1. Michael Essek - T-Shirt Side Hustle to T-Shirt Business Success Story
Michael Essek's T Shirt Side Hustle to T-Shirt Business Success Michael Essek talks about his successful online T-Shirt company, his own marketing and sales tips, and how to go about starting your own print on demand T-Shirt company. Michael Essek helps designers and illustrators come up with creative T-Shirt ideas, create better designs, and grow a long-term business from their art. Michael has been designing and selling T-Shirts online since 2013, primarily through Print on Demand sites like Redbubble, Merch by Amazon and Teepublic, and using Print on Demand companies like Printful. To start improving your ideas today - visit MichaelEssek.com [embed] https://youtu.be/FnESOm2ZokY [/embed] T Shirt Sales Marketing Tip Michael Essek 0:00 A lot of times people will buy a shirt as a kind of afterthought. They'll be like, Oh, that's funny. I'm gonna buy that and click click, click and they've bought it without really going through a process of That's amazing. Wow, I really need that you know data and then thinking about it for days or anything like that. So anyway, you can kind of make the T shirt fit that mold if you like fit that pathway, so that someone notices it thinks it's cool goes looking for it, finds it and buys it without you know, making too big a deal of it. Stacy Caprio 0:30 Hi, and welcome to the Her.CEO podcast with Stacy Caprio. The best advice comes not from your critics, but from those who are already where you want to be listed along with Stacey tweak to learn from those who have already built their dreams so you can learn how to build your own. Today we get to talk to Michael Essek who sells t shirts online. I followed Michael's t shirt selling journey for over six years. Ever since I started my own Etsy and print on demand shop and was looking for tips and help to get better designs and more sales. His 10k plus a month income reports were one of the things that inspired me to originally get into t shirt sales, currently selling on Etsy still, but it's much harder than it looks. And when I focused on T shirts solely. I've had some pretty good multi thousand income supporting months, but nothing compared to Michael. His idea structures, which he shares and almost daily emails and brainstorming idea output are incredibly prolific. I recommend hopping on his email list if you're looking to learn new structures you can use to brainstorm ideas in any niche or in any business sector. Or if you're looking to grow as a print on demand apparel seller, and stay up to date on the new trends and updates on print on demand and T shirt news. In this episode, Michael shares some great marketing and sales tips. A surprising perspective on how to do more effective influencer marketing the different ways he is now selling his shirts, including different platforms licensing and more, and his own experiences and growth in the T shirt sales arena. This is a great episode for you if you're interested in diving into any type of trendy e commerce or t shirt sales niches, or just learning how to think of new ideas and market and sell products online. I'll go into some of my favorite takeaways from this episode at the end. So hang around for that. Without further ado, let's hear Michael story and learn his t shirt selling tips. Hi, Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show. I followed your T shirt, emails and blog for a while now. And I was thinking that you could start by giving the listeners some background, how you got into the T shirt design space, and an overview of how you've progressed since starting. Michael Essek Michael Essek 3:00 Sure. Well, thanks for having me, Stacy, it's a pleasure to be to be here with you today. So I started I think around 2013 2014, I had a small website, a blog that I was running, which I sold to someone. And what I didn't realize in the selling process was that I was going to lose the income from that blog that I was getting on a monthly basis. So I quite soon set out to find another way to get some some income in. And one of the things I stumbled across was people selling illustrations and stuff on on online on T shirts or on prints and stuff. So I decided I would try and teach myself to be better. At the illustration side, I've always kind of been pretty good at art and design. But I didn't know how to use Adobe Illustrator very well. And I saw that a lot of these guys were using Adobe Illustrator and stuff. So I saw it as a kind of learning opportunity and a project for me to work on a kind of side hustle at the time while I had a full time job. So I created some designs started uploading them to or I would say offering them to, at the time what were known as sure today sites like t fury, and others and these were sites that would sell a design for 24 hours and then they would take it down. So yeah, after maybe a couple of months, I think of trial and error. I eventually got a design accepted by one of these sites, made a few hundred dollars in the 24 hours and that kind of hooked me and and I thought okay, this is possible. There's a lot of these websites, there's a lot of places to sell my work. And if I just put in the work and have enough designs, then eventually this could be you know, a full time full time gig. But it took a long time to get there. It was maybe two two or three years later, before I really grew the income to to what was matching my my job income at the time. And that was right around the time that Amazon launched a service called merged by Amazon where they would Print and ship t shirts. And you could upload designs directly to Amazon, they would do everything else. And that really was a godsend for me that was came at just the right time, I had lots of designs, I was able to get them up very quickly on Amazon. And basically why ride a wave of popularity, your early sales and momentum in that space. And that really allowed me to, to Yeah, to quit my job go full time on T shirts. And I've been doing that ever since. Stacy Caprio 5:32 Wow, that's awesome. So I have to ask, I'm curious, what was the website you sold originally? What was the niche? Michael Essek 5:42 Yeah, it was, it was actually like a hyperlocal blog to where I was living at the time. So it wasn't, it wasn't ever making lots of money or anything, but it was just a super local news site. And I was just kind of gathering, you know, interesting stories and, and sharing them online. And it got a bit of a following. And it got it was kind of just as Twitter was taken off. So I'd quite an active Twitter account as well. So yeah, I just kind of lost interest in the project and sold it. So it wasn't ever a big thing for me. But I guess it just shows up. I've always been interested in I don't know, getting things set up online and growing an audience and things like that. Stacy Caprio 6:20 Yeah, that must have kind of helped you transition more seamlessly into the T shirt, online selling space. So that's really cool. The next thing I want to ask was, which marketing channels and platforms do list on today? Do you focus mostly on March? or what have you found to be effective? Sell T Shirts Online Michael Essek 6:42 Yeah, good question. So I started off getting sales through sites like red bubble and tee public, you know, several years ago, and those are still bringing in, you know, good income for me every month, obviously, merch by Amazon was the one that came along and really took off. And that's still still going strong. And previously, I've sold and still have a Shopify site where I sell some stuff, but I don't really promote that much anymore. So those are the kind of the main channels and then Etsy has been a big one. And that's, that's picked up quite significantly in the past few months, along with almost everything else actually apart from obviously merge by Amazon, which has been down for a while, I'd say in terms of like the ones that are the biggest, in a usual month, when we aren't in the middle of a global pandemic, then it would be much by Amazon, then probably redbubble, then teepublic, and then Etsy, somewhere in the mix there as well. And then there's a whole series of other smaller websites. So I still have designs on like society, six, designed by humans and several others like that. And the other route through which I kind of make money from my art is offline licensing. So we have an agent for my business, who basically promotes my work to various manufacturers and retailers, usually in the offline arena. And, and yeah, we make royalties through that as well, the harder to track, you don't get notifications on sales, you know, in real time, like you do with lots of online sources, but we still, you know, make a significant income from that. And that tends to be growing every year very steadily, because it's not as wide open to issues and copycats and things like that. And it's more of a long term business play, if you like. So we have that going as well. Stacy Caprio 8:29 Oh, that's awesome. How did you find out about licensing or connect with your agent? T Shirt Business Success Michael Essek 8:37 I think a couple of years into maybe new t shirt business, if you like that i i set up and started once it was once I was going full time on T shirts, I kind of realized, you know, we had at least hundreds if not thousands of designs at that time. And I thought, you know, we got all these designs, and obviously we put them up online and we sell them through various places. And that's great. But there's there seems to me that there would be other other channels, and one of them was offline. So that the problem was how do we how do we find those people? You know, how does how does that side of the business work? So what I did was was put together my designs in a big, big catalog, like an a three, like ring binder catalog, we had like a few of these printed and we went down to a licensing show in London, there's a licensing Expo every year. There's also one in in Las Vegas every year which is run by the same organization. And this is really where a lot of big brands, cutting their work Warner Brothers, these kind of you know, mega brands will go and conduct their licensing business where they'll go in and talk to po