This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, what's up? Welcome back to Side Hustle School. I'm Chris Guillebeau. I've been getting a lot of requests to talk a bit more about print on demand, which is a service or basically a whole industry of companies that will print, ship and fulfill items that you design like t-shirts, mugs, iPhone cases, all kinds of other stuff. We will look at that today in the context of a broader question.
That question is why would you stop a side hustle that's already made $5,000 in profit and can probably keep humming along when the new way, the way that you switched to has a much lower profit margin? Why would you do that? Well, you might wanna do it if you want to work less and you value your time more or if you're looking ahead to the future. Hold your horses, that story right after this. [Music]
Krista Fabregas has had a number of jobs and side hustles over the years, including a period where she worked at NASA while building multiple e-commerce websites on the side.
She was in the right place at the right time for one of those websites she started and sales peaked at more than a million dollars one year before slowing down. Krista now writes for an online business directory by day and runs the horse junkie on the side. Now the horse junkie is an online store for, well, I know this is shocking, fans of horses and Krista sells t-shirts, mugs and other items with the tagline, barn life is better. Among her many interests and abilities, she's a horseback rider and a former graphic designer. So the horse junkie is a fun creative outlet that matches both her passion and her skills.
Now, as you'd expect, Krista loves horses. On her about page, she writes, what better way to express and celebrate this crazy addiction than through fashionably fun horse and barn themed tees and tops. Well, that's what she does. She sells t-shirts and other items, but she's tried doing it two different ways. And that's what I want us to focus on.
The first way is the traditional way. When she started this project, she set up her own screen print shop or at least her own screen print operation. It's actually pretty affordable to do that. It costs her about $2,000 for all the equipment and supplies she needed. Her first year, she sold $8,000 in t-shirts, clearing over $5,000 in net income.
So that's a pretty great profit margin. But this episode isn't about screen printing because she recently stopped doing that to change the whole model of the hustle, unbeknownst to most potential customers or horse fans who stumble on her website. What did she do? Well, she switched from screen printing, all those horse junkie and barn life is better shirts, to using a print on demand company to do it. Now there are a lot of different print on demand companies.
I'll link up a list of them for you in the show notes, but they all have a pretty similar model. And the way it works is you upload a design to these company's websites, and then whenever you want to make a t-shirt or a mug or some other item that uses that design, the print on demand company will either print or create or otherwise manufacture that item. And they'll do that on an individual basis, which is why it's called print on demand or POD for short. Now there are some pretty big pros and cons to using this model, which is why I was so happy to find a horse junkie story to illustrate this for us. Let's start with the negative.
By using a print on demand company, Krista is gonna make far less money for each t-shirt or other item that she sells. She's going from a very high profit margin to one that is just decent. So that's the negative. Now here's the positive. The main positive is they do everything for you.
You don't have to invest in a screen printing operation and set it up in your apartment. You don't have to go to the post office to ship out all your barn life is better shirts. When customers place an order, that order goes directly to the print on demand company, they fulfill it, they keep their share of the profit, then they transfer your share to your bank account. Now obviously that whole process is worth quite a lot. The other tremendous advantage of a print on demand service is that you can experiment with no risk or at least very little risk.
If you have three or four designs and you're not sure which one is better, well, if you're screen printing yourself, you might have to make that decision before you start taking orders. With print on demand, you would just upload all four and see which one people choose. You can also easily move into selling other items. So I mentioned mugs and iPhone cases. I don't know much about screen printing, but I'd imagine there's some different equipment involved when you're working with all those different materials.
Again, the print on demand company will do that for you. So Krista has just made this change recently and already feels better about making less money because even though it's less, now she's making money that essentially makes itself. She doesn't have to do anything for these orders. With whatever time she has to devote to this project, she can now spend that time on all the other aspects of it, whether it's creating new designs or blogging or experimenting with Facebook ads or whatever it is. But hey, don't take it from me.
Here's the verdict straight from the horse's mouth. Krista says, I don't necessarily see this providing the high income of my big previous e-commerce successes, but it's fun. And the switch to print on demand makes it easy to run. Best of all, I now spend my Saturdays riding horses instead of printing, packing and mailing t-shirts. [Music]
While Krista is clearly more than a one-trick pony, I wanted to focus on her decision to change horses in midstream and switch to the print on demand service.
Now, interestingly, you could flip this entire story and tell it the other way around, starting with the print on demand service and then coming to the realization that your profit margins would be much higher if you invested $2,000 in the screen printing equipment and you did it all yourself. So this is why it's so important to have a clear understanding of your goals of your goals, your values, your priorities, because depending on where you are in life and what you're trying to accomplish, you might very well say, well, I don't wanna give 70% of the purchase price or whatever it is over to this other company. If a customer comes to my website and purchases something, I wanna keep that money. And if that's your choice, that's totally valid. But for Krista at least, she thinks this new way will be better for her in the long run, or at least she's willing to experiment and see what happens.
Side hustle school listeners saddle up, don't look a gift horse in the mouth. The show is here to help you. I try to bring you these stories every day with unbridled enthusiasm, saddled with the responsibility of distilling lessons that will help you bring home the oats. But still, it's really up to you. As I say, every day you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink.
You've got to step up to stable yourself. If you'd like to learn more about how print on demand works, hoof it on over to sidehustleschool.com/131. That's 131. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'm actually recording late at night.
It's been a long day here, so I'm gonna hit the hay. But I'll be back again tomorrow, fresh and ready to ride. I'm Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
