Teespring

按需印刷服务有一个麻烦多的过去,Teespring has finally found their groove, and profitability, by getting more clever about their product. Marketing and multichannel sales are built right in, while a host of integrations provide influencers and creators more ways to monetise their social media accounts.

Whoever said it takes money to make money never stumbled upon the world of customised on-demand products. For someone looking to sell their original designs on clothing and other swag, all they need is a great idea. No investment necessary. Teespring isn’t nearly the first company to offer this service in a market that’s saturated with these kinds of services. But they do have some unique offerings and excellent integrations that make them stand out from the field. It’s a first-look company for aspiring entrepreneurs of all kinds, but also seems particularly well-suited to influencers looking to capitalise on their newfound (and likely fleeting) success.

不过，这并不总是这样。Teespring在2011年成立后取得了（看似）的开端。将Facebook用作营销和销售渠道，吸引了成千上万的新卖家进入该平台。2015年，Teespring获得了2.28亿美元的收入，甚至将其一些电力销售商变成了百万富翁。事实证明，Teesprings客户的表现要比公司本身更好。即使有了这笔收入，他们在2015年的亏损仍处于亏损状态，净收入为-3600万美元。然后事情真的很糟糕。到2017年，年收入急剧下降，下降到$42.4 million. There was good news that year, as they lost less money by a factor of 10. But when your good news is that your company only lost $3.5 million dollars, it’s time for a little self-reflection, at least.

Which isexactly what they did. After doing some business-y type stuff that this writer doesn’t understand (except the part about layoffs), Teespring was able to forge ahead, operating in a leaner fashion and expanding out their offering to go beyond selling T-shirts on Facebook. Adding new products and sales channels to the mix, as well as some big namecollaborationsand marketing directly toinfluencers, helped push things along. By 2019, Teespring hit $1 billion in lifetime sales and, more importantly, became有利可图.

With recently launched integrations with Twitch, Streamlabs, and Discord, Teespring has also positioned itself as the go-to print-on-demand service for influencers and creators in the gaming community. It’s a smart move to focus their efforts here: gamers are some of the most popular personalities on YouTube, and they’ve cultivated loyal fanbases among Twitch’s 15 million users. They also, as a group, aren’t generally sought after by brands outside of the gaming world, and are more likely serving the kind of content (irreverent, crass, profane, etc.) brands don’t want to associate with. With Teespring’s recent integrations aimed at this group, it provides brand-unfriendly personalities more opportunity to monetize their fame.

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Pricing

Like most Print-on-Demand services, Teespring is free to use. You can set up an account, upload your designs, and start selling without any financial risk. Teespring earns its money by keeping a portion of the total sale price. Rather than a percentage of the sale, there’s a fixed cost for each item: users are able to set their price wherever they want it, and Teespring’s cost remains the same.

Because there are so many items available, it would be much too time consuming (and ugly) if we listed them all here. Here’s a general idea of what items will cost you, with the stated range being dependent on style and fabric:

短袖T恤 -From about $10 to $18

长袖T恤 -From $13 to $23

Tank Tops —Around $13

运动衫/连帽衫 -From $18 to $32

Baby Stuff —From $10 to $23

For all of the above, Teespring offers volume discounts on a month-to-month basis. That is, if you cross a sales threshold by the end of a month, your next month's pricing is based on that. You can see the full pricing for all Teespring products, in US dollars and Euros,here.

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Setting Up Your Store

Because Teespring was purpose-built for print-on-demand products, the setup process is pretty straightforward. Setting up a store essentially means uploading your designs and creating products from them. In fact, once you’re logged in for the first time, the main Overview dashboard will have a link to create products as the first step in setup. There are a few other things you’ll need to configure in Settings, mainly related to payouts, and this isn’t necessarily made clear. It’s also not hard to figure out, either. All told, during our test of Teespring, it took just a bit more than six minutes to create the account, configure all settings, and upload our first design.

Along with uploading your design, you’ll need to pick an initial product on which you’ll lay everything out. If you select a t-shirt, then you'll know what your design looks like on the t-shirt (naturally). Here you can add text, though if you’re good with image editors you’re better off adding your text beforehand: While there’s a decent variety of fonts to choose from, you have very little control in the way of styling the font beyond bold or italics. There’s no arcing or shading or offsets or 3D effects. As for colors, there’s a limited color palette to choose from—just fourteen colors. If you want something beyond those you’ll need to have your Hex Color Code translator handy, and if you don’t know what that is: don’t worry. The people who do know what it is are annoyed at this also.

Laying the image and the text out on the shirt is very easy, though, with guides showing the printable area. You can resize, drag, or rotate images and text within the printable area, the elements snapping and sticking to the center of the shirt (or hat, or gaiter, or…) as you drag them.

走这距离很简单，快速，但是当您开始将设计放在其他产品上时，该过程可能会变得非常艰辛。男士/男女通用T恤有七种不同的风格，女性有七种不同的风格。连帽衫，运动衫，长袖T和坦克罐都有多种选择。有绑腿，面具，儿童和婴儿衣服，袜子，电话盒。而且，您需要编辑要出售的每个产品，以确保设计布局在这种新形状上看起来不错，并且您需要选择与设计相关的所有颜色。单击并等待网页刷新。考虑到Teespring可以处理印刷，付款以及运输和客户服务，这似乎是一小部分时间来制作。

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Content Management System

The “CMS“—such as it is—the most basic of customisation tools. To call it a CMS isn’t even accurate: Teespring is in the business of print-on-demand merchandise, not web hosting. The storefront design options are as follows:

• 标头 -您可以为背景选择一种颜色，至少可以为您提供一个适当的调色板，并带有滑块和每种颜色阴影的细度。您还可以选择您的徽标或网站标题将出现在顶部，以及您是否刚刚定义的该网站品牌在每个页面上都留下来。
  

• Banner —An optional image to put under the header.
  
  

• 关于 -Creates an “About” page where you can type a very brief description of the store/you, as well as add links to your social accounts. The interface doesn’t tell you how the limit for the bio, but we went over it in just three sentences.

And that’s about it for branding your store. From the storefront/design page, you’ll also add your products, which is not to be confused with creating products. We created products in the initial step, but that just populates the database with the items you’ll be selling and sets their prices and options. Here, you’re adding those products to the storefront/website. If you’re wondering why products aren’t just automatically added to the store, that’s because you can have multiple storefronts, and only add certain products to each one. All of Teesprings products are automatically categorized, and the categories are added to the navigation menu at the top of your storefront.

Think of your Teespring storefront less as a full scale online retail shop, and more as a merch table at a concert or festival. It’s barebones, built to sell products and not create an experience.

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Notable Features

Teespring offers Same Day printing and 2-Day shipping options, so anyone can create an Amazon-like shopping experience. They also handle taking payments, eliminate the need for merchants to hold inventory, and take ownership of the customer service. Beyond thatthey’ve added some pretty innovative features that have been a major part of Teespring’s resurgence in recent years.

• Boosted Network —当您建立带有Teespring的商店时，您可以做很多事情来推广您的产品并增加销售额。但是，Teespring在幕后也有一些事情，这是一个好处。Teespring与七个不同的在线市场集成在一起，为其客户创建多个销售渠道。一种算法可以处理这里的负载，找到符合某些条件的产品和卖家（没有有争议的内容，至少售出一次，良好的信任得分），并自动在以下任何或所有平台上提供这些产品以出售：188滚球地址，沃尔玛，Etsy，Wish，JD.com和Rakuten）。尽管您不愿意让销售发生而无需付出任何努力或费用，但您可以自由选择退出，这并不是您需要选择的。您的物品将出现在这些市场中最合适的地方，并且所有销售和支持都会发生，而无需您举起手指。该算法决定了这些其他渠道上的售价，因此每项利润各不相同。也就是说，您将为每种产品赚取最低利润。
  
• 基本和增强的重新定位 -If someone views your design but doesn’t buy it, Teespring will target ads at them, reminding them of your awesome product.
  
• Email Marketing —There are two ways Teepsring makes email marketing work for its users. The first is by featuring its customers' products in Teespring’s own branded marketing emails. This doesn’t happen for every product, of course: they’re not going to feature products that aren’t selling well to begin with. But they give you another way to market via email that puts the control in your hands. Using the “Messaging” feature, you can send promotional emails right from your Teespring dashboard to anyone who’s purchased from your shop before. You can send emails to all customers, or create segments of them based on past purchases for more targeted emails.
  
• Specialty Items —除了标准的按需印刷名单ts like t-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, and phone cases, you also have the option for many of these products to have the design printed all over, or just on sleeves, rather than simply centered on the front or back. They also offer beanies, trucker hats, keychains, pop sockets, backpacks, pins, and even fully custom plush dolls of your own design.
  
  
• Teespring Go —您不仅限于按需打印产品。随着Teespring的使用，您可以从字面上出售任何想要的东西。为此，您可以购买一堆库存并将其运送到Teespring的仓库，也可以直接与它们合作以采购您想要出售的任何东西。在这两种情况下，Teespring都可以处理所有付款，运输和客户服务，就像使用其POD产品系列一样，将销售价格的15％作为费用。
  
• Tracking Pixels —You can set up tracking pixels with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google. The results of this tracking feeds directly into Teespring’s analytics module, getting you much more meaningful and helpful data than a simple sales report.

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Integrations

• YouTube Merch Shelf —这是一个YouTube插件是直指influen的cers and other popular YouTube creators whose channels are eligible for monetisation. The plugin, as its name implies, creates a virtual merchandise “shelf” of your products which appear directly below your videos on YouTube. For influencers, this opens up a new way for them to profit off their popularity. There are no content restrictions here, either, so anyone with a popular YouTube channel can use it and start earning money over and above what YouTube pays out for ads and such. The plugin also includes something called a “Merch Alert” for use during livestreams. The Alert is a kind of social proof tool, alerting viewers to purchases of your merchandise in real time. Savvy livestream hosts can create limited time or quantity promotions which, along with alerts showing, can create FOMO among your viewers and drive sales. You can even pin your products to the top of the chat in your YouTube livestream to make it easier for fans to buy.
  
• Instagram Checkout —When Instagram granted access to its new checkout feature in 2019, they only allowed a couple dozen global brands to participate. Teespring was one of them. Be aware, though, that not every Teespring store is eligible for this feature as it’s all very exclusive. Requests are taken on a case-by-case basis because—and you’re forgiven if you didn’t know this—Instagram hasstandards.
  
• Google Shopping —Like the Instagram integration, access to this one is on a case by basis. If you are among the lucky chosen few, Teespring makes promoting your business through Google streamlined and easy. They handle your product feeds (just add a product to your storefront, and it’s automatically added with Google). They also manage your Merchant Center account, keeping it synced up with your Adwords account.
  
• Twitch Merch Store —The Twitch extension takes things further by integrating the entire shopping experience directly within your livestream. Any of your designs can be offered here, but you can also create and sell subscriber-only merchandise sold exclusively through your streams.
  Streamlabs —Buyers can create custom merch alerts when they purchase during a livestream. This means that instead of a canned “Username刚刚购买了一条衬衫的消息，客户可以写自己的警报以在流中出现在屏幕上。Teespring声称这已被证明可以将销售额提高30％。同样请记住，该流磁带本身就是一种与其他服务集成的产品，因此您的客户可以在YouTube和Twitch以及与流磁带集成的任何其他渠道上执行此操作。
  Discord —不和谐集成背后同样的想法：用户可以将自定义商品警报推向渠道你的choosing. The message is written by the buyer and a link is included to the product they just bought. This opens up social proofing to a wider, always-on community.
  

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Conclusion

In its nearly 10 year history, Teespring has certainly been through its ups and downs. It’s very much on the upswing right now, and it’s because they’ve made a lot of smart decisions around growing their core print-on-demand service. For people looking to sell their own merchandise there isn’t a more risk free way to do so than with Teespring or similar services. Among those services, however, there may be no more effective service to use than this one.

WIth marketing tools built in, automated third party marketplace listings and sales, and an analytics engine that integrates with Google Analytics, aspiring apparel moguls aren’t just given a free way to start a business, they’re given free tools to grow it.

他们还承认th有价值的细分市场at would benefit from their service—influencers and creators—by integrating with social channels. Now, these digital celebrities don’t have to wait to reach certain thresholds to monetise their YouTube channel, or rely on potential collaborations with brands to earn money. They can set up shop in minutes, and sell their products across all the platforms they’re known on.

Teespring is definitely having one of its Up moments, and there’s no reason to believe there are declines in the future. They’re doing all the right things in all the best ways.