Most people deciding where to put their artwork compare royalty rates. That is the second question. The first is what you hand over when you press upload, and the answer sits in a licence that very few people read before they agree to it.
This post walks through ours, including the parts that cost you something. The full text is public in our terms and conditions, and the partner agreement is shown to you in full before your first submission.
Who owns your design after you upload it
Copyright and a licence are different things. Copyright is ownership of the artwork. A licence is permission to use it in particular ways. Most print on demand arrangements, ours included, work by licence. Our agreement's own summary puts it as: you license your artwork to us and we pay you for that licence. That payment is the royalty, a share of the profit on every sale.
So the useful question is not who owns the file. It is what the licence lets the platform do, for how long, and what it stops you from doing.
Exclusive or non-exclusive is the first thing to find
A non-exclusive licence lets a platform sell your design while you stay free to sell it anywhere else too. An exclusive licence means that, within its scope, only the platform can.
Ours is exclusive for finished designs. Once a design is approved and a short cooling-off period has passed, you grant a permanent, irrevocable, exclusive licence to sell consumer products featuring it: shirts, mugs, totes and anything else that counts as merchandise, made any way and sold anywhere. It survives if you close your account. In practice you cannot also put the same design, or one substantially similar, on Redbubble, Zazzle or a shop of your own, and the agreement names those platforms outright.
The reason is not mysterious. We pay for the listings, the mockups and the copy before anything sells, and a design only earns that back if the same artwork is not also on sale somewhere else. It is still a real cost to you and should be weighed as one. If a design already sells as merchandise elsewhere, or you want to keep that door open, it does not belong here.
There is one exception. If you submit an idea rather than artwork, a description our designers then draw, the licence is non-exclusive. You can still make and sell your own version of the same idea. What you cannot do is copy the specific artwork our team produced from it.
What you keep
The exclusivity covers consumer products and nothing else. You keep the right to use the design:
- in your portfolio, online or printed
- as fine art, which includes exhibiting it and selling the original or limited fine art prints
- in client work that is not a product, such as a mural, a logo or a branding job
- for educational, editorial or personal use
Two obligations run the other way. You confirm the design is yours to license, and if somebody else's rights turn out to be in it, the cost of that claim falls on you. And if you later register a trademark or copyright on the design, the licence you already granted comes first, and you are asked to tell us within 14 days of filing.
You can change your mind for seven days
After a design is approved and listed, you have seven calendar days to withdraw it by writing to [email protected]. Withdraw, and the rights to your artwork come straight back to you. You keep your share of anything that sold during those seven days.
After that the licence is permanent, so the seven days are the moment to decide whether a design belongs here. A submission we turn down is simpler still: no licence is granted and its rights stay with you.
What happens to a design that never sells
This is the clause that matters most, because most designs sell little and plenty sell nothing. A permanent exclusive licence on a design nobody buys would leave good artwork stuck in a drawer.
So the licence ends by itself. When a design has been taken down from every marketplace (the agreement calls this sunset) and stays that way for twelve consecutive months, all commercial rights to the artwork you submitted return to you automatically. From then on you can sell it anywhere, competing platforms included. If we bring the design back before the twelve months are up, the clock resets.
The part that never comes back
Everything we make around your design stays ours: the mockups, product photos, titles, descriptions and keyword research. That holds after a withdrawal and after a reversion. What returns to you is the artwork you submitted, not the listings built on top of it, so taking a design elsewhere means new mockups and new copy.
The agreement also lets our designers make variations, versions that keep recognisable parts of the original, such as the same artwork with different wording. You earn the same percentage on those sales as on the original.
Questions worth asking any platform
- Is the licence exclusive or non-exclusive, and exclusive for what?
- Does it survive if you close your account?
- Is there a window to withdraw, and how long is it?
- Do the rights ever come back if the design stops selling?
- Can the platform alter the design or make variations, and are you paid on those?
- Who owns the mockups and the listing text?
Terms change, and that includes this post: the agreement shown to you when you sign is the one that binds.
Where that leaves you
Two examples of what a partner's upload becomes once it is licensed and listed: a goose design on Tickle Stitch and an autumn Goldendoodle design on Fluffy Doodle. Neither artist made a mockup, wrote a listing or posted a parcel.
The honest summary is that you give up the right to sell a design as merchandise anywhere else, and in exchange every other part of selling it is handled by us, with nothing paid up front. Most designs sell modestly or not at all, and this is not fast money. A design that does not sell costs you nothing but the time it took to draw, and after a year off the marketplaces it is yours to take elsewhere. What you earn on each sale is set out line by line on the payout example page.
If that trade suits a design you have, you can create a free account and read the full agreement before you submit anything.