T-Shirts Are Coming!

I have spent most of the weekend researching the many ways I can get more merchandise out there.  As once could imagine, the price of getting merch that is beyond stickers is a bit expensive.  I did look into on demand press companies, however the ones that were recommended to me were either to restricting in what sizes my art had to be and/or their commission was more beneficial to them. 

The latter I can understand.  The on-demand printing companies have employees, overhead, equipment, material costs, and shipping worries.  So that is the main reason why their commission is so high.  The downside though is that I would have to sell t-shirts and other items at a higher price just to make more than two dollars per item.  I am sure that there are many artists out there that can easily make a living off a return of two bucks when you multiply the amount by the number of fans an artist has.  Having said that, I did find one on-demand printing company that I did like.

After days of research I have found a possible way of getting t-shirts made alongside a few other things in work through a on-demand company that is less restrictive on their size limitations and are actually more affordable for you while giving me a slightly better percentage of profit.

The downside to this is the turn around rate.  My website is done through Squarespace which is the one of the few webhosts that will not easily connect to the company that I have chosen.  The turn around time frame will be a bit longer. 

For example, my stickers can be shipped out the same day that I receive an order because they are near me at my house.  The t-shirts have to be made on-demand which means that when I receive an order, I would go to the site and input what I need and then that t-shirt would be dropshipped to the customer's house.  This is a three day process plus normal shipping time.  Ideally this could have been done directly on my site making ordering seamless.  There is supposedly a work around that I will be looking into.

The upside to all of this, is that I can have more merch made available while not killing myself with having to set up my own screen printing machine and so on, although that is a near future goal of mine.

In the next few days I will be ordering from the company that I have chosen and I will report back with how it all turns out, and if all goes well, then I will start selling shirts, mugs, prints, and other merchandise on my site.

Fingers crossed.