How to Start a Tshirt Business From Home And Make $10,000+ a Month

Are you curious about how to start a tshirt business online that will make you some serious money?

Well, although competitive, it can still be a good idea. There are still ways to turn your design ideas into a successful t shirt business. If you want some guidance, look no further!

My name is Neil, and I have been self-employed in the internet marketing industry (if you want to call it that) for almost 5 years now. And today, I am going to show you exactly how to start selling t shirts online.

(I have made over $150,000 on Amazon selling shirts through the Merch by Amazon program.)

So I want to share with you the ultimate guide for exactly how I created such a profitable t shirt company. To give you the steps to replicate the process and turn your passion for tees into a full-time business starting right NOW!

How To Start a T shirt Business With The Merch by Amazon Program

You may not know this, but the Merch by Amazon program launched a while back. This is a great program for someone trying to learn how to start a successful T shirt business and sell their own custom designs. Without needing to buy or rent an expensive Direct-to-garment (dtg printing) machine.

For the first few months, almost no one knew this Amazon program even existed. This is because you are probably not a developer.

If you still have no idea what I am talking about, let me explain. Merch by Amazon is a print on demand service (POD). But it's not only a t shirt printing business. It's also used for selling MANY other products like mugs, etc. on their platform.

The way it works is simple:

• You create an account,
• You then upload artwork to the platform.
• If you're a graphic designer, you can create your own complex designs with Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator.
• You then pick a few t shirt mockups to test your design with different colors.
• You then enter a title, brand, a few bullet points, and a description of your shirt, and click publish.

Within just a few minutes, you'll have a money making page on Amazon selling your t-shirt to potentially billions of monthly visitors.

Amazon handles the selling, the printing, the shipping, and even the customer service for the t-shirt sales you get, and all you do is collect a royalty on each sale.

You don't worry about finding an e Commerce platform since Amazon handles everything. Not to mention the fact your target audience is sure to be found in droves on Amazon. This is a super cool program because your initial cost is $0.

Since the product isn't made until it's been ordered, there's no need to handle inventory or pay for storage fees. Once payment has been collected, Amazon does the printing, makes the shirt and sends you over your expenses.

If you have started to connect the dots, you see what an amazing business model this is. You can sell products to people with the full force of Amazon behind you and collect royalties! A lot of other people with business ideas started to see this opportunity.

The program quickly became swamped with sign-ups, Merch by Amazon quickly went to an invite-only program. You can still request an invitation, but there's no guarantee when you'll get accepted.

Amazon has also placed a limit on how many designs Amazon allows you to create at once. This means that essentially, you can only post so many shirts on an account when you get one. You need to prove you can make enough sales with those slots you are given before you can get more slots for high quality t shirts.

If your interest is peaked even a little, I highly recommend that you head over to Merch by Amazon and request an invite. You may be waiting a long while, but it can be really nice once you get in.

Start Your Own Clothing Line: 6 Steps for How to Start a Tshirt Business on Amazon

Merch by Amazon is not the only way to start selling shirts on Amazon, far from it in fact. You could always get your designs printed, and then send them in to be fulfilled by Amazon (FBA), or you could do the printing yourself and sell them from your home.

There is also the possibility of dropshipping your shirts from Ebay or another marketplace by doing retail arbitrage.

This is a brand, a business that you can build off of. You could launch a niche site and sell your clothes from there. You could design and sell clothes on Shopify. The opportunities here are endless. So you may want to niche down on a target market and create a business plan.

What if there was a way for not just creating t shirts, but hundreds of different items on the Amazon marketplace? What if you could do it without holding a single piece of inventory? And still see the same level of success, if not higher, numbers than I saw over the last year?

There is, and I am going to go over exactly how to do it based on the brand new Amazon/Shopify Integration. You can set this up and be selling on Amazon today if you decide to take action.

Step 1: Understand How Amazon Works

Before you even consider hooking everything else up, you first need to understand how Amazon works. This information is crucial to making sure your custom t shirt business designs can hit its full potential.

These are Amazon BSR and Copyright/Trademark metrics.

BSR (Best Sellers Rank)

For every product that is selling on the Amazon Marketplace, they will have something called a Best Sellers Rank or BSR for short. This number given to you is going to be relative to the number of sales that item is receiving.

This BSR number is also relative to the category that the product is in. 100k BSR in clothing is not going to be selling the same amount of units as 100k BSR in Gardening and so on.

If you were to go over and find a product, just scroll down to the product description and you should see a box that looks like this:

To give a very rough idea of what the BSR equates to, a BSR of 100,000 in clothing is selling around 1-2 units a day. You can also use Jungle Scout's free estimator to track how much each seller is selling every day.

The BSR in the picture above probably means they are getting a sale or two every few days.

The more experience you get selling in certain categories, the better you get at estimating how many sales these listings are getting.

You may find when you start selling t shirts online, that it's very different from selling coasters or other products. So, you need to check out different categories to see what works best with your online shop.

Copyright/Trademark

Copyright and trademark are very much different but they are both something that you need know well enough that you are not infringing on someone else’s rights.

Amazon does not want rip-offs, and they will punish you if caught. Why risk it?

Trademark is the other big one that you need to know how to use. These are recognizable expressions that people have protected. These can be signs, expressions, or logos.

When dealing with putting designs up on Amazon, you need to avoid putting any sayings on your merch that have been protected.

Make sure if there is any text or logotype work going on with your designs for printing, that you run the phrase through one of these sites:

• USPTO
• Trademarkia

Step 2: Research Before You Start Designing Clothes

Now that you are familiar with BSR and copyright/trademark, we can actually get into the fun part: Niche Research. This is by far the most important step in selling merch on Amazon. If you do not do research properly you will fail.

I have made a lot of money so far following a very simple strategy. Make better products than the competitors in niches where there is demand. All your custom t shirt design ideas should focus on this.

Simply put, I find what customers are buying, and I create more visually appealing products for them to buy at a fair price. I do this by analyzing keywords and Best Sellers rank!

Keyword Search

Head over to Amazon.com and enter in any niche you want plus “t-shirt” and hit search. For this example, I am going to be using a niche example: Veganism.

Note: Niches, where people are passionate about their cause, sell the best.

This brings up the product page for your search. You can see some examples of shirts that are for sale. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you can see there are over 15 pages of shirts in this niche.

Start opening up all the different shirts you see! This process can take a long time, but open as many tabs as you can. Once you have many open, go to each page, and navigate to the “Product Description” section on the product page and locate the BSR.

I will then take every single shirt that has a BSR that is low enough and copy that URL into a spread sheet.

Designs that you find on these t-shirts might be simple, or they might be complicated. Your first goal is determine if you or a designer can make a BETTER looking product in the niche.

If you cannot, do not add it to your list!

As you can see from the screenshot, if you go check out some of those shirts, they are selling very well. It would be extremely easy to compete against these because the shirts so far are mainly just text.

You will need to do this for every single niche you come up with. I would recommend coming up with 100 niches, and then going through the first 5 pages of shirts for each of those niches to make your initial file of potential designs to target.

Keep in mind this is a numbers game. If you want to put up 10 designs and think you are going to come close to big numbers, you are very very wrong. You want to eventually get to the point where you have thousands of designs online, each selling every day or two.

Start at just a few designs and scale up as you make money.

This is a process to build your t shirt brand. Not a get rich quick sprint.

Brand Search

The second thing that I will do is tied into the keyword search that we just went over. Sometimes it can be extremely hard to come up with other niches on the top of your head, right?

I love to let other people do this niche research for me!

The way we do that is by taking a look at brands that are already selling well on the platform. Use what others have done to help you figure out a brand identity that works for your online shop.

If you go back to the screenshot about vegan shirts, you will see that there is this listing: https://www.amazon.com/Plants-Protein-Vegetarian-T-Shirt-Medium/dp/B01APINC7E

Right above the title, you will notice the brand of the shirt. This shirt may or may not be selling well when you read this (currently #98k BSR), but you might wonder what other niches this brand has created merch around.

Simply click the brand at the top of the page there.

Simply scroll through the list to find new niches, and then open all the shirts in a new tab to check if they are selling via BSR (yes, open all 169 links, I know it takes a long time).

Keep adding to that spreadsheet you are making! Follow the keyword research and brand research that I have laid out above until you feel like you have a solid foundation for 100 killer designs.

If you do exactly as I lay out above, you should have what it takes to make the kind of money that I screenshot near the top of this article.

Speeding Up the Research Process

You'll want to get your online business off the ground as soon as possible.

These were the exact steps that I took to build my initial revenue stream. But if you try them out you will notice that it can take forever!

Since I still run a lot of large affiliate sites, this growing side business was taking up a ton of my time. I needed to keep the process going (because it was working) but needed to free up some of my time.

As the merch income grew, so did our small business and the questions from the community.

Merch Informer lets you pull up the top selling shirts for any keyword or any brand. These are in order by best sellers rank. You have the ability to save and download your links, images, descriptions, prices, as well as check keyword competition within Amazon.

Using the Vegan example from above, you can see what it would look like inside the software. I use all of this information to send to my designers which we will go over in the next step.

The easiest way to grow this business is outsource at light speed!

You can do everything I talk about in this article manually. Or you can try us out with a 3 day free trial that we give everyone.

We spent a lot of time and effort putting together the most comprehensive Merch research tool available to the market.

As a thank you to the Niche Pursuits community, please use coupon code NICHEPURSUITS for 20% off if you want to give it a go.

The biggest challenge that most newcomers face in the POD (print on demand service) space is finding niches that sell. With Merch Informer, we have basically created a keyword tool that pulls keywords in niches that are almost guaranteed to make you sales.

Amazon is a big data company. This means they use all this data in order to optimize how many sales they get. When you start typing a keyword, you will see that Amazon starts auto recommending or suggesting endings to that original seed keyword.

They do this because they know from their data that if you were to enter in one of the suggested niche, you are a lot more likely to buy things.

Use everything I put in above along with Amazon suggest to ensure that your research is rock solid!

How To Make Your Own Clothing Line Step 3: Getting Your Designs Created

There are two ways you can get your designs created. You can either create custom t-shirts yourself or you can outsource them.

I ended up doing my first 100 designs myself. But after I saw that the model worked, I started outsourcing. Since I am not an artist, I had to watch a few videos on YouTube to figure out what I was doing.

If you are going to create them yourself, you can use:

• Photoshop
• GIMP
• Illustrator
• Canva

GIMP is a free option that you may want to look into. If you're interested in Photoshop or Illustrator, you can check out Adobe CC here.

If you are not an artist like me, it really just leaves you a single choice: outsource! If you are familiar with outsourcing content to VA’s this is extremely similar. Since I was already hiring writers on Upwork, I decided this is the place I was going to get my graphic designs from.

Turns out you can get graphic designers for around $4 a design. There are many custom t-shirt businesses that outsource this way. It's a great way to get the custom t shirt designs you need for each idea without breaking the bank.

Here is the exact script that I used:

Hey, I am in need of 400 t-shirt designs in the time period of 2-3 months.

Your task will be pretty basic, I will send you ideas of t-shirts I want to make and you make them yourself in your own unique style. For example, I might send you a link of a already existing tshirt and I would need you to be inspired by it and create a better version that is in your own creative style.

I will leave a lot of 5* reviews so that you will be able to get jobs easier in the future and this is a long-term position. Once we have done the first batch of 400 – around 4 per day, we could continue if everything looks good.

I look forward to doing business with you!

I will then hire a few of them and give each person a few of the links from the research we did in the previous step. If they come back with good designs in their own unique style, then I hire them for the long term.

Keep in mind you want to give them the links and/or pictures as inspiration. This helps make sure you receive something back that is a better product than what is currently being sold.

Step 4 In Building Your T-Shirt Brand: Setting Up Shopify

Now that you have some pretty designs sitting around from your research, you need some merch to put them on! I mentioned in the beginning that the Merch by Amazon program was closed.

Not only is there a way around it, but this ecommerce platform is arguably an even better option.

It will allow you to put your designs up for printing on tons of different products besides shirts. The sky is the limit, and again you do not need to hold any inventory.

The way we do this is through the Shopify/Amazon integration. Since there are print on demand service providers that integrate with Shopify, and since Shopify now passes through to Amazon, you can set everything up to become completely automated.

Head on over to Shopify and sign up for a free trial (yes, this entire method works in the free trial).

Once you are signed up, then the back end should look like this:

As you can see you can then connect to your Facebook group or business page.

Next, what you want to do is scroll down to the apps section on the bottom and look for an app called Teelaunch. It will look like this:

Teelaunch is the company we are going to use in order to print our designs on products without ever touching them. When you get an order from Amazon, the order shows up in your Shopify store.

Teelaunch automatically sees the order, does the printing for you, and ships it to Amazon customers. This all happens without any input from you!

After you get the Teelaunch app installed in the back end of Shopify, you need to quickly set it up. Head on over to the app, and click on the “Account” button in the upper right hand corner.

Fill out your information and put in a credit card that will be charged when you get an order.

You will take the profits from Amazon and pay off this credit card every 14 days. Whatever is left over is your profit. Now that's a scalable small business.

Before the comments start pouring in, if you are from another country, YES you can do this method. Simply Google “free USA address” and look through the options that will give you an address as well as a mail forwarder.

Most people from overseas will handle returns simply by just refunding customers and letting them keep the product.

Head back to the Teelaunch app, we are going to add our first product. Click on “New Product” from the top of the page.

Pick whatever type of merchandise you want to sell. In this example, I am going to go over selling shirts because that is what I started with.

Pick the shirt you want to print on. I went with the Gildan shirt because from personal experience they are great quality. They're actually the cheapest choice, too. That's just a great bonus for us at this point.

Upload your design to the editor until it looks good, pick some colors, and then select a few sizes.

When you are happy with how everything is set up, give it a title and some bullet points in the back end and then publish it.

You now have a shirt in your Shopify back end. We will now need to attach this shirt so it shows up on Amazon.

Head back over to your Shopify menu, and click on “Add a sales channel.”

From here, install the Amazon sales channel. This is where the magic happens Once the Amazon channel has been installed, you will need to connect it to your Amazon sellers account.

Agree to the Amazon MWS agreement and you have successfully linked your account to Shopify!

Now that these 2 accounts are linked, you will want to go into the Amazon app, and click on “Sell on Amazon.”

When you click this button, it will bring up a list of products that you have published in your Shopify store. From this screenshot you can see the shirt that I was creating earlier.

Since you are building your own brand here, select that the product is made by your brand.

Pick the appropriate category, and start entering your title, your brand name, some bullet points, and a description.

Keep in mind two things. The first is that you will need to click the “Apply to sell in this category” before the shirt can go live on Amazon. This application asks you a few questions and you are approved INSTANTLY.

Also, you will need to make multiple listings for both male and female shirts. I actually prefer this as it gives us a chance to be more targeted in our keyword approach.

For each shirt you pick up, you will have variants. Each variant requires a UPC and a SKU.

You can make up SKUs since they are for internal use. They are just a string of characters. I decided to make mine random by using a 10 digit random string: https://www.random.org/strings/

You must purchase UPCs. These are 12 digits long and can be purchased from a ton of places online. I got thousands of them on Ebay for only a few dollars.

Since you need a new UPC for EACH variant you want to put online, I recommend that you put your designs on other things that do not require sizes.

Once you have finished entering in the variants and have been approved for the clothing category, you can publish your design.

It should take 30 minutes or so for the item to appear live on Amazon.

If ANY of these instructions are confusing, or you want a more detailed description of how to set up and connect the two, please read this article here.

Shipping Settings

Go into your seller central account and make sure you are changing the shipping time and the shipping price.

Teelaunch has been very fast on their shipping. But I like to extend it just a bit as well as lower shipping to $2.99 for the lower 48 states.

This makes my products more attractive to the buyer. Every sale is important for a T shirt company, especially in the beginning.

Return on Investment Calculations

If you price your shirts around $17 on Amazon with $2.99 shipping, customers will be charged around $20.

If you figure that a typical t-shirt that we created is going to cost you $12.50 (this is with shipping included), and Amazon takes their fee of around $3, you are going to be left with over $4 per shirt sold.

This might not seem like much at first. When you realize that you are selling on Amazon.com where there are millions of daily buyers, your perspective might start to change.

Shirts have a $4 profit margin but think of the other products you could sell. Mugs and sweatshirts might have a much higher profit margin.

Depending on what you price at, of course. Play around with it because the sky is the limit.

Small business owners who keep searching for the best revenue streams win in the long run.

Step 5 For Your Online Tshirt Business: Optimize Your Amazon Listings

When it comes to building your Amazon listing around the product you are building, there are only a few major points that need to be covered.

These points are:

• Price
• Brand
• Title
• Bullet points
• Competition

Price

This is a major one because it is one of the first things that a buyer will notice. Make sure you are pricing competitively.

If everyone else in your niche is selling for $20, why would you try and sell your merchandise for $25? Sure, you would make a better margin, but you will get drastically less sales. If you price about $25, you need to have an extremely good reason for doing so.

You want to see if your designs are really that much better to ask for a higher price. I like to make sure that my prices are right in the middle.

An easy way to do this is take all the prices on the first page, add them together, and then divide them by the total amount of listings on the page and then price your product at that price.

No reason to overcomplicate things.

Brand Name

I used to recommend people on Merch by Amazon come up with a different brand for every shirt that they put online. This is no longer the case with this method because you are selling on Amazon seller central and have full control over reviews and other aspects of the listing.

This lets you keep a consistent brand identity across Amazon, social media, and elsewhere. Many of the most successful t shirt business brands you can find online follow this advice.

Title

The title is extremely important to ranking on Amazon and where keywords will come into the picture. In order to talk about keywords, we need to go over competition.

For this example, say that you just came up with a really good design about “Cats.” When you are uploading your shirt, you want to actually look at what similar designs are out there and price to what the market is demanding.

When you get to putting in your title, you may just want to name it “Black cat t-shirt.” This is a huge mistake!

Look at that! If you were to name it black cat t shirt you would probably be lost in almost 150 thousand different results showing up.

You want to niche down if you are to stand a chance of making any sales.

Think to yourself “What would a customer search for if they were looking for this shirt?” Maybe your shirt has some ears in it.

Getting better, but still lots of results. Time to try and use a modifier to niche down even further.

Very close! I like to see if I can get under 1,000 results if possible. Niching down like this is the perfect way to add keywords to your title of your listings without looking spammy.

As you can see, by tweaking the title a little bit, we found out a way to lower down the competition you will be facing as well as putting in some keywords into the title for better rankings all around.

This is what you want to practice with every product you are putting up.

This is the same process that Spencer uses with long tail keywords. The money isn't in the short tail, high volume keywords.

It's in the low volume, long tail ones. People searching for this type of item know what they're looking for and the competition for you is almost none.

Bullet Points

Bullet points are what get your merchandise ranked in Amazon from all the tests I have run. You need these bullet points to be keyword rich without keyword stuffing.

To do this, make sure they are coherent sentences. Read them out loud to yourself to make sure they sound correct.

What many people do here is simple describe their product. Should you do this?

NO!

They will read these. Tell them why they want it!

I also like to put a last bullet point telling them to order a size up because these print on demand service shirts often shrink a size in the wash.

Description

If the bullet points are where you sell to customers, the description is where you want to describe what is in your shirt. Keep in mind that this section is what shows up on mobile and is oftentimes used in the meta description for ranking in Google.

Make sure you are filling these out and not leaving them blank.

That is not only important for SEO but its where you really get to sell why they should buy from your t shirt brand. Not the competitions.

Step 6: Scaling Up Your Clothing Line

This entire method is nothing but a numbers game and a pretty easy one at that. The majority of people will probably not even try it because of the time investment needed, but it works!

In order to scale quickly, you need to be able to either design yourself, or afford to outsource designs.

A lot of people reading this and who have listened to the entire process on my site have begun by putting up t-shirts on Amazon because that is what I used on Amazon.

DO NOT DO THIS.

Amazon limits brand new accounts to 100 variations a week. If you put up 1 shirt in 5 colors and all the sizes, you blow through almost 50 variations with a single shirt.

Instead, while everyone is focusing on putting up a few shirts a week, you can take your designs and put them on hundreds of products a week!

If you look and the Shopify app does not have the category you want to list in, list the product through seller central, and let it sync to the Shopify app.

Doing that one thing will set you apart from the competition and let you grow at an incredible rate.

Marketing Your T Shirt Brand

You'll need customers.

But the good news is that once you follow these steps to create a t-shirt business you'll just need to focus on getting attention.

Remember, you won't need to hold a large inventory, buy a dtg printing machine, or put up a bunch of money up front. So if you want, you can invest a bit into your t shirt business marketing to your ideal customers.

At least it is if your ideas are as good as you think they are. The custom t shirt market has been huge for decades and there are customers everywhere. It's not going anywhere.

There aren't many places where social media advertising still brings gang buster results. If you aren't careful Facebook Ads can get out of hand. But promoting a t shirt store is one of the areas where social media advertising and even a Facebook Ad can still consistently deliver.

There are many creative ways to market your t shirt line. Look for your favorite design idea and order a bunch of your own custom high quality t shirts to wear, give as gifts, or otherwise give to individuals with niche social media followings who can get you more attention.

This is a great way to get more attention to your store, but remember, your shirts:

• Need good graphic design
• Need to stick out (aka the shirt idea needs to be a good one)
• Should be high quality
• Aimed at groups passionate about their causes

If you follow this advice, keep track of changes in the t shirt industry, and continue to work when you start selling t shirts online and seeing success!

Success Stories Your Online T-Shirt Business

If you are still here reading through this, have no idea who I am, you probably have no reason to believe me. You get nowhere in life without at least trying, but people do always like to see some proof and I understand that.

The first guy who I will not name, has been a friend for a long time. He focuses heavily on Amazon affiliate sites.

But when I started talking his ear off about Merch right when it opened, he decided to give it a go and scaled up quickly.

Here are his earnings:

The second is a guy named Tom. One of the most driven people I have ever met, he designed every single piece of artwork himself, and just look at what kind of earnings he is hitting.

Keep in mind these are screenshots from ONLY selling t-shirts.

Can you imagine what they will look like after he starts putting those same designs on other pieces of merchandise?

Finally, we have Albert from Canada. This guy is always the first to jump at an opportunity and test it out before coming to conclusions. Be like Albert!

I have actually personally spoken with him just a few times. According to him, he heard about Merch through my tiny little marketing blog and hit the ground running with it.

He managed to strike fast and create a few very well selling designs and ended up doing almost $6,500 his SECOND month of selling shirts online.

Then when the Shopify/Amazon integration happened, Albert saw the writing on the wall and started putting up his designs that he had already created on other products.

In just 3 days he has made 8 sales! He only has a couple of designs up right now using the Shopify Method and plans to scale quickly.

Disclaimer: In order to see the same level of success as the above, you will NEED to be able to put in the time and effort. Do not expect to put up 10 designs and wonder why you are not making money.

If you don't have a lot of time and don't want to spend a ton of effort, there is a shortcut. You can have better tools than your competition.

Merch Informer helps you to figure out what keywords people are searching for. It helps you locate the low hanging fruit that requires the lowest amount of time and effort to rank.

If you want to read an entire Merch Informer Review, go here.

As you can see from these examples, successful t shirt business designs may very well be closer than you think!

Wrapping Up Your Tee Shirt Business Tips

That about wraps up the entire method and exactly how to start a custom t shirt business today. Leveraging the millions of buyers on Amazon has never really been this easy.

If you are lacking startup costs, you can do this on the cheap by learning to design yourself.

There is ZERO inventory that you need to hold, and minimal issues you need to worry about.

And for more information to help you along your journey check out our related articles such as how to make money with eCommerce. And a post on the best way to sell t shirts online.

I appreciate the Niche Pursuits community for allowing me to bring this to the table today. I wish you the best of luck on your journey and lots of happy customers!

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