Now you can turn out hundreds of unique personal designs on many dozens of products from water bottles to designer dresses, without spending a penny on prototypes.
I’ll just take one example from my redbubble account.
this is one textile design on many products
That’s just one page-ful of surprises, but I have hundreds more, just on redbubble, and hundreds more on cafe press, zazzle and paintalloverme.
Look, ordinarily, if you wanted to get into the designer business, fashion business or small personalized items, you’d have to scrape together the venture capital to do it, and you’d be up against solid losses.
This way, you have no losses. You don’t make what doesn’t sell. What sells, you don’t even have to make — they make it for you, and ship it and bill it, if you want to go that route but then, of course, your customer knows your source.
How you do this is you upload your designs and adjust how the design falls on the product, then price it and let it go out on the design floor.
Of course, you don’t really want folks buying right off of red bubble. You want them to see your garment as a designer item, and hiding the source is part of that mystique you paint as a designer.
In order to protect the secret, you should get the product shipped to yourself, sign it and re-ship it to your customer, without them ever knowing how you produced what you sold them.
Okay, that’s double shipping, but there are some advantages and the cost isn’t that much, if you get how to do this right, how to correctly market your fashion products.
As an example of how to do it right, I offer Lee & Radha’s cosmetic supply hustle — it was truly successful and could have been a front-runner had it been developed further.
You can see some of their full-page ads in Wings Magazine and Galaxy, if you can find copies anywhere — they’re now very scarce.
With my designer method, you can generate thousands of items with as many designs as you like, without spending a penny on prototypes or prototype samples.
Now, if you want to really design some clothing without having a huge factory in your pocket, you’ll want to have the PAOM — print all over me — experience, or should I say, “adventure”?
PAOM allows you some real creative freedom in the design of your products, but it’s a much more serious and expensive proposition, and selling directly from their graphics is going to be an issue, because they don’t encourage wired marketing.
I also use zazzle and cafepress to generate items, and they provide me with a very modest income over the year, but would buzz greatly if the items were marketed off their website, which they are not.
I don’t have the time. I put those things up to show how it’s done, with no other thought in mind — same as the youtube and facebook and instagram and all that stuff — it’s just there to provide inspiration and some stable facts on which you can rely.
One of those facts is that if you want to get this marketing thing together, you have precious little time in which to do it.
A horrifically repressive era is about to erupt, and we’re in range of its effects.
I invite you to visit my eBay selling sites every day to see what I’ve put up there — especially for a dollar, which you’ll find primarily on rareandunusual.
You can put up a wide variety of items — for instance, art prints, rare photo prints, copper jewelry, fashions and so much more.
Try generating a list of things YOU could offer, with your skills and with your attic or storage unit.
What I mean is, a combination of things you make and things you want to get rid of from your junkpiles in the attic, garage, den, closets, storage units, basement or outbuilding.
Notice I didn’t say “outhouse” — having spent several summers working on a farm, I know better.
If you want some instruction and ideas on how to proceed with fashion design, you need to sign up for my workshops this fall and winter, which you can do right now, just by letting me know in the forum or zoom chat that you want to attend.
I can also provide tons of material for YOU to market, without you having to create them, if you’d rather just sell them.
Everyone has potential for designing but the skills have to be developed — they don’t just happen by themselves, and I’m talking about instinctive design here.
I’m quite prepared to sell off entire collections of things for almost nothing, just to get you started in the entrepreneurial trades.
It takes a LOT of photography, organization, filing and storing of things so you can retrieve stuff off the shelf as it sells.
You don’t want to ever sell something on eBay that you don’t have clearly in hand. They’ll bust you right down, if you don’t ship within 72 hours — I’m not kidding.
So far this week, I’ve done a couple thousand dollars, having not sold anything on eBay during the pandemic until just a week ago.
I’ll be able to bring that up to about $50,000 a month, if I can get a little more traction, and for that, I depend on you to not let a single one of my auctions sit at one dollar.
If you bid only to the point where you feel comfortable, that’s okay — it can be at that first dollar, I don’t care how much the thing sells for, I just want to show you how it’s done, and blaze a trail for you to see how to juggle this whole thing rightly.
I hope you’ll ask questions about this at the morning meeting on zoom.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby