Can You Make Money With Spreadshirt?

By Gigi Ukim

You may think that there is a chance that you can make some money with Spreadshirt. The thing you should ask yourself first is this, "Is it going to be worth it?." To save you some time reading and looking up information I am going to say "No."

Don't get me wrong. I have recieved some payments from Spreadshirt but it has given me so much headaches, I wish I spent my time doing something more productive. Like watching Fox News ;) There are many people making money off of Spreadshirt. Most people do not.

From going through the good and bads, maybe my experience might help some of the aspiring artists out there that are trying make some money off of their talents.

It may sounds simply or even easy. You make a couple of nice designs and let the come money rolling in. Wrong. It is not that simple or easy at all. While using Spreadshirt sounds good on paper, it can turn into a really huge mess. Everyone starts off with a standard shop where you can upload your designs that will be inspected and wait for them to see if they are within regulations.

If you are looking to make any money, you need to learn how to make vector designs. Vector designs are unique designs that can be resized and retain their quality. Raster designs on the other hand get blurry and pixelated when resized. Vector designs need to be inspected in order for the plotting machine to accept the design. And you have to do vector designs saved in .EPS format. Sure you can upload raster designs but they look like crap and they get horribly pixelated when resized. Oh, and you are only allowed to use 3 colors for your vector designs. Black and white counts as colors too. You can quickly see how your artistic vision gets limited quickly.

After creating a vector design using 3 colors and exporting it into .eps, you have to upload. Then the waiting game begins. You find out that your design was rejected because the machine would not accept it. Some of your lines or curves come too close to one another, or that they are too sharp of an angle for the plotting machine to cut. This would get you irritated fast. After a couple of changes and re-uploading, you design might be accepted. If it is then that is great. After that you can put your design on products, like t-shirts or mouse pads, and publish them to your shop. You can also have the option of publishing your design on the Spreadshirt Marketplace where it is pretty much a huge mess. Another annoying thing that you might encounter is that there is a limit on the designs you can upload. To get around this you have to "upgrade" your account to get unlimited design uploads and a designer shop. The designer shop will seems cool at first, but it's pretty much useless. It is a gimmick in my oppinion.

After you get your shop set up, it is now up to you to promote it. Meta tags and optimizing can only do so much. Google adwords can get expensive fast. After spending some money on adwords, I quickly realize that I was selling more from the marketplace, or rather other shops than my own. This made me realize what a waste of money the upgrade was. To best take advantage of the upgrade, I suggest you have your designs ready, buy 1 month of the upgrade and upload your designs all at once. If I had to do it all over again, I would've left my designs on the marketplace and left it at that. Hopefully, the designs do sell themselves and aspiring shop owners will use your design in their shops.

I consider myself an above average user. Spreadshirts admits that most shops that get started fail because of poor design, layout, etc. Considering that I made some money with spreadshirt I can't really say that it was a complete failure. I do however value my time and in all honesty, I believe Spreadshirt is a complete waste of time. If you are thinking about making money with Spreadshirt, please be realistic. To get anywhere, you will need to invest in lots of time and energy. A LOT. Also consider current events and trends. We are in a crippling economy. People are going to tend to save and downsize. Spreadshirt is a luxury. I am sure everyone at Spreadshirt are hurting. Even the big boys.

This is my personal experience and your's may vary. However, you must be rational about it if you decide to start a Spreadshirt.

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Making money with Spreadshirt?