Most people test a shirt idea by asking whether it is good. Friends say yes, the design goes up, and then it sits there. The more useful question is narrower, and it can be answered before you draw anything: when people search for this, does anyone buy?
How to tell whether anyone wants your shirt idea
Every shirt idea has a phrase behind it, the words a buyer would type to find it. "Funny nurse shirt." "Frog coffee shirt." "Sheepadoodle mom." Demand belongs to the phrase, not to the drawing, because a marketplace shows a listing to people who searched for something, and nobody can search for a design they have never seen.
So the first step is to write the phrase down. If you cannot say in four or five words what a shopper would type, that is worth knowing before you start, because it is the most common reason a good design goes unseen.
The number of results is not demand
The obvious check is to search the phrase on Etsy and look at how many results come back. It is also the misleading one. A results count tells you how many listings exist, which is supply. Thousands of results can mean a busy phrase with thousands of buyers, or a phrase every seller copied and nobody shops for. The count cannot tell those apart.
What you want to know is how many of those listings are selling.
Count the listings that sold, not the listings that exist
Look at the listings near the top for the phrase and ask how many different ones have sold recently. Etsy does not publish sales per listing, but research tools estimate them, and partners here can see those estimates for real listings on our Demand Search page. The estimates are not exact. They are good enough to sort a phrase into one of four rough groups.
- Plenty of listings selling, none of them dominant. Buyers exist and spread their money around, so a new listing has a real chance at a share.
- Plenty selling, but one listing takes most of the sales. Buyers exist and mostly buy the same shirt. A new listing there competes with that one shirt, not with the phrase.
- Only a few listings selling. Thin. There is some demand, not much. Worth one design as a probe, not a series.
- Nothing selling recently. Pick a different phrase. That does not always mean a different idea. "Boat mechanic shirt" came back with no sales at all, and a design aimed at it may still be findable under the words boat owners actually use.
What the check cannot tell you
- It measures the phrase, not your design. A phrase with plenty of buyers is also a phrase with plenty of sellers. Passing means you are allowed to compete, not that you will win.
- It reads one month. A Valentine's phrase checked in September will look dead. Seasonal phrases have to be read in season.
- It is one marketplace. Etsy demand is search demand. A design that suits a social feed can do well somewhere search never sees it.
- It is an estimate. Trust the groups more than the exact numbers.
Two checks to run before demand
Demand is wasted if the design cannot be listed. First, search your exact wording on Etsy. If another shop already sells your line word for word, a buyer who types it finds theirs first, and we deny a submission on the spot when the opening four or more words of its title already appear in another shop's Etsy listing. Remixing a trend is fine; repeating someone's line is not.
Second, check the words are not somebody's trademark for clothing, which catches more ordinary phrases than you would expect. The post on what you can put on a shirt explains how that works.
How it works here
Every design submitted to YourOtherJob has its phrase checked this way when it arrives, alongside the trademark screen and the Etsy wording search. The demand check informs the review rather than deciding it, because the estimates can be wrong and a thin phrase is sometimes worth a probe. If a design is approved, we list it, price it, print and ship each order, and pay you a share of the profit on every sale.
None of this makes a design sell. Most designs sell little or nothing whichever phrase they target, and this is not fast money. What a demand check does is stop you spending a weekend on an idea nobody is shopping for, and a design that does not sell here costs you nothing beyond the time it took to make. The money side is on the payout example page.
If you have an idea that passes, you can create a free account and submit it.