Teespring users share their top selling tips for the holidays

We’ve collected top holiday tips from our seller community to help you prepare for the 2019 holiday season. Thanks Alison, Paul, Angela, Cristina, and more for sharing this valuable advice with the community! 🙂  

Choosing holiday designs

Whether you’re a creator with an online following or a seller who targets a particular group of people with ads, chances are you’re selling products to a niche audience. A niche, is a smaller section of a larger audience. It’s a group of people with a very particular interest. By identifying these precise groups, you can create tailor-made designs that sync perfectly with their interests. For example, it’s hard for a shirt about the medical field to stand out. However, male nurses over 40 that love knitting is a very specific audience that will like a certain kind of design. 

Designs that make shoppers think ‘this was created for me’ are the most effective. So whether your design theme is inspired by laser focused ad targeting or an inside joke only your community knows…the more precise the better!

Using existing design themes

If you’re already selling merch to an existing audience why not look at your current design offering and see which ones can be adapted for the holidays. Perhaps there is a joke you can make a holiday-themed pun with, or a design you can adapt and place onto ‘winter’ products such as all-over print sweatshirts, hoodies, beanies, and joggers.

Paul, for example, adapts his successful design concepts like motocross, snowmobiles and hot rods for the holidays. He’ll test a few designs and then adapt the winners to other audiences. Alison also adapts her top selling designs and pet niches for the holidays. She says if people will buy her existing shirts, they’ll buy Christmas shirts, Halloween shirts, etc too. 

The image below is an example of how you could adapt a dachshund themed design for the holidays. 

 

Finding new design themes

When it comes to new niches, Alison looks at trending holiday designs in global marketplaces and on social media. Then she considers whether they can be adapted to her existing audience, or whether a similar design concept will work instead. She also researches other niches that already have products out there but don’t have any good holiday designs available yet. She checks out to Merch Informer and Facebook ad targeting options when looking for new niche ideas.  

 

Creating new designs

There are lots of tools available you can use to create holiday themed designs, and the best part is you don’t have to be a graphic designer to use them! 😉 Here are some of the top platforms Teespring sellers report using to create their product designs.

• PlaceIt: This platform enables you to easily create product designs, edit existing design templates, create custom promotional assets, videos, lifestyle mockups and more.
• Typorama: This app gives you access to over 40 different text options, the ability to edit colors and shadows, or add filters and overlays to your images. Their transparent background option makes it easy to create slogans and text-based designs too. 
• Canva: With Canva you can choose from premade templates, stock photos, cartoon images, shapes, icons, and more when creating a design. Similar to Teespring’s text tool, Canva also has a text generator with over 100 different fonts to choose from.
• Creative Fabrica: This platform recently announced they offer a full POD license for sellers who want to use purchased designs to sell on products. It’s not uncommon for people to purchase design elements instead of creating a design from scratch. 

Please note whenever purchasing a pre-made design or design element it’s very important to research the design’s license limitations to ensure your design complies with IP laws.  

Once you’ve created your design apply it to some of Teespring’s top selling holiday products like long sleeve tees, hoodies, sweatshirts, beanies, jewelry, and all-over print tees. Note Teespring will also be releasing additional holiday themed products so keep a lookout for them in the next few weeks!

Right now Teespring is running a special offer with Placeit—if you sign up with Teespring you’ll get an additional 20% off for life! Check out the video below to learn more. 

 

 

Promoting your products

Most sellers use either paid promotion or organic promotion to sell their Teespring products. Paid promotion consists of running advertisements on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and more. Organic promotion utilizes free methods to drive traffic to your listings, like sharing/posting on social media, sending out emails, publishing a blog post or video, etc. Whatever method you decide to run with (it may be both!) there are some great ways to incorporate the holidays into your promotion efforts. 

Advertising

When it comes to ad images Alison uses customer selfies from previous years (ex. people wearing her products at their Christmas party or with their Christmas tree in the background). She says customer selfies are some of the best ad images to use. Note this could also work very well when sharing listings on social media organically. 

Paul starts running ads as early as August. He incorporates holiday elements and colors into his ad images but commented “even with additional holiday elements it’s important for people to be able to easily see the design you’re selling–so I always include a close-up of the design.”

He also offers promotions (like 10% off) within his ads starting in September through October then stops during November and December (with the exception of Black Friday and Cyber Monday). Afterwards he may create new discounts again once things slow down in mid to late December. 

Organic promotion

Apart from organic promotion on Facebook, Paul also uses Pinterest to share his Teespring products, “I like Pinterest because once someone ‘pins’ a shirt it stays there unlike a Facebook ad that’s gone when I stop running it. Pinterest can be useful for organic promotion long-term.”

Alison has created a following for one of her niches on Twitter where she shares her products to generate organic sales. She says, “Twitter is really useful for organic promotion and super-short-term trending shirts; where a politician or a comedian has said something hilarious and you want to get it straight on a shirt and into the hands of the people who are tweeting about it.” Also, Ashish and Marcus both use Twitter to sell their products organically.

Another seller, Angela Vickers, suggests creating one Instagram account per Teespring store and using hashtags to increase listing views organically. You can learn more about her blog post on 6 ad-free ways to promote products on Instagram. 

Cristina C. suggests using Teespring’s promotion tool in conjunction with the buyer message tool to drive additional sales. This tactic is especially effective during the holiday season. 

An example of a seller using user generated content and hashtags to organically promote their products on social media.

 

Upcoming holidays and events

There are tons of events going on between now and January 2019. Mark your calendars for these upcoming events, create designs, and share them with shoppers. Keep in mind you can create global products in the Teespring Launcher to offer your buyers a localized shopping experience—they’ll get the cheapest and fastest shipping options available based on their location.