One mistake a lot of people make when selling t-shirts and gifts online through a company like Cafepress is that they slap the same image on t-shirts as they do on mugs as they do on clocks as they do on buttons. The problem is that different products have different usable spaces and slapping the same image on every potential product leads to some ugly looking products!

The solution to this is simple - you have to have different images for different types of products.

Let’s look at an example of how slapping a single image on different items looks. Here is Mr. Happy Clown on a variety of products from CafePress:

Mr. Happy Clown was designed as a 10″x10″ 200 DPI non-transparent image which as you can see means that on the black t-shirt makes an ugly white background around the graphic, looks good on a standard t-shirt, leaves a lot of white space on the oval and bumper stickers and uses a very small amount of the available space on hats as well. The problem from the last two types of products happens because you are trying to fit a square image onto a non square image space.

To solve these problems you would, create a transparent version of this graphic for the black and other dark colored shirts, and special designs for odd shaped objects such as oval stickers and hats. How you fill in the “white space” is up to you but it should be considered in order to make your images not only appealing to potential buyers but also allow you to offer a full range of products for each design.

Remember there is no accounting for taste and just because you don’t think your customers would like a bumper sticker doesn’t mean you are not losing sales because you do not have them.

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J.J. Jackson is President of Land of the Free Studios, Inc. and Cafepress “Top Shopkeeper”. He has been selling t-shirts on-line since 2004 and is the owner of the T-Shirt Entrepreneur, a site dedicated to helping people get involved in the T-shirt Economy. He is also the owner of Funny When Wet T-shirts, American Infidel Tshirts as well as many other online t-shirt and gift stores.