How He Sold $500,000 With Print on Demand (With the Right Designs)

what's up everybody I'm here today with a good friend of mine Ralph I'm not going to go too much into who he is I'm just gonna let him introduce himself so Ralph man what's up how's it going hey Paul how you doing thanks for having on here thanks Gavin here excited man I've been following your content for about two to three years now and you know finally get to do this nice yeah we connected over Instagram

and I saw what you're doing I was like man like people got to hear about this not a lot yeah we're talking about it but before we get into that part why don't you just quickly introduce who you are and kind of like what it is that you do right now then we'll kind of go back to your history and see how you got to this point perfect yeah so my name is Ralph retro on Instagram it comes from a DJ name that I used to have so I definitely keep it for branding purposes so it helps me right now what we do is I own a fulfillment business we cater to everyone on that's in the print-on-demand business so it's a type of dropshipping but it's print on demand so we produce the products we actually make them for the people and ship them out basically all over the world right now our main branch is in San Pedro California and we're looking to expand you know for faster deliveries and stuff like that but it's definitely a print on demand two type of drop shipping I would say most people describe it that way and we're showing people that it's possible to do this so excited for what's to come and actually want to let more people know about this since they know what the drop shipping style is so now it's kind of educating them on print on demand yeah most people here drop shipping they

think it means one thing this is not the case guys it means a whole bunch of different things so for those of people who don't know what print on demand is can you kind of inform us what that means yeah definitely so print on demand is it's basically for clothing companies online retailers I want to say you put up a mock-up for example a t-shirt with a certain design let's say happy birthday on there and you actually don't have the t-shirt in stock we have it in stock we fulfill the shirt we have the show we have the blank and then you send us your design and we put it on the shirt or a mug or a hat a hoodie or anything like that so nothing you don't keep anything in stock so to start a business like this is basically zero costs it just takes time for sure to build something like this so how did you get into this where did this all start from it's full circle it's so funny so we actually I started selling I had a concert business so I started selling tickets online I was like okay what else can I sell and that's when I came across your content your dropshipping content and I was like okay cool I could definitely start doing this and then I saw that more people were doing t-shirts two and I've been familiar with a t-shirt and apparel business for about 15 years so I was like okay I'll definitely invest into a machine and try to drop ship instead of sending my orders out to fulfill for someone out to someone else I would just fulfill it myself and then I was able to actually help more people doing that as well being their fulfillment center and do know like that but it's yeah it goes back to drop shipping definitely started with your content I remember the DSM tool I started with I mean my girlfriend were just waiting for eBay stuff like we had a page drop dropship eBay I remember all that madness so it definitely started with drop shipping with your content that's crazy guys honestly I didn't even know that before this interview so yeah let's kind of go more into like how

print-on-demand works what people need to do to get started with it that kind of thing okay yeah so prune on demand is actually a pretty big business Amazon does it is well their side of the business called merge by Amazon so you would upload your designs to Amazon platform and then they're able to actually fulfill it for you within two to three days basically cater to designers what we're trying to do is actually incorporate everything we kind of supply the designers we have in-house designers so everyone is able to dropship now from us we know the trends we know the designs we know what's selling so we just put a team together for one person to be able to have their own online shop you can use print on demand on Shopify eBay Amazon Etsy is probably the most profitable one to begin with and scale it from there so it's zero to start like literally zero dollars to start just like drop shipping you don't really have anything up front cost you know it's just a learning curve for sure cool so if I'm

understanding this right somebody who likes designing they'll go they'll make a design they don't even need to have it it's not like they're drawing markers on a t-shirt right it's all done exactly all done in the computer yeah so we serve right now people from all over the world India so they never see their products you know India Morocco Mexico United staes different states in California so they never see the actual product they're just ok at designing and we show them what marketing skills they need to be able to sell their products so then they would upload that to something like Etsy and once it sells they tell you guys and you guys just print it and send it exactly so we have a software cost ship station that we use to be able to filter their orders we connect to their marketplace wherever they're at it'd be Amazon eBay or Etsy it funnels them into our software then our production company picks it up and ships it out for them what does that look like

from your end give a warehouse like a factory yes yeah we have we actually have a warehouse out here so right now in my home office but right now I decided to do the interview here because it's noisy out that you know they have the machines running all day so we definitely have right now we're expanding getting ready for q4 because all our partners they're doing well so we know there's gonna be exponential sales when it comes to q4 so it's definitely warehouse we're in right now cool so I've seen other services like

this before like you said Amazon has it sounds like you need something a little bit different though in terms of like the education that's exactly that's the big part that I want to basically brand myself as I want to make sure people understand it and educate them on print-on-demand how it's possible there's not a lot out there on a personal level that people will teach you specially from a fulfillment center like there's not too many Amazon reps teaching you how to scale your business it's mostly people that are already in the business so I personally own the company and then fulfill your orders so I see all the orders filtered through you know I drop off the packages when I need to and do all that stuff so it's more on a personal level that I want to educate more people on it and the very

cool thing about this is that you set up this system that you're helping these people learn how to do print on the man and the more money they make the more money you make so it's very big yes definitely that's I think the beauty of it is combined with their success I if they're successful my company's successful you know so I need to make sure they're successful I always follow up with all our partners make sure they're doing well whatever it is they need to had a special packaging you know we were able to put in I'm a flyer to save 20% on your next order we can do that you know cuz the more business they get the more business weekend that's how we're able to scale so we're tied to their success for sure where do you see most

coming from Etsy yes definitely Etsy I think the market that is really hot for us right now I want to say 90 percent of a partner sell on its and they do fairly well I

would say the target market there it's women shopping for someone else for a special occasion so they'll go on Etsy and also because it's on Etsy you gold to buy custom stuff so we sell custom stuff we're able to customize the text a mug you know happy birthday and then we could put the name underneath or whatever it is so we're able to buy custom stuff and a lot of people are driving traffic to Ed's heel that way so let's kind of get into

some of the more secret stuff here yeah what is it that makes some products or some designs better than others you talked a little bit before about trends yeah and things like that can you go more into them we see everything ship you know we don't share information for partner to partner but I can tell you that simple designs are what's hot you know sometimes we've sold I want to say 10,000 shirts of two words like literally a simple cool Tex sells over and over again which is crazy like we save a lot of on ink and stuff like that so it's Co for us you know but definitely simple stuff birthday stuff sells a lot back-to-school is always big so you have to follow those trends Halloween's coming up so I definitely advise all our people put out content in our group you know it's Halloween start creating stuff for Halloween for kids create a stuff like that always these

trends that come along and I think people if they're paying attention to the news and what's going on can hop on them yeah we capitalized for sure on that I feel like the next election will be something that there'll be a lot of funny t-shirts about that recently we had that whole area 51 exact and I'm sure there's a ton of t-shirts about that as well yeah we've heard it a couple of those are pretty for them coming the elections people already making shirts for that custom stuff like that so people are definitely already on it too which is cool to see you know we learn like that we get the data and we're able to we still do our marketing too and then we pass it on to our part for sure so they can create their content their designs how many t-shirts

are you printing a day or it's not just t-shirts right yeah its hoodies mugs and all that stuff all right now we're doing about 200 to 300 products a day Wow so yeah we're pumping awesome stuff it gets heavier during the holiday season for sure we'll probably be able to I want to say maybe like 1,500 products a day so it's it's building up there for sure and when you

started it was just for you right so what were using just like a manual yeah exactly we're just printing heat presses and it was like we weren't too concerned about the quality at the time because it was just for our shop and we were like pumping it out we were more concerned about just getting all our stuff out you know but now that we were catering to more people I have to make sure the quality is up to par for everyone and luckily our team has been doing a great job keeping the quality you know up to par up to standards that people get great reviews and on Etsy as well as any other shop that you own on eBay to reviews or King you know if you have solid reviews your shop will keep getting better sales you'll get ranked higher and all that stuff so we're definitely you know on top of that as a

seller quality production team we have our sellers especially our beginning sellers because they want to start you know getting more views as we go once the item they track the item once it arrives you just send them a message hey I just want to make sure you know your item arrived is everything okay with it check it if you have any issues you know you can always return it any sizing issues we accept exchanges so always keep in contact with us at with the buyer on Etsy you're able to do that very easily because they reply almost all the time so definitely keep a connection with them and that builds relationship for you know the next time they plan on purchasing a shirt if

someone did want to get started with this what would be your advice what would be the first thing that they should do the first thing issue look at like what were the first steps to get moving with this yeah so as I was you know teaching people how to do this I'm kind of learning myself on what requirements they would have I would say designing would be the first thing to be able to create something on Photoshop you know on a personal level if you don't have you know any capital you don't you can invest into a designer or hire a designer then you would have to pick up the Photoshop skill that would be hit really after that uploading and everything I there's the process is fairly simple you know what

this reminds me of back in the days when Kindle publishing was getting very popular I don't know if you were paying attention back then but all these people were coming out with these Kindle books very short and what people ended up doing was outsourcing the writing of the books okay I'm wondering if people if I could for instance hire of someone off a fiver or a virtual assistant and say hey this is what I want the t-shirt to say make it up for me yes then I send that to you yes actually Kindle is coming up again it's KTP I think that's what it's called now and it's big I've seen a lot of people a lot of our print-on-demand people they have great designs so now they're moving those designs to books which is also a big market and they're doing great so they're all they're making money off their t-shirts then they go to Amazon and publish their books so it's double stream revenue for them right now because of that so do you

think it's possible to outsource the design process yes definitely we have actually four V's right now that design for us full-time so we could we send them the research we're like okay this is what's trending this is the type of designs that we want so they come back to us with the designs within 24 to 48 hours and then we write now what we're doing is we're helping out partners that don't can't design so then we give them those designs and then they upload them and do what they have to do with them but yes definitely we hire them on up work and fiber so

guys even if you aren't good at design like I would be terrible at it yeah you can still hire help to do it for you if you're creative enough and you think of a good design you can kind of give them some direction and you can actually kind of turn this on autopilot that's multiple of them to make you multiple designs every day or every week and start just pumping them out it sounds like yeah there's groups of t-shirt marketers that designers are in there just trying to sell their design so the markets there for it there they sell them bundles sometimes like 10 5 shirts to see that's an itch they'll sell them to you so you're able to upload those designs to your shop do you

find that the trends are the only thing that sells or they just tend to so well trend do so well but you always want to have products you know that are there year-round evergreen gonna keep selling every year so um you always I always say like a graph you have your up times you know and then but when you know that your trends not hitting as well as it was you still fall back on your evergreen products and then you still keep on the trace but the trend I would say is the moneymaker when you want to have exponential growth for sure what happens next how do we make sure that people actually buy it from us or buy our design yeah so what I advise everyone is have a friend buy it first so have it's a shop you know have a friend buy it ship it to them will and then have them review so once you get the first review it creates trust in the shop and then sales will start coming organically there's also promoted ads on it CJ eBay has them too you know you're able to promote per click on there and I think on ebay percentage but on Etsy its per click and you're able to do that so you it gets shown to more people for sure and then we show you guys those strategies as well how to scale that and all that so then ship station it just

myself as a so I don't have to do anything nothing at all exactly yeah that's it that's the beauty of it for sure ship station sends it to my production team and they pick it up your designs will be in a Dropbox folder you know with the SKU and then I have all that in videos you know on the onboarding process we teach everyone this and then my production teams able to pick it up match the SKU with design name and then they print it onto a shirt or whatever it is and the tracking number is that it gets uploaded automatically through ship station uploads everything automatically yeah we're big on ship station there definitely helped us out because we can do Shopify on there any marketplace even our eBay account is also on and on ship station uploads everything automatically tracks it for us it's really good software so a new

seller coming in trying to get started with this how long will it take how many designs do they need before they start to see some traction with us I would I always advise everyone to have 30 within the first two weeks 30 designs and is if you're not a designer then it'll probably be an investment but if you're already a designer 30 designs you can crack them out in like two days if you really you know paid you know you focus on this but 30 designs you'll start seeing sales coming in there's always says it's pretty cool like every day every shop that we've opened or helped open already has a sale so the market is there for a people are always buying t-shirts and yeah it takes about I want to say a week or two for you to get your first sale within that for sure we've seen sales like within 24 hours

and then what about scaling is so it's just you had more designs and you get more yes exactly that's a cool thing about it yeah so you keep you keep obviously there's we set up a process where you do your marketing you know then you send it to your designer then your designer cranks out the design and you upload it so if you keep that system in place it basically scales by itself just make sure everything's getting done would be the hardest part make sure like the research is being done because with no research you don't have no design so the research is huge for sure guys this is one of the reasons I love the drop shipping model and a model just like this because it's so much easier to scale where you're not having to analyze what's the cost benefit analysis of buying all this product up front and what if it doesn't sell there's no risk there you just make the design list the products up for sale and then if it doesn't sell it it's a learning lesson and that's pretty much it the cost of not selling something is minimal or nothing in a lot of cases yes I agree completely and that's the beauty about drop shipping you know we're able to do that there's you give so many people the opportunity with this from someone that's not making any money to they can be making thousands within a month you know so definitely a great model to drop shipping is a great model so do you have people who just do this

full-time just continually crank out new designs yeah so a good amount of our partners they're in it full-time so they have a full design team I want to see four to five designers that are just cranking out illustrations for them every day and uploading every day and they do it full-time literally no job nothing there they're probably gonna break a hundred K in you know just this just like cuz they also there were their designs they'll put them in KDP or merge by Amazon so we're not the only place where they're publishing their designs our publish them in different places as well what do you use the word partners what does that mean it's like students I want to say yeah I say we say partners cuz they're our business partners they help us grow so we call them partners on our end but you do it yourself too right yeah we do it ourself we have our own team as well in-house so we always have that but we also our main thing is the partners that we want to help out as well but yeah in-house we do have our own stores

so let's talk about sort of this elephant in the room why would people use your service instead of using like merch by Amazon yeah so merch by Amazon first you have to apply they have to accept you so it takes about thirty maybe six months to get accepted and the profit margins are very low I think Amazon charges I want to say anywhere from fourteen dollars and you probably make a dollar off every shirt with us we are able to work with you in the beginning you know we'll ensure that you are able to be profitable since to start because we controlled the cost of goods we control the cost of labor everything and we're able to ensure that you're profitable and scale your business because at the end of the day what we want to do is make sure to keep you in business for the long run that way we can stay in business as well but yeah on Amazon it is smaller profit margins with us you on Etsy has been proven you can make anywhere from thirty to fifty percent profit margins on their competitors Amazon ten percent that's a big difference yes for you have people who are doing both yeah exactly you can do both you can get revenue from Amazon and then revenue from Etsy as well with the same designs so we know why people

are gonna wonder what kind of numbers you could do with a business like this do you feel comfortable sharing some of that yeah definitely I like to be very transparent when it comes to all this because you know a lot of people get steered the wrong way or see flashy cars and then they start going towards that like we like to talk numbers and we'll be frank with you on profit margins and all that our biggest store to date has done five hundred thousand in less than ten months right so it's a pretty solid number with profit margins ranging from 25 to 40 percent depending on the season we crank up our prices when it's q4 because everyone's buying you know so it definitely is between those profit margins that's the that's a good thing about us we're able to switch the margins because we own the company and stuff like that our partners their profit margins range from 25 to 50 percent I've seen some of them are charging 35 for a shirt $30 for a shirt custom shirt which is really great and then they get orders that are about two to three thousand dollars just in one order so it's pretty good profit margin ordering that many shirts it's usually so big their niche is vacations so when they go on huge vacations it's a whole family trip and then it's like 50 shirts custom shirts with their names on the back and stuff like that so they're able to do that for those customers that need back think

about things like vacations I'm sure bachelorette parties yes huge exactly those are big and you know those are emotional bodies like they'll don't buy because it's an emotional you know you need it they don't care about the price though they'll just pay it for it absolutely think about

anything that where people are already spending a lot of money so a wedding people were dumped in so much money what's another thousand dollars on top of that yeah exactly yeah so those yeah those are great trends to be a part of their stores that are just catered to that niche and they're killing it they're killing you see on it see they're killing it it's it's pretty cool to see them what final

advice would you have for anyone who's looking to start this to start research more than anything that's always a big part you can use our services but there's multiple services that offer this you know and find what fits you best because everyone's in a different starting place if you're already a designer you know any service would fits you best it's just what profit margins do you want to deal with customer service on SC you'll deal with customers you have to deal with customers that's why I guess your profit margin is a little higher because you do the customer service on merch by Amazon you don't do any other customer service all you do is receiving royalty on your designs so it just depends on what you want to do there's also the Shopify model where you have to invest in Facebook Ads to bring traffic to your print-on-demand store your beginning I would suggest go with that see a hundred percent I've seen the best results there I've seen people that don't know anything about econ get started there and have a success for sure alright I

want to give you a chance to because you've teased us enough I want to hear a little bit about your I guess you call it program service you're gonna talk about what people would expect if they did sign up for your service yes so with us what we do is we add you to a group it's called the novelty inner circle the name of our printing companies called novelty Inc so colder haze you know it goes together and we're able to help you directly so you see your shirt if you need a sample of your shirt we'll give you and we're able to ensure your profitability in the beginning we have programs sometimes if you start then it's ten free shirts just start with us because we want you to believe in what we're doing so we'll give you your first ten shirts for free you're already profitable like that that's about if you sell your shirts at twenty dollars that's 200 bucks profit you know you don't have to pay us I just want to make sure that you understand the model and you know that this works after that we scale with you so we meet up once a week we have a group and I'll go live and talk about how your specific store can scale you know how other people store are scaling and we all share our screenshots of our sales on there and motivate each other to stay consistent you know we that that's a big part of it we want to everyone one has to be ready for q4 because when q4 comes it's an insane time like I'm sure you've experienced it you know on t-shirts or whatever you are selling but yeah it's a it gets crazy so we're trying to get everyone ready for q4 right now and I think the time to start would be as soon as possible there's never a bad time to start either relates with novelty or with another company just start it you know it's it could be a passive income for some people and some people that want to take it a little bit more definitely more money for them for sure how much does it cost

to join oh it's free right now so right now we're doing the beta and it's gonna be limited to only 50 more people after that I closed the group completely to ensure their success because I need to have make sure my partners are successful before anything before expanding after that then we'll definitely launch a full course on how we scaled 150 partners and they'll be in charge to get into that for sure later on in the future okay guys don't get mad at me if you are the 51st person and it's not true I can't go back and edit this video later so I will leave the link down below and check it out but like I said don't get mad at me if it's not free anymore you guys had orange and I also leave your Instagram down below cuz I know that's how you talk to a lot of people and if there if anyone has questions you are you cool with them reaching out to you on it I reply to all my DMS and I stir them the right way so if they need help with getting started I have videos on that if they want to join the group right away I'll send you the link to that as well but I know you'll link it below but yeah I apply to everyone on Instagram all right well thanks so much

for being here I learned a lot this is great and guys if you like this and want to learn more about this you want Ralph to come back just give the video thumbs up and leave a comment down below just tell me if you wanted to come back and I'll make him come back in maybe a couple months or after quarter four well yeah take a deep breath okay sure there sure thank you pop for having me appreciate in Manhattan thank you for giving a lot of people education we needed to start this because to be frank without you we would have probably never started this business I always talk to my girlfriend we were excited that we were that I'm here because we were just in my little room back in the day just watching your videos now which is crazy and I always told her like it comes full circle it's just it's cool to see this man for sure I appreciate it well thanks for saying that I didn't pay him to say that I promise we appreciate you saying that yes sir all right bye for now