A lot of advice about selling your own designs starts with the same instruction: build an audience first. Grow an Instagram, post on TikTok every day, collect an email list, and only then launch. For some people that works. For someone who can draw and has no interest in becoming a content creator, it is mostly a reason never to start. So it is worth asking the question directly, and answering it with how the marketplaces actually work rather than with what sounds right.
Do you need a following to sell shirt designs?
Not on the marketplaces we sell through. Etsy and Amazon are places where buyers arrive already looking for something. Somebody types "funny nurse shirt" or "bernedoodle mom" into a search box, and the marketplace picks which listings to show. The buyer never sees who has the most followers. They see a grid of shirts that match what they typed, and they choose one.
That is how a marketplace sale usually happens: a buyer who was already looking finds a listing that matches. Etsy also runs some advertising on other websites on a seller's behalf, and charges an extra fee when that brings a buyer, but that is Etsy's audience, not the seller's. None of it depends on anyone having a following.
What a following does change
An audience is not useless. If people already like your work, telling them about a new design can bring its first buyers sooner than search would, and a sale is a sale wherever the buyer came from. Your percentage is the same either way.
It matters most on TikTok Shop, which works the other way round. There is no search box carrying buyers to a listing there. Products sit next to videos, and the video does the selling. We wrote about that difference in the post on one design across three marketplaces. If you already make videos that people watch, TikTok Shop is where that effort pays. If you do not, it is not where a design gets found.
What a following cannot do is make a design that nobody searches for into one that people search for. Your followers will see it once. A stranger who has never heard of you finds it only if it matches something they typed.
What you need instead
Without an audience, a design has to be findable on its own. In practice that comes down to four things.
- A phrase people actually search for. The wording on the shirt, or the thing it is about, should be something a buyer would type. When you submit, we check the phrase against real Etsy sales and record whether other sellers are selling it, which is a better guide than how clever it sounds.
- Wording nobody else is selling. A joke that is already for sale in a hundred shops is competing with all of them, and its title will match someone else's listing.
- Artwork that reads small. In a search grid your design is a thumbnail beside forty others. If it only works at full size, most people will never see it at full size.
- Time. Search learns slowly where to show a new listing, which is the subject of the post on why a design is not selling.
What going without one costs
Here is the honest trade. Without a following pushing a design, it waits to be found, and most designs are not found quickly. A first sale usually takes weeks, often months, and most listings, ours included, never sell at all.
So you skip the work of building an audience, and in exchange you depend on search, which is slow and selective. For a lot of people that is still the better deal, because building an audience is a job of its own and most people who start one stop. But it is a trade, not a shortcut.
Who does the rest
The part of selling a shirt that has nothing to do with drawing it is ours. We make the products and the mockups, write the titles and tags, list the design on the marketplaces, rewrite a listing that nobody is seeing, and deal with printing, shipping and customer messages. You make the design and decide which shop it is for.
If you do have an audience, you are welcome to tell it about your designs. It is simply not the plan we rely on, and you do not need one to take part.
The honest part
Most designs sell little or nothing, with or without a following, and this is not fast money. What it costs you to try is the time it took to make the design: no stock, no upfront fees, and no listing fees during a design's first eight months. The money side is on the payout example page, worked through on real orders.
If you can make a design and would rather not become a content creator to sell it, you can create a free account and submit one.