When I started this project, I was not completely new to Merch. I had access to my brother’s Merch account for about a year but I had only ever uploaded one design. My brother had been working for Amazon a few years ago on the software team that actually developed and launched Merch. For this reason, I gained early access. However, it was not until this learning goal that I was able to put appropriate time into it and fully experiment with the service. I remember my brother telling me that when Merch had first launched, the early creators on the site were making tens of thousands of dollars every month. While the profit margins have decreased since then, my brother explained to me that his friend that still works on amazon continues to make around $30,000 a year doing Merch. This idea of securing a passive income intrigued me and made me want to pursue my goal even more.

When I first began to create designs for Merch, I started by using my own photography to put on the clothing. I realized that this could be a great way of taking advantage of my photography in a unique way that I had never considered before. I mostly stuck with New York City street photography and began creating clothing that I thought I could see myself wearing. This early process mostly consisted of me playing around with Adobe Illustrator and learning how to manipulate my photography in cool ways. Here are some of my early designs:

While these sweatshirts were cool to me, they were not selling after a few days. I decided to create more New York themed T-shirts, but expanding to images that were not just my own photography. I created a series of shirts that just said, “New York” across the chest with different images of the NYC subway in the background.

I was getting faster and faster at creating new designs. I was experimenting with Illustrator in ways that I had not before. The two main methods I went about honing my Illustrator skills were with youtube tutorials, as well as calling my sister for help. (My sister is a professional graphic designer). The youtube videos I watched ranged from how to save files specifically for Merch, to more technical skills such as how to create clipping masks.

These youtube videos helped develop my skills and allowed me to ultimately create more intricate designs. However, after all this initial work, I still had not been selling products. While the hours I was putting into this project were still satisfying, as I was able to express myself artistically, I was failing at one of the major parts of my learning goal. I failed at creating a viable business model with products that would actually sell. When I spoke to my brother about my designs, he suggested that I think of a niche market that could be marketable. He explained that his friend that was making 30k a year would constantly target new groups of people and make designs accordingly. After brainstorming different niches to enter, I landed on the idea of greek life apparel. Being surrounded by greek life every day, I realized how much people like wearing their respective greek organizations letters and logos. I was ready to attack this new idea and began uploading very basic designs of fraternities and sororities. I started by looking up the largest fraternities and sororities by number of members nationally. Therefore I started with organizations like Sigma Alpha Epsilon, and Sigma Chi. Here were some of my designs:

I started adding sororities into the mix as well. After a week or so of religiously uploading designs, I began seeing my first sales. This business model seemed promising. Once I saw that this was a legitimate market that had serious potential, I buckled down and started creating a multitude of designs every day. I was spending between 1–3 hours a day for a few weeks in a row. After becoming this serious about Merch, I realized that I needed to plan more. I knew that I had greater potential and therefore wanted to achieve the most success possible. In order to learn more about Merch I watched countless Youtube videos about the best methods and practices. I learned that black is almost always the best selling color among all t-shirt colors. I also learned that offering more than 3 colors for users to choose from is often paralyzing and leads to fewer sales. Keeping this new advice in mind, I was able to change my approach to Merch and improve my sales. The next big development in my Merch advancements was when I learned how to properly and efficiently analyze the sales of my products. I found an instructional video on Reddit that explained how to download an excel template that would generate graphs and charts to help visualize Merch sales. This document broke down the sales, returns, revenue, profit, designs, colors, and just about any other categorical data. Therefore, I could see exactly what worked and didn’t work in my business plan.

The first graph shows the breakdown of each product, so I know what types of shirts were selling the best. The latter chart reveals the most successful colors that I had. I concluded that selling my products for $16.99 produced the best sales and that sororities T’s in black, white, and pink had by far the most significant sales. I shifted all of my focus towards sororities and began creating multiple designs for every existing sorority. Quickly, I began making significantly more and more money per day. In the period between February 20th and March 6th, I was averaging $65 a day in profit with my best day being $93.11. The success was completely addictive and I could not stop designing and uploading.

After a few weeks of this great success, I began to wonder how the success came so quickly. I began researching the designing and selling of fraternity and sorority t-shirts. I quickly found a few few different resources that claimed that all greek organizations were protected by trademarks. While it made sense to me, I was somewhat shocked because all my designs were having no trouble passing Amazon’s advanced copyright and trademark detection. Before pushing every design to market, Amazon uses AI to detect if a design is illegal. Since I never had an issue, I suspected that what I was doing was legal. I then researched what happens to Amazon accounts that break copyright and trademark law. Multiple different threads confirmed that Amazon has the right to shut down any account without warning and not pay the user that broke the law. Since Amazon does not pay its Merch users until 30 days after the end of the month from which the product was sold in, I had still not been paid a single dollar. However, I was owed over $1700. Therefore, because I am a moral, law abiding citizen (and because I wanted to ensure my account wouldn’t get shut down before I got paid), I removed all of my greek designs from Amazon. It was incredibly disappointing to essentially throw out all the hard work I had put in over the past month or so. I learned that all good things come to an end, especially when they are illegal.