Make Money With T-shirts

I first got the itch to design T-shirts back in the mid 90's. After researching what it would take I quickly gave up as all the talk about heat presses, design transfers, and screen printing equipment made dollar signs fill my head. Even today if you wanted to start this process in your basement or garage it would cost around $10,000 to get going. Then you have website costs and design, shipping, taking orders, and all the other headaches. There has to be a better way!

Well, thanks to Cafe Press, Zazzle, Printfection, and numerous other sites there are alternatives that require little out of pocket expense. I will talk about Cafe Press because this is the company I use for my own shop and they were one of the first ones I discovered when starting this venture.

So what do you need to get started?

1. Some ideas

2. $59 for a year subscription

3. Some sort of editing software for your designs

4. Patience to learn the correct methods to getting your designs looking good

There are many editing software programs out there that are cheap or free that you can use to get your designs uploaded to the Cafe Press servers and in to your own shop for sale. You can put as many t-shirts as you want. You are limited only by the number of ideas you come up with.

Perhaps you are part of a niche hobby like Pigeon racing, quilting, stamp collecting? All of these could be put in to use with some T-shirt designs. For example something as simple as "Real Women Quilt". You could put a picture of a woman quilting if you have the skills to do that, or simply the text itself. Probably half of the shirts I see on Cafe Press are text only designs. Come up with something clever and it has a great chance of selling.

I'll cover some more on this topic in a later post. If you have any questions or want help with your T-shirt ideas please let me know.