How Print-On-Demand Allows Me to be a Stay-at-Home Mom
In 2024, I made almost six figures on Etsy as a stay-at-home mom. I did this while raising a toddler, gestating a baby, and giving birth to said baby in July 2024. Thanks to the fact that my Etsy shop is made up of digital and print-on-demand products, I only worked about 10-20 hours a week.
So yeah, 2024 was a wild year!
(This post contains affiliate links, so I might make a small commission if you click on a link and make a purchase, at no extra cost to you. A girl’s gotta eat.)
This past year has really made me realize why I started all of this in the first place. When I first started selling printables and POD, I didn’t have any kids and was still working as a burned-out freelance writer. I knew that diversifying my income was an important item on my to-do list because the rat race of constantly promoting myself and looking for new clients was not something I wanted to do forever. I wanted to have the actual freedom that people talk about with freelancing and self-employment, and I knew that wouldn’t be possible unless I had at least one source of income that wasn’t as reliant on active work.
A Recap of My Print-On-Demand Journey
My print-on-demand (POD) journey started in 2017. I had quit my job the year prior and was working exclusively as a freelance copywriter for small cannabis businesses. I had been selling on Etsy casually for years, and at this point I had a shop where I sold prints of my photography. It was never enough to make a significant income – definitely just casual side hustle money, but I always wanted to turn it into something bigger.
One day, I decided to scrap the “print” model entirely and list every photo I’d ever sold as a digital download. This way, customers could just buy the file and print it themselves and I didn’t have to worry about going to the post office. It was more of a “set it and forget it” method, which was much more appealing than printing and shipping everything myself.
I was pretty surprised when the sales started picking up way more than they did with actual prints. It inspired me to see what other kinds of printables I could create. The political world was in chaos at the time (when is it not?) so I started making printable wall art designs with inspirational and funny quotes related to politics and feminism.
None of these quotes were difficult or complex designs, they were pretty minimalist and used trendy fonts that were popular on Instagram at the time. It was basically stuff that I’d hang in my own apartment.
This was when things really started to take off. As more buyers found my shop, I started getting messages asking if I could ship them a poster instead. I didn’t want to go back to printing myself since that’s why I started the printable shop in the first place, so I searched for a company that would print and ship the product for me. That’s when I discovered the world of print-on-demand, a process where a company prints the order for you and ships it to your customer with your branding.
I first discovered Printful for selling posters, and soon after, I found Printify. Between these two companies, it felt like a whole world of opportunity sat before me. Not only could I have them print posters on demand for me, but I could also have them print my designs on apparel, coffee mugs, blankets, bags, tapestries… you name it, they could print it
This motivated me to really get to work and spend more time on my shop. I spent every evening coming up with new design ideas, creating them in Canva or PhotoPea, and adding them to new products. Within a month my store contained dozens of new products. I experimented with quite a few different types, but found that since I was falling into the political niche, people really wanted posters, t-shirts, and tote bags.
Eventually, I also added stickers to my inventory. At first I wasn’t sure if people would pay a few dollars to have a sticker mailed to them, but I could not have been more wrong about that. Even if people didn’t buy stickers, they brought in so much traffic that they helped increase my other product sales as well.
By 2020, I was making more money on Etsy than I was with my writing work – partially because I was spending more time on it and taking on fewer clients, but also because I knew how to use search engine optimization and drive organic traffic to my store. Since the pandemic was also happening at this time and I was spending more time at home, I decided to diversify and opened a Shopify store. I knew that if I had this much money coming from my brand, I needed a little more autonomy beyond the Etsy marketplace.
In 2022, I had my first six-figure year due to a few unexpected factors.
Pre-2022, most of my promoting was done through search engine optimization and organic search. I made sure my listings were tailored to reach as many customers as possible organically, which is the most important key to consistent sales. However, I knew I also needed to branch out and actually put some effort into social media.
In 2022 I joined TikTok, posted a few videos, and had a 7-second t-shirt video go viral. This opened up my mind to the world of possibilities that TikTok provided, so I spent a lot of time making ridiculous videos of my products. Some I’d take myself, others I’d make using video mockups on PlaceIt. I was not in any of the videos unless it was of my hand holding a sticker. Some videos barely broke 200 views, but when I’d hit the right spot in the algorithm, the results were massive. This played a significant role in making over $150,000 in revenue in 2022 (at roughly a 50% profit margin thanks to the printables).
This success on TikTok was a lightbulb moment for me. I had spent so much time trying to put myself in front of people who were already searching for my products, now it was time to put my products in front of people who didn’t yet know they wanted them. Throughout 2022 I posted somewhat consistently on TikTok, Instagram, and even found a subreddit that was perfect for promoting products in my niche. Sometimes I want to kick myself thinking about how long it took me to realize that finding people who didn’t know they wanted my stuff was also a great way to make sales.
In early 2023, I gave birth to my son. While in the trenches of new parenthood, I took a lot of time away from work. I still made decent money, but only about a third of what I made the year prior. As much as I wanted to hit that six-figure mark again, the lower revenue wasn’t surprising considering I took a lot of time off (besides submitting orders on Printful and Printify) and it was also a slow year for politics so there weren’t as many people looking for products in my niche anyway.
By the end of 2023, I found out that I was pregnant with my daughter. The exhaustion from taking care of a baby while also dealing with early pregnancy meant that I was doing the absolute bare minimum and getting on my computer was a pretty low priority. However, once the 2024 election season started picking up, it inspired me to create again. The big switch from Biden to Harris happened a week before my daughter was born, so I spent as much time as possible adding Kamala merch to my shop before baby time. Coincidentally, one of my products went viral on TikTok while I was in the hospital, and I made over $3,000 during those 48 hours. We celebrated with lots and lots of sushi.
I’m now 6 months into parenting 2 kids and slowly finding a routine where I work on my shop or other side hustles (like this blog) during nap time. Other times, I sit on the couch and do absolutely nothing because I’m tired and would rather watch Love is Blind.
That’s what I love about print-on-demand. As long as I’m answering customer questions and processing orders on the POD company dashboards, I can give myself as much of a break as needed and choose to spend time with my kids without my income dropping to zero. At this point I’ve been doing it for 8 years, so all the work I put in and all the trial and error over the years has helped bring me to where I am today.
Tips for Starting a Print-On-Demand Store
Now that I’m 8 years into this venture, here are some of my top tips for success if you’re starting from zero:
Don’t pigeonhole yourself too much into one niche.
If you have one specific niche idea that you want to go with, absolutely give it a try. But if you have a few ideas, don’t be afraid to try them all and see what works. Over time, you’ll notice in your sales and shop stats which products are selling more and getting the most visibility. Use that information to make more products based on what’s working and ditch what’s not working. That’s how I did it, and it’s a great way to experiment and fall into whatever you’re meant to focus on without narrowing it down too early.
Learn and use search engine optimization (SEO) for your titles, tags, and descriptions.
This post has everything you need to know about the basics of SEO if you have no idea what I’m even talking about. Basically, you want to make sure each listing contains search terms that your ideal customer is likely to type into the Etsy or Google search bar that make it more likely for them to land on your product. It’s one of the most essential skills to online sales, whether you’re selling on Etsy or not, so you absolutely need to learn and use it.
DO NOT sell trademarked items.
You cannot sell anything that contains someone else’s intellectual property. No Disney. No Harry Potter. No Bluey. No “boy mom”. This is a surefire way to get your shop shut down. “But other people are doing it!” doesn’t matter. They will get caught eventually. Aside from the risk of getting shut down or sued, print companies won’t print products containing other people’s intellectual property. It’s a waste of time to list them only to make a sale and find out they won’t print it.
Learn more about how to avoid trademark violations in this post.
Remember that it’s a slow process full of trial and error, not a get-rich-quick scheme.
You probably won’t make a sale in your first week. Maybe you won’t in your first month. But if you’re consistent and constantly learning and willing to adapt, eventually you’ll figure out what works for you and will see results.
My Top Tools for Selling Print-On-Demand Products
The first thing you need when you decide to start a print-on-demand shop is a selling platform and a print company. For beginners, I recommend selling on Etsy since it’s a marketplace with a built-in audience of millions of shoppers. It gives you a significant boost in visibility when it’s a trusted platform for many people and the shoppers are already there.
You’ll also need a print-on-demand company. I’ve always been loyal to Printful and Printify. The two companies recently merged, but each one has their own website. Browse through each catalog to help get some inspiration on what kinds of products you can sell.
When I first started with POD, I designed everything in Canva using graphics and fonts from Creative Fabrica. If you’re downloading fonts and graphics to use in your designs, you want to do your due diligence to make sure they have a commercial use license.
For realistic lifestyle mockups to use for listing photos, I love PlaceIt.Net. I also use them to create videos for my listings and social media. Etsy claims that listings with videos get more sales, so I’m working on adding videos to all of my listings.
My most-recommended skills: Patience and consistency. There’s going to be a lot of learning in the process, and you’ll inevitably make mistakes. Start by listing just ONE product (no, you don’t need 20 products ready to launch before you open). Once you have your shop open and you’ve listed your first product, do it again and add your second product. Rinse and repeat.
Ready to start your shop? Open it here and get 40 free listings. Etsy now charges a $15 startup fee to open your shop, so make sure you take advantage of the free listings which adds up to $8 in fee savings.
What else would you like to know about starting a print-on-demand business? Help me help you!
