Filipino power couple pioneers selling with Teespring

Marvin and Mary Ann Kate (a.k.a. Kate) are a husband + wife selling team. Both Marvin and Kate were born and raised in the Philippines and are some of the first successful sellers from this region who use Teespring. The couple specializes in military, sports moms and occupational niches and most of their buyers are located in the U.S.

Kate and Marvin recently crossed the 17k products sold milestone and had some tips to share with the rest of the Teespring Community. See what they had to say to newbies who are interested in creating their own success story with Teespring!

How has selling on Teespring impacted your life?

It’s changes a lot. I don’t have to go abroad to earn a living anymore (as I did for 4 years). Two years ago, building our own home seems too far to realize but… last year we just started the construction of our dream house and hoping to finish it this year. 😉  We were also able to travel the country and even brought my little girl to Disneyland Hong-Kong—all thanks to Teespring!

Teespring gave us the perks of working ANYWHERE and the luxury of spending more time with our kids. Selling on Teespring brought our family even closer together….we are learning together and enjoying our success together.

How did you overcome failure when first starting out?

When we first started selling, it took about 2 months to get our first few sales, bit within 4 months you were selling hundreds of products! I guess it’s a mix of perseverance, hours of youtube tutorial videos and a little luck. With a $200 max ad budget that we set aside, it was just enough for us to get started. We burned out about $150 on ads at first with no luck of hitting gold. But we never stopped. We scoured the internet for tips, tricks and design ideas. When we launched our 9th or 10th campaign, it made 2 sales within the first 24 hours. I can still remember the joy we felt when we saw those first 2 sales! By the end of the campaign we sold a total of 94 units. This gave us enough profit to continue running ads for several more campaigns. We launched a couple more winning designs and little by little it brought us to our 17k milestone today.

What’s it like working with your spouse?  

It’s actually a lot of fun working together and sharing ideas. Sometimes we agree on something and sometimes we don’t. LOL. Marvin creates our designs and ads while I take care of the niche research and posting/monitoring fan pages.

What’s your top advertising platform of choice?  

Currently, we are only advertising through Facebook and Instagram but we are now testing Pinterest. To the newbies out there, don’t be afraid to gamble on ads. Learn about them and study how they work. There is a lot of free content on the internet. All you need is focus, the will to learn, and small ad budget. Teespring does the rest.

How did you choose your niches (target buyers)?

We chose the Military/Veteran niche when we first started selling on Teespring because it was the go-to niche at that time—there are a lot of passionate people in this audience. Also, Marvin was already familiar with the people in this niche (popular sayings/slogans, views on controversial topics, what they like, interests etc.) because he worked inside an American military base in Afghanistan for two years.

Do you have any design pointers or tips for new sellers?  

Simple, easy-to-read fonts I guess. We believe that design doesn’t really matter that much as long as the message of your design resonates with the niche you are targeting. Basically, the criteria of a winning design depends on the niche. We can’t really give a solid “winning design pointers”. What worked for us might not work for them. So my tip for newbies is test your designs. 

What are your favorite Teespring tools and features?

We are most excited about the Boosted Network. It’s a great opportunity for us to be able to list our products on both Teespring and Amazon, and have Amazon orders fulfilled through Teespring.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with the community?

To my fellow Filipino Teespringers (and everyone else around the world)—don’t give up!