I’ve been hanging on to the last remnants of Christmas vacation, but I guess it’s time to get back to work. First, a recap of the holidays. I made around $2000.00 total during November and December between Cafepress and Zazzle. In terms of number of items sold, December set a record of best Christmas EVAR at Cafepress. 344 items sold, compared to my previous record in December 2007 of 286 items sold. December 2008 was a bit shabby with the whole recession thing and all, only 213 items sold.
Zazzle sales accounted for about 110 items in December, and I had one happy little sale from my new shop at Skreened. Strangely, I did not get my Traditional Printfection Sale this year. Guess I won’t have that $7.00 check to look forward to.
So, it is now 2010 and this marks the beginning of my sixth year in the POD business. I plan to work extra hard this year, making up for lost ground, and hopefully make this my best year yet.
What I’m doing in 2010:
Getting in on the Twilight Madness This is one area where Cafepress still shines. If you’re not already aware, Cafepress has contracts in place that allow regular people like you and me to design for certain movies, tv shows and bands without getting slapped with a cease and desist letter and possibly sued. I’ve been steadily selling the few crappy Twilight designs in my shop, so I’m going to concentrate on adding more. They’ve recently expanded the list of allowed properties:
TV/Movies
Lost
Scrubs
Grey’s Anatomy
Desperate Housewives
Legend of the Seeker
Twilight/New Moon
Dexter
American Idol
The L Word
Fame
Schoolhouse Rock!
Bands
Maroon 5
The Who
Tommy Lee
ZZ Top
Whitesnake
Cheech and Chong
Chickenfoot
Gene Simmons
KISS
Lil Wayne
Each property has it’s own guidelines for designs, so check them out.
Explore New Product Ideas on Zazzle As I posted previously, Zazzle has a plethora of paper products that can be creatively used for other things besides their intended purpose. I need to work on adapting them to my niche(s) and coming up with new ways to use them.
Build More Affiliate Websites Using the Wordpress method of affiliating Zazzle products seems to work well for me, so I plan to continue in that direction.
Improve My Web Design Skills I’m signed up for a couple classes at the local community college to update my skills, which are pretty much limited to html and tables (circa 2003).
Get Organized This is probably wishful thinking, but I’m going to try to be more organized in my POD endeavors. Since I routinely work from two or three different computers, I’ve decided to use Google Docs to work up some sort of sales spreadsheet for Zazzle so I don’t have to log in to my multiple accounts and add things up with a calculator when I want to see how much money I made three months ago. I also just discovered Evernote, which looks kind of interesting, and might be useful for keeping track of ideas, color schemes, resources, and other things I come across on the ‘net.
Quit Selling on Etsy I’m nearing my one year anniversary of selling vintage clothing in Etsy, and I’ve about had enough. In retrospect, it was a good thing because I started selling only a few months before the Cafepress debacle, so the extra money helped me get through those lean checks. But, I think it takes away from my POD design efforts, because it’s so time consuming to buy, clean, repair, photograph, measure, store, pack, and ship the stuff. Not to mention all the buyers that waste my time buying stuff and then not paying for it. (It’s happened a lot more in one year on Etsy than in the ten years I’ve been selling on Ebay) So, now that I’ve got some Christmas money under my belt, I hope to spend the next few months bringing my POD income back up to the pre-“Cafepress Sucks” days, and then sell off my remaining Etsy inventory. (And convert my storage room into a POD art room!)
Expand into More Passive Income Areas More on this later, but I’d like to expand my money grabbing tentacles into other online areas that are graphic friendly.
Tags: earnings
I really appreciate you sharing your experiences with the rest of us. You served as inspiration for me to get started on the POD wagon, and I’ve had some success (very small as it seems to take me a long time to go from conception to a finished product), but one area where I still have questions is profit margin. For example, do you have a set % that you require for each product or does it vary? Is there a minimum % you’ve established for your work based on what people will pay, uniqueness of design, etc…. Any ideas about this would be helpful.
Thanks again for sharing your stories with us.
Thanks for these updates. As I have a POD print company going and am expanding into the shop & goods area, your selfless sharing of info like this helps my focus. At this point, I had signed up only with Cafepress; hadn’t occurred to me to spread the goods through several shops, as you do. Meanwhile, good continuation.