- So I paid five designers $1,000 on Fiverr
to design the same T-shirt and this is what I got.
Hey, everyone, and welcome back.
So here's the thing, right?
Usually when you're going to Fiverr,
it's to hire a freelancer to do something
that you yourself are not an expert in.
So for most people,
if they wanna start their own T-shirt line
and they're going to Fiverr
and doing a search for a T-shirt designer,
it's usually because they themselves are not a designer
and they want to hire someone who has expertise in it,
which can be really challenging then
because what you quickly find on Fiverr
is that people are charging drastically different prices.
And so how are you then, who's not an expert designer,
supposed to know what the difference is
between buying a $5 gig versus buying a $400 gig?
Which should you get?
And which is the best bang for your buck?
Well, that is why, my friends,
I have created this video today.
I have spent $1,000 just on T-shirt designing gigs.
The prices I paid per gig, excluding fees and taxes,
ranged from $5 all the way up to $395.
so quite a wide range there.
And for each of them, I gave them a slight variation
on pretty much the same design brief.
For this Fiverr experiment, I decided to go ahead
and give each of these gigs a design brief
that asked them to create a T-shirt themed around the niche
of Swedish Vallhund dogs.
Swedish Vallhunds are a dog breed
that's fairly common in New Zealand
but pretty rare overseas.
They have a nickname, it's called wolf corgi
because they have a similar body shape to a corgi
but they have a similar coat to a wolf.
Just like a wolf, they have sable coats.
And so what this means then is that, just like wolves,
Vallhunds come in a range of different colors.
Some are brown, some are gray, some are even white,
and they each have their own different stripes and markings,
which, as you're gonna see, is gonna become pretty relevant
while we complete this experiment.
So I picked this as my niche for this experiment
for two reasons.
The first one being that my dog Starbuck
is a Swedish Vallhund so I, of course, love them.
But secondly, I picked it
because there isn't much Swedish Vallhund merch out there
and so there is definitely an opportunity
for people to come in and make more of it.
And finding untapped niches like this
is something that I talk about
in my free print-on-demand ebook
where I share how I and others earn passive income every day
from selling print-on-demand merch like T-shirts.
And if you'd like to download that free ebook for yourself,
I'll have a link to it in the video description.
But for now, back to this experiment.
So what I did was I went
and I found some clever top-selling corgi T-shirt designs,
since corgis and Swedish Vallhunds are quite similar,
and I saved copies of them.
And I then sent those pictures to the Fiverr gig
along with a variation of this request.
For each of them, I basically asked
that they would create a Swedish Vallhund design
that featured a picture of at least one Swedish Vallhund dog
and that also featured the text,
I've got friends in low places.
And I said to them that the popular designs
I found for this for corgis featured retro designs,
which they could use if they wanted,
but if they wanted to deviate from there
and to use their own creative judgment
to come up with a different style
that I would prefer that they use their creative judgment
to create the best design.
And I think what you're gonna see
is that because that design brief was a little vague,
because it allowed people to use their own creative judgment
to come up with their own designs,
which I find most people who order gigs on Fiverr do,
it means then that you don't always get what you want.
And as an added bonus,
I had the idea to go and take each of the five T-shirts
and then to poll my local Swedish Vallhund club
to see which design the members like the best.
And because of the fact that Swedish Vallhund club members
are pretty much the exact target market
for T-shirts like this,
I think that the results of the poll show which T-shirt
would have sold the best in actuality.
And I'll tell you now, I was pretty surprised
by the poll results of this experiment,
and so I think that if you stick around
and watch this video, you might be surprised as well.
So let's start out by taking a look
at the cheapest T-shirt that I bought.
I ordered from this budget Fiverr gig here.
When I ordered, they had a five-star rating,
and for my T-shirt, I paid just $5.
And a tip, by the way, from ordering from Fiverr
is that even if you don't know exactly what you want,
it's really helpful to know
what type of style that you're after,
such as retro designs or typography designs,
because, understandably, most artists do specialize
in particular styles of art.
And so if you know what you want,
you can go and do a search for it directly on Fiverr
and then get a T-shirt designer
who has experience designing the style that you're after.
And so for this one here,
since the example T-shirts that I sent over to them
were in a retro style,
I did a search for retro T-shirt designers, found this gig,
went and emailed them my brief,
and they said that they could do it for just $5.
And well, two days later, this is what I got.
And when they submitted it to me, they actually said
that I could make changes to it if I liked,
which I was quite surprised about for just $5,
although for the sake of this experiment,
I decided to just accept
whatever the first design was sent to me.
And when I took a look at this design,
my first thought was, huh, that looks like a fast copy
of that corgi T-shirt design that I sent to them
except they've switched in a silhouette
of a Swedish Vallhund instead of a corgi.
So let's be honest,
not a lot of creative design went into this T-shirt.
However, I'm also not surprised
because, let's be honest, what can you expect for just $5?
When you're paying just 5 US dollars for a design,
they can't afford to sit there for hours
coming up with some creative, new, inspiring idea for you.
They need to just pump them out as quickly as possible
to make it worth their while.
And so how do they do that?
They take similar designs and then they copy them
and then you just switch in different pictures and graphics.
And that's not a criticism, by the way.
That's just an observation
because I see people expecting miracles
all the time on Fiverr for just $5,
and that's just not realistic,
so don't expect miracles for $5, okay?
But I'll tell you what, things get quite different
when you go from $5 a gig to $15 a gig
and I'll show you what I mean.
So for my next gig as part of this experiment,
I ordered from this gig here,
which, when I ordered, had a five-star rating.
I contacted them and sent them my brief
and they sent me back a custom offer for just $15.
And, well, here is what I got.
And it's quite funny because they actually sent me initially
two different T-shirt designs
and asked me which one that I liked the best.
One T-shirt featured a silhouette of a Swedish Vallhund
and the other one featured a silhouette of a corgi.
And so here's what I find interesting, right,
so that $5 T-shirt,
it featured an extremely similar retro sunset design
to the example corgi T-shirt that I sent through.
But for the $15 design, they used their creative judgment.
They didn't just copy the pictures I sent through to them.
They used a completely different color scheme
that they thought was best,
and so I thought that that was the biggest difference
from going from a $5 gig to a $15 gig.
But, yes, at this point in the experiment,
we had seen what we got
if we went for the low end of Fiverr pricing,
and so now I thought it was time to step things up a notch
and see what we got if we went to the mid-tier pricing.
And so to do that, I found this gig here.
When I ordered from them, they had a 4.9-star rating
and they had three different packages,
one for $50, one for $100, and another for $150.
I messaged them for a price,
and they said that based upon my design brief
that they recommended that I order their $100 standard gig
so that's what I paid,
and, well, this is what I got.
Now, something that's really interesting, right,
is that when I ordered T-shirts
from the lower tier of pricing
that I only got stock images
of Swedish Vallhund silhouettes,
but now, with this mid-tier pricing gig,
I got a custom-drawn Swedish Vallhund dog.
And I think that's pretty significant to keep in mind
that when you go from the lower tier pricing on Fiverr
to the mid-tier pricing,
that is when you start getting custom art.
Unfortunately, though, when I got this T-shirt back,
I couldn't help but think this doesn't seem well optimized
for the Swedish Vallhund niche for sales
because of the fact that Swedish Vallhunds have sable coats,
which means then that Swedish Vallhunds
have different stripes and markings.
But because of the fact that this picture
featured just an outline of a dog
and didn't show any stripes or markings,
it kind of makes it look like the Swedish Vallhunds
are a one color coat dog, which they're not.
Whereas the silhouette images, they're completely neutral.
They imply nothing about a dog's markings or stripes,
and so it's very easy to project your own dog onto it.
And so when I saw this, I thought, ugh, you know what?
Even though the design layout of this T-shirt
is clearly superior,
there is a chance that the neutral silhouettes
of the cheaper T-shirts
mean that they might end up having an edge
over this T-shirt in the final poll.
All right, so we've seen what happens when you order
from the low-tier pricing and the mid-tier pricing,
so now it's time to see what you get
when you pay the big bucks and you order a Pro Fiverr gig.
For a designer to make their gig a Pro service on Fiverr,
they need to have worked with established brands
like PayPal or Nike
and they need to submit an application to Fiverr,
who manually review it to confirm
that, yes, this Fiverr designer
does indeed have established experience.
If you want to find Pro gigs on Fiverr, it's really simple.
When you're doing a search for a private gig,
you just click the little Pro services button
and now you will see all the Pro gigs.
And so I went ahead and did this for T-shirt gigs,
and I quickly discovered
that there weren't a ton of Pro-verified gigs to pick from
so I couldn't find one that specialized in retro designs.
But that didn't actually matter
because in the design brief,
while I said that I was sending them examples
of popular corgi T-shirts
that did happen to feature the retro design,
they didn't have to go with that,
and, instead, I was more interested
in them using their creative judgment
and seeing what they came up with.
And so I went ahead and reached out
to this Pro-verified gig here,
which, when I ordered, had a five-star rating,
and they sent me back a custom gig for $325.
So what did I get for $325?
Well, I actually got two different T-shirt designs.
The first T-shirt design featured a fully detailed,
fully colored Swedish Vallhund dog,
and I personally think that's pretty difficult
since Swedish Vallhund have sable coats
and those are not the easiest things to paint.
But secondly, they sent me a different version of the design
which was less detailed
and featured just an outline of the dog.
But the truth is is that I actually preferred this one
over the other one.
Do you agree with me? I'd love to know in the comments.
But, yes, the problem was that I could only use
one T-shirt design in my final poll
to pick which of my Fiverr gigs
was ultimately going to be my best-selling design,
and so I ended up choosing the fully detailed picture
even though it wasn't my favorite
because I had paid more money
to get a fully detailed picture.
I wanted to get my money's worth, you know?
And so now we've only got one more T-shirt to go
before we can declare which one
was our most popular top-selling design, yay.
For my final T-shirt, I went ahead with this Fiverr gig here
that had a five-star rating when I ordered it.
Now, this designer does actually offer a $655 package,
which, if you check out her portfolio,
gets you some very beautiful, detailed artwork
with incredible backgrounds.
But when I sent her my design brief,
she didn't send over a recommendation for the $655 package.
She instead sent a custom order for $395,
which, by the way,
is $390 more than the first T-shirt that I ordered.
And, well, here is what I got.
I got a T-shirt design
that featured a custom-drawn Swedish Vallhund picture
that was fully painted,
and I personally really liked the picture.
Although I will tell you something,
I learned a very important lesson
from doing this experiment, and that is this.
When you're hiring a designer to create T-shirts for you,
it doesn't matter whether you're paying your designer $5
or whether you're paying them $395.
If you wanna make the most money from your designs,
it needs to be a collaborative process
between you and the designer.
Because here's the thing, right?
That $395 T-shirt that I bought,
yes, it has a very cute picture of a Swedish Vallhund dog,
but it's a very specific picture of a Swedish Vallhund dog.
And as I said earlier,
Swedish Vallhunds all come in a range of different colors
and they all have their own unique stripes and markings,
and so you can imagine what happens when most customers come
and take a look at this picture, right?
They go, "Oh, that's a cute picture,
but it doesn't look like my dog.
I want my T-shirt to look like my dog."
And so you know what they go ahead and buy?
They go ahead and buy the cheaper T-shirt
that features the silhouette.
And so what would've been better
is if I had been more collaborative
and I had used my specialized knowledge of this niche
to come up with a more specific idea
that I know that my niche market wants.
So for example, I could have requested something
similar to this picture here,
which features a group of dogs,
except I could have requested
that it feature a group of different Vallhund dogs
which all feature their own different stripes,
colors, and markings.
Either way, the lesson here
is that whether you're paying an artist $5 or $395,
it's not realistic for them to become an expert in a niche
that they aren't already an expert in.
And so that was it.
That those were the five T-shirt designs that I got
for spending $1,000 on Fiverr.
I'd love to know which was your favorite T-shirt
in the comments.
In total, I paid 840 US dollars for the T-shirts,
plus 49 US dollars for the Fiverr processing fees,
and I paid $126 in sales tax
because sales tax in New Zealand is 15%,
so, in total, I paid 1,015 US dollars,
which is just over $1,000.
But, of course, our experiment is not yet over, folks,
because we still have to answer the question,
which of our T-shirts would've sold the best?
And so to answer that question,
I, of course, took each of the five T-shirt designs
and I polled my local Swedish Vallhund club
to see which one the members liked the most.
And which one do you think was the winner?
Drum roll, please. (drum resonating)
The most popular T-shirt design was the $100 T-shirt.
Yes, this design won,
although there was another design
that came up pretty close in second,
and that was the $5 T-shirt.
The general consensus
was that people really liked the layout
and the color scheme of the $100 T-shirt,
but they preferred that the $5 T-shirt
had a more neutral picture of a Swedish Vallhund
so that it better reflected their own dog,
which was, of course, what I suspected would happen.
And so, as you can see,
sometimes when it comes to creating a top-selling T-shirt,
it's not always about hiring the most expensive designer.
Instead, the real key is to pick a niche
that you yourself understand
so that you can come up with a design brief
that matches exactly what you know
that your niche customers will love.
And then you can go to Fiverr and you can choose a designer
not based on their price but on their portfolio,
and you can pick a designer
that, based upon their previous work, you believe
will help you bring your creative vision to life.
So then, did you learn something new?
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(mellow music)