🧢Guide: Start a merch side business for less than $20
Get your side business off the ground for less than $20
Each week I send a detailed guide on how to start a side business to supplement your income during COVID-19.
We all have that one business idea that we’ve been waiting to start.
Maybe it’s selling your famous chocolate chip cookies, or your home-sewn multicolour scrunchies... whatever the idea, something’s been holding you back from taking the next step. I want to change that.
I created One Week Startup to show you how easy it is to take that great idea of yours and start testing it in one week or less.
During COVID-19, I want to get these guides out to anyone whose income has been affected by the crisis so I have one favour to ask, please share with a friend or subscribe yourself!
By subscribing, you’ll get first access to my weekly guides and bonus content on how to build your one-week startup into a permanent side business.
Find all my guides at: oneweekstartup.substack.com
I want to help as many entrepreneurs as possible during the crisis.
If you are building a business and need assistance, please reach out to me at: brett@leafforward.org
In this week’s guide, you'll learn…
🙇♂️How to come up with a concept for your line of merch
🖨Getting set-up with a print-on-demand and dropship vendor
💳Building a super simple e-commerce flow
🔜Next steps once you've validated the idea
What I’m listening to in quarantine…
problem
Did you know that only 7.4% of all retail transactions were completed online in 2019? COVID-19 has been a wakeup call for small businesses and legacy retailers who didn’t prioritize e-commerce. With brick and mortar stores indefinitely closed, we’re seeing customers shift en masse to buying more products online.
Look no further than Amazon, they’re hiring over 75,000 more employees to help them manage the explosion in order volume.
And don’t expect this to be a temporary bump. Similar to other behavioural changes due to COVID-19, the shift to online shopping is likely to be permanent. Brick and mortar retail will not reopen anytime soon, at least not as we know them, and the convenience of online shopping in 2020 is too sticky for many customers to return to the old model.
Retailers need to get online, like yesterday. I’ve seen a number of shops in my neighbourood needlessly close without an online presence. This is a tragedy and many will go out of business because they didn’t take the initiative to open a Shopify store.
That being said, the significant increase in e-commerce interest unlocks new customer segments never before accessible to direct-to-consumer brands. Now is a great time to start an e-commerce business, any e-commerce business. And with tools like Shopify and Printful, it’s easier than ever to get started.
solution
Tap into this spike in new e-commerce customers by starting your own merch business. Get creative and figure out your niche. Experiment with different types of merchandise, this could be t-shirts, masks, hoodies, notebooks, tote bags – really anything.
Use existing tools to bring ideas to market affordably and quickly to test if there’s demand. You may think of something that sounds silly at the beginning but ends up becoming a huge hit. You’ll never know unless you try.
case study: my friend Dan started making “Make the Leafs Great Again” hats right after the election of President Trump. The hats went viral among Toronto Maple Leafs fans. He ended up building a real, profitable business! This could be you.
💼what business are we building?
I’m going to show you how to quickly get a merchandise business off the ground in less than a week. I’ll take you from concept development to production to getting your first sale, and show you why, if you can find your niche, e-commerce businesses can be great sources of passive income.
In my case, I’m going to create a line of ‘thank you for staying home’ products. Gifts that employers, friends and family can send to thank others for staying home during COVID-19.
💸why I like this business
The best thing about merch businesses are how affordable and fast they are to get started. You can get one off the ground with minimal cost and time commitment to quickly test if your concept has any viability. This is a great business for first-time entrepreneurs.
capital light: using print-on-demand services makes starting merch businesses cheap and easy. Per this playbook, you should be able to launch your business for under $20 investment! This is (by far) the most accessible business idea I’ve written about in One Week Startup.
quick to start: not only are they cheap, as you’ll see in this guide, merch businesses are also the fastest to start. Since manufacturing your product is on-demand and there’s no need to allocate lead time, you can design the product, launch the website and start selling your product within a day.
low maintenance: once you get the site up, the only ongoing work you need to do is sales and marketing. Production of your products and fulfilment is all outsourced, in many cases to one vendor. This makes ongoing management very light weight.
versatile: the options for your merchandise business are endless! You can pick whatever category/niche and products that fit best for your community. Be creative!
easy to find your customers: if you’re making merchandise for a specific community or niche, you know exactly who your customers are and where they are. Since you already know what channels will be the best to sell through, you should be able to learn really quickly if you’re on to something or not. And since you don’t need to put down any upfront capital, it’s as low risk as you can get.
📈goal
I want to get the store up and running and sell 10 items within a week
resources
What I built
Stay Home Squad
Tools
Carrd
– highly recommended simple website builder
Gumroad
– lightweight e-commerce transaction tool
Printful
– print-on-demand and dropshipping service
Documents
📊
Workbook – Tasks
(click duplicate in the top right to use yourself)
💸
Reflection Document
– What to consider about after you're done your one week test
day 1: product development
category brainstorm
You’ve decided that you want to do this – great! What’s the first step? Well, you need to figure out 1. What your category is? and 2. What your products are going to be?
For the category, start by writing out a list of your passions. Do you like politics? Is there a show or band you love? Are you outdoors obsessed? I recommend making merchandise related to a topic that you appreciate because it’ll be a lot easier for you to come up with compelling concepts that other fans, like you, will want to purchase.
Alternatively, you can go broad, which is what I’m doing. I’m creating a brand called Stay Home Squad. That’s going to sell gifts for anyone who wants to thank their friend, family or colleague for staying home during COVID-19.
product brainstorm
Once you’ve figured out your category, you can start to think more about what you’re actually going to sell. To start, take a look at the printing and fulfilment service we’re going to use called Printful. They offer printing on a number of different products, so go through the inventory and pick the ones that make the most sense.
When you finalize the types of products you’re going to sell, you can start to think through design.
design
This is the trickiest part of this whole business, unfortunately it’s also the most important. You’ve got your category and decided on some product types, but what are you going to put on them??
There’s no real easy way to do this. I have some very basic design skills, so I took a look at the product dimensions on Printful and created my own product.
However, if you don’t have any design skills, you do have options:
1. Use a service like 99Designs, Dribbble, or Fiverr to find a contract designer who can work with you on concepts (expensive)
2. Search for an illustrator, either locally or remote, who can draw bespoke content for your new brand (expensive)
3. Play around with Canva to see if you can come up with something yourself (affordable)
I played around in Sketch, my preferred design software, and came up with this:
naming
The last thing you have to do is come up with a name. By now, you should have a pretty good idea of what is. I’m going to call mine the Stay Home Squad.
day 2: setting up your online platform
Finalizing Product
Now you need to get those designs on your products. Create a Printful account and select your products. On the platform, you’ll be able to apply your designs and see what the finished product will look like.
I’m going to go with stickers to begin with. Here’s what the design looks like after mocking it up on Printful:
Setting up your e-commerce
When you’re done mocking up products on Printful, you can create your ecommerce store. The first thing you need to figure out is your payment integration.
My goal is to get this shop up as quickly as possible so I only want the essentials. In a world where I have more time, I’d create a beautiful Shopify page with our story, details about the designer, etc. But instead, I’m going to create a quick landing page using a new service I discovered called Carrd. Carrd is the easiest website tool I’ve ever used and it’s super affordable with only an annual fee.
I created my Carrd account and used this template:
I wrote some light copy, customized it for my needs and ended up with this:
Then, I had to figure out payments. For that, I used my Gumroad account. Gumroad is an easy to use marketplace service that integrate with Printful.
In Gumroad, you’ll have to manually create all your products. I used the product creation tool to create a ‘sticker’ product > added a variant for each size (3x3, 4x4, 5.5x5.5). If you go to your Printful dashboard, you’ll see a section called Stores. You can add a store from an external source, pick Gumroad. This will import all your products and you can select the proper Printful template for you product. Now, every order made through Gumroad will automatically trigger a Printful order.
This is a good tutorial on integrating Gumroad and Printful.
I added my payment info to Printful and deposit info to Gumroad, then I added the Gumroad link to my Carrd page, and I was ready to sell!
To summarize, here are the steps to get setup:
Create a Carrd landing page
Open a Gumroad store
Create a Printful account and take note of the products you want to sell
Mock those products up on Printful – eg. 4x4 sticker
Create a Gumroad store with your product and the variations (ex. t-shirt sizes)
Integrate your Gumroad store with Printful
Add button to your Carrd page that directs to your Gumroad
Add payment info to each of the platforms
BTW my stickers are for sale so please do consider buying one! All proceeds goes to supporting Ontario health care workers: https://stayhomesquad.carrd.co/
Domains and other extras
I could’ve made this more sleek if I wanted to do, but really my main goal is to get to market as quick as possible. If you do want to put in the extra time and money, Carrd is compatible with custom domains at the higher pricing tiers. You could also integrate Gumroad directly into your Carrd page with a on-site popup rather than a redirect to their site but it’s more expensive and time consuming.
Focus on going live and work on the extras after a few sales.
day 3: sales and marketing
Selling merch products is fairly straightforward. You’ve created a product for a specific kind of person. Think through where they might be online and sell there. Through this, you’ll learn quickly if you have the right concept or need to revisit the drawing board. Even if nobody buys your product, because you’re using print-on-demand services, there’s no upfront cost to you – this is as low risk as it gets.
Facebook Groups/Subreddits
If you designed your product for a certain community or niche, your best bet is to start where that group convenes. I’ve found Facebook groups to be a particularly effective channel.
Let’s say you made a line of merchandise geared towards fans of the 2000s hit sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica. To sell to other fans, I’d start by posting your merchandise on Facebook groups and subreddits for the show. Post to as many as you can.
This is a quick way to discover if there’s demand for their product. If your targeted community doesn’t purchase, there’s probably not much there.
Friends and Family
As always you can sell to your friends and family but, in this case, the real test is the community. If you can get the community onboard, you’ll have a great and sustainable business.
day 4: reflection
Congratulations on getting this far! Whether this is your first or fifth business, it’s never easy getting something off the ground. I’m pumped that you’re here.
Now, it’s time to reflect on whether you have a real business. If you hit your goal or made traction on sales, you’re probably in a good place.
If not, that’s OK! So what, your first concept didn’t hit. I’m sure you’ve got other ideas. Come up with different creative and try again. You know the drill.
As always, here’s a doc that you can refer to for reflection.
next steps
Did you hit big? Is your product a success? Great! Build a brand around it. Here’s what I would do:
1. Create your social channels
2. Craft copy for your website
3. Design social content
4. Develop a Shopify store
5. Add new products and look for a vendor who might be able to give you better pricing
6. Promote through the same channels you already had success with