> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.oliphonic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Print-On-Demand Tees: My first side hustle experiment
- URL: https://www.oliphonic.com/print-on-demand-tees-my-first-side-hustle-experiment/
- Published: 2026-09-11T09:03:20.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-11T09:05:32.000Z
- Author: Oliphonic

Passive income. Surely the nirvana of wealth generation - sit back & watch the money flow in! However unless you're the heir to a 16th-century English Baron & Baroness and have enough sovereign funds in the bank such that earnt interest is able to actually pay for more than one coffee a month, then chances are you don't have any.

**BUT ALL IS NOT LOST.** Perhaps passive income could be real? Either way, this led me to my first side-hustle (can't stand the word...) experiment - **print-on-demand merch!**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9c/fa/9cfabe9c-bcc0-471f-a6fa-271bee166fa4/content/images/2026/09/ChatGPT-Image-Sep-11--2026--09_28_26-AM.png)

I mean, it's gotta work right? ............****RIGHT?**

OK, let's get down to business. I wanted to operate on a zero-cost basis - I will expend precisely £0 on this side-hustle - the only thing it will consume from me is my time (which to be fair, took slightly longer than I'd hoped).

How did I do it:

1) **Think of a design** \- the unfortunate reality here is if you think of it, it will already exist. Perhaps a corollary to Rule 34 of the internet (and less explicit...), but trust me - if you have a clever design idea, *IT WILL ALREADY EXIST AND BE BEING SOLD ALREADY BY SOMEONE ELSE*. Don't let that stop you though. Back your ideas, create a bold variation and push forward to Step 2.

2) **Get GenAI to help you make it.** OK, well if you're an actual artist then perhaps not, but for those who are as artistically limited as I am, AI is your friend here. Some clever prompting can create you what you need - indeed my hack here was subscribing to the free trial of Midjourney to create images, then cancelling for a refund (see, no £ spent...).

3) **Make sure it's high-res**. Get a free trial of Adobe Illustrator - port the image in / vectorise it / scale it up and get it to a decent 6000x6000 pixels (it's typically what the POD sites demand).

4) **Create your store on POD websites** \- redbubble, zazzle, threadless, teepublic - put your designs on as many stores as you can bother to really. I see this as a 'quick-win' dimension to the problem - just multiply your designs across as many POD websites as possible to hit as much traffic as possible.

5) **??????? PROFIT!** \- well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. But the feeling of pushing your site & designs live is honestly quite exhilirating. Like you've joined an exclusive club of (fake) artists and have your merch 'out there' - now to sit back and watch the money roll in.

The key bit here is visibility / SEO. You can tweak around with tags... descriptions... and I did get chatGPT to help me optimise them for best SEO. But the cold hard reality is searching for 'new york cityscape t-shirt' (e.g. my midjourney assisted design below) on any POD website will yield 10,000+ results and your place in that queue will have 5 digits at least.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9c/fa/9cfabe9c-bcc0-471f-a6fa-271bee166fa4/content/images/2026/09/NewYork.png)

Concrete jungle where dreams are made of (one of "my" first designs...)

My recommendation is to get to at least 15-20 designs, as novel as you can make them. Some POD sites allow you to see page views, which can be quite helpful for subsequently refining the types of designs you make and backing "what sticks" (e.g. I noticed my musical-themed designs started actually generating some double-digit page views).

So what was the result? Quite astonishingly, only 3 days after launching my first sites across 3 POD websites, **I made my first sale.** After clearing up the cereal I'd accidentally snorted after seeing the email ding up on my phone, I was even more astonished when it wasn't just one t-shirt - it was **EIGHT** of the same t-shirt. 

Which design you ask? See below. 8 t-shirts for a hen-party taking place in Australia of all places. Everybody wins - a hen-party gets a completely ridiculous t-shirt for them all to wear, and I get a successful side-hustle experiment AND my money.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9c/fa/9cfabe9c-bcc0-471f-a6fa-271bee166fa4/content/images/2026/09/Hen.png)

**Or do I?** Well it turns out I don't actually. For an **£83.44** sale, I received **£7.59** in artist margin. That is below the minimum **£10 threshold** required to be able to extract any money from your account.

Sad times. *But all is not lost* \- the point here is the designs persist and so long as the POD sites keep living and the internet keeps ticking, perhaps someone will click that elusive 'buy button' on one of my designs. 

Onwards & upwards?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/9c/fa/9cfabe9c-bcc0-471f-a6fa-271bee166fa4/content/images/2026/09/ChatGPT-Image-Sep-11--2026--10_01_23-AM.png)