In this video I'm going to teach you how to do some proper research on print on demand
sites. In this video I'm going to show you how to do research on RedBubble but you
can use these techniques on Merch by Amazon, Teepublic or wherever you want to, even Etsy.
I'm going to show you how to look at the data and see what's selling and then using that data to
come up with ideas on what to design and sell on t-shirts. You don't want to miss this. Let's go!!
Thanks for joining me on this video. My name is Juna with Detour Shirts. I've been designing and
selling t-shirts online since 2005. So I've done this process a bunch of times trying to figure
out what sells well on print-on-demand shops like redbubble and t public and merged by amazon so i
use this technique myself i don't do it in this detail i kind of do it in my head but i'm going
to show you how to do it detailed version of what you can do where to find stuff uh how to
break down the data and then how to come up with ideas around that data so i'm going to
show you all the whole thing that i do in my head i'm going to do it on paper on the internet and
in affinity is what i'm going to use you can use whatever you want um you're going to see this is
pretty easy so i'm going to go into redbubble first find the data find what's selling first
then i'm going to break down the data and then i'm going to show you um brainstorming and how to
come up with ideas this is a great way to do this you can do this with any print on demand shop you
can do this with any topic today we're going to do the topic of music but you can break it down
even further you could do kawaii or animals or father's day or whatever holiday that's coming
up you can use the same technique so i think this is going to be very valuable for anyone
first starting out or anyone who hasn't done research before this is how you do it at least
the way i do it so let's get into redbubble now and find that topic so here i am on redbubble
we're gonna do step one of the research process step one is to find out what's selling so you can
go to any print on demand site i'm on redbubble you could go to merch by amazon you could go to
t public wherever you're selling and you could do this for any product or any niche or topic so
first i'm gonna go in this video we're gonna go to clothing and just t-shirt so we're gonna narrow it
down to the product t-shirts and i'm gonna narrow it down even more if you go on t-shirts here
you'll see shop by theme i'm gonna just do music now you could do the same process for movies
or sports or games whatever it is on here again same process so i'm gonna see all music t-shirts
and it's gonna load here and this is page one of music t-shirts redbubble right
next thing i wanna do here is instead of most relevant and you could do most relevant you
could do trending but i want to do best selling and i know a lot of people know this on redbubble
best selling may not actually be best selling right now we're just going to have to take
their word for it at least these are selling i we know that these are selling on redbubble
and redbubble saying that these are the ones that they're selling there's no bsr on here
or whatever to tell us how well they're selling we're just gonna have to take their word for it
these are 108 designs here on redbubble and this what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna scroll down so
you can see it says 108 designs so of these 108 designs what i'm going to do is i'm going to look
at all of them together and i'm gonna put this in affinity designer and the reason i like affinity
designer is i can just grab this and just drag it onto affinity designer and i'll have it again so
now that i have this i'm gonna look at the data and kind of study it so my next step is and i'm
not going to show you how i do this but i'm just going to bring in affinity designer open it up
and then drag these in here and you're going to see i have all of them together now you can do
this in canva you can do this on a pinterest board you can just look at it right here if you want to
you don't actually have to do it in affinity designer but i like doing it there so i can
kind of break it down and you'll see what i mean in affinity designer so next step is going
to affinity designer and i'll show you what i do once i have the data all right so here we are on
affinity designer now you can use any application that you want the reason i use affinity designer
is one i'm familiar with affinity designer and two i have artboards i can do multiple artboards you
can see here on the right here i have multiple artboards i can use i can break down this data
now the reason i want to put it on here and kind of get away from redbubble is now i'm just focused
on the design so this is just a design research method i'm just looking at what's selling on
a t-shirt right what kind of topics what kind of designs sell well in this case on redbubble
in the music niche right so you can do this with anything so i just laid it out in a nice grid here
just to have it all nice the first thing i'm gonna do well first thing is bring all 108 designs on
page one here or however many you wanna do if you want to do page 1 page 2 if you want to just do 50
whatever it is i like to do at least 100 and and you'll see why it's gonna get narrowed down really
quickly from 100 but the first thing i'm going to do now that i have all 108 here is to remove
the things that i know i can't do and that is copyrighted material especially on redbubble
there's so much copyrighted material i'll show you what i mean i'm going to zoom in here and see like
right there the strokes that's a logo from the band the strokes right so i know i can't do that
um i think i saw like let's zoom in just a little bit more to kind of scroll around so the smiths
sugar man raise like there's a black philip there's a whole bunch of copyrighted records
uh band names things like that that i know that i can't do or i should stay away from from redbubble
so first things first let's take those away and i've already done that here so i'm left with now
67 designs after removing copyrighted designs so 67 out of the 108 are the ones that i can actually
get ideas from of course i can get ideas from things that are copyrighted right so i've removed
all of that almost half almost half of those things and i don't know if i got them all actually
so there may be some some things in here i just took out the ones that are super obvious
there may be some other ones left in here in the 67 if you see them
you know let me know in the comments but i think this is a good place to start these are the ones
i can actually look at and kind of get ideas and brainstorm so so the first step was finding
the data right the second step is gathering just bringing all that now we're gonna kind
of break down the data so now that we have the 67 that we can actually do this is the gathering
part still kind of breaking it down to what we can actually use i'm gonna break it down even further
to see what kind of trends we're seeing not not like trends that are trending you know
the hot words but um seeing if there's some kind of relation to like is there a certain
kind of graphic is there a certain layout that's working well is there a certain color t-shirt
is there a certain like just looking at the data as a whole right so let's look at what i found so
first thing is i notice and this is different in music than it is normally and that is most of the
t-shirts 54 of those 67 are on light t-shirts which is really interesting i have always said
do it on black t-shirts and that's usually right for merch by amazon dark t-shirts sell well
but here in the music niche on redbubble 36 of them 54 are on light t-shirts check that
out really interesting right so you may be okay with doing things on light t-shirts and
it's really close to half so it's you know black black would work dark t-shirts would work too but
if we're just looking at the data more than half are on light t-shirts next thing i found
46 of them are tall designs so this is what i mean by tall designs i'm going to zoom in here you can
see it takes up the shirt and that makes sense because the shirt is a tall canvas so most of the
time you want it tall um i think this is true for most t-shirt designs anyway but i narrowed it down
69 of my way more than half of them are tall designs and that's to be expected so you may
want to do things that are tall of course wide designs do sell you can see if i go back here
this is a wide design it's more wide than tall and they do sell on here but more often than not
tall design sales so now we know light t-shirts
and tall designs is something that we may want to target next
mostly graphics are used in the music at least in the music topic so of course redbubble is known
for graphic arts artists of course they're going to want to highlight those things and a great way
to highlight graphics is to just do graphics on t-shirts right so more than half of them 64
are just graphics so if i zoom in here you can see no words at all right just graphics
take a look at that so when designing for music on redbubble you may want to put it on a light
t-shirt a tall design with just graphics right so those are real basic ones just using the data now
what kinds of graphics you may be wondering so i'm going to break it down even further what
do i design i know it's graphics but what kind of graphics so let's break it down even further
47 or 70 percent of these have two or more things together so i'm calling these mashups
so what i mean by mashups so let's go in here so this is a mountain with a record right
outdoors and record player mashing it up a monkey wearing earphones with butterflies
you can see and splatter paint so like four of those things mashing up this is a guitar
um with the outdoors right trees uh a chameleon playing a guitar that's a mashup
all mashups here right they're mashing two things that usually don't go together but
they're putting it together anyway right in a in a cool way so take a look at that
cool mashups right so think about that you may want to do a mashup of music of course we're
in the music niche or topic of course you're going to want to mash it up with music somehow
but then mash it up with something else music plus outdoors music plus an animal music plus a space
or whatever it is right so do that as a mashup more than 70 of it so that's good data right there
so what kind of matchup what can i match up so 15 i noticed a lot of them were um
we had the acoustic guitar right so let's check it out a lot of them are playing and not just
acoustic some of them have electric but most of them were acoustic guitars here so you can see
22 percent that's that's still a lot so you may want to use a guitar when you're when
you're doing a design 13 had animal designs so you can see you have a monkey here a a unicorn
a dinosaur another cat here raccoon beetles fox let's scroll down here bear dinosaur unicorn
all very popular animals that are being used you could do a dog in here an axolotl
a sloth right some of those other things just coming up with ideas on animals different animals
next and last you can keep doing this as much as you want but another thing that i saw was a
lot of records right a lot of records this one's doing it in the background you can see right here
this one's doing it with space someone writing it right here a lot of records too so
we know records do well guitars do well animals do well so keep that in your mind
now that we have all that data we know what kinds of shirts do well the the type of designs we know
we want to do mashups we want to keep it a tall design maybe put it on a light t-shirt
now we're going to come up with ideas so now that we're done breaking down the data we're going to
want to brainstorm with that data in mind to come up with ideas and this is the last part
so brainstorming so here are 10 of my ideas that i came up with of course there's lots more ideas
but you can see how my brain works here um we we saw other animals playing a guitar we didn't see
a dinosaur playing a guitar so that could be one idea we saw a lot of records being
matched up with something but we didn't see it matched up with a rainbow so a record
and a rainbow mashed up together we saw cassette tapes there but we didn't see like a 80s pixel
version of a cassette tape maybe tetris pixel you see where i'm going here an astronaut
with headphones we saw astronauts in there but we didn't see an astronaut with headphones listening
to music like we did with that monkey we kind of could swap out that monkey and put a astronaut
in there so lots of different ideas just to go down to this a dog listening to music again animal
axoloto playing with guitar right guitar was one of the things in here a unicorn dj we saw cat dj
why not put a unicorn dj a sloth sleeping on music we saw their cat playing with the musical notes we
could do a sloth doing kind of a similar thing we saw a lot of band stuff playing guitar and stuff
we could do animals doing that maybe a band of cats a band of dogs a band of whatever right and
lastly maybe we saw a lot of music symbols we could use those musical symbols to make a shape
like a heart or something like that so come up with ideas if you want to do any of these go ahead
draw some of this out make sure that it is a tall rectangle right put it on a light t-shirt see what
you come up with be fun i didn't draw any of these you're not copying me these are just ideas right
ideas are just ideas if you want to use this idea go ahead see what you can come up with i think uh
it's it's fine and you can come up with more ideas of what you saw and you can use
these techniques for any print on demand site so those are the four steps again i'm gonna go over
them so first find out what is selling second gather all that data third break down the data
and then four brainstorm come up with all the ideas now this is just for design this is design
research right finding out what sells what design sell on a certain print on demand shop i'm using
redbubble here you can use any print on demand shop but this is just design you're gonna after
you come up with your cool design that we hope will sell because of the data then you're gonna
have to work on keywords and seo and all those different things but just i think starting with
the design idea and finding out what sells first and then designing that is a good first step on
getting your design out there and getting it well now it still has to be a well
designed you just can't put any dinosaur playing at the guitar on there it has to be
something that people still want to wear it has to be nice enough that people want to wear but
at least you know kind of what to design here so hopefully this was really helpful for you can see
how my brain works and how this research could work on anything you can do with music again
or whatever you want so have fun with this come up with lots of ideas and using the data to support
you to know what could sell on a certain print on demand site so that is it for this video hopefully
this video is really helpful for you at least to do some research now you know how to find out what
is selling on a print on demand site if this video is really helpful for you make sure to give it a
thumbs up and if you're not subscribed to this channel already make sure to hit that subscribe
button there it really helps and for the question of the day for this video is how do you do your
research i showed you how i do my research let me know how you do your research is it the same way
is it a different way let me know in the comments there thanks again for watching and if you want to
see more videos on how to do research on how to design stuff make sure to click on these videos
right here and as always guys keep creating and keep learning i'll see you on the next one bye