The print on demand reality hit harder than expected last week.
This week, it doubled down.
I got sick on Thursday evening — more or less right after hitting publish on last week’s post — and I’ve been sick for most of the week since. I’m still not fully back, which naturally slowed everything down.
This hasn’t been a productive week in the traditional sense.
But it has been a clarifying one.
What actually got done
Despite low energy, the project didn’t stop completely.
I’ve uploaded more designs and now have 13 designs live.
I’ve also started looking into creating TikTok videos using Canva — very early, very exploratory.
Nothing dramatic.
But not nothing either.
The real surprise: time
What has become very clear this week is how much I underestimated the time it takes to upload designs.
Each upload involves a long list of small decisions:
- writing a solid title
- crafting a description
- finding relevant tags
- choosing a default color
- excluding colors that don’t work with the design
- dealing with platform-specific requirements
On top of that, there’s the constant back-and-forth:
designs that aren’t the right size,
backgrounds that don’t work,
wrong file formats (PNG instead of JPG),
small adjustments that send you back to Canva — export again, upload again.
So far, 13 designs have taken two to three hours to upload — and that’s on just one platform.
And that part matters.
Those 13 designs are live on only a single platform so far. I haven’t even started uploading them elsewhere yet.
Print on Demand is not passive — at least not in the beginning
I’ve known this in theory.
But now it’s black on white.
Print on Demand is not passive in the early stages.
It’s administrative. It’s repetitive. It’s full of micro-decisions.
Designing is not the bottleneck.
Uploading is.
When you start doing the math — 13 designs taking several hours on one platform — it becomes obvious that uploading to six or more platforms will take a significant amount of time.
This doesn’t mean the project is wrong.
But it does mean the original assumptions need to be recalibrated.
Print on Demand Reality: Re-examining the goals
This is where I’ve started to question my initial targets.
Not out of frustration — but because reality is now providing data.
- Is 100 designs realistic within the current timeframe?
- And if so, is 100 dollars in revenue a reasonable expectation tied to that number?
One thing is clear:
100 designs is not 100 files.
It’s hundreds of decisions.
A small but important step forward
One concrete thing I did this week was ordering two of my own t-shirt designs.
I also already have two shirts I ordered back in 2024, when I first experimented with Print on Demand. I’ve barely used them — not because I didn’t like them, but because I’ve been careful with them.
This time, I want to look at all four properly. Not just as designs, but as physical products: quality, fit, print, and how they actually feel to wear. I look forward to showing them here later.
Closing thoughts
This week wasn’t about output.
It was about calibration.
Understanding what this project actually demands — in time, energy, and attention — before pushing harder.
Next week, the focus is simple:
continue uploading,
see if the process speeds up,
and start identifying where time is best spent.
I’ll keep going.
We’ll see how this pans out.