I have launched a small collection of flowery stationary for sale via Redbubble. Redbubble is an Australian based print-on-demand, aka POD, company. As it says, the orders are always printed on demand with the art of independent artists, so there are no stocks waiting anywhere. Orders are printed and shipped by 3rd-party fulfillers based on the delivery location and product types.
Shortly, I created an account on their website, uploaded my patterns and chose the products to sell. I ordered some test prints of the products and after that released them for sale. I have my own shop page on their website among other, probably thousands artists, I guess, around the world. When the customer places an order, the company will take care of the production and delivery. I only get some royalties per each sold product. I don’t expect to swim in money after this, but this is a nice way to spread the word of my patterns as products. Also, I don’t need to keep storages at home and take care of shippings while I got another day job and my time for surface pattern design is limited at the moment.
Because of the consciousness of the environment and also the knowledge by my design degree, I want to be sure of the quality of the products I sell. I have ordered tests prints of the items I have listed on my shop to see the final result with my own eyes. I can tell you examples of the products I wasn’t happy with. I ordered some stickers and magnets in the end of last year. Magnets look nice as a gift and a piece of art, but they can barely hold anything on the door of a fridge so I decided they are not worth of money to anyone. The stickers I ordered did not satisfied with the quality. Also my design intent was to add several stickers on the same sheet but even though they looked ok on the screen, they came melted together. Of course you can use scissors to separate them but I don’t consider that as a quality product. I ordered some new samples with one motif per sheet only. Let’s see how they will turn out.
I also ordered some coasters. Quality was quite ok, could have been a little bit better. But the main thing with them was that they were made in the UK. As the UK is not part of European union, I needed to pay some extra euros for the customs. It wasn’t much but causes some confusion and extra effort.
When you make the order from Redbubble they won’t tell you excatly were your product will be sent from. As thinking of my fellow Europeans, I don’t think it is fair to get this surprice customs pay as extra, so I didn’t want to list them on my shop.
There are little hints from the country of origin when the parcel arrives. My notebooks and cards seemed to came from France. I liked the quality of hardcover and spiral notebooks. Nothing special but my pattern, of course! Cards were pretty, too. I did some small adjustments for the pattern scales and ordered new pieces to get my own marketing and portfolio photos.
Go to visit my shop and tell me what do you think! What kind of products you would like to see in my shop?
More pictures of my first test prints on my portfolio
More about shipping locations (A link to Redbubble´s website)
