what does it take to make another artists work on merchandise

To quote the Brazilian creative person Romero Britto, "Art is too important not to share".

And there's good news for you, every bit a designer, artist or illustrator: the digital age has brought nigh powerful, unprecedented opportunities to share your artwork and monetise it.

Online tech has connected artists with fine art lovers from all over the world; at that place's truly something for everyone.

And, at the same time, new, heady business opportunities have emerged, offering new revenue streams in an manufacture that's traditionally been considered equally low-paid (except for the successful minority).

No longer are you limited to selling your original artwork and prints — you can sell your artwork on all sorts of products — from custom t shirts to mugs, face masks to art prints.

And, with print on demand dropshipping, you lot spend far less fourth dimension worrying almost the hassle of logistics, supply bondage and gild fulfilment. Your focus remains solely on creating great piece of work, and promoting it to your audience.

Of course, there are challenges — as you lot'd await from any business organization opportunity. Creating designs; edifice your existing post-obit; building trust and growing sales.

None of these are what y'all might call 'easy'. Just, as artist Dayna Winter wrote in a great Shopify article:

To succeed in fine art, you must also succeed in business.

Fortunately you take ii significant advantages. Firstly, unlike many aspiring merchandisers who agonise over where and how to source amazing designs to add to their products and sell to their audience — you lot already have a trunk of work ready to become. Good creatives are one of the about important success factors in merchandising. You have this covered!

And, secondly, every bit an artist or designer, you may already have been building an audience at least partly receptive to your work and, consequently, your products.

Those two elements combine to create a huge opportunity.

Just let'due south get specific.

Let's not just talk near the size of the opportunity — let'south show you exactly how information technology works, step-past-step!

Choosing a store platform

In guild to sell art online, y'all get-go need an online 'shop window.' A platform that provides the actual functionality by which customers scan, buy and pay for your products.

Choosing a platform through which to sell your artwork is a really important determination.

There are a lot of online marketplaces and ecommerce sites with large audiences through which you tin can sell your products. Of course, there are the 'obvious' options similar eBay and Amazon. Similarly, creative market Etsy offers an 'Art & Collectibles' section, which can potentially connect y'all with a range of fine art enthusiasts.

I pick is to stock inventory and fulfil orders yourself. Still, you'll take to consider listing fees, transaction fees and all sorts of other potential overheads. Information technology's hard work.

Alternatively, you lot can register with Prodigi and utilise our manual order form. Through our dashboard, yous tin lodge any of our print on demand products, enter your customer's address, and identify your society.

Although information technology's a little more than time consuming than using the automated integration of a print on demand app, it enables print on need fulfilment on these big marketplaces. Amazon and Etsy take large audiences and stellar reputations. Then it is definitely worth considering as it may exist the correct motion for your brand.

In that location are a range of print on need marketplaces out there besides. RedBubble and Society6 are simply a couple of well-known options which practise pretty impressive numbers.

It's pretty easy to become up and running on these sites, but again in that location are limitations. These sites are very popular, which sounds swell, only they're so saturated with piece of work that information technology tin be difficult to actually become noticed. You'll have a profile page with your products and yous'll be one amid thousands of other creators.

Your fine art is unique and you need a unique online presence, so if you explore the market route it's key to really work on your listings to make your products stand out from the crowd.

An alternative solution is to set upward your very own, custom-built storefront using an ecommerce provider like Shopify or BigCommerce. This sounds intimidating just information technology's easier than you might remember to prepare a store and become started.

These systems are super-intuitive and you tin build a globe grade ecommerce site and customer experience without writing a line of code, using pre-built themes and WYSIWYG editing tools.

Having your own ecommerce shop gives you unrivalled control over the blueprint, look and feel of your store. You tin also assign a custom URL to your store, which lends a valuable sense of credibility, actuality and personality to your product offer.

If y'all already have a website, you tin add together your Shopify or BigCommerce store to a sub-domain on your website — which you can't practice if you're using i of the large marketplaces.

With an ecommerce platform like Shopify or BigCommerce you're non limited to stocking print on need products from a unmarried marketplace. You can also list other products from different providers and suppliers. This gives you the option to offer products you're able to fulfil yourself, such as the original artwork, alongside multiple impress on need and/or drop shipping partners.

Once more; choosing the right ecommerce platform is essential. Many offering gratis trials, so consider taking your called platform for a test bulldoze first to become a experience for how it works and make sure it's the right option for you.

If you literally have no idea where to commencement, Capterra is a great tool that lets you compare different options side-by-side. You can compare features, price points, and a diversity of other of import factors to assistance yous make the best possible decision.

Our personal recommendation is to ready a store through either Shopify or BigCommerce. Not only are they the world'south nigh widely used ecommerce store providers, they both come up with a range of apps and plugins designed to create powerful customer experiences.

Prepare your art

Art that sells…

Now, it'southward time to bring together ii of the most important things: the production, and your fine art!

There's no silver bullet to success in custom merchandising, but peradventure the about important single consideration is a great design. Not just a groovy design, but a blueprint that connects with your audition and, ultimately, convinces them to buy it.

Now, nosotros're not saying that commercial considerations trump artistic integrity! Start and foremost, y'all should always look to create art that has personal significant to y'all. And for most artists simply applying the art you have already created to print on need products is enough.

But i of the beautiful things about impress on demand is that you can really be experimental when information technology comes to the designs yous sell. Y'all can create pieces specifically for your store, upload them to your product range, and but see what sticks. If yous don't make whatever sales, you have the option to take that slice down and supplant information technology with something else, with nothing lost. This is one of the biggest differences from traditional merchandising, in which you could easily exist left with hundreds of items of unsold stock, at a considerable personal loss.

There are as well lots of great online resources to help you keep on the pulse of what'southward popular and electric current.

Dribbble, for example, is a design website, on which an invite-only customs of designers submit their work to exist rated and to inspire others.

Similarly, Information technology'due south Nice That, Creative Bloq and Behance are excellent mag-way sites with articles, curated galleries and an array of other inspiration to inflame your senses and give yous an idea of the sort of stuff that'south currently inspiring others.

Digitising your Artwork

If you're a 'traditional' creative person working on sheet or newspaper, your piece of work needs to be digitised. This basically ways taking the art from paper or canvas, onto your computer screen equally a digital file — and doing it in a style that maintains the quality and integrity of the artwork.

If your artwork files aren't perfect, they're going to wait distorted and poor-quality when they're applied to your products. That can, obviously, undermine a lot of hard work and leave a poor gustatory modality in the mouth of your client.

Nosotros've written at length about how to prepare the perfect print on demand epitome file. This helpful article contains loads of tips and tricks, and should definitely exist your starting point if yous need to digitise your artwork.

The right designs for the right products

It'due south likewise important to get your blueprint right for the product you're planning to apply it to.

There are then many print on demand products to choose from to sell your art online.

If yous're using designs you lot've already created, you can do this retrospectively. But check out the product range of your chosen print on demand partner, and employ this to work out which designs would look best on which products.

But there's likewise an opportunity hither to get creative, and create artwork specifically for products.

If y'all head to ane of our production pages, for example, y'all can download a template which is the exact proportion of the printable area on the particular production. You tin then create artwork to suit these exact dimensions, and do something a fiddling more than creative.

Over again, the beautiful thing about print on demand is that if certain products don't sell, it doesn't really matter. This gives you astonishing flexibility to try things out. Y'all might think you accept a keen read on the products your audition might like to buy, just customers take propensity to surprise you. Try something outside the box for a while, and simply run into how it goes.

Uploading Your Products

There are lots of different means to go your designed products online, but the easiest fashion (in our biased opinion) is using a Prodigi integration via the Shopify App Store or the BigCommerce App Store.

Yous simply take your completed, digitised artwork file, and upload it into the Prodigi app equally a new collection. You'll automatically exist shown mockups of your design on the whole product range, similar the screenshot below.

You can enable or disable each individual product, and click into each of them to edit the pattern positioning, production descriptions, and pricing. You'll be able to see the wholesale and shipping price you lot pay to u.s.a., and tailor your own price to make the amount of turn a profit y'all'd like to from each sale. When you lot're done, you can push these products directly to your online store in seconds.

Build Your Following & Promote Your Products

In one case your store is upward and running, and your products are available to buy, the difficult work really begins.

At that place'southward no doubt that the real challenge for artists selling custom trade is to become your products in front of potential customers. This takes creativity, hard work and patience.

At that place are a number of different means to promote your products:

On social media

As we explained at the beginning of this article, your head starting time in all of this is that you may already take an audience. Wherever you gathered this audition — whether it's on 'traditional' social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram or design/artist specific media communities like Dribbble and Behance — these is your 'low hanging fruit' that you lot should look to selection beginning.

Employ your existing network

Your existing audition is one affair but be sure to reach out to your existing network besides. This includes friends, family and business organisation contacts!

There'southward a famous Shopify article in which the writer, Richard Lazazzera, tells the story of how he built an ecommerce business from scratch and generated nearly $1000 revenue in iii days. Some of the tips in this powerful commodity are ridiculously simple, and one of them involves but reaching out to his friends on Facebook and letting them know about his business organisation directly.

Offering promotions

Whichever ecommerce platform you opted to go with, chances are you lot'll be able to offer promotions to launch your business and give it a boot start. If you chose Shopify (BigCommerce has similar functionality), you can simply click the 'Discounts' selection from your left sidebar, and then 'Create Discount'.

Past filling out a few short details, you tin create disbelieve codes that give y'all something to shout most when promoting your brand new product range. Y'all can apply discounts and promotions to individual products or all products.

Paid advertizing

Organic reach (i.e. unpaid for inbound traffic to your website) is the holy grail, simply it only goes so far. At some point, most serious custom merch entrepreneurs demand to branch out into paid promotion to grow their audience and promote their products.

Paid search is a topic that is too complex to cover here, but the lesser line is that when you lot're allocating money towards paid advertizement campaigns, it'south and then of import to be organised and vigilant. You need to continue tabs on your campaigns: analyse which ones are driving traffic, particularly quality traffic that converts, and avoid knee-jerk reactions.

First small, measure regularly, be patient — and do more of what works.

Retargeting

Frustratingly, given how much time and effort it takes to generate traffic to your site, 98% of that traffic won't buy or convert at the first fourth dimension of request.

'Retargeting' ways targeting your ads at people who've previously visited your site. And it'due south proven to be super-effective…

• People who are retargeted are 70% more likely to convert
• Retargeting ads are 76% more likely to get clicks than regular display ads.
• The boilerplate ROI of retargeting ads is 200% or higher.

Thanks for reading

Hopefully, this article gave you lot a flavour of the concern opportunity presented to sell art online as impress on demand merch.

As an established artist, you accept the designs — and potentially the audience — to create a really rewarding business. By investing the fourth dimension into setting up a impress on need custom merchandise offering, on an ecommerce platform that you can control, you can create an additional, reliable revenue stream to augment your current sales.

Good luck!

Interested in setting up your own print on need store with Prodigi? Create an account today

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Source: https://www.prodigi.com/blog/sell-art-through-print-on-demand-merchandise/

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