How to Quickly come up with Design Ideas for Print on Demand Products

Whether you need design ideas and inspiration or you need help with where to get designs made, this article will be for you.

This article is a very handy step-by-step guide to help you learn how to launch your own Print on Demand Online Business. WC Fulfillment founder Nate Andreshak created this tutorial based on what he learned from his own e-commerce success story. In this post, you’ll find dozens of great tips that will allow you to focus on making sales as quickly as possible by testing and launching new designs. Who knows, this guide could mark an exciting turning point in your life as you embark on a journey as an e-commerce entrepreneur. Let’s get started.

Where to get Design Ideas?

Do you Love the idea of Drop shipping Custom Products for your e-commerce Store? Have the issue of wanting good design but not sure where or how? Or you’re not a designer and you can’t make designs yourself or you do not know where to hire good designers for a decent price? Then this article is for you.

Look, we get it. We understand the hurdles you are facing because we have experienced many of the same issues when we launched our first POD stores when we were getting started. The good news is it DOES get easier. So we hope you use this article as a guide in helping you get started with finding, making and buying good designs.

In this article, you will read several common ways how you can get started finding, sourcing and buying designs that you can use immediately for your POD e-commerce business. The great thing about POD is it instantly sets you apart and makes your products and store unique. So the better designs you have the more unique buying proposition you have and more likely people are going to buy from you.

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Stock Photo Sites

A lot of e-commerce store owners forget about the easy design strategy, which is to buy existing designs. They always think they need to hire a designer to make something custom. While that can be a great idea to get what you want exactly, when it comes to POD, it really is a guessing game when it comes to understanding what your target market thinks is cool and what they are willing to buy. That’s why we say do not forget about the simple idea of going to different stock photo sites and seeing what designs already exist and are for sale. You could even use our Design Testing Strategy to see if a design is a hot seller BEFORE you commit to buying a design. This can be a very effective strategy. The great thing about Starting an Online Store and selling custom products is you are in control of the brand, the design, the creativity.

Free Public Domain Images

Not ready to buy designs or hire a design? Definitely try free Public Domain images. Just use google to find these images. You will be surprised how well these can sell sometimes. If you find a cool photo, image or graphic, slap it on a wallet phone case , and it may just take off and turn into a powerhouse.

Spy Tools

A very powerful strategy to find already winning design is to use spy tools. You can see how many have sold, when they sold, for how long they sold, what the design is, what niche is about, how to target, and much more. The only thing you want to be careful about is not to copy designs. Take the information you find and have your designer remake it as original, get creative and remake something in the same niche because you now know that niche is buying.  Here below is a view of websites you can explore to find winning teeshirt designs which you can then take, remake and put on a wallet phone case and profit 🙂

Pinterest

There are SO MANY t-shirt designs, graphic designs, and ideas you can get inspiration from on Pinterest. A lot of the teeshirt designs you find on Pinterest you won’t find on the spy tools so it is a great way to expand your research and come up with more design ideas.

Pinterest also has A LOT of quotes. Quotes are a great way to get spark emotion when you’re targeting your POD product to a niche specific audience.

What makes Pinterest hard is that you have to dig to find the good stuff. It won’t automatically be at the top of your searches. One tool that can help with this research is a free Chrome extension called “PinonTOP“. It will sort your Pinterest search by most re-pins showing you the best content at the top. This helps you find designs that average people LOVE, which means you will more likely have a winning design that sells like hot cakes when running paid advertising.

Tee Websites

If you have not noticed, t-shirts are a great way to get design inspiration for your POD Products. That’s why we recommend browsing some of the largest t-shirt websites on the web. The ones below have been known to focus on trends and niches, which makes them perfect for POD inspiration.

THREADLESS
80TEES2
BUSTEDTEES
SKREENED
SNORGTEES
RTEEPUBLIC
TEESPRING
TEECHIP
TEEFURY
SOCIETY6
REPRESEANT
SUNFROG

Trending Topics

If you did not know, trending topics can be even more powerful than niches. We always have a portion of our POD product centered around the Trending topic strategy. The reason for this is it can be very consistent IF you know how to identify trends and come up with creative angles that make something irresistible to potential customers. Think political parties, events, topics, or other news related items that millions of people are aware of.

While there is not a perfect solution to identify trends, you can use software like google trends to see what topic is a breakout topic. When you see something that has a huge surge, you want to jump on the opportunity. Create something controversial or funny and you will see the magic happen. People won’t be able to help themselves. They need to have these type of trendy products.

Have Your Inspiration? Now Where to Get Designs Made?

So you have a niche in mind, and you did your research and you have the design inspiration finished which you intend to have made into a finished designed product. Great! You are further than 90% of other people right now. Now you have a few choices. You can work on learning graphic design yourself, or you can hire a professional to take your inspiration images and come up with a winning unique design to put on your products. We, of course, recommend you always hire unless you are a pro yourself. You will get a better design, and you will save time. In the end, time is money. So paying a designer is about the same as the opportunity cost if you were to try designing it yourself.

Below are a few design services you can use to get great designs for your wallet phone cases .

Hire Designer

This is normally the most overwhelming part of the process because you might not be sure how to portray to the designer what you want, and you might be scared to overpay for designs. It is ok, this is normal feelings. What I can tell you is most designers will be willing to work with you and give you 2 or 3 revisions so you get what you ultimately want without having to keep paying. These are a few design services we recommend.

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DIY

If you are a designer or know how to use photoshop, you might feel comfortable with creating your own designs, or remaking designs you got inspiration from. This is great and you should DIY if you have the skills.

Filters and/or Photo Scripts

Another overlooked technique you can use to create designs and graphics is to use photo filters and scripts to generate unique images to use as your design or in your design. A great place to find unique photo scripts is graphicdriver.net website. They have many awesome scripts that will auto-generate amazing graphics for you at the click of a button.

Fiverr

Sometimes you can find cheap designers using a website like Fiverr. Be wary, sometimes you don’t get what you pay for so Fiverr will not always provide the best source of graphic designers. If you want a better place to source graphic designers, I recommend the website Behance.net

99 Designs

A GREAT way to get the EXACT design you want is to use a website like 99Designs. Dozens of designers compete to provide you with the best possible design per your specs. You can continue to filter down and leave notes for the designer and they will continue to make tweaks and submit improved designs until you’re happy. It is a great experience, however, the costs can be high, $100 + per design.

Conclusion

So now you should have a good idea on how to find inspiration for designs, and how to get a design made, whether that is by hiring a professional or following one of the DIY methods above.

Success in Print on Demand is all about testing and finding new designs. Following trends, targeting niches, and being relevant to your target audience at the right time.

Your job is now to launch as many designs as fast as you can in order to consistently find winners. Not all winners are equal. Some designs will sell 100 units, others will sell 20,000+ units. It really depends on how passionate your audience is and how great of a design you have is.

Want More Training?

Step-By-Step Training Course

Start Selling Wallet Cases The only thing we have left to teach you is how you can get started with your phone case business. All you need to do is install our Shopify app and upload your design. It really is as simple as that.

About the Author

Nate Andreshak is an E-commerce Entrepreneur with 10+ years of experience in running and managing online stores. He now helps aspiring e-commerce business owners get started having their own success.

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