How to Scale a Print on Demand Business: Tips, Tools, and Tricks

Last Updated on January 12, 2023 by John Cirelly

So you’ve made some money with print on demand, but now how do we scale it?

In this article I’ll show you exactly how to scale a print on demand business, and increase your month over month revenue.

Let’s scale this thing…

If you’re looking a step-by-step guide on how to start a successful print on demand business, check out our complete POD guide.

Scale a Print on Demand Business by Outsourcing

Outsourcing the things you don’t like, or aren’t good at is one of the fastest ways to free up your time help scale print on demand business.

Think about all of the things you do in your print on demand business. What can be outsourced? What can assigned to a virtual assistant?

A good experiment to run is to tally up all the things you do, and assign yourself an hourly rate for doing them. Say $50 per hour. Now ask yourself, can you hire someone else for less to complete the same task?

Outsourcing Design Tasks

Design is something I love, but am not great at. I have outsourced nearly all of my design work. I provide a general sketch or overview and they create the finished product.

There are a few different options for scaling your print on demand business by outsourcing designs:

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Premade Designs With Vexels

Vexels is a service not many print on demand businesses know about, yet it’s one of the best ways to have real designers create POD-ready designs.

Rather than creating every design from scratch, you can browse Vexels and choose from over 70,000 designs that are legally allowed to be modified and resold on your shirts, mugs, or whatever you sell.

Vexels works on a subscription model which allows them to continue keeping their inventory up to date, reflecting the latest holidays, trends, and memes.

Since the platform is dedicated to print on demand they only publish designs that are ready to be sold. These are labeled as “POD ready.”

Their platform also allows for you to request custom designs, where a designer will take your request to create your design. If you have Photoshop, you can use their premade PSD templates that let you download a design, and then modify it super quickly through premade color and effect layers.

Vexels starts at $22 per month, allowing you to use hundreds of POD designs to create thousands of variants across tons of different products. You can even hire a virtual assistant to use Vexels to scale your print on demand business even faster.

Vexels has reached out to us and is offering our readers 35% off their annual Merch tier Check it out below.

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Hire A Designer On Fiverr

Fiverr actually has designers that are incredibly affordable and specialize in making designs specifically for the print on demand industry.

While Fiverr can wind up being more expensive than a service like Vexels, it’s still a great way to scale a print on demand business.

If you only need a handful of designs that have specific requirements, chances are someone on Fiverr can get it done for between $5 to $20 per design.

You can do a quick search for print on demand designers below.

There are a ton of designers on the platform, which means you’ll have plenty of options to find a designer that has the style you’re looking for.

Hire A Virtual Assistant

There are a lot of tasks that fall between creating designs and marketing your clothing. For these tasks hiring a virtual assistant is often the best way to remove yourself from these tasks, and scale your print on demand businesses.

VAs can be surprisingly affordable if you know where to look. My favorite place to hire remote workers for specific tasks is from OnlineJobs.ph. Here you can hire virtual assistants to help with keyword research, data entry, and other mundane tasks that eat up your time.

The best thing about the platform is that they hire exclusively from the Philippines. Filipino natives are taught English right away and often have experience working remotely for other countries already.

A quick search shows that there are over 1000 matches for virtual assistants in the Philippines ranging between $168 to $421 per month. This helps smaller print on demand businesses scale from part time help, to full time as they grow.

Even with automation tools in place, there is still a fair bit on manual setup and work that goes into setting it all up. One of the most powerful ways to scale your print on demand business is to hire a VA to work and manage your print on demand automation tools.

Below we’ll touch on some of the automation tools available, and how they help scale print on demand businesses.

Scale Your Print on Demand Businesses with Automation

If you didn’t already know, there are tools out there that can completely automate the design uploading process. This allows you to publish your designs across dozens of platforms with a few clicks.

You look pretty smart, so I won’t explain why this is crucial for scaling a print on demand business. 😉

Uploading to multiple platforms takes a lot of time. Automating this process helps put your designs in front of thousands of other people browsing platforms like MBA, Redbubble, TeeSpring, FAA, and a ton of other marketplaces without spending hours of your time.

Automation tools can also help you create variants, which essentially multiply the use of your design across multiple niches. Let me explain.

Say you have a single design for teachers like this:

That’s great, but what if we wanted to scale this same design to include tons of other professions, like plumbers, doctors, or pilots? With tools like FlyingUpload you can import a CSV of different variables with the names of different professions, and make hundreds of design variants automatically.

You’ll then be able to automatically import all your keywords, colors, and designs and publish them across different marketplaces with a single click. You can even translate your keywords and descriptions with one click to offer that same design in different countries.

But it get’s even better.

You’ll be able to automatically perform competitive keyword analysis and automatic trademark looks up from the same tool. This will give you an idea of exactly how saturated a keyword is, and allow you to quickly check for a trademark before you hit publish.

If you mix this automation into your businesses you’ll be able to quickly scale winning designs, and get in front of thousands of more potential buyers.

You can scale even further by creating an SOP for the automation tasks, and training a virtual assistant on how to operate the software. While FlyingUpload is my favorite tool, there are several others that offer similar automation services.

1. FlyingUpload – This tool is my favorite. It allows for unlimited automated uploads to over a dozen marketplaces, features a keyword research tool, and product tag generator. Has a FREE version with paid plans starting at $8.66 USD per month.
2. Merch Informer – Allows you to place designs on 200 different products across 30 different marketplaces from a single dashboard. Also features automatic trademark protection, keyword research tool, and built-in designer. Starts at $9.99 per month.
3. PODConnect – Features automated uploads to 30 different marketplaces across 400 different products with auto trademark checking. Starts at $9.99 per month.
4. Merch Titan – Allows for scaling to multiple markets and products through bulk CSV imports. Features keyword and SEO analyzers with trademark detection. Starting at $9.99 per month.

Use Designs To Their Fullest Potential

Are you really using your designs to their fullest potential? If you’re sending the time, money, and effort on creating a design, it’s worth the extra effort to ensure if can be on as many products as possible.

Make sure you’re using automation tools to reach the maximum number of print on demand platforms you can. If one platform offers a few clothing type, make sure you have a design that can be placed on it.

A huge opportunity that is also often missed is Kindle Direct Publishing. Yes, you can put your designs on clothing, but did you know you can put those designs on notebooks and other products through KDP?

And no, you do not need to do any writing in order to publish on KDP.

You could upload your designs to KDP manually, but this will require you to resize them and then prep them for upload on the platform.

Thankfully, tools like FlyingUpload automatically take care of the resizing for you, allowing you to publish to even more platforms without burning hours doing the process manually.

In order to scale your print on demand businesses even further, ensure that two versions of each design, one for light clothing, and the other for dark. This can be done easily by inverting the colors when finishing the design.

Don’t Forget Email Marketing

So many print on demand store owners sleep on email marketing. When you don’t utilize your email marketing list you are leaving money on the table. Most people don’t know you can actually get started with email marketing completely free.

You can gather email addresses from orders (with consent of course) and remarket relevant products to them. This is actually super easy, and can be done through tagging with my favorite email platform ConvertKit.

For example, when someone buys your car shirt, we can tag their email with a Cat Lover tag in our email system. When it comes time to promote a new cat design, you’ll have an audience who’s purchased cat shirts from you before.

Leverage Additional Funding To Scale

Lastly you can barrow funds to kickstart the growth of your business and quickly scale your print on demand operation. I would only recommend get a business loan if you had a firm understanding of exactly how you were going to use the funds, and what those loan options were.

Now with so many different ways to make money online, there’s no need to go into debt in order to fund a project or business idea. Consider starting a service-based business on the side to fund your POD efforts, or take on part-time job if necessary.