Etsy Print-On-Demand Mug Business Success Guide

Etsy shops can achieve remarkable profits by utilizing print-on-demand mug designs and effective marketing strategies.

### Starting a Profitable Etsy Print-on-Demand Mug Business
* 💰 In just over a year, an Etsy shop selling mugs has generated over **$600,000**, averaging **$117,000 in monthly profit**, showcasing the potential of **print-on-demand side hustles**.
* 🖥 The integration of new AI tools and automation has simplified the process of creating and listing custom mug designs, making it **easier than ever to start a business from home**.
* ☕ Successful listings, such as a custom camper mug, can sell between **150 to 500 units monthly**, with some designs generating **up to $160,000 in sales** since their launch.
* 📦 Utilizing suppliers like Printify allows sellers to **avoid inventory issues**, as they handle printing and shipping **directly to customers**, streamlining operations **significantly**.
* 🎨 There are four main strategies for obtaining designs: **creating custom designs**, **purchasing proven designs**, **making handmade designs**, and **using AI-generated graphics** to meet market demand.
* 📈 The importance of SEO and effective marketing strategies cannot be overstated, as leveraging **Etsy's search algorithm** can **drive traffic to your listings** without the need for **costly ads**.
* 👥 Joining a community of fellow sellers can provide support and resources, enhancing your **chances of success** in the competitive Etsy marketplace.
* 💡 With the right tools and knowledge, aspiring entrepreneurs can quickly set up a **profitable print-on-demand mug business**, tapping into a **lucrative market with minimal risk**.

In just over one year of being open for business, this Etsy shop has made over $600,000 and roughly $117,000 per month in profit from selling mugs. I'm, of course, talking about the side hustle that made me my first $100,000 online, and that's the world of Etsy PR on demand, which is just drop shipping mugs. Now, 9 months ago, I talked about a very similar side hustle, but since then, a lot has changed. Not only do we have dozens of new mug listings that are making five and six figures, but now nearly a year later, with brand new AI tools that can make designs specifically for mugs and the automation tools that I've built to automatically upload and title products for us, combined with the fact that still hardly anyone has tapped into this business model, means that the new year is the perfect time to go over exactly how to start up a print-on-demand mug business from the comfort of your home. It took me about 8 months to hit my first 100k with my own mug.

business business back in 2019. But if I had the tools and knowledge that I'm sharing with you today, it would have happened a lot sooner. Now, for you to really see the potential here and understand how all of this works, take a look at this listing here on Etsy. Now, this is a custom camper mug, so the customers get to come in here and then choose which character they want on their mug, as well as submit a name to be printed right below it. Now, even though this is a super simple graphic, it does extremely well. You can see that it sells anywhere from around 150 up to 500 times per month. By the end of the video, you'll see how we can make mugs just like these. Look at this one, for example, which is just a funny take on this kind of definition-style mug where the customer just changes out their name as the customization. Now, if we look at the stats, you can see that this mug has brought in over $160,000 since it was posted around 9

months ago. Now they're selling hundreds to thousands of mugs each month. That would be a lot of mugs to buy, hold inventory for, print the design on, and ship out to the customers. And that's where the print-on-demand business model comes into play. It's similar to traditional drop shipping, except that you'll work with a supplier like Printify. They offer a ton of different blank mug options that you can sell, like these standard white mugs, these multicolor mugs, black mugs, camper mugs, or even latte mugs. And they're all very affordable, leaving you with a good profit. Printify integrates directly with Etsy, where we'll be selling our mugs, making the entire process super easy. Your job is simply to pick one of the mugs to sell and then upload some kind of design to it, whether that's a custom design, a pre-made text design, or even an AI-generated design, and then list it for sale with a nice-looking mockup, of course. Now, assuming that you sign up using my links from down below, you'll be

able to post to your Etsy store completely for free. Then, when one of Etsy's over 470 million monthly visitors finds your item and then decides to buy it, the order will go straight to Printify. The design that you uploaded will be printed on the mug and shipped directly to the customer without you ever having to open a website or run any ads, open a physical store, or hold any inventory, or anything besides just making the listing. But just for more proof on how well this can actually work, this shop that's selling this mug that we just looked at is selling a lot of items, and they have some other items like ornaments as well, but they have a big catalog of mugs. Now, we already know that their cheapest mug sells for around $22. When you add up the price plus the shipping cost for their cheapest standard 11 oz white mug, that means that after we have it printed and shipped with Printify for around $10, we're left with a $12.20 profit. So, with this shop's 21,000

orders. That's about $259,000 of profit earned over the last 15 months, which comes out to about $177,000 per month of take-home profit. See, I didn't even clickbait as hard as I could have. I'll leave more examples down below. Now that you see how well this can work, there's only three components that we need to run a successful shop like this. First is a shop on Etsy to sell our mugs in. Second, our designs for the mugs, and we'll cover four different strategies for how to get good designs. And third is marketing to get the mugs to sell. But the very first step is setup shop. Now, to save us both time, I built out this free guide that walks you through everything that you need to do, from coming up with a business name, setting up a business email, to opening a Printify account and connecting it to Etsy with 40 free listings. This guide will get you ready to sell and jumpstart your business in 10 minutes or less, completely for free, with the best

discounts and coupon codes already included, so you can download the guide after the video. But with the shop set up, we can move on to the most important component, which is the designs. These are the images that go on the mugs, and there are four different methods that we can use to get these images. But we also have to do a little bit of market research so that we don't waste our time making a bunch of designs that never sell. Now, I mentioned this mug last year, and as you can see, over the last 12 months, it's continued selling quite well, bringing in about $22,000. And all it is is a simple flower wraparound design on a white mug. Now, this design could easily be made using AI. Now, here's another example of this kind of broken wall design with a bookshelf behind it. And to be completely honest, I have no idea who's buying this, but you can see that over the past two months, really, this mug has brought in around $3,000. If you can generate

designs like these in just a few seconds using AI. Then, even if it's not a six-figure mug, it's probably still worth doing. To do this, we could use an AI like Mid Journey or Leonardo AI. Now, I'm going to be using Mid Journey today, and since I've already covered the setup many times before and because it's super easy to use, we'll just jump right into it. To make a wraparound design image, we need to come in and change some of the settings. So, first, we want to change the aspect ratio to 15x7. That'll make a perfect wraparound design for most mugs. Then, we can leave the stylization kind of low. I like leaving weirdness and variety off. I'll do fast mode with stealth on, and we're obviously going to be using Journey version 6, which just came out a few weeks ago. From here, I just have to describe the type of design that I want to make. So, I could just come in and say something like a broken wall revealing a bookshelf behind it, and then

I just have to hit enter, then I can come over into the create tab and just wait a few seconds for it to generate our image. So now you can see that we have four versions of this image that don't look too bad for a start. Now we could obviously come back in and create something new, so we could say a broken hole in the wall revealing a bookshelf on the other side, a dimly lit scene. Now this is just a similar prompt, but it's a little bit different, so we'll get a similar but different result. Now even with that small modification to the prompt, I think these came out a lot better, and personally, I think that they look a lot closer to this design that was already proven to get sales. Now obviously, we could keep playing around with the prompt and dialing it in to get even better images, but the wraparound designs aren't even the best thing. We can make some designs like this one that we looked at earlier do super well with this little cute clip art watercolor.

graphic as the main appeal, and just by having the right prompt, which in this case did take me several tries, we can get very comparable graphics that we can use on our own mugs. Again, we don't want to copy their designs and their listings, but we want to use the elements that are already proven to work, like cute little watercolor graphics. Mid Journey is super capable. The key is just crafting a great prompt, which mostly comes down to describing in detail the type of design or image that you're trying to create. Our bookshelves came out quite nicely. These flower designs look good as well. I made clip art for this bear, the giraffe, and the fox, and I even recreated this retro-style frog. If you guys want to see a full video on how to make designs with Mid Journey, be sure to subscribe and let me know in the comment section below. But with our clip art designs and wraparound designs made, we can save them to a file on our computer to upload to the mugs that we're selling. Besides using AI, the

second easiest method for getting designs is to simply buy them. You're just paying for someone else's artwork that's already been proven to work. For example, this shop is selling mugs with this saying on it that just says, It's fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine. And they're really not doing too bad. This single mug has generated over $10,000. Now, instead of trying to handmake this design for yourself, we can just come and search for it on Etsy. So, if we just make a search for It's fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine. SVG, we should see some results. Here's the original design that they're selling, as well as that other second design that they're selling for A1 and $2 each. Now, a huge bonus here is if you decide to buy these designs later on down the line, once your mug shop starts to take off, you can repurpose these same designs onto a different product like a t-shirt. This one right here has brought in around $30,000. And here's that other design.

that was also selling. That's just now starting to pick up some good traction. Now, you might be spending a couple of dollars per design, but let's say you even bought 100 designs for $200. That could be saving you days or even weeks' worth of work. Some people think that because anyone can buy the design and sell it for themselves, that it won't work if they try to buy it and sell it in their own shop. But the thing is that everybody has that same thought, so nobody actually ends up doing it. And for perspective, even if your version of the product only sells 10 times a year, you're still making your investment back passively every single time it sells for years to come. Now, the third option for getting designs is by far the hardest, and that's by making handmade designs. Here's a handmade design in action. Now, this is a super simple single-word design that probably didn't take too much effort to make, and honestly, for what it is, it isn't performing too bad. Text designs can be very simple, but

here's one that's a little bit different. Now, excuse the profanity, but this is just a funny saying for someone who's retiring. It's a very basic font and just a funny kind of gag retirement gift. But what makes this listing super interesting is if we look at the sales history, you can see within the last 12 months, it's done $76,000. But if we look at the all-time sales history, you can see that since it was posted in June of 2021, it's done about $86,000. But it took over a year and a half before it started picking up any kind of traction. Now, even though this did take an unusual amount of time to start selling, I'm bet they're pretty glad that they did post it back in June of 2021. The goal of pre-made text designs is to get them to sell passively. This is a bit more difficult since you have to anticipate what customers want, get an idea, and then make and stylize the design for them. What I first do is

see what ideas are selling. For example, like this retirement mug. So, I can use the idea for my own mug. Then, I'm just going to use chat GPT and come in and ask it to give me a list of funny trademark-free retirement sayings that I can put on mugs. Then, I'm just going to wait to see what it comes up with. Now, you might have to rerun it several times to get some good results, but out of the ones that it's made, I already like this one: I'm retired; every hour is happy hour. Then, all I have to do is assemble the design. So, I could just come over into Canva, which is probably the easiest design tool to use, and I'll just make a custom canvas. And from here, I just have to paste in my design. Then, I just have to resize it and choose a fun-looking font. So, that took about 30 seconds, and it really doesn't look too bad. And from here, all I have to do is download it so that I can use it on my

mug again. Just remember that none of our designs are going to look super good until it's a finished product packaged into a sellable listing. The design by itself probably doesn't look that good. Making handmade text designs that sell passively is a challenge, but if you do it correctly, it will definitely pay off in the long term. Even though a lot of the shops that we've looked at have had fast success, this is a long-term game that makes long-term money. Now, the fourth and arguably best option for beginners is to sell Custom Designs. Almost every six-figure listing that we've looked at today is a custom listing. That means that you're just offering some kind of template that the customer can modify, and then upon ordering, the customer will give you the details that they want filled in on their own mug. So, for this one, a customer sends you a photo of their pet, and you cut it out and put it on the mug, and it's made around $91,000 this year. This one is just kind

of a favorite child gag gift where the customer is just sending over a list of names, and they fill it in on the mug, and this one's done $77,000 this year. This one's definitely the simplest of them all where the customer just sends a photo and some text for the mug, and you can see that it's done about $103,000 this year. Making custom designs is super easy, so all I have to do is just create a new board, just do a 4,000 by 4,000, and then we have to get some kind of image to use. So here, maybe we'll look for a family photo. Now what we can do is we can just filter by photos and look at all of the different options here. So maybe we like this one. Okay, doesn't look too bad. Now we just have to add some text explaining what it is. So we can add some text to the top that says your photo here, and then we could duplicate it, and we can move some text to the bottom that says your text here, and

essentially, this is a finished design. It took me about 10 seconds to make, and this is a custom product. Now, obviously, there are a lot of ways that we could make this look more visually appealing and probably get more sales, but as a start, this is not bad. Now, from here, I could even duplicate this page, and then I could search for something like a pet photo. And here, you can just look through all of the different pet photos that we could use to just target our mug a little bit differently. So, instead, maybe we want to use this dog, so now we're targeting pet owners instead of people who want a family photo on their mug. Again, we can use this process to keep creating a bunch of different custom designs to target all different kinds of interests that might want to buy our products. Even just a simple font change makes a world of difference and makes this a lot more likely to sell. If you wanted to get crazy with this, you could even target more specific people with your custom product products. So, for example, you

could Target specific dog breeds, or you could even Target cat people instead of dog people. Now, I told you earlier that we'd be able to make mug designs like this one that are already proven to sell super well, which is just a cutout of a Pet's face. So, for example, if we had a design like this, we can just select the photo right inside of Canva, hit edit photo, and then use the background remover tool. You can see that it cuts out the background, and so now this is what would be printed on the mug. Of course, you could use a website like PhotoP, which is a free Photoshop alternative, to get better cutouts of the pets and even apply some cool stylization and effects to them. But this is all you would need to get started. Now, I haven't mentioned this up until this point, but one of the things that all bestselling shops on Etsy have in common is a lot of listings. The thing is that getting the design, uploading it to the products, posting it for sale, it's all a

time-consuming process. That's why I invested $20,000 to build the product uploader program. This allows us to select the mug that we're selling and bulk upload designs without any additional user input. This takes a process that would normally take hours and reduces it to an automated task. Once it's done, all you have to do is hit publish. As for the price, even though it was expensive for me to build, I'm giving it to you for free. You'll find a link for it at the end of the video. Now, in order to actually get sales, we have to get our mugs in front of the shopping customer and then get them to click buy. First of all, customers are never going to swarm to buy our products if they don't look appealing. We have to get our listings to look less like this sad, boring, and lifeless, and more like this quality, premium, and professional. Since this is a proven-to-work mockup that's generated hundreds of sales for this design, we want to see if we can find a

similar mockup or the exact same one to display our own designs on to generate sales. So we can come to Etsy and make a search for mug mockups and see what the results are. Now immediately I can actually see the exact same mockup listed right here and it's for sale for just $2. So for $2 I can get the exact same mockup that this winning listing is using and proven to get sales in my own business. Putting the designs that you've made on top of the mockup is another extremely time-consuming process. So instead of doing it manually and wasting hours creating the product images I've got two tutorials on my channel as well as a mockup script which allows you to automatically generate mockups for the products you're posting for sale again without any user interaction required. You can check those videos out and the download for the script at the end of this video. Now the mockups are only one part of the process because we still have to get our products in front of customers. To do that we have two options.

first is to pay for Etsy ads. You could run a $5 or so budget per day and try driving some traffic that way. The good thing about running Etsy ads is you only pay for the ad after a user has clicked on it and interacted with your listing. This means if you have good designs, then running ads could be profitable. But I've found a much more effective method for me. See, instead of paying for ads on a platform that's driving their own traffic, why not just utilize their search algorithm? Now, I also did a full video on this, but it mostly just comes down to using algorithm-friendly SEO in our listings and then making a lot of listings. This is the exact strategy that I've used to grow my own seven-figure shops. Now, that was a lot to cover, so hopefully, you're still tracking and hopefully, you ConEd that we've been able to make a lot of high-quality mugs. But if you follow the link in my description and come over to my website, you'll see all of the links.

that you need from this video, as well as an option to join the Discord Community that's completely free. Being around people in the same position as you is extremely useful and helpful, and you can do things like get your shop reviewed by other people who are also starting up their own shops. It's a super helpful resource if you're looking at taking this business model seriously. Let me know what style videos you want to see next, and as always, stay dangerous.

Make $40,202 Per Month Selling Mugs With A.I.

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

Alek

Successful Etsy Mug Business: A Step-by-Step Guide

An Etsy shop specializing in drop shipping mugs has generated over $600,000 in just over a year, with new AI tools and automation making the business model even more accessible.

Customizable mug designs are driving sales, with some listings bringing in over $160,000 in just nine months.

Printify's affordable mug options and direct integration with Etsy streamline the process, allowing entrepreneurs to launch their mug business without holding inventory or running ads.

Profiting from Mug Sales: A Step-by-Step Guide

The speaker has earned $259,000 in profit over 15 months from selling mugs on Etsy, with a monthly take-home profit of $177,000.

The three key components for a successful shop are setting up an Etsy store, creating mug designs, and marketing the products.

The speaker offers a free guide to help with the setup and provides strategies for generating mug designs using AI.

Using AI, like Mid Journey, can generate comparable graphics for mug designs with the right prompts.

Buying proven artwork from shops, like popular sayings, can save time and effort while offering the potential for passive income.

Handmade designs are the hardest to create but can eventually lead to significant sales and passive income over time.

Selling Custom Mug Designs: A Step-by-Step Guide

Using successful retirement mug ideas as inspiration, the process starts with generating funny, trademark-free sayings using ChatGPT.

Designing the mug in Canva is quick and easy, with a focus on resizing and choosing a fun font.

Offering custom designs, where customers provide their own photos and text, has proven to be the most lucrative option, with some listings making over $100,000 in a year.

The design process for custom mugs can be quick and simple, with the option to duplicate pages and target different audiences using various photos.

Changing the font and targeting specific interests, like dog breeds or cat owners, can increase the likelihood of making sales.

To streamline the process, a product uploader program has been developed to bulk upload designs, and the key to success lies in creating appealing listings that attract customers.

Mug mockups can be easily found on Etsy for as low as $2, offering a time-saving solution for product images.

The speaker provides tutorials and a mockup script to automate the mockup generation process.

To drive traffic to listings, they suggest using Etsy ads or leveraging the platform's search algorithm through algorithm-friendly SEO and multiple listings.