7 Success Tips for Marketplace Designers

You keep asking us ‘What can I do to improve my chances of selling on the Marketplace?’ First up, the good news – the odds are in your favour! More than 2.4 million customers are roaming Spreadshirt’s international marketplaces every month, offering you great exposure to a huge audience. You can apply to become our featured artist of the month in Spreadshirt Select, and – if the appeal is strong enough – we’ll feed your designs to external marketplaces as well. Check out these 7 essential tips to sell well.

1. Get your concept right

Creating an appeal for a certain type of target group means offering designs that cater 100% to their needs. Of course, it’s a great advantage if you’re part of a particular kind of group yourself to get your sales off to a good start. Can’t find your niche? Some of our classic topics are always worth a consideration. Try out a few different styles and ideas to see what works well for you, and then elaborate on what makes your ideas and style unique.

2. Choose your tools

You’re spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing software for creating designs. Here’s a quick overview of the most popular graphics tools. Don’t get put off by the high prices of some of the software – older versions may be available for free. And some are indeed free to download and use:

Complex image processing software to e.g. knock out the background of a photo is easily done with Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo or Gimp.

Create vector graphic files like illustrations, logos or symbols with Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer or Inkscape. All vector-based programs support scalable vector graphics (SVG).

Once you get used to the software, you can vectorise your designs in next to no time. What’s more, you can use e.g. effect filters to pimp your designs and create stand-out pixel graphics.

Need help with creating or editing your designs? Our Graphics Service will be glad to assist.

3. Tag for success

As soon as you’ve created a design, you can easily upload it in the Partner Area.
You should consider the name and description of your design carefully, and also add tags that describe your design well to help customers find it when they do searches.

Keyword tags:

Talking about keywords! If your keyword tags match the search terms that customers enter, your design will pop up on the search result page. That’s why it’s super important to find pertinent tags that really hit the gist of your design. Use keyword tools like Google AdWords or Keyword Planner, kwfinder and Hypersuggest.

Products:

Publish your designs on as many fitting products as possible – the more products you offer, the more choice you offer customers to print your design on.

4. Use the Showroom to show yourself at your best

As soon as you‘ve published a series of designs on the Marketplace, you should brush up your Showroom for more visibility to show off your work. You can add a header image, profile picture, short intro about yourself and your work, and link up to your network channels.
To find out how you do this nicely, read this.

5. Build your community

Share your Showroom and designs on your social media channels.
Build your community, and keep your followers posted. Facebook and Instagram are easily fed with your new designs in order to push your sales. Use your social media activity for Marketplace promotions that you’ll find in the promotion calendar.

6. Create your own marketing material

With Canva and Placeit, you can easily create social media posts to run your promos. Our Placeit cooperation makes it easy to integrate your designs, images and logos with professional model images. This way, you can create perfect marketing material in a matter of clicks.

Also, our collaboration with Moo.com offers you a chance to create top-notch promo material at very reasonable rates.

7. Be up to speed and proactive

• Keep checking the Blog and subscribe to our Partner newsletter.
• Take part in design contests.
• To increase your reach, publish your designs on our North American platform as well.
• Download our Partner App and keep an eye on your sales at all times! You’ll get valuable info to improve your sales as well.

We hope our marketing tips will give your sales a boost! Please get back to us with any kind of questions, we’ll be glad to help!