Wix and Printful | How To Create Product Designs For Your Print-On-Demand Store | Video Lesson #4

Has product designer display ever impacted whether you bought a product in an online store? If you're anything like me, display in design, have a big push on whether I purchase a product or not.

In fact, I was once working with a client, his name was Tom, and he came to me after we built out his online store and he said, “Michael, I'm struggling getting people to buy products on my site. Why is that my traffic is high?” And I said, “Okay, Tom, let's, let's take a look.” And I went through and I was like, “Tom, can I be honest with you?” And he said, “Yeah, Michael, what's going on? Is it anything bad?” I was like, “No Tom, what it comes down to is, I said, you've got solid products. I've seen your products before. But the problem is is the designs aren't top-notch and you're not really displaying them too well on your site. They don't look visually appealing.” And he's like, “Oh, okay, okay, so, so what does, what does that mean?” And I said, “Well, well Tom, have you ever gone to an online store? And second guessed your purchase decision if you found out that the product image didn't really look all that great or the design itself was blocked?”, he said, “Yeah, I mean I have” And I said, “Okay, in addition to that, did that website lose a little bit of credibility and trust in your mind?” And he said, “Yes it did”.

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And that's because you know a professional online store takes the time to iron out those small details that will make a difference in your purchase decision. So Tom made the changes and started seeing sales go up. If you'd like to be like Tom and you'd like to learn Design101 join me in today's video as my goal by the end of this video is that you have all the tools and resources needed to create winning product designs and winning product displays.

You're ready and anxious to dive into the content. But do me a favor, pull up a coffee so you have a coffee, get the design creative spirits flowing and two hit that subscribe button in the bottom right of this video and turn those bell notifications on so you never miss any videos in this series along with all of my Wix Training Academy content, and you'll plug into 31,000 plus like-minded entrepreneurs.

All right, let's jump in.

How To Create Product Designs For Your Print-On-Demand Store

The year is 2020 just like my vision, so I'm here protecting them with these blue light glasses. So don't mind me, I look like Mr. Peabody. I know, but what you do want to mind is this Wix and Printful series gladly sponsored by Printful and today we're jumping into Design101 - Create winning designs for your products. And we've got one objective by the end of this video. And my goal is to provide you the tools and resources to create winning product designs. We've got a two prong approach to that.

Number one, the tools overview. We're going to discuss different tools and resources available to you to create these winning designs. And then two, we're going to discuss principles in house tools, some of their in house services design services to help you create those winning designs.

First and foremost if you're anything like I was when I was first starting my print-on-demand t-shirt shop for fitness apparel, I had absolutely no idea where to even start with product designs. You know, "What design am I going to put on the t-shirt? What's going to be catchy, what's going to get people to buy, what does that look like?" And I decided to follow my own bolded blue advice like on the screen here, which was seeking inspiration may be your golden ticket.

What I mean by that is look at other players in your niche and figure out what they're doing, what's working for them, what's effective. And then you never want to copy someone's designs outright by any means, but you can draw inspiration from some of the aesthetics that are going on with some of their designs and maybe even some of the sayings what the whole concept is around to be able to create your own winning design.

And I've got three tips for you when coming up with your design. First you need to understand your niche thoroughly. And this kind of goes back to the point I just mentioned. So you need to be aware of not only the competitors and what they're doing in your niche, but you also need to be aware of what your market enjoys, right? What does your market want to buy? Is it something that motivates them in the case of fitness apparel or entrepreneurial apparel? Is it something that they just think is really, really cool and they'd like to support that brand? What does that look like? So understand your niche.

Two seek inspiration. There's various forms of inspiration that we just discussed. These can come in the form of typography, current patterns, patterns that are going on, collage designed, hand drawn designs, et cetera. Go out there and look at what's going on with design in your particular niche. So you can start to draw from that.

And then third and finally, take advantage of online resources. You know, use tools like Canva to practice your own designs. If you want to build out your own designs or use tools like product hunt to figure out which products are winning. And if you can, you know, follow a pattern to see if there's designed with those products that maybe you can follow. Use different online tools. There's a myriad of them out there and that's what Google has allowed up for us.

I'd like to end this slide with a quote, which is "Product design and aesthetic plays a fairly important role in the success of sales for your products." Just like Tom, how we adjusted the design and he changed it up to make it more visually appealing in the display, appealing increased to sales. So product design and display plays a huge role in whether your product will sell or flop. So that's how to start coming up with designs.

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Printing Techniques

Now that you know how to start coming up with your designs, let's talk about a few different printing techniques that are available. We've got screen printing, we've got direct to garment, we've got sublimation and we've got embroidery. So just a few examples. Sublimation is like all over printing.

So if you've ever seen shirts that just have like literally printing all over, maybe it's like a weird, you know, a kind of pyramid looking shirt or geometric shapes that's all over the shirt, front, back sleeves, everything. That would be an example of sublimation embroidery. That's where you've got maybe like a little crest on your chest and it's embroidered in. So it's actually raised a little bit off of the shirt. It's got a bit of a different material or fiber used for the actual design piece that's embroidered on.

You've got screen printing where it's actually just printed straight onto the shirt from the computers straight from the design. And these are a few different printing techniques that are available to you using Printful. All four of these can be utilized using Printful products and it's very cool. And you can see the example picture here. This is pulled straight from Printful. These are all different products and you can see they've got some different printing techniques going on here from the hat to the shirt to the little canvas. So those are the printing techniques available to you.

So now you've got to design, you know, some printing techniques. And really when it comes down to printing techniques, it ultimately is your choice. It doesn't really matter. You know, what you decide to go with. It's whatever you feel is going to fit best with your market, with your niche. But more importantly, that covers the printing. But we need to talk about design.

Sourcing a Designer

So first and foremost, you need to determine off of the bat, are you going to design your own products? You know, are you going to be the one to create the different designs that go on shirts or hats? Or are you going to source a designer? How to determine that? So you need to determine where your best use of time is.

I've spoken with many t-shirt shop owners with many apparel shop owners and it's really a big split. Some of the owners feel that their best use of their time and where they feel they're the most productive to the company is when they are designing, when they're the ones creating the designs, creating those winning selling designs. And then the other part of them is like, “No, my best use of time is marketing. Doing the business, managing a website, doing the, you know, the business entrepreneurial side of it.”

And so you have to determine where you believe your best use of time. If it's in your own design, then we're going to talk about some techniques on how to go about that. But if you'd like to source a designer and actually utilize an outsource designer for your projects, here's a few words of advice I would look for.

So number one, you're going to want to view the previous work from that particular designer you're looking at. You want to see what they've done previously. Does it match this style and aesthetic you're going for, for your brand? And is it quality work? Number two, you want to test their communication skills before you commit to moving forward with a designer. Find some ways to communicate with them in different mediums. Email, you know, phone call over a platform if you're using a particular platform and see if they respond to you. And if they're thorough in their communication rather than just diving in and then figuring out that this designer is just going to ghost you on all communication and revisions aren't going to get done, et cetera, et cetera.

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Number two, can they hit deadlines? Maybe talk to some of the clients that they've previously worked with and say, “Hey, I was thinking about, you know, utilizing XYZ for this design project. It appears they did some work for you. Did they hit their deadlines on time?” There's nothing wrong with reaching out to someone and asking if a previous outsource designer hit their deadlines. It's something you need to know and that kind of follows suit with the next one, which is are they trustworthy? Can you trust them? And if you reach out to previous clients that they did work before, you can probably quickly find out whether or not the designer you're considering pursuing is worth their salt in this. Someone you can trust and will hit deadlines, have great communication skills, and provide some really winning designs for you.

And then after you've determined those things, what you have to determine is how you'd like to bring this designer on. Do you want to bring the designer on project to project, which means they'll create a project or a design for a particular project that you post out there or maybe a collection that would be considered one project. Do you want to bring them on a retainer, monthly basis, which means that this designer is being paid every month to create as many designs or however you work out a contract with the designer. Maybe it's you have up to X amount of designs and this is their monthly retainer at that price. Or maybe you can use a service like design pickle and pay $499 a month and have unlimited graphic designs for you. So you have to explore options like that.

And then the last option you have is after you've reviewed it and you're growing as a company and you're expanding, does it just make more sense both cost-wise and timewise to bring that designer on full time and they're just a salary designer or an hourly designer and they work your eight hours a day or nine hours a day and do all design for you. Then fulfill all of your design requests at some point. That's going to make a lot of sense. As you continue to grow and scale, you're going to want your own in house team of design rather than having to outsource it, but in the beginning phases you might want to go project to project or find a designer that you can work on a retainer basis. These are all things to take into consideration when sourcing a designer.

Choosing a Design Service

Once you've sourced your designer or maybe you're choosing to go at it yourself, you have to choose a design service. So how are you actually going to find the designer or how are you actually going to fulfill your own designs? There's a few services that I'd like to draw your attention to. I'm going to speak about the two Printful ones in just a moment, but to begin, if you're brand new and you want some great designs that are relatively affordable, going to a platform like Fiverr and seeing someone and finding someone that offers designs for whatever type of product you're looking to build might not be a bad idea.

Like I said, you can usually get pretty good designs at an affordable rate in a timely manner so Fiverr is never a bad option. If you want someone that might be a little bit more honed in their craft and a bit more of a professional's platform, Upwork is a great place to go. They've got a variety of different designers that you can post a project out to and those designers can submit their proposals to you as far as timelines, costs, and then you can learn more about the previous work they've done and see the resumes and communicate with them all on that platform as well.

Now if you'd like to take the full time designer out and you're already ready to make the move into bringing on an in-house design person or an in house design team tools like ZipRecruiter and Indeed our job posting sites, ZipRecruiter is especially incredible because you can put it on there and it'll go grab all potential applicants that really fit the job description and job mold that you may be looking for and pull them into one platform and you can review them on ZipRecruiter.

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The same thing happens on Indeed except Indeed is its own platform, its own job board and so you can manage all of your applicants that apply from indeed on your indeed dashboard. And these are all different ideas for choosing a design service. Does it matter which one you go with? No, it really ultimately does not. It just depends on what your needs are according to project basis, retainer basis or full time. Because that will determine what platform you use.

If you'd like to go at it yourself, you can use something like the Printful mockup generator. Okay. And I'm going to show you that in just a second. And if you decide, you know what I'm going with Printful, I want to use Printful for everything from printing my products to fulfilling my products, to packaging my products, to shipping my products. If that's your case and you're like, you know what, I want to try print design services. They've got a whole creative team that will actually design professional product designs for you as well. There is a fee associated with that, but this is an option you can use. So that way you keep everything just in one easy platform on Printful makes your life a little bit easier. And it sure does turn out to be some extremely quality work.

Printful's Mockup and Print File Generator

So what I'd like to do is kind of show you a little preview of principles, design services, and they're a mockup generator. So if we draw our attention over here, this is principles of mockup generator. So I showed you this a little bit in yesterday's video with Products101 but you can actually mockup and print files right here on Printful. You can see they give you options. So if we click on men's clothing and we're designing a t-shirt and we just go ahead and pick a t-shirt and then just like we did yesterday, just go to the tri blend.

If we click on this, what we'll see happen is we'll see the ability to come down here and use Printful’s designed mockup generator. So we can either upload our own design that we created. And if you're creating your own designs, you know, you could use tools like Canva, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom to edit pictures, stuff like that. And then you can upload your own photos and move them here on the actual mockup generator. Or you can use some of Printful’s options such as adding text. And you can choose text right here. We'll just see, say a Wix Nation, right? And then you can see, you can choose the text color, you can choose the text font, you can move it around. You can choose the spacing between letters, the text size, you can rotate the font, you can move it on here.

So you've got a lot of cool tools to actually manipulate here on principles, mockup generator, but maybe text isn't your style. So if we go back, you can go grab clip art. So Printful has got a collection of clip art that you can actually choose from as well, from different shapes and symbols to holiday shapes, to line drawings to animals, emotions, USA gift ideas, halloween, different holidays. They've got a whole bunch of icons to pull from as well, which is pretty cool.

So the Printful mockup generator is another useful tool that you can utilize. However, if you decide, “I don't want to design stuff myself, I want to use a service, but I don't want to use any of the services you mentioned before. I'd rather use Printful for everything.” Also offers their graphic design services and they have these beautiful services. And if you scroll down here, we can learn a little bit more about it from logo design to getting your perfect logo, to creating awesome print files for your shirts, tote bags, mugs, whatever that may be. They can adjust your existing print files.

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So if you started your own, but you're like, “Hmm, it's just doesn't have that winning feel to it.” Printful can edit those and adjust those. And they've also got just graphic design services, so branding packages, a home goods digital products or digital and social designs to post on your social media. And then they've got some really cool examples of some of the work they've done in the past. And you can see this is really quality stuff here. I mean, they've got some solid solid product designs and they've got a whole suite of awesome testimonials and they prepare it all in advance and you'll get obviously rough drafts to see what they look like.

You'll get to high resolution pictures, color swatches, so you'll be able to be communicated with throughout the entire process and be able to tweak when needed. And all you have to do is fill out this design request form on Printful and I will throw a link to their design services in the description below and then you'll just have to submit your request and Printful will shoot back with a quote depending on what type of design service you're looking for. Obviously what that quote to you is will be different depending on what you're looking for. If you're looking for a whole branding package or just a logo, those are two completely different things with two completely different price tags. But what I can tell you is, Printful does an amazing job and the value is certainly there.

Conclusion

There you have it. You are now equipped with the tools and resources to be able to come up with product designs either go out at yourself, source a designer, and then utilize a service to either find those designers or utilize external services to fulfill that design and create winning product designs and displays so people will purchase on your print on the store. Because at the end of the day you're in this video series to learn how to create this store. So that way you can make more money and create more freedom for yourself. And I'm here to support that.

Start selling with Printful today:

https://www.printful.com/a/1622224:b93a79cea039086dcf623cfc33342fa6

So if this video helped you out, drop a like down below, comment if you've got any questions, let me know what you liked about this particular video, and then hit that subscribe button in the bottom right of this video and turn those bell notifications on so you don't miss a single upload here on Wix Training Academy. And you'll plug into 31,000 plus like-minded entrepreneurs.

Thank you guys for watching, I'll catch you on tomorrow.