How designs become products, what the marketplaces actually charge, and what earning from your art really looks like.
October 19, 2026
A first sale changes what happens to a design: the listing is protected and left alone, its eight months start again, it becomes eligible for Amazon, and at three sales it becomes the starting point for new designs aimed at the same buyer.
Read the post: What Happens When Your Design Makes Its First SaleOctober 18, 2026
We aim to have a seasonal design live 90 days before its holiday, which for Christmas meant late September. A Christmas design submitted now can still sell this year, but the season it is really built for may be next year's, and a partner's design is kept listed until it gets one.
Read the post: Is It Too Late to Submit a Christmas Design?October 16, 2026
Most listings go quiet, and quiet has three different causes with three different fixes. What we do at day 50, what a rewrite changes, why nothing is cut short, and how a design that never sells comes back to you.
Read the post: What Happens to a Design That Is Not SellingOctober 12, 2026
A lot of shirts that sell are an idea before they are a drawing. How an idea-only submission works, what it pays compared with finished artwork, what the licence lets you keep, and how to describe an idea so a designer can draw it.
Read the post: You Do Not Have to Draw to Sell a Shirt DesignOctober 9, 2026
The number of listings for a phrase measures competition, not demand. How to check whether anyone is actually buying before you draw, what the answer can and cannot tell you, and the two checks to run first.
Read the post: How to Tell Whether Anyone Wants Your Shirt Idea Before You Draw ItOctober 7, 2026
Usually weeks, often months, and for most designs never. Why a new listing is slow to sell, why a quiet first month proves nothing, what that means for judging your own design, and why the wait costs an artist nothing here.
Read the post: How Long Does It Take a Design to Make Its First Sale?October 6, 2026
An artist merchandise deal payment comes in one of three shapes: a flat fee, an advance against royalties, or a share of each sale with nothing up front. Each puts the risk of unsold shirts somewhere different, and when the money arrives matters as much as how much it is.
Read the post: Artist Merchandise Deal Payment: Flat Fee, Advance or a Share of Each SaleOctober 2, 2026
Most shirt artwork is drawn on a white canvas, and most of the shirts we sell are not white: of 89 items bought on Etsy, 66 were dark garments. What happens to a design on a dark shirt, why a colour's name misleads, and how to make the dark version without redrawing it.
Read the post: Three in Four Shirts We Sold on Etsy Were Dark: Why Your Design Needs a Dark VersionSeptember 30, 2026
Amazon Merch royalties are one number, and it pays for more than the design. What it covers, what the creator still does to earn it, and what one of our own Amazon orders left after every cost was taken out.
Read the post: Amazon Merch Royalties: What They Pay You ForSeptember 29, 2026
Uploading artwork to a print on demand platform means agreeing to a licence, and the licence matters more than the royalty rate. What ours takes, what you keep, how rights come back to you, and the questions worth asking anywhere.
Read the post: Who Owns Your Design After You Upload ItSeptember 25, 2026
A teespring profit calculator gets the arithmetic of one sale right. The number that decides whether a design is worth your time is the one it asks you to type in yourself, and on one of our own orders a fee it never mentions took the profit from $5.63 to $2.03.
Read the post: What a Teespring Profit Calculator Will Not Tell YouSeptember 20, 2026
SHIRT, FLORAL and SORCERER are all active US trademark registrations in the clothing class. Across 2,343 checks of our own titles, three in four turned up at least one, and almost none of them were a real problem. Telling those apart is the part nobody explains.
Read the post: The Word COFFEE Is a Registered Trademark for Clothing: What You Can Actually Put on a ShirtSeptember 15, 2026
Etsy, Amazon and TikTok Shop are not three shop windows onto the same product. They have different buyers, different fee cliffs and different ideas of what a listing even is, and one design has to be three different things to work on all of them.
Read the post: One Design, Three Marketplaces: Why the Same Shirt Behaves Differently on EachSeptember 10, 2026
The print area is not the garment. It is a rectangle inside it, a different shape on every product, and its shape rather than its size decides how big your artwork lands. Measured on a real hoodie.
Read the post: Why Your Design Prints Smaller Than You ExpectedSeptember 6, 2026
Misprints, wrong sizes and parcels that never arrive are the part of selling merch nobody plans for. They are also the clearest illustration of who is actually carrying the risk in a print-on-demand arrangement.
Read the post: What Happens When a Shirt Arrives WrongSeptember 5, 2026
Etsy advertises a 6.5% transaction fee. Across 82 recent order lines the real number was 11.66%, and the gap is not a hidden charge. It is which number the percentage is taken of.
Read the post: What Etsy's Fees Actually Cost: We Checked Ours to the CentAugust 26, 2026
None of them are about talent. Most are about the gap between making something and listing it, including one that can cost real money rather than just time.
Read the post: Seven Mistakes People Make Selling Their First DesignsAugust 8, 2026
The headline percentage is the least useful number on a royalty page. What matters is what it is a percentage of, and the questions worth asking before you sign up anywhere.
Read the post: How Print on Demand Royalties Actually WorkJuly 21, 2026
Three numbers separate a bad design from an invisible one, and they need completely different fixes. Most abandoned designs were never actually tested.
Read the post: Why Your Design Isn't Selling (It Probably Isn't the Design)June 30, 2026
Six steps between a finished design and money in an account, and only one of them is design work. A walk through the unglamorous half of selling artwork on a t-shirt.
Read the post: What Actually Happens After You Upload a DesignJune 11, 2026
Almost every merch idea dies the same way: a bulk order, a spare room full of size M, and no money left to test a second design. The problem was rarely the design.
Read the post: Why Holding Inventory Kills Most Merch IdeasFree to join. We handle listing, printing, and shipping.
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