard sizes on the left, or you can customize your artboard size on the right. Once you are happy with the size, click "Create New Design" in the lower right. 

From there, you can let your imagination run wild—you can add text, illustrations, photographs and manipulate all of them. Here I've added in a colorful background and added in some cool graphics in seconds: 

The "Graphics" panel on the left opens up a library of illustrations. You can search by keyword or just browse. When you click on an illustration, it automatically gets set on the artboard (in the middle). 

There are also layers, so you can move illustrations, fonts or graphics on top of each other with ease. On the right side, the layers panel shows you the vertical order of the layers. For example, below there is a picture of a frog and it is sitting on top of the wolf. If I want to move the frog under the wolf, I simply select the frog layer and drag it down: 

One of the coolest features that Creative Fabrica offers is Creative Fabrica Spark, which is a text-based artificial intelligence interface. You can type whatever you want into the text box and A.I. will create images for you! Here is an example—on the left side the menu, click "Spark AI". Here I've typed "cute ghost in a forest". I click generate and the AI does the rest. I can select from multiple images and pick the best one that works for me. 

You don't need to use Creative Fabrica Studio just for print on demand—I use it in my personal life too! There are many different templates that you can use for things like invitations, postcards, social media posts... the list is virtually endless. I like using the templates because the graphics, fonts and colors are already set up. I can change them if I want to, but the majority of the work is already done. 

I highly recommend checking out Creative Fabrica Studio - it's a huge leap forward in the graphics-design space because of the ease of use and access to the many amazing assets that makes Creative Fabrica such an awesome resource!

MY TOP 5 BEGINNER MISTAKES ON REDBUBBLE

There's a learning curve to any new skill—whether you're knitting, driving a car or selling on Redbubble (or any print on demand site).  I started on Redbubble around 2017 and I've sold hundreds of designs on products like t-shirts, poster prints, stickers and even some weird stuff like pillowcases and even a shower curtain!  It's weird to think that someone in the world is taking a shower staring at one of my designs.  Very cool! 

Starting out, I made some mistakes but that's OK.  That's how we learn.  If you're new, you can benefit from seeing my mistakes early on.  

Mistake #1: Pull Mindset

This was probably my biggest mistake early on and it cost me a lot of time, energy and lost revenue.  When I first started out on Redbubble, I just created designs based on whatever I was interested in—cats, weird shapes, more cats, funny sayings, etc.  I did not really consider if they would sell.  I just made designs that I liked.  And then I waited.  Crickets were chirping, a tumbleweed blew down the street—no one was buying my designs.  This is what I call a "push" mindset.  I'm just pushing random designs into the world and not really knowing if they will sell.  On Redbubble, if you search "cat" you get over 1.4 million results.  That's a ridiculous amount of designs.  Even if you have the greatest cat design in the world, no one is going to see it. 

I would recommend looking for niches that aren't very full (ideally you want niches with less than 1,000 designs, and the fewer the better). 

Mistake #2: Quality

It takes time to figure out what makes a good design.  You can search on Redbubble by "most relevent" (that is the default setting) and you can see the best-selling designs (or at least the designs Redbubble thinks will sell).  You want to make sure that your stickers aren't full of holes, your text is properly spaced and the right size, etc.  

Mistake #3: Scaling Up

Time becomes a valuable commodity, especially if you want to compete the bigger sellers on Redbubble.  There are shops that have 1,000 or even 4,000 designs on Redbubble.  A new shop with 50 designs is like a drop in the ocean—even if your designs are great, no one is going to see them.  An easy way to create more designs quickly is to use the exact same design template (or at least the same size document) when you're creating designs.  That way, when you upload your design onto Redbubble, you can just "copy the existing design" and all of your presets will be copied over.  (Just go to Manage Portfolio and then click on a design in the top right—there's a little gear icon.  Then click "Copy Settings").  This is a huge time saver as you just need to do tiny tweaks to your new design (and sometimes no changes are needed other than a few new tags). 

Mistake #4: Tagging

Using tags is super important.  It's the best and easiest way to get customers to see your designs.  The tags are the descriptions that trigger the SEO (the search engine optimization).  So if you Google search "funny cat sticker" and Redbubble designs show up in the Google search results, that is SEO.  Make sure to have at LEAST 15 relevent tags.  You can go up to 50 tags, so you might as well put as many tags in there as possible to help your design get found.

Mistake #5: Art Snob

I made the mistake early on of being a bit of an art snob.  I would spend hours crafting a super amazing work of art, and then shake my head at the best-selling simple text designs or crude illustrations that were at the top of the Redbubble search rankings.  Well, guess what?  It turns out that many, many customers on Redbubble want to buy rude, funny, crude, zany and weird stuff.  They don't WANT to buy high-end artwork.  They want to buy a rude sticker for a dollar and put it on their binder at school.  They want a phone case with a joke on it.  I figured out that simple is quick and simple is good.

Printbest: Print on Demand Supplier

There's a print on demand supplier called PRINTBEST and they service both the United States and Canada.  They offer some really high-end apparel brands like Champion, Fruit of the Loom and Gildan.  If you have a print on demand business and you're looking for some different products to stock in your Etsy store, this could be a great option.  Printbest also interfaces with Shopify and Woo Commerce, so if you have an online store, you can easily add in print on demand products as well. 

Print on demand is a great option for many small businesses because you don't need to buy any inventory in advance. In the old days, you would have to order 100 shirts as a minimum and then store them somewhere why you try to sell them at a flea market or at the mall. However, with print on demand, you can list the item right on your website or Etsy shop, and then once the order is made, Printbest will print and ship the order right to the customer.  

Example: 

• Customer buys a shirt for $25 from your online store
• The order syncs with Printbest
• Printbest prints the shirt and ships it to the customer
• You (the shop owner) buys the shirt for the base price ($18 for example) 
• You pocket the profit ($7)

You can sign up for a Printbest account right here: 

https://bit.ly/3g0IjyM This is an affiliate link (if you click the link and buy something, I would receive a small commission).

I ordered a hoodie and did a product review here: 

  

 

HOW TO MAKE MORE SALES ON REDBUBBLE

 One of the most common questions I get is "how can I make more sales on Redbubble" (or any print on demand site like Teepublic, Merch by Amazon, etc.).  I have a video on YouTube that goes in depth on how to do this: 

There are a few key things that you should do in order to maximize your chances of making a sale on print on demand: 

1. Ask yourself why anyone is coming to your Redbubble shop and buying a design.  This is the most fundamental (and important) question that you need to answer.  What problem is your design solving?  Remember, people can go to Walmart or Target or any of the thousands of department or clothing stores.  They don't need to go to Redbubble at all.  So why is your Redbubble shop better than Walmart?  Typically designs on Redbuble that sell well are funny, rude, cheeky or super unique.  This is known as a niche. You need to be different than the regular, standard Walmart or Target shirt.
   
2. Are your designs actually unique?  A common myth about print on demand is that anyone can just upload a simple text design and make $5,000.  This does happen, but it is super rare.  Most of the time, if a design is popular, 100 people will just enter the text into their computer and create a similar text design.  So ask yourself: how unique is your design?  How easy is it for someone to re-create the design from scratch?  
3. How competitive is your niche?  If you are trying to sell "funny cat" designs, then you are fighting an uphill battle.  There are over 1 million designs for the search term 'funny cat' and more are pouring into Redbubble each day.  So I would encourage you to find niches with fewer designs in them.  This can be hard but you can do it.  For example, take your hometown and then pick a profession.  For example: St. Louis electrician.  If you search for "St. Louis Electrician" in Redbubble, you will get very few designs.  That makes sense, since there are not a billion electricians running around St. Louis fixing electrical stuff.  It's a really tiny market.  But if you can find a niche with actual demand and also few designs on Redbubble, you can make some sales.  This is the strategy I use.  I don't make "funny cat" designs and expect them to be big sellers.  But I make very specific designs for very specific niches, and I do get sales. 
4. Are you dominating your niche?  The goal here is to be the "whatever" store.  Whatever your niche is, you want so many designs that are in that niche, you become the dominant, go-to store in that niche.  For example: if you really like Scotland, then do 1,000 Scotland designs.  And name your Redbubble store "Scotty Store".  And if someone, anyone searches for "Scotland", they have a good chance of finding at least one of your designs.  And here's the key: because your store is ALL SCOTLAND, they will immediately favorite your shop and come back to it.  You've just instantly created a "brand" around Scotland.  Your competitor has cats, Scotland, funny slogans, rattlesnakes, etc.  They are a general store with a couple Scotland designs.  You ARE Scotland on Redbubble.  People will find your store and favorite it. 

Remember to think about WHY people are buying on Redbubble.  If someone is passionate about something, make a t-shirt about it.  People from Scotland love Scotland and will proudly wear a Scottish flag or Scottish design.