Print on Demand for entrepreneurs opens opportunities for revenue and brand building at no up fro...

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show. And today I'd like to talk to you about print on demand merchandise, because this is a way that we can all promote our brand, sell our product through merchandise, or we can give it as gifts. What's great about print on demand is that we no longer have to carry stock. This is something that I'm working on for the Unnoticed Show, and I wanted to share with you what I've learned so far. In creating my own line and sharing that, marketing that on Etsy. So now the merchandise market is a big one, as we know, and from 2018 to 2023, it is projected to grow from $26 billion to a value of $33.99 billion. This is from Statista. Report. In other words, merchandise is about as big as fashion. This is just the licensed sports merchandise market is worth nearly $34 billion. So you can imagine all the other kinds of merch that are worth money. I read the other day that Elon Musk had managed to sell $700,000 worth of The Boring Company t-shirts. So there's money to be made out of selling t-shirts with your own branding. Now, in the old days as a company, we used to have promotional items and as East West PR, as a small company in Singapore and in China, I used to give away to journalists notebooks, which in fact had the same dots design as I'm now using for the Unnoticed Show. So as EastWest Public Relations back 20 years ago, I was printing notebooks, giving them to journalists and giving them pens. But of course, the problem was that I then had all this stock and I had to keep it somewhere in my storeroom. I'd have to pay for it in advance. Print on demand, which is the new make just as when you need it technology, has really revolutionized this. And this isn't about 3D printing, it's just about low-volume, high-value conversions of all manner of items, of clothing, of household goods, office products, even mobile phone cases. So I want to share with you what I'm going through here because I'm building this myself. Now, the research I've done so far was about 2 parts. One was the production and the second is about the selling. So when it comes to production, I found previously a company called Vistaprint here in the UK does a very nice job of helping a company or an individual to design and to print on, for example, a mug or a t-shirt or a mouse pad. And it's great, Vistaprint. The service that they have, in fact, when you get stuck with your design is really good. It's online and they had actually some people in North Africa who were on customer support when I needed some help with the design. The thing with Vistaprint is that then I have to buy the product and I have to basically bring it to me and then ship to somebody else. And what I didn't want to do was to buy stock and have stock sitting here where I live and also needing to buy some sort of minimum volumes. So the traditional model of printing, buying, and shipping is not very good if you're an entrepreneur. So then I had interviewed a chap called Drew Stone in America for the podcast. He talked about Teespring, about a platform that you can use to design and promote t-shirts. And I had a look at that and that service is now called TeeLaunch. And that's great for designing and launching. Your products. And what you do is you can then embed that TLaunch, as it's called, as a, as an extra player below your video on YouTube, for example, starting to do some integration with your social media channels. But again, still, it doesn't integrate with the store. So I looked again online, and I found one called Redbubble, which is great for t-shirts, and people are using Redbubble To market the designs that they're making into Amazon merchandise, for example. But I wanna do more than just t-shirts. So, and Redbubble as a marketplace is probably a slightly different demographic than the one I want. So I then was looking at Printful and Printify. Both sound very similar, and I have chosen to work with Printful because they have fulfillment in America, North Carolina, but also in Europe, Australia, and they've just opened a facility here in the north of England. So they are one of the only companies that I can find that is going to be able to serve my clients around the world. There's another one called Gooten, gooten.com. Now what these POD, print on demand services are doing is they're allowing us to basically place an order and only when the order is bought by a customer would they actually make it. And what some of them are doing is this idea of dropshipping where you don't even take ownership of the goods at all. So what would happen is that I could design a product on Printful and then I can promote that, for example, on my website. And when someone buys it, then Printful will make it and they'll do the shipping directly to the customer for me. Now that's great as long as I have got enough people that want to buy from me. But what I want to do is not just use merchandise as a promotional item, which is perfectly good if you use something like Vistaprint, if you want to make something for your company and give it away. But if you want to actually sell and make some money from your merchandise, then it needs to be on a couple of the big players. And those really are Amazon. With Amazon merchandise, and you have to be invited to get onto that, or on Etsy. And Etsy's a marketplace now with literally tens of millions of people who are looking for an Amazon alternative. It's a listed company, run very, very well from what I can see, because my wife has got an Etsy store and is doing very nicely, thank you, selling Oriental teapots that she's buying from China and selling and shipping around the world. Now, the problem with Etsy is that Etsy is the marketplace, but they don't hold your inventory. And as I mentioned, I don't want to hold inventory. I want to be able to design and sell in a marketplace and have customers purchase from the marketplace, but the fulfillment be done directly by my POD partner. And very few companies do that. Printful has an integration where you can design the products and then you integrate that to any number of stores, including Etsy, another one called Storenvy, another one called Wix, of course, which is the kind of the website development company. They also integrate to a whole host of kind of smaller niche merchandise, kind of homemade handmade stores. So what we're seeing is a proliferation of these new marketplaces that are, if you like, anti-brand, that are not Amazon, that are run for artisans. And that kind of fits more where I, I'm going to be going because I'm going to be selling the Unnoticed merchandise to other entrepreneurs. And I can't compete with the big t-shirt manufacturers or the big cup manufacturers, for example, I'm gonna be selling to my own, my own tribe. But I also, what I want to do is I want to have the ability to have merchandise available that I can gift to people that, for example, have bought and reviewed the book or who give a review on the podcast. And in the past, I didn't have anything to give them but my thanks, but now I can give them a number of different items. And what I like about this model where I have Printful with the designs and the fulfillment and the production, and with Etsy as my marketplace, is that the whole value chain is done online and I don't have to take any goods at all and I don't have to buy any inventory. So what sort of products am I gonna be making? What sort of margins am I gonna make? The question is, can I make it profitable or is it really just a marketing activity? It starts off largely as a brand building exercise, and for many companies and many entrepreneurs, that's what merchandise is. When I spoke to Oscar Trimboli the other week, who talked about listening and active listening, he talked about making merchandise, for example, making puzzles and making playing cards to show the 4 villains of listening. So merchandise could be a great promotional gift. idea, but also we can start to maybe monetize. So what I've done is I've created a number of products in my portfolio to start with. So I've got a stainless steel bottle, I've got a mug, I've got a laptop sleeve, I've got face masks, a spiral notebook, an eco tote bag, and a phone case, a t-shirt and a polo shirt, and then an apron. So I'm just going for a small number of products to start with. And then I'm going for them in different colors cuz I don't want to have too many product types that then I have to manage. And what I've done is I've taken the same product but with different variants on the design. What does that look like? So if I look at my water bottle, for example, this water bottle is white, and then I've got my gray dots as a variant. I've got an One which is the Eclipse, one which is the red, and one LGBT. So I've got 4 variants on the bottle. They cost me £14.51, so they're not cheap to buy. The shipping is £4.99 and the VAT is £3.90, so it's going to cost me about £24, £23.41 to buy. So what I now have to do is to go and look online and see what price do water bottles sell for. But what it does mean is that I could conceivably give a gift to people for £29 of a branded water bottle. If I wanna do something cheaper, for example, like a mug, a mug which is just a plain white mug with nothing on the inside, is gonna cost me £5.95. The shipping's quite expensive at £4.29. And the VAT is £2. So a mug is gonna cost me about £12, which is about what it would cost in the store. The benefit is, of course, I haven't had to buy any mugs and I'm not having to go to the post office to do the shipping either. So bear in mind, I don't have to buy the box, I don't have to go and stand in line, I don't have to do anything but sell it. So it costs me £12.29 to give away for free. If I sell it for, let's say, £16, £17 is not an unreasonable amount for a cup, then I can make myself £5. So the idea of merchandise as a way to build your brand has in the past been impossible for entrepreneurs because it means, well, the cost of design. But now on Printful, you can either upload your design or you can take some of their stock designs and put them on a t-shirt or a cup or a apron or a bag, or even homeware products. I've also done a phone case, for example. You can then let the system synchronize with a platform like Etsy or Storenvy, for example. And then when people buy the product on Etsy, Etsy will let me know, but then Printful will do all the fulfillment and all the delivery. So actually it's a hands-off E-commerce transaction, and it gives me the opportunity to create social media posts about the merchandise that I'm creating. So we just announced the book and the book's going really well. This podcast has reached now the top 4 in the UK for entrepreneur podcasts. So ka-ching, very happy to ring that bell that we've made some progress in the last 12 months. But now then also I can say, guess what? We've got the book, we've got the podcast. And now we've got the merchandise. It's a complete branding opportunity and it doesn't cost me anything other than my time to do the design. The Etsy store costs me 20 cents per product that I list, but I can be then in retail or e-tail very quickly with no fixed costs and only ever making some money if I sell something. So I wanted to share this idea of merchandise today because PR in the past has had a large component of giveaways, and we've had, whether it's Post-it notes on your desk, whether it's pens, or in my case, giving away notepads to journalists. People really appreciate it and they carry it around. It's no longer necessary to print a large stock of these and hold them in your office or in your home. You can design a whole store layout and worst case, You can order the samples from Printful because they give you 3 per month at a discounted price, or you can buy them from your own Etsy store, and then you can start to build up a reputation as a merchant as well. So it's an opportunity now for all of us that run small companies to get involved in something that historically regarded as just the preserve of the big companies who could buy merchandise. and stock it, or just the retailers. So encourage you to just have a look. My Etsy store is just Entrepreneur Merch Company. It's going live now, and we are just synchronizing this week with these new products once we finalize the pricing. And I'd love to get your feedback. Tell me what you think of the products. Tell me what you think of the design. Tell me what you would like to buy if you wanted to let other people know that you're an entrepreneur by the water bottle you carry, by the phone case that you use, by the apron that you wear around the house or in your, in your restaurant? I'd love to hear. The idea of my merchandise is that there are entrepreneurs all over the world like you there listening to this show now. And if you were to wear a piece of merchandise that let other people know that you're an entrepreneur, I think that would start conversations because entrepreneurs love to talk to other entrepreneurs. And that's really the mission that I have for this podcast and for the book and for the newsletter and now for the merchandise. So the merchandise is my way to help people to start conversations. If you were to create your own merchandise, what would be your objective for it? Let me know. If there's anything I can do to help, then obviously just give me a shout. As always, all my contact details are in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur.