Print on Demand with Redbubble

One of the most popular side hustles is to engage in Print on Demand. If you have some design aesthetics and perhaps a funny liner or two, selling tshirts and other merchandise could be a good way to earn a side income. Today, I’m going to explore one such platform – Redbubble. I’m also going to show you how easy it is, to upload print designs for tshirts (and other merchandise) and start a Print on Demand side hustle with Redbubble.

Why Redbubble, you ask? There are a number of other POD platforms out there, such as Printful, Teespring etc, and I will get to those in later posts. But in essence, I’m using Redbubble because not only are they a print and fulfillment platform, they also have a customer facing storefront where people can browse and purchase directly. I don’t need to have a separate storefront for that.

If I use Printful, I’ll have to create my own storefront domain, and import from there. Still, printful is super useful if you’ve decided to create your own merchandise brand, own your own domain and promote your brand exclusively. I will go through a shopify + printful combo in the future.

But for now, back to Redbubble. What will you need? You will need a Redbubble account, a Canva account (for producing prints) and some ideas.

Create an account on Redbubble

This should be easy enough. Go to redbubble.com, click on sign up, put in your username, email and password. Boom.

Create an account on Canva or Picmonkey

Now, open up a new tab, and create an account on Canva. If you already have a preferred graphic editor, feel free to use that instead.

I find canva extremely user friendly and would recommend using canva if you don’t have any alternatives. I’m currently on the 30-day premium free trial as the free version does not have the ability to export transparent PNG files.

Another alternative that is popular online is Picmonkey. Picmonkey’s basic tier starts from $5.99 CAD per month, while Canva for work starts at $12.95 per user per month. You can test out Picmonkey on a 7 day free trial.

I would suggest using the free trials to test them out and choose the one you’re comfortable working with.

Coming up with some ideas

Designs that you come up with and upload to Redbubble can be printed on various merchandise. These include apparel, cushion covers, mugs, phone casings, notebooks, totebags etc.

Keep this in mind as you start designing and also remember to design with a transparent background in mind, as these items can be printed in various colours.

Here are the dimensions and formats you should follow for uploading your work to Redbubble. For me, I stuck with a 2400×3200 dimension as my starting point was designing for apparel.

Think about your niche and how you might design around that. I decided to try something that’s been a saying of sorts for a while that has to do with my name.

Remember to save your designs as a transparent PNG file.

Add your design to Redbubble

Once you’ve had a thought and come up with some designs, it’s time to

Proceed to login and complete your profile for the registration. Now, on the top right of the page, you should see your profile icon. When you hover over it, you will see a list of options in the dropdown. Select ‘Add new work’.

Find your PNG designs, and upload to all work. Once you’ve done that, you will be able to see product previews and decide whether to include those in your merchandise by toggling the enable/disable options. You can also click into each one individually to adjust the file to suit that particular product.