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.
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