Is Selling Shirts a Good Side Hustle?

by John Reese

We’ve all seen it.  Scrolling through our FYP on TikTok, “I wish I had known About This” or “easy way to make $10,000 a day” or whatever claim is being offered by some creator desperate for likes.

Some of us know better and some of us still need to learn!  Can you make good money doing shirts as a side hustle or even as a full time business?  Absolutely!  Is it easy, not really.  The last one of these Tik Toks I saw actually shocked me which isn’t very easy to do.  I nearly broke my ankle running for the comments to see if people were actually buying into this.  To my surprise and delight, they were not.  Most comments took this creator to task and rightfully so, it isn’t that easy.  

This particular creator was advocating using print on demand to sell on Etsy.  The majority of commenters rightfully pointed out that he would have to sell these shirts well above competitive pricing to see any profit and his production time would also be far behind the competition.  In an already saturated market, your print on demand side hustle would be dead on arrival!

So what is the answer, how can you make it work?  There is so much to learn and unpack with managing your business and adding product listings.  Understanding how to correctly title your product and keyword research is a never-ending and nuanced journey in and of itself.

In this blog series, I don’t want to get into product listings, I don’t have enough excedrin for that.  I would like to go over some of the basic technologies and techniques to make shirts and fill orders.  Controlling your own production allows for a higher profit margin, faster shipping times and better quality control.

In the next blog installments we will take a realistic look at different ways to make shirts.