The clothing niche is huge on the internet with one apparel in particular – T-shirts, and you can see them a lot on drop shipping sites. What if I say that you can make money selling T-shirts online without having to store them in your garage. By using Teespring, you can be a T-shirt designer and an entrepreneur at the same time. Let’s see how you can get started.
What Is Teespring?
The idea of making T-shirts started when two senior students, Walker and Evan, created commemorative shirts to support their favorite local dive bar that was closing down back in 2011. Teespring was born following that successful event and today, it is a creative platform that helps sellers prints custom designed apparel and ship them directly to the buyers.
How Do You Make Money Selling T-Shirts Online With Teespring?
One of the best ways to sell T-shirts is to create a theme (or a campaign) because this will help you get targeted buyers within a certain time period. Without a campaign, your T-shirt will not be special and it would take forever for people to notice your product. A campaign can be related to a worthy cause such as raising donations or an entrepreneurial idea whereby profits are made from the sales.
Once you have a theme in mind, head over to Teespring to create an account.
Step #1 – Design Your Tee
With the easy-to-use Teespring designing platform, you can create your tee by adding/editing text styles and artworks online. When it comes to quality, rest assured that your designs will be printed on names like Hanes and American Apparel, which provides some of the best materials out there for T-shirts.
Step #2 – Set a Campaign Goal
Your goal here refers to how many tee you want to sell and the amount of profit you wish to achieve from the sale. For example, if I want to sell 50 pieces of my Time Rich Worry Free design on Hanes Tagless Tee, my profit is estimated to be about $631+. Each T-shirt design come with different colors and you are encouraged to add varieties to the color and style to optimize your campaign.
Step #3 – Create Your Campaign
Next, you need to give your campaign a nice title and description so that people will know what your T-shirt is all about. You can choose to run the campaign for a minimum of 3 days to a maximum of 21 days. Once you have completed this step, a URL will be generated to direct buyers to the campaign page for them to book their orders.
And this is how your campaign page would look like at the front end;
Step #4 – Marketing Your Campaign
Now, it’s all about getting your campaign out there so that people will know about it. There are a few ways you can go about doing this.
- If you have 3 campaigns or more, you can create a storefront on Teespring to cross promote your T-shirts whenever someone visits the marketplace.
- Share the campaign page within the social networks. Let them know why your campaign is special and why their support can make a difference. Based on the general feedback, Teespring sellers tend to have a lot of success with Facebook postings and ads. So if your target audience is within this network, you should check out their YouTube tutorials on how to get started. Considering that T-shirts are pretty visual, you should also take advantage of Pinterest to promote your apparel.
- Email your families, friends and colleagues and share with them about your T-shirt project.
- Create a WordPress website and blog about your campaign. This way, you can reach out to more audience and make more sales.
How Much Does It Cost?
It’s absolutely free to design your tees or launch your storefront on Teespring. You will only be charged when the campaign reaches the minimum order required for printing, which is usually about 3 to 5.
So, Is Teespring Worthy of Your Time?
Back in the old days, T-shirt sellers have to source for their own suppliers and printers. With Teespring, that’s been taken care of. It’s almost like selling drop ship items, except that they are all YOUR custom design apparels so it makes your business campaign more unique in the eyes of the buyers.
When the designing, printing and shipping works are being handled by someone, you will have more space to focus on the marketing effort. This is really important considering that you have very limited time to make the best out of your campaign.
In summary. Teespring is a wonderful platform whether it is for a personal, business or community project. Everyone loves to have a nice tee that represents something significant. So, wouldn’t it be great to have someone wearing a T-shirt designed by you? 🙂
Can’t wait to get started? Read how you can start an online business selling T-shirts with my recommended training platform at Wealthy Affiliate University.
Do you have any thoughts or questions about this business project idea? Please leave them in the comment area below and I’ll get back to you.
Hello Cathy,
It seems the world is full of T-shirts displaying a huge variety of expressions, and thoughts of the individual wearer. You certainly give a wealth of information here on how to have your own online business in the T-Shirt world and I believe that the demand is so great that any individual willing to commit and put in some time can achieve success.
Absolutely Angela,
Who doesn’t like a T-shirt that can express their thoughts and personalities? They are such a great wear whenever you feel like having a good laugh with your friends. It’s amazing how anyone or any organization can create a T-shirt representing them with Teespring.
Hello Cathy,
This is very nice and original idea. I have to admit I want to start creating T-shirts myself right here right now! It is really something you can do together with the kids for fun or setting up a business campaign.
And of course the best way to show your T-shirts to the people is by putting them online in a website. Great idea!
Hi there,
Designing and selling T-shirts can be very fun for kids especially if they are raising some funds for certain school projects. You can involve the parents and the entire community as well by creating a fundraising project and get them to support your campaign.
Hi Cathy,
I have seen a similar program for selling T-shirts but it was quite expensive to get started with it. I really liked the idea though and this company sounds really interesting. How good is it that you don’t pay for anything unless your T-shirts sell?
Having a blog would certainly help with the sale of your T-shirts and this would be a great niche idea.
Thanks for this Cathy, I have bookmarked your site.
Exactly Kerry,
Not having to invest in a large capital set up is really wonderful when it comes to selling T-shirts with Teespring. I am curious to know, which program/company that you used before this? Thanks
Hey! This is really cool! I’ve always wanted to start a T-shirt company and this is a very easy, FREE way of doing it. Do you usually make pretty good commissions off of your campaigns? It seems like these T-shirts can be pretty lucrative.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up! You’ve given me a whole new way of making money online!
Welcome to my blog, Jay.
I think the profit margin for the T-shirt selections on Teespring is pretty good. You can earned up to almost 50% per sale. So the strategy here is really to amplify your campaign during the set duration to maximize profit.
Glad to know that Teespring can help you kick start your online business.
This is amazing! It is great when people that have ideas have a place to implement it, try it out or whatever. I didn’t understand the charging. When campaign reaches minimum order they charge you for what? For all T-shirts in the campaign? Is the selling concentrated in only, for example, America or they can send it anywhere in the world? How that effects price of the shirt?
Hi there Branka,
When a campaign reaches a minimum order of 3-5 pieces of T-shirts, Teespring will proceed with the printing and shipping and deduct the cost of production from the total profit. So even if your goal isn’t met – say you wanted to sell 50, but only manage to sell 5 – you still get to earn some money.
Teespring does ship internationally and you can check for the shipping cost on this page.
Hope this helps.
Hi Cathy,
I find this idea of making money selling T-shirts online with Teespring rather interesting. I saw it stated that they will keep printing tee shirts as long as their sales generate a profit.
So lets say my goal is 25 shirts, because I don’t know how well I will be able to market them, and I barely meet that but I still have sparse orders come in. Do you know how many orders, in how many days I have to get to keep a “profit” as defined by Teespring?
Hi Debra,
When selling T-shirts through Teespring, you set your own goals and campaign duration. The minimum order for printing is between 3-5 shirts. So even if you manage to sell only 10 at the end of your 3 weeks campaign for example, you will still profit from the sale, just not as much as selling 25 shirts.
Hope this helps.
Being able to sell t shirts and make them is great. Nothing is better than when you can make a profit off of something that you personally created. It’s the best feeling in the world and making t-shirts seem like it would be fun. Teespring is something I’ve never heard of and I am glad I read your post because I learned something new today.
Hi there Marc,
Making T-shirts can be a lot of fun whether you are working on a small or a big project. What niche are you currently involved in? Can it benefit from T-shirt design and selling? Just some food for thought.
Hi Cathy, let me start off by saying that I did read your entire post on how to sell t-shirts Online and I am so glad I found this post. I have always wanted to do something like this without any know-how but you have certainly shed some light on my path. Thanks for sharing and good luck with your t-shirts.
Hi there Peter,
I am glad to be able to help you there. Designing and launching a campaign on Teespring is really easy. Whatever your ideas may be, I am sure you’ll like using this tool as much as I do.
What an awesome idea for t-shirts! I never knew that this was out there. I always thought that I would have to purchase all the equipment to design my own shirts. To know that there is this option is great. Thanks for sharing and I am definitely going to be checking this out soon. Thanks again for all the info.
Hi James,
Despite its popularity, I am surprised myself too that there are still many people who don’t know about this designing tool. Hopefully, this article will be able to provide you with an idea on how to make your online business/selling more creative and interesting.
This is such a creative idea!
A couple of years back me and my boyfriend wanted to get into designing and selling T-shirts with slogans and graphics on them. It looks like we might even have an opportunity to do this now!
The only thing that stopped us from pursuing our dream was the fact that we could not afford to order enough T-shirts and buy all the equipment we would need!
Thanks for pointing out this awesome site. I will show my boyfriend later today and we will have a go at this some time.
Welcome to my blog Hannah,
T-shirt supplies and printing cost are certainly the biggest factors that deter most people from selling stuff online such as what we see with drop ship items. Fortunately, Teespring has simplified the entire process and makes it possible to start even from your own garage. I am excited with the kind of opportunity that is coming your way Hannah. Do keep us posted.
Hi Cathy,
This is such a great idea! I am so doing this. I have bookmarked this page so I can come back to it later. I was just looking for a way to boost income and I am really hoping this could be the way. I have to think about the campaign I would promote as I have 2 ideas but this is just fantastic. And the fact that it is free is just the icing on the cake.
Great to hear from you again Emily,
I am glad you found this useful. Your niche about Traditional Native Healing can certainly benefit from this designing tool. Do share your campaign link with me once you publish your T-shirt design online.
Thank you for sharing this. I love designing and can certainly use another extra income source on my site. How long have you been working on this T-shirts campaign anyway?
Hi there Renelyn,
I am still starting my baby steps here in T-shirt campaign, but I have a friend who runs a fitness studio who has been using it for a while to create awareness for exercise in his community and social networks. He printed his website address in the design so whenever someone wears it, they are indirectly doing free advertising for his online business. I think you should apply that for your campaign too.
Hi Cathy,
Where do you find this stuff? This is an awesome idea from these 2 students! I’ve sold t-shirts myself in the past, which I had to find manufacturers for, get an estimate of what I thought to sell shipped over, and just hope the quality was somewhat ok. I had a look at these guys and it definitely looks to be legit! I might have to get back in to selling shirts again. 😉 Thanks for the great info!
Great to hear from you again Maarten,
Rest assured that Teespring is a total legit company. If you run a quick search on Google News, you’ll find that they are expanding their marketing to UK and Europe based customers (as of September 2015) and even helped a woman earn a 6 figure income by working from home. It’s a great zero-cost tool to use if you know what needs to be done in order to sell T-shirts online.
Perhaps it’s time to revive some old projects, Maarten. All the best!
This is a really great idea. If only I was a bit more artistic this would be an excellent business venture to get into. It looks like it would provide a good income as well. I really like the idea and am going to give this site to my friend who is looking for a business to bring in some money.
Hi there Christine,
Rather than design, think of a message that you want to spread to the world and have that message printed on the T-shirt instead. I think ‘creating awareness’ kind of campaign can also make T-shirts sell quite well these days. There are a lot of supportive community out there in almost any niche so reach out to them with some powerful words.
Hi Cathy,
Thank you for providing an excellent break down on how someone can start an entrepreneurial business of selling t-shirts online. I must admit I have seen others advertise these shirt campaigns for charity/fundraising causes but I had no idea how they created it! Do you think Pinterest is a place that could be used to market t-shirts?
Welcome to my blog, Melissa.
Pinterest is definitely the platform of choice when it comes to sharing designs with your audience due to its visual appeal. Ideally, you want to drive traffic back to your blog so that they get to read more about your project/campaign and become interested in buying your T-shirts.
What a great idea. This online tshirt making business is good for creative people whose hobby is to design beautiful and aesthetic tshirt prints. If managed effectively, it can bring good profit to people who purchased it. Brilliant business ideas for those who want to start business with a very low capital. Thank you for the information
Welcome to my blog, Karl.
Yup, the T-shirt making business is huge and it’s an on-going trend too. So many sectors from commerce to campaigns can benefit from this creative tool. Maybe you should consider creating one for your own blog too.