Plenty of people with a good idea for a shirt never do anything with it, because they cannot draw. It is a reasonable worry and mostly the wrong one. A lot of shirts that sell are an idea first and a drawing second, and the idea is the part that is hard to come by.
Why a shirt idea is worth more than people think
Read the titles of the shirts in our own shops and many of them are a single sentence. I Can Explain It To You But I Can't Understand It For You. My Five-Year Plan Is Just Making It To Friday. Property Of The Firefighter. Leave Me Alone I'm Reading. Whatever artwork sits around them, what those shirts sell is the line and the person it was written for.
That is the part a drawing cannot supply. A beautiful illustration of nothing in particular has nobody in mind. A line about the gap between explaining something and understanding it, worn by a nurse, has an obvious buyer: the nurse, or the person shopping for one. Two of the shirts above are live on Tickle Stitch as examples of where an idea ends up: the I Can Explain It nursing shirt and Property Of The Firefighter.
How an idea-only submission works
Our submission form has two tiers. A finished design earns a 50 percent share of the profit on each sale. An idea earns 25 percent. For an idea you upload no artwork. You give it a title, describe the idea in words, add at least 20 keywords a shopper might search for, and pick which of our brands it is for. If it is approved, our designers draw it, and from then on it is listed, printed and shipped like any other design.
The gap between the two shares pays for the drawing. Turning a description into print-ready artwork is real work, and it is done before anyone knows whether the shirt will sell. A quarter of a small number is a smaller number, and you should weigh that honestly. The trade is that you need no software, no drawing skill and no files.
What you keep
The licence on an idea is not the same as the licence on finished artwork. A finished design is licensed to us exclusively for merchandise. An idea is non-exclusive: you can still make and sell your own version of the same idea elsewhere. What you cannot do is copy the specific artwork our designers produced from it. The post on who owns your design covers the rest of the agreement.
How to describe an idea so it can be drawn
The description is the whole submission, so it has to do the job the artwork would have done.
- Give the exact words. If there is text on the shirt, write it precisely, with the punctuation and line breaks you want. "Something about nurses being tired" is a theme. A line is an idea.
- Say who it is for. A job, a hobby, a breed, a kind of parent. The designer pitches the drawing at that person, and the keywords come from there too.
- Describe the picture, if there is one. What is in it, what it is doing, and roughly where it sits against the words. Name a style if you have one in mind, such as a vintage sketch or a simple cartoon.
- Keep it to one idea. Three jokes in one submission usually become one crowded shirt. Send them separately.
- Do not plan the colours. The design has to work on light and dark shirts alike, which is a decision for whoever draws it.
What gets an idea turned down
Most refusals have nothing to do with how good the idea is.
- It does not fit a brand. We run two. Tickle Stitch is comedy, and its test is whether a stranger would smirk at the shirt in public, so sincere, sentimental and awareness designs do not belong there. Fluffy Doodle is dog designs for doodle owners, where the dog is the product, so an idea that would work just as well without the dog does not fit.
- The wording is already for sale. Every submission's title is searched on Etsy, and if the opening four or more words already appear in another shop's listing, it is denied on the spot.
- It is someone else's trademark. Every submission is screened, and ordinary-sounding phrases are registered for clothing more often than people expect.
A denied submission still counts against your monthly allowance of 100, so it is worth searching Etsy for your exact line before you send it.
The honest version
An idea is the cheapest way in, and it is not a shortcut to money. Most designs sell little or nothing, whoever drew them, and an idea earns half the share a finished design does. What you risk is the time it took to write the idea down: no stock, no fees and no artwork to pay for. What each share pays on a real order is set out on the payout example page.
If you have a line you keep thinking would make a good shirt, you can create a free account and submit it as an idea.