With print on demand, you can offer merchandise, build your brand, and open opportunities for revenue with no upfront cost | The UnNoticed Entrepreneur — step into the spotlight.
With print on demand, you can offer merchandise, build your brand, and open opportunities for revenue with no upfront cost
How Big is the Merchandise Market
This was 20 years ago and back then, I was printing notebooks and giving these along with pens to journalists. The problem was that I had to keep stock somewhere in my store. I also had to pay for them in advance.
Now, with print on demand, you can make your merchandise as you need it. Technology has really revolutionised merchandise and it’s not about three-dimensional printing; it’s just about low-volume, high-value conversions of all manner of items — from clothing to household goods, from office products to even mobile phone cases.
What I’m Doing for The UnNoticed Entrepreneur
I’m currently building merchandise for my podcast. The research that I’ve done so far comprises two parts: One is about production and another is about selling.
The problem, however, is that I have to buy the product first, take it with me, and ship it to somebody else. What I didn’t want to do is to buy stock and have it sit where I live, and have the need to buy some sort of minimum volume. The traditional model of printing, buying, and shipping is not ideal if you’re an entrepreneur.
I found two other websites, and . I chose to work with the former because they have fulfillment in North Carolina in America, Australia, and Europe (They’ve recently opened a facility in the north of England). They’re also one of the few companies that I found to be capable of serving my clients across the globe. The other that I found was called .
How Print on Demand Helps
With businesses that offer print on demand or POD, you can place an order and they’ll only make it only once a customer buys your order. Some are also offering drop shipping where you don’t even take ownership of the goods at all.
On Printful, I can design a product and promote it on my website. When someone buys it, Printful will make it and ship it directly to the customer on my behalf. This is great — as long as I have enough people who want to buy from me. However, I don’t want to simply use merchandise as a promotional item. If you tap someone like Vistaprint, you can simply make something for your company and give it away. But if you want to really sell and make some money from your merchandise, it needs to be on big players such as Amazon (But you have to be invited to get onto that).
is a marketplace for tens of millions of people who are looking for an Amazon alternative. My wife has an Etsy store selling oriental teapots from China and it’s doing well. The problem with Etsy though is that it’s a marketplace and it won’t hold your inventory. As I mentioned, I don’t want to hold inventory. I want to be able to design and sell in a marketplace and have customers purchase it from the marketplace, but the fulfillment has to be done by my POD partner. And very few companies do that.
Now, there’s this proliferation of new marketplaces that are not Amazon and can be considered anti-brand. They’re run for artisans and are more fitting to the direction that I’m going. For The UnNoticed merchandise, I want to sell my products to other entrepreneurs. I can’t compete with big t-shirt manufacturers or the big cup manufacturers — I’m going to be selling to my own tribe.
What I like about this model — where I have Printful for the design, production, and fulfillment, and Etsy as my marketplace — is that the whole value chain is being done online. I don’t have to take any goods at all or buy any inventory.
The Idea of Merchandise
The questions now are: What sort of products am I going to make? What sort of margins will I get? Can I make it profitable or is it just a marketing activity?
My plan is to go for a small number of products first and then make them available in different colours. I don’t want to have too many product types that I have to manage, so I did similar product types with different design variants. For example, my water bottle has four variants. The water bottles themselves cost me £14.51. The shipping is £4.99 and the value-added tax (VAT) is £3.90. All in all, they cost me about £24.
I also looked online to see at what price water bottles sell for. I’ve learned that I can conceivably give a gift to people for £29 of a branded water bottle. If I want to do something cheaper like a plain white mug, it will only cost me £5.95, plus a shipping fee worth £4.29 and a VAT worth £2. The total cost will be £12, which is about what it would cost in a regular mug store.
The benefit of this is that I don’t have to buy any mugs and go to the post office to ship them. I don’t have to buy a box or stand in line or do anything but simply sell them. In reality, It only costs me around £12 to give it away for free. If I sell it for £17, I can make about £5 but it won’t be an unreasonable amount for a mug.
In the past, the idea of merchandise as a way to build your brand has been impossible for entrepreneurs because of the cost (including design among other things). Now, with platforms like Printful, you can either upload your design or take some of their stock designs and put them on t-shirts, cups, aprons, bags, and homeware products.
Also, it can give you the opportunity to create social media posts about the merchandise that you’re creating.
Merchandise for The UnNoticed Entrepreneur
It’s a complete branding opportunity and it doesn’t cost me anything other than my time to do the design. The Etsy store costs me 20 cents per product that I list. I can be in online retail very quickly with no fixed costs and I can make money if I sell something.
I wanted to share the idea of merchandise today because, in the past, giveaways were a large component of public relations. Whether it’s post-it notes that can be put on a desk or pens and notebooks, giving away merchandise is something that people appreciate. They carry it around. Now, it’s no longer necessary to print a large stock of these and hold them in your office or in your home. You can design a whole store layout. In the worst case, you can order samples (Printful gives three per month at a discounted price). You can also buy them from your own Etsy store. Then you can start to build a reputation as a merchant as well.
It’s an opportunity for small companies to get involved in something that’s historically regarded as the preserve of big companies and retailers who can buy merchandise and stock them.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Originally published at https://theunnoticed.cc on May 12, 2022.
