All right, let us get it out in the open... if you are reading this blog you are probably thinking "she is doing this to make money selling t-shirts for peace in Ukraine, not because she cares about the war". Not true! I have no intention of making money out of this. Let me show you why.
1. Designing t-shirts is very time consuming
Art is just a hobby for me, I have no professional training in graphic design. Producing visually attractive designs with meaningful messages for peace and justice takes me a very long time to do. Just to try to make an acceptable caricature of the aggressor Head-of-State who is leading the war of aggression against Ukraine took me about 11 months, with many failed attempts in between - see image below.
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| Trying to capture the likeness of the invading Head-of-State |
Can you guess who is the aggressor Head-of-State that I am trying to caricature? What do you think, does any of these caricatures capture his likeness? Feel free to leave your opinion in the comments below.
2. Selling t-shirts is challenging
Once the t-shirt design is complete, the next step is to figure out how to sell it online, how to print it and ship it to the customer.
From my experience, printing kits for doing the manual printing myself do not give good results in terms of durability - the print gets damaged when washing the t-shirt.
So I opted for using websites that have an online store, do the printing on demand and ship the purchased t-shirt to the customer. Although the products in these websites are quite pricey, the artists' earnings are meager, as most of the retail price corresponds to the costs for production, printing and delivery of the t-shirt, plus the service provider's commission.
The money that the artist can make with the sale of a regular t-shirt is about 2 Euros in Europe (where I am based) and about 6 USD in the USA. And if the online store gives special promos, guess where that price cut comes from? I will give you a clue, it is not out of the product's base cost.
The Threadless store has reasonable prices for customers in the USA, and often offers free shipping and promotions, but if buying from abroad the shipping plus customs costs make it too expensive. The prices in the German store are just very pricey, even without the extra costs.
If it does not pay-off, why do it?
I have been my only customer, zero sales, but I continue to try to get the messages out there. That is the purpose of all this. This war is making me very anxious and I want to make whatever I can to stop it - you can read more about it here. Even if there is little chance that it will make a difference, I have to try.
If I ever happen to make any sales in the future, I will donate my earnings to a humanitarian organization supporting Ukraine.
If you have other experiences and know of better ways of producing and selling t-shirts, please share in the comments below, I would appreciate the advice.
Until next time, stay safe!
If you get people to see these it's already a win - even with little or no sales. <3
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment! Yes, absolutely : )
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