Redbubble Blues
Redbubble was the first print-on-demand site I ever tried. I can't for the life of me remember when I had first heard or found out about it--the company's been around since 2006; that's quite a while--but I think I decided that I wanted to use it somewhere between 2019-2021. I was fed up with an ongoing situation and wanted to pivot over to something else. I had already said for the longest time that I wanted to get back to revising my characters and selling original art, so, this was a good time to do something productive with that, instead of being upset.
One of the biggest draws to Redbubble was how beginner friendly it was. You could join it for free and have your own storefront on the website! The other features were nice too:
- The ability to protect your work by adding a watermark to previews
- Getting to adjust the placement and size of your design
- Having the options to create patterns out of your design
- Providing mockups to give you and your customers an idea of how big your image would be printed
- A good variety of items for sellers to choose from
- Getting to disable certain items if your image doesn't work well with them and being able to swap the main design out with an alternative version to make it look better
- Allowing sellers to copy all of their information from a submitted design incase you want to make a similar listing, and save you the time consuming work of literally starting all over again with each one
- The ability to sort listings into collections to organize designs that share themes with one another
It was a pretty sweet deal! How could I resist?
Somewhere in the midst of doing research and creating my account, I drew my initial Sweet Sheep sketches, and later modified one of them to test what I could do with RB. After getting a decent amount of designs into my shop, I was excited. I couldn't WAIT to get closer to making this long-cherished dream of mine a reality.
When I launched my KTCW pages, things didn't go how I had hoped...though, I'm not really sure why I expected all that much after starting a business during a global pandemic...where most people would be trying to save money...it probably wasn't the best idea, but I was just trying to get my start somewhere. I hold onto big ideas a lot, for a long time, and I didn't want to wait any longer with this one. I guess I figured that people were doing a lot of online shopping anyway, and thought it was still worth a shot. 🤷🏾♀️
I did sell a handful of things...one was from someone I was unfamiliar with, a few were from people I knew and the rest of the purchases were from me testing my items. 😅 While it probably wasn't anywhere near what most were getting out of the platform, I was still happy that anyone would want to buy something from me in the first place. I was hopeful that my sales would get better if I kept making designs and promoting myself.
But then, in April of 2023, every struggling seller on the site was hit with some terrible news:
Redbubble released a blog post announcement about introducing artist account tiers. Depending on which of the three tiers you were in, the company was going to take a much larger cut of your profits with each sale. I was in the Standard tier. The lowest tier. This new 90% artist margin applied to me. 😐
As someone who was already getting stressed out about my reach on Instagram, I was devastated. How was I going to turn my shop into reliable income at this rate? I worked too hard putting things together for something like this to happen! Other artists who were also put in the Standard Tier, made their displeasure known through starting a boycott on social media. In their posts, they expressed that artists deserve better and advised their fellow sellers to close their shops to send a point to the company. I decided to do the same.
I put together an IG post letting everyone know what was happening and how I didn't see the point in keeping my shop opened under these conditions. I also mentioned that I was looking for another POD site to take its place, but RB was hard to compete with...there weren't a lot of sites that made the process as easy as they did. There were exclusive items I had on there that I wasn't able to duplicate due to the platform's unique features. I created Reels and YouTube Shorts to bring even more awareness about the sale I was throwing before my shop closure, in case anyone was especially eyeing these listings. I even edited the descriptions to explain what was going to happen and included a list of discount codes at the end. But none of these things helped to boost my sales.
I can't remember if there was any way for me to directly notify those who had favorited my designs to see if they'd wanted to get something before it was gone. If there was, I would have had to do it individually, which would have taken who knows how long. I just accepted that this whole "farewell sale" was a lost cause. Before May 1st arrived, I had changed my banner to announce my plans going forward and where I could be found. Once the day was here, I disabled everything in my shop, removed my link to it on my main Carrd, and added a "🔒" to my full shop list to indicate that was closed.
The second POD site I was using in conjunction with Redbubble, was Teepublic and as soon as I heard about the tier news, I knew it was only a matter of time before RB's sister company would implement them too. I thought I'd have to go through shutting another storefront down, but when their version of this system rolled out, it was more forgiving. I ranked higher this time around and decided to stay there. It's features and catalogue isn't as expansive in comparison to RB, but purely because of the artist tiers, I would recommend them for beginners instead, or encourage you to look for other alternatives.
So...yeah. This part of my POD business attempt, ultimately became a letdown. (._.; )
Like I said earlier, part of the failure is my own fault. That just comes with trying new things and starting out for the first time. But, gosh...RB and Instagram, who got rid of tabs in their search a month after the tier nonsense, made it worst...😒
While a combination of these happenings did get me down for a while, I'm ready to start getting back to the plan. Since fleeing Redbubble, I got back to setting up my Zazzle account, discovered Bonfire, and it's very likely that I might be joining another POD site sometime this year. 👀
Now that I've been thinking hard about my time on Redbubble to create this post, there is part of me that sorta misses it. 😕 I thought about possibly returning if things get better. But after recently checking to see how other artists currently feel about the site...I don't see that happening anytime soon. 😬
Well...until then, good-bye, Redbubble! Thanks for the...learning-experience stepping stone!
Let’s see how it goes!
~*K-Tee ✍🏾👩🏾🐹