T-Shirt Design Ideas

uglyshirtsfortune.com/member/lesson-2

May 5, 2018

Lesson 2

We have now verified that we can reach passionate people. Next, we want to
make shirts that resonate with these people

Be it an occupation, a hobby, a sports team, or a pet; every one has their core
values and ideals.

Rarely do passionate people (our perfect shirt buyers) consider what they do
to be a minor event in their life.

Therefore, in designing a shirt with a message that strikes up a chord with them, we need a
deeper understanding of what’s in the mind of these people and their values.

How do they see themselves?

How do they want others to see them?

What’s their pride?

Any special quotes that represent their thoughts?

It used to be heard; a lot of time and research was required– unless you’re already one of them.

Things have changed. Thanks to Pinterest, we now have a place where people have already
compiled lots of content for our research. These are those who are passionate within specific
niches, people who have spent time compiling pins on sayings and quotes that share their values.

They have done all the work for us; we will go in and pick the best ones for our shirt. Cool, huh?

Now, let’s pick up some ideas.

Sign up for a free Pinterest.com account.

We will login to our Pinterest.com account, then punch in “[niche name] quotes” on the search bar.

“[niche]” being our niche, so it’s “firefighter quotes” if we are aiming for the firefighter niche. Like
this:

We will spend some time studying the quotes in the search results, then pick the quote that we
feel would be the best message that would resonate with the people in our niche.

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Let’s just say that we like this quote, “A hero is just a person who is baptized by fire”.

We can then hop over to Teespring.com to start a t-shirt campaign with the quote. Easy!

Apart from looking for ideas on Pinterest, I use several other sites to come up with shirt ideas. I
spy on them to see what others are selling in a niche that I want to run campaigns in.

I visit the sites listed below, then punch in “[niche] t-shirts” on the search boxes.

These are great time-savers that will save you a ton of research time.

Here they are:

#1. Sunfrog.com

#2. Cafepress.com

#3. Redbubble.com

#4. Etsy.com

Is using someone else’s quote legal?

I get asked a lot about this somewhat controversial topic.

Yes, quotes can be copyrighted… and this applies to jokes, poems or other collections of words.
But that doesn’t mean anyone can write one word down on a piece of paper and “own” that word
under copyright law. There must be some unique expression embodied in the copyrightable work.
A group of words that’s distinct enough to be quotable is likely to qualify.

Here is the thing. Even if a quote is copyright protected, in reality; people quote each other all the
time. It would be prohibitively expensive to legally enforce every instance of someone’s words
being repeated online (or in print.)

This is why there are tons of Etsy shops selling stuff featuring Donald Trump’s quotes. There are
Trump quotes on shirts, on mugs, on posters, even on envelopes.

Trump’s estate generally has more important things to do than to look for people on Etsy who are
violating his copyright.

Now, what if a quote owner (like Trump) wanted to go after those who are violating his copyright
on platforms like Etsy and Teespring?

If this happens, the first step will usually be a cease-and-desist letter from the quote owner’s
attorney, telling you that you are in violation of copyright law and instructing you to stop selling the
offending product.

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In our case, we’re selling our shirts on Teespring website, so here is what Teespring will do:

#1. Teespring will deactivate that URL your shirt sits on.

#2. They will drop you an email notification saying the shirt was reported to be against someone’s
copyrighted property.

#3. There’s no #3. That’s it. Life still goes on.

If you are running ads to the shirt, what you’ll do is just go to your Facebook Ads Manager and
pause your ads. Simple. No biggie at all.

Teespring won’t even close down your account. You are free to keep launching new campaigns.

No one will bother you, not the quote owners, not Teespring. The likelihood of actually being sued
for repeating someone else’s words on the Internet is ridiculously low.

Moreover, you’re not selling the shirts on your own property. You are selling it on the Teespring
platform. As such, they have every duty to make sure the stuff on their site is right. So it’s not just
you. It’s them as well.

Don’t be afraid to take a quote on Pinterest (I do it all the time) if you find it resonates with your
niche’s audience. Just be prepared to move on to the next campaign if the original speaker (or
someone representing their interests) asks Teespring to take down your shirt.

That’s how it works in this business.

Do you need a designer?

You can either hire a designer to design a shirt or just use Teespring.com’s design interface to
type the text onto the shirt (I’ll show you how to do it later).

Whichever way you want to go is fine.

So long as your quote captures the heart of your target audience, they will tell themselves, “This is
me!” and buy the shirt.

Graphics do not play a critical role in this. I have seen so many ugly text-based shirts outsell those
with beautiful graphics. It’s the message itself that touches people. Sometimes the graphics serve
to draw the eye, sometimes not.

I have tested my own text-based shirts with “better versions” – that’s text plus graphics. I did not
see a huge difference in sales.

I’m not saying that you should sell only text-based designs. What I’m saying is this: what matters
is the message, not the graphic.

If you have a budget to hire designers, go ahead. But remember, beautiful graphics aren’t the
deciding factor.

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Therefore, if you are rolling out many campaigns and would like to save some extra money, you
can always test text-based shirts first. If they convert, hire a designer to design a better version.

Here are a few places to hire designers:

Where to hire designers

You can do so on Upwork.com, pay a rate of around $30 an hour which is a pretty standard
market rate.

Many designers will be able to make around 2 simple text & graphic t-shirt designs in an hour,
depending on the design requirements.

So, each design will cost $15.

Once you are sure about the message on the shirt, pass the design creation to a professional so
you can concentrate on preparing your next campaign.

Other than hiring on Upwork, there is another option. You can hire a t-shirt designer from
Fiverr.com

Here is a listing of t-shirt designers on Fiverr.com.

Just like other services on Fiverr, freelancers offer t-shirt design services at $5 each. This is very
affordable. You may browse through the listing, talk to a couple of reputable designers and try
them out.

If you’re looking for higher quality designs, check out another website: the 99Designs
marketplace. Here is the link.

Designers on 99Designs charge way higher compared to those on Fiverr. I don’t recommend
starting here.

Only hire from 99Designs when you’ve hit a winning campaign, made some decent profit and are
very sure that a professionally designed shirt will make even more sales. That’s when you want to
get better designs here.

You want to be very careful when it comes to investing on shirt designs. If you’re new to a niche,
don’t spend too much money on design.

Start small with cheap designs and grow slowly. Keep your operating cost low.

There is another disadvantage when we hire others to make t-shirt designs for us: it’s the lag time
issue.

Most of the time, good, reasonably priced designers are quite busy. It is very common for them to
be unable to deliver design orders on a short notice.

Don’t want to rely on outsourcing? Here’s what you can do:

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If you want a bit of graphic in your design but don’t want to rely on outsourcing, here’s what you
can do.

Buy and use professionally-designed vector graphics alongside your quotes. This will make your
t-shirt design look more interesting compared to plain text.

This way, you don’t need to hire a designer for your shirts but you’ll still get decent looking
designs vs. boring text-based ones.

To do this, you need to learn a couple of very basic Photoshop skills.

You only need to use Photoshop to accomplish the following tasks, which is very basic stuff:

#1. Crop a vector image from its background.

#2. Type in your quote alongside the image.

#3. When you’re done, save everything as a .png file without a background color.

#4. Upload the .png file to Teespring and boom! You have a nice t-shirt done!

There are How-To articles you can find on Google or YouTube, and you’ll be able to easily pick up
the steps. No sweat.

Once you’ve mastered the basics, choose your vector images from Shutterstock.

Go to Shutterstock.com and search for vector files that are related to your niche.

Say you want to create a shirt for firefighters; look for firefighter vectors on Shutterstock.

Go through the search results, and buy the images that you like.

They have several packages – I always sign up for the basic package. At the time I’m writing this,
the basic package is $49. You will get 10 downloads with this package.

I normally download each vector for a niche that I want to test. I would reuse the same vector
images with all of my t-shirt quotes. This way, I’ll further decrease my cost per shirt design.

When you download images from Shutterstock, remember that they offer 2 types of downloadable
files: vector and jpeg. Download only vector files, not jpeg.

Once I’ve download a vector file, I will then open it using Photoshop, crop the image from its
background, add text, and then save it as a new .png file and finally upload it to Teespring.

Using a simple image related to my t-shirt message always works great.

In the next lesson, we will cover things that need to be done before we start our first campaign;
that is: creating a Facebook page for our chosen niche.

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Go and take a break before you come back. Then, we’ll start the next lesson: Create your first t-
shirt Facebook page.

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