Leveraging AI for Print on Demand Mugs Business

Starting with mugs, the speaker made 100K online using print on demand & AI design, demonstrating the business model and process.

### Print on Demand: Leveraging AI for Passive Income on Etsy
* 💰 The speaker shares their success story of earning **$100,000 in eight months** through a print on demand business model on Etsy, focusing on selling **mugs with AI-generated designs**.
* 🛍 They highlight the potential of this business model by showcasing successful Etsy shops, such as **Strictly Business Mugs** and **Le Blue**, which have generated **hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars in mug sales**.
* 🖼 The process involves using AI tools like **Canva and Mid-Journey** to create design prompts and generate unique mug designs, which are then uploaded to **Printify** for printing and fulfillment.
* 📈 The speaker emphasizes the importance of **SEO optimization for Etsy listings**, including using **relevant keywords in titles and tags** to improve search visibility.
* 💡 They provide tips for creating mock-ups and improving design quality, such as using **Photoshop alternatives like Photopea** for editing and adding **text layers to designs**.
* 💻 The business model requires **minimal investment** and can be started with just a Gmail account, an Etsy shop, and a Printify account, making it **accessible to beginners**.
* 🎨 By leveraging AI tools and print on demand services, sellers can create **passive income streams** by continuously adding new designs and listings to their Etsy shop.
* 🌟 The speaker encourages viewers to **subscribe for more resources** and mentions Printify as a sponsor, offering a link for **signing up that supports their content creation**.

this shop makes over twenty-one thousand dollars per month selling mugs on Etsy, and there's dozens of other shops just like it. Today, we're diving into the business model that I used to make my first 100K online, but with the slight Twist of leveraging AI to do all the heavy lifting. I'm of course talking about the world of print on demand, basically just simple Drop Shipping with mugs. I started doing this at the end of 2019 with mugs, and it took me about eight months before I was able to earn my first 100K. But if I had started with these AI tools, I probably would have gotten there way faster. In this video, we'll look at several examples so that you can see the numbers for yourself. I'll explain the entire process and business model, and I'll even start my own shop right here in this video and walk you through step by step, the easiest and lowest skill method to get started. Now, for you to really see the potential here and understand how this works, take

a look at this listing here on Etsy. It's a simple mug with a floral print, and it's generating around five thousand dollars a month. Now, this is a fairly simple design, but it's surprisingly effective. And we're using AI to get designs just like these. The same shop has other very similar listings like this one that's making one thousand dollars a month with a very similar design, or this one that's generating 500 a month again with a very similar design. Just between these three listings, they've sold over 1191 mugs. That's a lot of mugs to buy and hold inventory, print designs on, and ship out to customers. That's where print on demand comes into play. It's very similar to traditional Drop Shipping, except you'll work with the supplier like Printify who will provide you with white label products like these: t-shirts, pillows, socks, posters, and mugs that can be printed on. Printify integrates directly with Etsy's Marketplace, making the whole process extremely easy. Your job is simply to pick out one of these

products upload some kind of design to it, whether that be an image, text, or an AI design, and list it for sale in your Etsy Shop. With a little bit nicer of a mock-up, it'll show up in your Etsy store. When one of Etsy's over 450 million monthly visitors finds your shop and orders that item, it'll go straight to Printify. The design that you uploaded will be printed on the mug and shipped off directly to your customer without you ever having to have a physical location, a website, or even run any ads. This is one of the easiest businesses that you can start. But just for some more proof so you can see how well this can really work, this shop is called Strictly Business Mugs, and they sell pretty much only mugs. But they've done over eight hundred thousand dollars just in mug sales. But even more impressive than that is this shop called Less Blues or Le Blue, maybe, which has been on Etsy less time actually than Strictly Business Mugs, and it's made around 1.25

million dollars selling mugs. If we look at some of their designs, you can see it's pretty simple stuff like this definition mug that's brought in over seven thousand dollars, or this mug that's brought over six thousand dollars just from that one single listing. But what's actually more impressive is they made that 1.25 million dollars that they've done in revenue over the last 1735 days as of recording this video, which sounds like a really long time but that actually means that since the day they opened their account, they've earned a daily average of seven hundred and twenty dollars every single day, or twenty-one thousand six hundred and thirteen dollars each month. So maybe it's clickbait, or maybe it's just a good business, you can decide for yourself. Now we've seen lots of examples already, so let's get into the fun stuff of actually making the designs with AI. The very first step is to open a new Gmail account, which can just be the name of your business. This will be super useful when you start opening up all the

other Associated accounts that way it's organized and not linked to your personal email. Then on Etsy at the very bottom of the page, just click on the sell on Etsy button and click open a shop. Then using that business email address that you just created, you can sign up completely for free using the link below this video, which will give you 40 free listings. Then with the same email you just made, follow the other link from down below and sign up for Printify. From there, you'll also want to add your Etsy shop just by clicking connect and logging into the two accounts so that all of your products and orders will sync up with one another. This will make everything really passive down the line. Now with all of that set up out of the way, which is actually really easy, we can begin designing products using my favorite AI tool, Canva. You probably already know about it, but Canva is just an image generation AI that's been out for a while now. And basically all of these images that you can see were generated from a single line of text called a

prompt: We're going to use Mid-Journey to generate entire designs for our mugs, so make sure that you have a free Discord account. Then go to Mid Journey's website and click on the Join the Beta button at the bottom of the page. This will connect you to the Mid-Journey server inside Discord. Since you're already in Discord, go ahead and join my Discord server so you can chat with me and other like-minded people, talk about similar topics to what I talk about on the channel. A lot of the people in here are always happy to help each other out. Now, sadly, you will have to pay ten dollars a month to use Mid-Journey and have access to the full commercial rights to sell the images. Now, in the Mid-Journey server, where it says Mid-Journey bot, just right-click on it and select Message. This will bring up your own private chat so that you don't have to see everybody else's images that they're generating when you're trying to make your own. So, to make our first image, just

go down to this chat box section at the bottom of the screen where it says message, and you'll start by typing out a forward slash. Now, when you see this pop-up, just click on the amount imagine option. Here is where we can type literally whatever we want to get any kind of design that we can think of. So, if we wanted to do something similar to this Cactus mug, for example, that alone has made roughly two thousand dollars, we could do it super easily. So, in the prompt section, I would just want to type out something like cactus plant in the style of watercolor painting sharp prickly on a white background, and adding that on a white background is really important. And then I'm just going to hit enter and wait to see what it comes up with. Now, each time you run a prompt, it'll generate you four new images, and these honestly almost all look pretty usable, but it'll also give you some new controls right below it. So, for example, this reroll button, if you click it, it'll run the same prompt again giving you

four brand new images. And you can click this as many times as you want. If one of them is almost right but just not quite there, then you can use the corresponding variation buttons to make more similar images. This will just give you four variations of that image. And then once one of them looks good, you can click the corresponding upscale button to make it larger. Just by using this prompt as a simple template, I was able to generate tons of great images with white backgrounds that we could use on our mugs. Now, at this point, with an image that looks good as long as it's on a white background, you could upload it directly to a mug on Printify and be ready to sell it. But there's a lot more that we can do at the prompt to get even better designs for our mugs. So let's type out a forward slash and go to the settings option and open up the settings window. From this page, you can decide how much stylization or creativity is given to the AI. For example, a low stylization

is going to generate an image very literally based on your prompt. While choosing a higher stylization is going to add a lot more of the AI's own creativity to it. So if I run the exact same prompt at a different level of stylization each time, you can kind of see how we're getting different images, but with different amounts of flair, I guess. The images on the left are pretty much exactly what you'd expect to get with low stylization, while the ones on the right are kind of more chaotic and stylized. But before you go making a ton of different graphics, there's one last feature that you have to know about if you're going to be selling mugs for instance. When you're crafting the prompt, there's obviously important keywords that compose the type of images that you're left with. That's pretty easy to understand, but there's something really important towards the end of the prompt called parameters. Basically, you're able to add a parameter at the end of a prompt to force the AI to generate.

certain types of images. For example, when we were generating seamless patterns to sell, we ended the prompt by typing dash dash tile at the end of the prompt. And this generates us a seamless pattern like you can see right here. There's a lot of different parameters, but most importantly is adding dash dash AR for aspect ratio. This allows us to tell mid-journey if we want a vertical image. So we could do a 9 by 16, for example, if we wanted it to be vertical. And this will usually print individual items since there's less space. Or you could do it wider. You could type 16x9 and get a lot more items in your art since there's more space. Or you could just enter your own aspect ratio. So what if you could create an aspect ratio that would perfectly fill the total print area for a mug? Well, you can. You can start by typing dash dash AR and then add a space and then type 293 colon 151 at the end of the prompt. And it'll generate a super

wide image that happens to be the exact size you need to fill the total print area of a mug. As for what I've been able to create using this exact method, the first style that I went for was this mushroom design, which came out all right, but it was hard to get the exact same style. But I still think I got several good results. Then I tried to do this cacti, which are honestly my favorites. I think these came out really well. Then I tried to imitate this pressed flower design, which has sold super well. This single mug has done over 30 grand, and I also got some very comparable results, which I think with the right mock-up would sell super well. But how do we take these images and make money with them? Well, here's how. Once you've upscaled an image that you like, you can click on the image and literally just right-click it and save it to your computer. Now, with the image that you downloaded, as long as it's on a pure white background, then you can

upload it directly to a white mug on Printify. That's ready to sell. You can see that the design fits perfectly and looks great on the mug mock-ups in Printify. And if the same design was on a smaller mug, I just have to move it down a little bit, and I think it looks even better. Since we're generating images that are already the right size, we're ready to just publish it to our Etsy shop. I uploaded this one as a second example so you can see more how to apply this, and even with this design uploaded as is, it could probably already sell. But we can use more AI to make more variations and better designs to get even more sales. For example, I can hop into my second favorite AI chat, GPT, and ask it for a list of trademark-free funny puns and sayings that can go on my mug with a cactus design to sell in my online store. And this tool is completely free, and it'll spit out a ton of ideas for sayings that you can add to the mug.

then when I like one like this one, says I'm a prick, I can go to test and just make sure that chat GPT didn't mess up and it's not a trademarked saying. Then we can go into printify and add a text layer right below our design and just type in that saying. I've got a ton of videos covering how to edit text layers with graphics on figma and canva so if trentify doesn't have the font that you want, go check out my other videos. And at this point, we've gone from pretty much nothing to a product that's ready to list for sale using only AI. Hopefully you can see how you can use this to make a ton of great designs with hardly any work. And again, you only need one design to pop off to do really well. Now in the listing section, from here, I'm just going to click on this one to edit it real quick so you can see how fast this can be done. Now we'll start with images, and just so you know, I've never had a good

listing successful listing sell with the default printify mock-ups or place it mock-ups. The absolute best option is to come to Etsy and search for mug maca and find some that are proven to work and buy those and use them in your shop. But if you need a free option, I like using rawpixel.com. So you can come and search for mug mock-ups here and you can be sure to filter by free. When you find one that you like that you think could work, you can download the file. And from here, you'll be able to open and edit it. But you'll have to come to this website called photo P, which is a free Photoshop alternative. You can drag in that file that ends in PSD that we just made. And here's how we can edit it. We just have to find where we're supposed to place our design. So on the right-hand side of the screen, there's usually a layer that's labeled Your Design here or something similar. And I'll just double-click the icon on the left of the title.

and in here is where I can literally drag in my artwork and position it to fill the space. Then I'm just going to hit command s to save it on my keyboard, and I can close out of this window, and the mock-up should update. Then from here, I can just go to file export and save it to my computer. Then we can just upload that image to our listing and save it as the first picture. Now the title and tags make the biggest impact for SEO. To get the best title, just search for similar products on Etsy that are on the first page of search results. Then when you find one and you open it, look at the keywords that they're using in their own title and compose your own title based on those keywords. Now at the very bottom of the page on that successful listing, you'll see these bubbles, and each one of these bubbles is a tag. So we're going to fill out our own listing using very similar tags to what they're using in theirs. Doing those two things really well should be enough to eventually get your

listings to rank organically, so you don't have to pay to run ads. Remember, with this method, you'll usually have to post more listings to increase your chances of getting seen. Now a couple issues before you go, sometimes when you're making mock-ups, that's just one side you'll and you go to edit the design layer, you'll have to scale up your artwork if it's a full wrap image like we were generating earlier and move it to the side so that the correct side is showing. So when you hit save and the mock-up updates, the design is on the correct side of the mug. As for the single graphic images, you don't have to remove the background as long as it's white. But if it isn't white or you want to be able to sell that graphic on a black mug, for example, you can remove the background by going to this website that I'll have in the description. You can just upload your file, and it'll do a really good job of removing the background for you.

three free demo removals. But since you don't even have to have an account to use this website, you can just make a new incognito or private tab and get three more demo uses. So basically, it's just infinitely free. Now, this business model, minus the AI, was how I made my first 100k online, and for that, I will always be grateful. It definitely wasn't easy, and it took me months of very long days to be able to achieve those kinds of results. So make sure that you subscribe and check out all of the free resources down below that could help you succeed. A huge thank you to Printified for sponsoring this video. I've been working with them for four or five years now, and I'm super happy that I get to help you guys succeed on their platform as well. When you sign up using my link down below, it helps me out a lot, and it allows me to keep making free content like this for you. I hope this helps, and as always, I'll talk to you soon. [Music]

Make $21,613 Per Month Selling AI Mugs (Easy Side Hustle)

E-Commerce, Business and Finance. I'm sharing my financial journey, and the things I've learned along the way.

Alek

Leveraging AI for Print on Demand Business on Etsy

A print-on-demand business model using AI for mug designs has the potential to generate significant monthly revenue on Etsy.

The use of suppliers like Printify allows for easy integration with Etsy's Marketplace, requiring minimal effort from the seller.

Successful shops on Etsy have demonstrated the lucrative potential of the print-on-demand model, with some generating over a hundred thousand dollars in mug sales.

Tips for Starting a Successful Mug Business

A mug business can be highly profitable, with some sellers making millions in revenue.

Using AI tools like Canva and Mid-Journey can help generate unique designs for mugs.

It's important to set up a separate business email, sign up on platforms like Etsy and Printify, and join relevant Discord servers for support and networking.

AI can be used to generate a variety of mug designs by using specific prompts in the chat box.

The AI provides four new images each time a prompt is run, with the option to generate variations and upscale the chosen design.

Adjusting the stylization level can also impact the creativity of the generated images, and adding parameters at the end of a prompt is important for guiding the AI to generate specific types of images.

Using AI to Generate and Monetize Images for Mugs

AI can be used to generate images with specific aspect ratios for mugs, allowing for perfect printing.

These images can then be easily uploaded to platforms like Printify for selling on white mugs, with the potential to adjust the design for smaller mugs as well.

By leveraging AI to create variations and using chatbots to generate puns and sayings, a wide range of mug designs can be produced for sale in an online store, maximizing the potential for sales.

Using AI to Create and Sell Unique Designs

AI can be used to quickly create product designs by adding text to existing graphics.

Finding proven mock-ups from Etsy or using free options like rawpixel.

Optimizing the title and tags based on successful listings on Etsy is crucial for improving SEO and visibility.

Posting more listings can help you rank organically without paying for ads.

When creating mock-ups, remember to scale up full wrap images and move them to the side to ensure the correct side is displayed.

If you need to remove the background from a graphic, there's a website that offers three free demo removals and allows for unlimited use through incognito tabs.

This business model helped the speaker make their first 100k online, and they recommend checking out the free resources and subscribing for more help.