This week I finally got tier 2000 after just over 10 months in Merch and selling 1034 products. It’s taken a huge amount of work to get to this stage and most of my focus over the past year has solely been on Merch, but I’m hoping that now that I’m in Tier 2000 I can step this up another notch, start to play with the big boys and see this develop more as a business.
What Difference will Tier 2000 make?
Up until this point my strategy has just been to sell as many Tshirts as possible, with the sole purpose of getting tiered up and giving me more opportunities in the future. I’ve been building up my stock of design assets and refining my process, and so far haven’t been too concerned about making money from Merch.
Now that I’m on Tier 2000 I feel that I’ve proven this business model can work, that I am good at it and if I apply the same principles and scale up, my buiness and returns should increase as well.
Expand into Other Products / Markets
Being in T2000, will give me more opportunities to expand out into other products (up until this point I’ve only listed standard Tshirts) and I’d also like to list more shirts in the UK market.
It doesn’t sound like it has provided a lot of return for many people, but I’d like to try this myself and see if I can make it work… after all my competitive advantage is that I’m English and understand the humour and the market a lot better than the US Market.
I also speak near fluent German, so may try listing some designs that I feel could sell well in Germany.
Experiment
Having more slots available has another advantage for me in the fact that I should now be able to experiment more. I have a bit more flexibility to upload similar designs with slight variations in texts, colours and design assets to see if this will make a difference.
Scaled Designs
I’ve created a number of template designs whilst I was on T1000 and should now be able to quickly roll out a large number of designs. For example, I have a number of US State themed designs that I’ve only created for a few States.
Up until now i’ve been using Design Pickle to create my designs and these guys are perfect to help you create the inital template and then roll these out to multiple niches. The best thing about their service is for an extra $35 a month you get access to Getty Images source library which is freakin’ awesome value!!!
Text Based Designs
Whilst doing my research I found a number of keywords/niches that looked like they had evidence of demand and had 0 or very few listings on Amazon.
I hadn’t bothered creating any designs for these previously as I didn’t want to use up my slots or have my designer spend any time on them. Instead what I can do now, is throw up some text based designs and see if any of those start to sell.
Because there are only a few listings on Amazon doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no demand in the niche… it might just mean that other sellers haven’t discovered this niche yet.
Re-Upload
I’ve also had about 400 designs fall off of Amazon since I first uploaded them. Some of these were just bad designs, but a lot of them may have been targeting the wrong keywords or need a tweak to the listings, so I now have more slots available and can get back on the case and reupload these.
Make a Profit
Now that I’ve put in a lot of hard work to get to T2000, it feels like it’s time to start make some hard cash back on the time that I’ve given to Merch.
I’ve learnt a lot of lessons about designs, what sells, which niches to go for and how to use AMS over the past 10 months, but now I want to start to see some financial reward for the time that I’ve given to Merch, and hope to get my royalties up to around $1000 per month in the next 3 months.
It’s definitely not a get rich quick programme, and I still need to keep on grafting away to make this a sustainable business, but the royalites are still steadily growing, and I have an endless stream of ideas that I can use to create designs with, so theoretically the royalites should keep on growing.
The main problem I’m facing as ever is time. At the moment I’m travelling through South America for 3 months, and had hoped that I’d be able to dedicate more time to Merch and my other side hustles, but I’m finding that I have even less time than when I was working full time!!!
There’s mountains to climb, oceans to swim in, fiestas to attend and lots of cerveza to be drunk instead… really is a tough life eh but that is part of my lifestyle dream which I’m getting a little closer to day by day
To read about the exact process I used to get to Tier 2000 read this article
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