Did you know that you can create custom t-shirts online with zero prepayment and zero stock? Sites such as Teespring, Redbubble, and Zazzle will let you create a free shop page and print and send your designs around the world for free.
Of course, they will receive some of the profits, but this is better than investing in inventory or production costs. It can also be a great way to customize your clothing.
Whether you are looking to create your own brand, sell products, or create custom wearable clothes, this guide will tell you everything you need to know.
Teespring vs Redbubble vs Zazzle – which is better?
There are dozens of websites with customized merchandise now, but we’ve picked three titans that offer easy registration and creation: Teespring, Redbubble, and Zazzle. We’ll compare prices, fees, and product creation tools across the three websites below.
Zazzle is a difficult designer, low profit
Zazzle is the best platform for making not only T-shirts to order, but also a wide variety of products. With Zazzle, you can print your designs on hundreds of products, from shirts and hoodies to skateboards and playing cards.
When it comes to creating t-shirt designs, the Zazzle tool can be quite tricky. The system works similarly to Canva, a free online image creation tool. For us, we found the Zazzle creator page to be perfect for creating something like posters or photo frames, but we thought we thought about t-shirt design later.
Less help making sure everything is aligned, and no detail on what the print quality will be that the competition has.
Royalties on Zazzle are small. The base price for a basic custom t-shirt is $ 17.95 and you have to add royalties to it. Recommended royalty rates are between 5% and 10%. With this, you will earn between $ 0.90 and $ 1.90 per T-shirt.
Redbubble – simple designer, low profit
Redbubble also offers a wider selection of products and is very easy to use. Create an account and add banner and information about your store from your profile page. From there, you can upload images and they will be directly added to whatever products you choose.
There are some problems with this because you need to design outside of the website and upload it directly. You cannot add multiple images at once. When you add images, they will appear when you preview your t-shirt or product. Some may prefer this approach, but being able to add elements and customize them in the design before completion is much easier.
Prices for Redbubble vary, but at the time of writing, we’ve found tee prices starting at £ 12.70 ($ 16.48). You can add your own margin – 10% margin will make the retail price of the cheapest t-shirt £ 13.76 ($ 17.86) and you get £ 1.06 ($ 1.38). Very similar to Zazzle’s proposal.
Teespring – simple designer, reasonable profit
Teespring has a designer similar to Zazzle but simpler. Just upload images and add text. This will display images and text on the shirt. You can click to move, rotate and resize all elements.
What we love about Zazzle’s design is the quality checker. If you add too low quality images, Teespring will let you know. You can also quickly see if the images match each other.
For more complex custom t-shirt designs, Teespring will provide you with a printable template so you can line everything up perfectly.
Teespring deals with pricing a little differently. Instead of adding royalties to the base price, you can select the retail price of your shirt and Teespring will calculate your profit. If you priced the t-shirt at $ 17.95, you’d make $ 7.38 per t-shirt – much better than Redbubble and Zazzle.
With a lower base price on Teespring, you can buy your own design T-shirts at a lower price, or get more profit on every sale.
How to Create Your Own Custom Teespring
With more profit and the best designer tailor-made for custom t-shirts, we chose Teespring for this guide. Below, we’ll show you how to set up your own store and design your own T-shirts to sell or buy for yourself.
- To get started, first visit Teespring and click “Get Started” in the upper left corner.
- Go through the account creation process.
- Then click Create & Sell and then Continue.
- You will need to choose a store name – this will be your own URL where you can place your own products.
- We then invite you to return to the Teespring homepage. From here, click Start Design again.
- Select a product category and a product to which you want to add your design. In this guide, we will select mens / mens tees and then a classic tee.
- Then select Buy if you would like to buy the design for yourself, or Sell if you would like to list it in your store for sale later.
It’s time to create your own t-shirt design. We highly recommend using image editing software to create your own designs and text using the font you like. Save each image as 300dpi PNG files with transparent background. If you can’t afford Photoshop, try a free image editing alternative
Alternatively, search the Internet for free clipart to use in your projects. You can find additional instructions on this from Teespring here
It is best to create separate images for each element or logo – for example, one image for the logo and one for the text. Then click “Add Image” on the Teespring Creator page. On the right, you will see the image on the shirt. Click and hold to drag the image to a new location.
Each image you add will have separate controls for rotating, positioning, resizing, and deleting.
You will also have onscreen prompts to indicate the size of the item, so you can make sure the repeating items are the same size, and onscreen prompts will tell you if the print quality is good enough. If Teespring reports the image will be of poor print quality, recreate the image at a higher resolution.
After you finish your design, select the available colors and prices on the left. You won’t be able to change this later without contacting support, so make sure you pick the colors you like. We do not recommend choosing T-shirt colors that are too similar to your design.
Then click “Continue” and add a description and URL for your shirt. Make sure you select the correct visibility settings and decide to add it to the store you created earlier. Finally, click “Post Ad” and you can find your T-shirt in your store.
If you’re creating your own designs to buy, you will skip these last few steps and can buy directly instead.
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