Hello, and welcome to this video. In it, I'm gonna be teaching you how to research winning print on demand designs so that you can use them as inspiration to create your own ones. Yes. If you've been watching our videos inside the econ clubhouse, you'll know that as part of it, we teach multiple ways to source products for your store. 1 of the ways is by drop shipping products directly from manufacturers themselves that we find on aliexpress dot com. This is 1 great way to add products without having to buy them in advance. Another way is of course creating your own custom products for your store using print on demand services. With services out there like Printify, you can create your own custom products like t shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, pillows, and even shower curtains. What you do is you take a piece of artwork such as this image here, and then with the help of Printify, you then place the artwork onto products. You can then put these products on sale in your store. Printify lets you create these products for free. Then each time a customer comes to your store and buys 1 of your products, Printify's manufacturers will create it and then ship it out to the customer for you. So this mug here is an example of a successful print on demand product. In the past, if you wanted to sell this mug in your store, you had to buy 100 of them in advance and hope that they would sell. But you don't have to do that anymore. The seller for this mug is selling them for 13 dollars and 99 cents. When someone comes and buys it for that price, all the seller has to do is go to their print on demand provider and buy 1. Printify sell black mugs for just 7 dollars and 50 cents. And that markup you charged, you get to keep the price difference yourself. And don't worry. Thanks to the awesome Printify and Shopify integration I'm gonna help you install in step 3, the process of buying that mug from Printify and having it shipped out to the customer is going to be semi automated. Want to check out Printify's product catalog to see what types of custom products you'll be able to create in your new store? Well, I'll have a link to Printify on this page. Please note that it is an affiliate link, which means we may get a commission if you use it. Using it is optional, but we always appreciate it and are thankful when you do. Print on demand then is a fantastic way to add custom products to your store that you can sell without having to buy them in advance. There is just 1 downside to it though, isn't there? Unless you are a naturally gifted designer or artist, how are you going to get the images to place on your custom products? Well, that's what we're gonna be talking about in this video. In this video, we're gonna be researching previous designs and artwork that worked well on other print on demand products. Then, as I'm gonna teach in a later video in the course, you can then create your own versions of the artwork and designs that we find here using the freelancer website fiverr dot com. The reason why I'm gonna teach you how to find previously successful designs so that you can then hire a freelancer on fiverr dot com to make your own versions of it is because in business, usually the easiest way to be successful isn't by inventing new things. It's by creating your own better version of previously successful things. The Japanese economic post World War II miracle boom was built on this. Their economy thrived because they took previously successful products like TVs and made better versions of it. So that's what I'm gonna teach you how to do. I'm gonna teach you how to find designs that are already using views, traction, and sales so that you can make your own, better versions of them. And just to be clear, when we find previously winning designs, we don't wanna copy them pixel for pixel. We want to use them as inspiration to make our own better versions. Copying it would be copyright infringement, so that's not what we want. What we want to do is to get an artist to come and to make a better version of it. Let's take this t shirt here that is so well for its print on demand store, Badass Mom Clothing, as an example. Well, what could we do to change it? We could modify the font. We could add color so it's not just a black and white design. We could switch up the text sizing to be more exciting visually. We could put a strike through the word can't, and we could even see if getting rid of the word bunny and replacing it with an image of just the bunny is more visually appealing. There is a lot we could do here. I also want to address something. Yes, if you are talented at designing and you trust your own skills in this, then that's absolutely fine. You can skip this video. But for most people out there, including myself, we're not super gifted at coming up with their own designs and ideas, and that's absolutely fine. Everyone has their own strengths. Something else I want to point out also is that when you launch a store, you don't want it to look empty and unfinished. If it looks unempty and unfinished, then customers are less likely to trust you, which is 1 of the reasons why I recommend that when you launch a store that you launch with at least 20 products. Now you might be thinking 20 products. Sarah, I plan to source all of my products with Printify. Does that mean I'm going to have to come up with 20 different designs? Not quite. At a stretch, you can get away with having 10 different designs and then printing them onto 2 different products. So let's say you've opened a store focusing on the 1 space, and your research indicated that galaxy designs had sold well. Large scale, epic pictures like this look very visually striking on shoes, so you could add these. And you could take that same design and add it to a hooded blanket as well. That would be 2 products for this 1 design. You can add even more products, but my point here is that you shouldn't cheap out and say, only create 4 designs, and then slap those 4 designs onto 5 different products and be like, voila, 20 products. Doing that looks really cheap and unprofessional. You don't wanna do that. Keep in mind though that you don't just have to exclusively source products to sell with print on demand. You can mix and match products from other sources. So you could list products you were drop shipping from AliExpress, and you can create your own unique products. Sourcing products from multiple different sources is called a flex store. This is a successful flex store mugdom. These mugs here are the products that they created with print on demand services, but this mug here is 1 that they are drop shipping from AliExpress, so they are doing both in the same store. And this mug here is pretty cool. So if the idea of creating 10 different designs intimidates you, then don't worry because you can source products in multiple ways. All right. So with that out of the way, let's talk about how you can spy on previously successful designs so that you can make your own better versions of it. The first place I absolutely love to go for this is etsy dot com. If you don't know what Etsy is, it's 1 of the largest online marketplaces on the internet. People can post handmade, designed items for sale. A lot of designers will post things like mugs and t shirts on there. Some designers will manufacture the products, but most use printing services like Printify. So what we want to do is we want to take our store's chosen niche that we picked in step 1 and see what products are selling well in it. Alright. So come to Etsy. Now all you've got to do is come to the search bar and type in what your chosen niche is. So for the Ecom Clubhouse, you're gonna see me throughout this video tutorial series build an example store around a niche that I use a lot on the Wholesale Teeth Teeth YouTube channel, and that niche is coffee. Lots of people are extremely passionate about coffee, which means it has great potential as a niche. So I'm gonna type that in now and do a search for it. First thing I want to let you know is that when you're doing research on Etsy, you should ignore, any listings here that feature the word ad on them. People are paying to have their product listed here. So that's not what we want, to focus on. What we want to do is we want to come to the products after the ads. Now something about the Etsy search algorithm is that every time a product makes a sale, it will jump up in the search results. Because let me show you something. Check this out. There are literally 250 pages of results for items that Etsy has found that are related to the word coffee. That is a huge amount of results, isn't it? So Etsy literally has thousands of items, that people have listed on its site that it has to choose from, and it has to put some on the first page of its results. Now similar to Amazon, the biggest way that does this is that it looks at a product sales numbers. And for Etsy, it thinks, well, if a product has made a sale recently, then then that's a great sign that if we place it in front of, more people, that they will purchase it too. So any products, any designs on the first page of results are designs that you should take a look at and see if you want to make your own version of it because we know that these have sold recently. Now something that you should be especially looking for on Etsy is this best seller badge. This is, pretty rare. Not many products actually get this. And so, it very much indicates that this is a hot product that is regularly selling. So, of course, if you think about it, if people like this poster on here and if you make your own better version of it, why would people not like that 1 as well? And Printify do indeed sell posters along with canvases. So if you had a store in the coffee niche, this would be a great product to get inspiration from, and to add to your store because we know that there is a market for this poster amongst coffee lovers. Now, of course, not all items can have that best sellers badge, but that doesn't mean that you want to necessarily ignore those. We can still figure out if a product is regularly selling, or if it's just a 1 off, you know, trending product based on some sort of limited time event. To do that, let's take this product here and we'll open it up. Now this, of course, is a t shirt that's joking about needing, coffee in the morning. Well, if we scroll down, we can come to the reviews. Now, what we want to do is we want to see if there has been a recent review in the last, month for this product. Even just 1 review is a fantastic sign, But of course, this product has had more than just 1 review within the last month. I am filming this video on June 20 second and we can see that there's been a review on June tenth. There's been a review on June third, a review for this t shirt on May 30 first, a review for it on May 20 second. So this has had 4 reviews within the last month, which is a fantastic sign because keep in mind that most people do not leave reviews. On Amazon, on average, only 3 to 5 percent of customers leave a review. So a lot more than just 4 people have bought this item. We can't know for certain, but we know that it's been a lot. And if you think about it, there are many ways you could come in and you could, change up this design to make it even better. This is a very simple design. Now something I really did want to point out because I noticed it here in the listings is this mug here, this, Donald Trump mug. So obviously, this has been selling really well. I mean, look at this here. Wow. Like crazy. But there is a reason why this mug has been selling so well, and the reason is because it has just been Father's Day here in the United States. Now, well, here, sorry, over in the United States. Now, I'm currently in New Zealand. I just got back from the USA, and in New Zealand, our Father's Day is actually September first. But, yes, this is why this mug has spiked because this mug is a dressed up version of, you know, the idea of having a best dad mug. So while this design is something that we can very much learn from and you could very much potentially repurpose this design for future holidays, it is not as timeless as this coffee shirt. And so, if you want to get more designs than if you want to get more ideas, you can get far more specific, than just typing in your niche into the search bar. We can look for specific, products that we could come and we can take a look at what are the top performing, coffee shirt t shirts on Etsy. So I think that we can see here that, the phrase, but first cough but first coffee. This 1 doesn't count. It's an ad. But first coffee, but first coffee, but first coffee. You know, that is a very popular phrase. So, that means then that there is a lot of mass appeal for that, which means that, using it in our own design in a creative way has a huge amount of potential, which is great. There was a product that, really caught my eye my eye, though. This product here. Now, this 1 is interesting because it's combining multiple niches together. Dogs and coffee. Now I'm a huge believer in combining different niches together to create a custom product that appeals to a specific individual. So if someone is passionate about both dogs, coffee, and books, this t shirt will feel more personal and resonate with them because, this is, you know, very specific to them than if they had just seen, a t shirt specifically about dogs or a t shirt about books or a t shirt about coffee. They're like, wow, this really truly is me. And so because of that, they are way more likely to buy it. The thing though is that when I saw this, I wasn't really sure if there would be enough people out there that this would specifically appeal to. So, to check whether or not this was a regular salary came down to the reviews. And, there are not many reviews for this at all, and the reviews were not within the last month. So, to me, this is an indicator that there just isn't a huge amount of ongoing, demand for it. So, perhaps crossing, you know, 3 niches together is just a little bit too, specific. But, you know, there was a niche, sorry, a t shirt in here that I saw that very cleverly combines, 2 niches together rather than, smooshing together 3, and it was this 1 here. Now, not everyone will appreciate this t this, t shirt's message, and I understand that, but I think we could all appreciate the play on words. So, this here, pothead, this is a pretty funny pun. Now when I saw this, I was 100 percent certain that this sort of design was probably gonna be selling well, and I wasn't wrong. Take a look at this here. June seventeenth, a review was left and it's had multiple reviews within, the last 6 months. So this is a great sign, that this t shirt, is, getting ongoing regular sales. And, of course, the t shirt is doing well because it's targeting people who are passionate about 2 things in a funny way. It's targeting people who both love drinking coffee and, well, people who enjoy smoking pot. Now, this is not actually a shirt that I'd recommend mimicking if you plan to advertise with Facebook ads, which I'm gonna teach you how to do in step 5 because the marijuana niche can be a little bit problematic with Facebook's rules. But this shirt highlights something that I think is quite important, and that is the idea of creating a design that crosses 2 niches together. If someone who loves coffee sees a shirt that makes a joke about coffee, they'll think, oh yeah, that's me. And if an avid marijuana smoker sees this shirt, they might laugh at the joke about hiding but not hiding in and think, oh yeah, I can relate. But when someone who is both an avid coffee drinker and an avid pot smoker sees this, it feels more personal to their interests, and they're more likely to go, wow. That's totally me. Of course, you can have a lot of success selling products that just focus on 1 niche and don't cross niche. For example, many of you may recognize this picture of a very successful print on demand product featured on our YouTube channel. It was created by millionaire print on demand store owner, Michael Shi, and it made tens of thousands of dollars in profit. It only targets the niche of dog owners and dog lovers, so while cross niching can be helpful, it's not necessary to create a winning product. If you can create a really visually appealing, interesting looking design targeting 1 passionate niche, as Michael has shown, you can also be very successful. But back to this design here. This is of course funny because it's a pun. Funny images like this can be a great source of product ideas. And do you know where you can find images that people find funny? Instagram. So that's the next place that we're gonna go to research ideas. Alright. So all you've gotta do is come to Instagram, and then come to the search bar, and then type in, your niche plus the word memes. So for me, my niche for this example store is of course going to be coffee. So let's type in coffee memes and then do a search for that hashtag. Now, the first post you will see are gonna be the top posts and these are the most recent posts, that have performed the best. And then you'll come down here and then you'll hit the most recent. What we wanna focus on is these, and some of these are, you know, pretty funny. This is probably my favorite. My favorite co worker is the coffee machine. This quote really is something I understand. This is exactly how I felt when I worked my job job. So this is 1 way to look for funny pictures and quotes to get inspiration from. Another way is to come and find pages that are specifically devoted to this. So of course this page here coffee memes is dedicated to posting, funny pictures related to coffee. And funny pictures perform really well on Facebook because you know, let's say, that you have a t shirt, with this phrase on it. And people find that really funny when they when you advertise it to them, in their Facebook feed. And even if they don't necessarily want to buy the t shirt, they will very likely share that image with a friend of theirs who also, feels this way in the morning before they drink their coffee because of the fact that, it's really funny and they want to make them laugh. And so, funny products, get free traction and they get free traffic just from people sharing them with their friends for you. Now something of course when you're browsing through Instagram pages looking for inspiration, it's important to pay attention to which images performed better than others. So of course this 1 here has 2000 likes, whereas this 1 here has 1700 likes. So this was the more popular phrase and it's it's a really good idea to browse through a page like this and to look for pictures that might have a disproportionate number of likes and that are doing really really well. Like here we go, this 1 here 4000 likes. This is almost double well, it's it's more than double what a lot of these are. And so this would be an excellent image to take inspiration from, when coming up, with your own design. Another great social media website to look for when researching designs is Pinterest. So here I am on Pinterest. Now, of course, you can use Pinterest to search through so many different types of popular pictures and get tons of inspiration for your designs, But something that Pinterest is uniquely good for is getting inspiration for great looking, simple illustrative artwork, and there is a hack for this. So come in here, type in your niche, and then type in the word stickers. Sticker art is fantastic. 1 thing that you can do with sticker art is you can combine it, with typography artwork to create a really unique design. Sticker artwork is simple and clean and performs really well. Now there was a design on here that I got a lot of inspiration from actually. So something like this here, you could be potentially targeting, coffee lovers and people that love bunnies. But of course, think about this here. Let's say, you know, that you've got a store that targets cat owners. Well, you could get inspiration from a design like this. You could give this to a Fiverr illustrator and say to them, you know, make something similar to this, but replace the slippers with cat slippers and have them be wearing a hooded blanket with cat ears. And now suddenly you've got a really unique original twist on this design that you can advertise towards the hyper targeted passionate audience of cat lovers or cat owners that also love drinking coffee. And while that is hyper targeted, it's actually quite a large audience, so there is a lot of room to scale it. Now what you want to do is you want to pay attention to the number of times something has been pinned. This has been pinned, over 900 times. You know, let's come here and check this 1 out. This one's been pinned, 113 times. So that's how you can gauge which designs are more popular than than others. 1 way that you can also another great hack is to search for niche, decals, and then you can get some really great word art to get inspiration from. But Pinterest isn't just good at looking up designs and artwork. 1 of the other really great things about Pinterest is that people will regularly post actual products, and people will pin and comment on these as well. So, this way you can actually see, you know, what designs people are truly interested in buying on buying when they are put onto a product. So, you know, if you come to this 1 here, we'll see this 1 has been, saved 2000 times. And of course, you don't just have to search for, t shirts on Pinterest. People post all sorts of different products on here. We can come, we can look at coffee mugs. And Pinterest also makes it really simple, to, filter them, you know. If I wanted to come and look at the most, popular quotes that I've, put on coffee mugs, I've just got to come and click on the filter up here. And so, Pinterest is a really great way to browse through and find products and designs that are getting a lot of traction and interest. Something to keep in mind with Pinterest though is that it is predominantly a female site. With Instagram, it's more fiftyfifty. Another place that we can do research for previously successful winning designs is Facebook. We can go through the public posts on Facebook and see if we can see any successful advertisements for print on demand products. You may remember back in step 1 when we were selecting our winning niche, we went through Facebook to see if each of our chosen niches had at least 10 products that had been successfully advertised on Facebook. They had to meet the criteria of having 25 shares, at least 30 comments, and having been posted within the last 6 months. So we want to look at the same criteria as well. Here's how to use Facebook to research previously winning print on demand design ideas. All you've got to do is come to Facebook and come to the search bar and type in your niche. And then a really great idea is to type in a call to action that you would expect to see on a post for a print on demand product. So something like free shipping is a great example. And then come and do search. Now what you want to do is you want to come today posted. You want to select a year that will let you go back 6 months. So 2019 is perfect because it's currently, getting towards the end of June. So that will give me 6 months worth worth of post to go back by. And then you want to come to post from and you want to select public. And then all you've got to do is, scroll through and look for products that are very clearly print on demand products. And you might not find them, for quite a bit. You might have to scroll down, and that's absolutely okay. Just keep scrolling. Now alright. So this 1 here, it does meet our criteria. I'm not going to lie. But this product here, I would call a trap. The reason for that is because take a look at it. What is it? This is Mickey Mouse. Everyone knows that this is Mickey Mouse. It may not be the black silhouette, but, this here is a trademark infringement of, the mouse himself. So perhaps they're willing to risk it, but I cannot recommend to you that you do that. And infringing on trademarks and copyrights, it's really short term money. It's not a long term strategy. You should look to create your own designs that you can trust and that you can invest in. And take a look at this 1 here. This design performed even better, yet this infringes on no copyrights at all and no trademarks. So, that shows to you that you don't need to, do illegal things to have designs that, that connect really well. You just gotta have something really clever, and this is quite clever, and it looks great, and it meets our criteria. So that is how you find, designs that are performing well, with Facebook. And there is another tool that I recommend for design research, and that is TeeSpy. With TeeSpy, you can spy on the top selling products, mostly t shirts and hoodies, across some of the biggest shirt launching platforms such as Teespring and Represent. I absolutely love TeeSpy because you can do product research based off of sales numbers rather than having to make guesses based on social media data and shares. And ultimately, it's sales that are what make us actual money. T spy does have a free account, but to do what I'm gonna do, you will need to have a starter plan. You don't need any of the more expensive plans. Now I will have a link to TeeSpy in this video page. Please note though, that it is an affiliate link. So let's do this. Once you've logged into TeeSpy, come up to the search bar and type in your niche. Of course, mine is coffee. What we want to do is we want to sort these designs in descending order for sales. So come and click on sales, and now we've got our top performing designs at the very top, and so scroll through these. So this one's had 1800 sales. That's a huge amount of sales, but check it out, it is infringing on the Starbucks trademark. This is not something I would recommend. This 1 here, absolutely fine. All I care about is my German Shepherd and like maybe 3 people and coffee, and it's within our niche as well. But even though this has sold a huge amount, it's not something I would prioritize because take a look at the social engagement. It's had very it's it's it's so far, t spy has only been able to find 1 form of social engagement for it. And the 1 of the main sources of traffic that I'm gonna teach you in step 5 is Facebook ads. So ideally, we'd want to prioritize products that have a higher number here. Now this 1 here does 756 sales, 64 social engagements, but it's not a product I'd normally recommend because this is actually a trend. Kanye West tweeted about dragon energy. Dragon energy is something that's a part of the Tayist tradition. The internet found it very funny and it became a meme. So this person capitalized off of the, trend for dragging energy at the time. But, you know, they'd actually made quite a bit of money. Like, if we come and, they sold this t shirt for 25 dollars and they sold 756 copies of it, well, they made nearly 19000 dollars. So this person did very well capitalizing off of a trend, but we're looking for a product that could perform well right now. So, even though I'm very impressed with this person, that's not what we want to focus on. Something like this though is timeless. I'm an engineer. I can't fix stupid, but I can fix what stupid does. This is a mug that in my store with co with novelty coffee mugs, I could create this and then target it towards engineers. And look, 742 sales, 245 social engagements. So this would be a great product to get inspiration from. The fact that this is about engineers, though, did make me think about something. So there is a niche that's actually quite popular, nurses. Nurses are very popular within the print on demand niche because of the fact that nurses are extremely passionate about their jobs. So we will look up, some top performing designs for nurses. And then we'll come and we'll sort it by sales. Sometimes when you're using Tspy, it might not necessarily be the absolute fastest. And the reason for that is because it's got so much data that it's having to process. It's constantly adding in new, campaigns, and then it has to sort all the data. Like, see it found 4000 items and it has to sort it by sales. So perhaps you've come here and you've got a store targeting nurses and, you've gone through these designs and you found some, but you would like even more. My advice to you is don't think that you have to just look for top performing designs within your own niche. Teachers are a very another very popular, niche when it comes to, professions. Why? Because teachers are extremely passionate about what they do. And so what you can do is you can come and you can see what designs have been performing well with teachers because there's a very strong chance that given both of those are social good occupations that a lot of the designs will cross over and work together. So this 1 here, I have to keep calm, I'm a teacher. This could be easily repurposed to nurses. I have to keep calm, I'm a nurse. And, this 1 here, 1800 social media engagements. And it's for the outcome, not for the income. So it's a little bit controversial because it's talking about wages. And clearly that, being controversial has resulted in a lot of social media discussion, which will have been free advertising for this product, which is, probably helped it do much better in the sales department. And this has been a very successful product. And you know what? This 1 could be easily repurposed for nurses as well because it applies to them. So don't think when you're browsing through this set you just have to look at your own niche. You can find the top selling designs in other niches, and then you can repurpose them for your own. Alright. So before I go and send you off to research your own designs, I wanna make something very clear. Don't get too hung up on this process and try and find the most perfect design because you can't. As my good friend, Michael Shee from Print Profits said in 1 of our Wholesale Ted video collaborations, We can't figure out ahead of time which designs will be winners and which ones won't. Instead, as he said, we have to put our designs out there and let the market decide. Take a look at the successful Etsy print on demand store. They have sold nearly 2000000 dollars worth of print on demand clothing in the past 5 years. And look at how many designs they have created, over 1000. And you know what? It will only be a very small percentage of these that will successfully sell. The reason why the store was successful wasn't because they researched and found the perfect product and launched it. The reason why they were successful wasn't because they researched and found the perfect design. No. They were successful because they decided that they would keep creating different designs, keep launching them, and keep advertising new ones until they found golden designs and products that connected with their audience. Most people give up after just a few products not selling well, but this store was dedicated to making it a success. And now, well, over 1000000 dollars later, it is. So don't get stuck in the research process. The most important thing is getting some designs made, and then advertising them in step 5, and letting the market decide. So go on and start researching your designs now, and when you've found some that you want to use as inspiration for your own products, I'll see you on the next video.