How to Start Print on Demand from $0 in 2025 | Jon Law

So when I was back in middle school when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, this YouTube channel was my outlet for health and fitness videos. So I posted videos like these. And I wanted something that represented my brand materially that my followers could use, that I could use. And so my solution was, like many creators, merch. And that's what started my journey into print-on-demand. Whereas I didn't have much money at the time, so my solution was either, okay, I can go and purchase upfront a large amount of clothing items, right, like the sweatpants, the hoodies, the shirts, and whatnot. Alternatively, I can go to a print-on-demand company, I can put no money down, and I can get pretty wide distribution right there. So that's what I did. I went and I listed on Merch by Amazon, and you can see some of the resulting merch items that came out of that. And so coming off of the best side hustles in 2025 video, in this video, I wanted to do a deep dive into starting print-on-demand in 2025 with no money. Now, I'm not saying that this model is for everyone, but I do suggest watching through this video if you aren't familiar with the print-on-demand model. It's useful whether you're pursuing a sole like merchandise business, or whether the merchandise, not just clothes, but other kinds as well, that you produce through print-on-demand can be used to complement a pre-existing business. For example, a e-commerce or a retail business. And so if you're not familiar with print-on-demand, it's all really in the name, and it just means that when someone demands or orders or purchases a product, only then is it actually created. And the beauty of that model is it means you don't have to order merchandise in advance, right? And you don't have to deal with actual product creation or with shipping or with a lot of the cost and time and effort intensive parts of the standard kind of e-commerce or just product creation as a whole model. For example, if I own a, say, dog walking business, and the people who I walk dogs for want, say, clothing, or let's say a coffee mug that represents my brand, I can go and just create designs and list those designs with a print-on-demand distributor or manufacturer. And all I have to do is list the designs. And thereafter, right, the people who I walk dogs for can go to various websites, whether that's mine or a third party, and then they can purchase those items and then the print-on-demand company manages putting the design on the product and then shipping it to the end client. Now, throughout this video and the walkthrough we'll do of the product creation process, we'll be using the platform Gelato. One of the big pitfalls of traditional print-on-demand, for example, back when I did it in my earlier years, is that orders take a very long time to arrive. And Gelato has the world's largest print-on-demand production network. And what that means is that 90% of all the customer orders through Gelato are produced locally and 90% arrive within five days of being ordered. So that especially is a massive selling point to me versus other print-on-demand platforms. Also, many people associate print-on-demand with only t-shirts or whatnot or hats, but Gelato has over 150 products in their catalog, which we'll take a look at in a minute. And they integrate into all of the major e-commerce platforms, so Etsy, Amazon, TikTok, WooCommerce, and more. And as per the print-on-demand model, you only pay for what you sell and there's no monthly charge or subscription, so it's completely free to use. It's for those reasons and others that we'll touch on that we'll be using Gelato throughout this video and walkthrough. And if you want to follow along throughout this video, you can get 50% off your first order that's created within two days of creating your account, or just, you know, try Gelato for free by going to gelato.com forward slash John, that's J-O-N. Again, that's gelato.com slash John, or just go to the top link in the description. And now I want to touch briefly on the advantages of print-on-demand versus other models so you can better evaluate whether this is for you. So again, one of the big advantages is that it doesn't cost any money to actually start. There's a lot of businesses, whether we talk on this channel or others, or just businesses that are generally popular where realistically you do actually need money to get started with them. Whether that's monthly charges, whether it's inventory costs, you're going to have to put up, you know, a few hundred bucks, a few grand, or maybe more than that to get started. That doesn't mean this business is easy per se. It just means that it's a different model, which may be more open to you if you aren't starting with any capital. And number two, logistics and shipping is completely handled and that means you don't have to worry about managing actual inventory or storing it. You don't have to worry about shipping. That's 1,000% just done for you. And so I think generally there are two ways you can proceed with a print-on-demand model. The first, again, we touched on this briefly, is that a print-on-demand model complements a pre-existing business. So let's say you have a business where people may want to buy some kind of merchandise or some kind of product that relates to the business. That right there is a just low-hanging fruit opportunity if clients of that pre-existing business would be interested in some of these print-on-demand creations. Alternatively, if you want to start your own print-on-demand business where it's purely about the products that you're creating and selling those, then it's 1,000% only a marketing and branding game, right? That's because you don't have to manage anything on the product side. And what I mean by that is if the product is completely created for you, you don't have to manage inventory operations or whatnot. It really comes down to, are you branding the underlying product successfully? So are your designs appealing? And then can you market them successfully? Can you reach people who want them and convince them to buy your products profitably? That has its downsides. It also has its upsides in that it is simple and it's straightforward. It doesn't make it easy, but it is simple enough in that, okay, what are we creating and how do we market it? That's the entire business. If purely print-on-demand is the business, as opposed to, again, that kind of complementing a pre-existing business model is what you're going with. Okay, so now I wanna get started with the actual tutorial or walkthrough of how exactly you can get started with print-on-demand next year. And to do that, I'm actually going to do this myself with an idea that I have for design. And then I'm gonna go through the stages of creating the designs, listing them, and whatnot. And so any print-on-demand model is going to start with the concept for the designs or the products that you're creating. And I'll tell you what mine is. So I'm a student at Boston University currently, and I think that the merch designs for BU are not exactly creative. And I think there's a lot of room in terms of what students might want to wear, or just really fun designs to be created that represent BU, but also don't actually infringe upon BU trademarks. And what I'm gonna start out with is capital BU burnt out, because BU is a very kind of academic school where it's kind of a running joke among the student body that they're burnt out from school. So I think that would be fun for students to buy in apparel form, and also especially as kind of posters, because it's kind of this novelty item. Now, I think what's nice about that is that there's existing demand among the student body, and I know how to reach the student body. So I wanna create a design, and that's kind of the whole concept here that just meets that existing demand among consumers where I already have the marketing and branding piece down. So now we need to actually create those designs. So let's go jump onto my computer. Okay, so what I did first, just to save time on creating these designs, is I went to this website where you can generate print-on-demand images. And then the three I like here are this little burnout zone one here just because of the text and the way that all looks, and then this little blue one on the right just because of the electricity. And then I like just the color design, I think, on the bottom left. So I'm gonna download these images and pull them into Photoshop, and then I'm gonna start working on the design so I can get them how I like. Okay, so I now have my poster designs in Photoshop, and then I'm going to do some work, primarily to remove graphics and really make the DU stand out, again, without infringing on the copyrighted material here, to really get these how I want. Also, for any Photoshop users here, I don't know if you guys have been seeing the recent kind of quick actions here that are all AI-driven and whatnot, but there is a pretty big assortment here that is really fun to play around with. Okay, so I wanna keep these designs fairly simple, so I'm going to stick this, really just keep it looking like this, although I may play around with the colors of the DU there, and I'll get onto these two. Now, I think what's pretty cool about graphic design nowadays is that you can use tools like Photoshop, but there also is so much just AI graphic design support out there now. So if you wanna get into print-on-demand and you don't wanna create your own designs in Photoshop or Photopea or a similar platform, you can use tools like Canva or just GPT and DALI and whatnot, right? There is a lot of just really cool technology out there now. Okay, so it's been a few more minutes in Photoshop, and we are back, where, again, I'm focusing on simplicity for all of these designs and also things that just kind of subtly speak to the view. And again, I'm imagining these all as posters, not as designs for clothing or whatnot. So I'm going to export these, and then we'll go check out the Gelato website. And one quick thing as well, you will need different aspect ratios or image sizes depending on the type of print-on-demand product you're going with. So what I suggest is just to have images like these that you can resize very easily, and you can also just remove the backgrounds of, et cetera, so you can export those and resize them as per the image that, or excuse me, as per the product that you're trying to create. Okay, now, so this is what the Gelato website and platform looks like. So print-on-demand for your e-commerce business. Again, this is what I was saying, that 90% of orders do arrive within five days. There's also very good prices, which we'll take a look at in a minute, and really the best compared to other platforms. And there's 24-7 support, which I really like about Gelato, and they really do feel like your business partner in this. So I'll sign in right here. Okay, and then this is what the homepage looks like now that you're signed in. So if you wanna get started and be on this video, you can see some of the tutorials right here. Now on the left over here, we can go to the product catalog, and that's where we can see those 150 plus products that I mentioned. So for example, we have different categories, men's clothing, as is kind of associated with print-on-demand, but also a number of other products, right? So we have wall art, calendars, cards, photo books, hats, stationery, and business, which I especially like. And then brand-wise, you can also choose from a number of different actual clothing materials. And what we're going to focus on initially for the designs we've just created is going to be the posters. So I'll just search for that. So there's obviously a lot of different kinds here, and let's also just note the prices. So we can get those for anywhere from six to looks like $15 per, just depending on the poster type. So if I want to sell those, let's say a 2X, you know, I'm looking at somewhere between 10 and 20, maybe $25, which I think is a good price range for students. And if we line the pricing up here, and I really do want to emphasize this with other popular platforms, just going off the size and the paper material quality, right, Gelato is a lot cheaper. So with that said, we're going to proceed with a few of these, and then we have to actually put the designs on the posters. And to do so, we're going to click create product in the top right, and then create multiple products. And then I just created a resized poster design for the second artboard. So we're going to proceed with this image right here. Then we'll just hit continue in the top right. And now we can see what this design looks like on wall art, aka posters. So I do like how these look. And what's great as well is that I can select a number of different products to create simultaneously. So for example, I can go with the classic poster paper, museum quality paper, and then I'll go with a wooden framed poster as well. And let's look at a few more of these. Let's go with the semi-glossy paper, wood framed as well. And then I'll just select continue as well. Although just note, you can select between other products here as well. And then mock-ups are essentially just your design in a sales worthy kind of photo so that people can see what it would look like if they purchased it. So I'm going to look at a few of these and just select a few that I like. Okay, now what I'm going to do next is just hit continue. And then we're going to fill out the details for the products and just switching between them here. Now, obviously this is all filled out already. I just will add a few little touches to make it mine. Okay, so I filled out all the details and then I'm just going to click continue and then we can set up the prices. So this is where you can see how much it costs and also your profit margin. For example, I can see right here that this is a 50% profit margin and the default is going to be set at 15%. So I can sell this, like I said, for 25 bucks is roughly what I'm aiming for for the cheaper poster. And so I can sell this for $25 and make a 43% margin, which is pretty good. So it costs $14 to make another $5 to ship and then the $11 or so there is profit. So what that means if this is a business that I'm investing myself in is that I essentially have $11 of marketing budget to go and spend. Now, if I can spend $5 to get a customer on ads or with content for paying people, then I get that net, take home five and a half dollars per product. We can review the different products we created and then click save as templates. Okay, so now these products are saved in our templates and then what we can do is either buy them ourselves if we want to buy them and sell them locally or as per the real print on demand model, we can add to a given store. Now, this is where the whole e-commerce model comes into play. So this is what I was saying as well, where you can connect to any number of e-commerce sellers. So Amazon, TikTok, WooCommerce for WordPress, Shopify or Etsy. So what you're gonna want to do is connect to a Shopify store or an Etsy store or any of those other platforms and then you'll automatically sync the products and customers can order them on the front end. So I'll connect to a store now and show you how that is done. So over here in Shopify, the app in the app store opens and I'm just going to click install. And once again, I'll click install. Okay, and that is all it took right there. So the store is connected successfully and then I can publish the first product. And you can see all the integrations here. So we can integrate with the stores I mentioned. We can also go with platforms like eBay or Walmart. So I'll click add a product and then use a template and then I'll just select, for example, this design we created here. So I've just selected some of the product variants and now I will once again select some mockups. This is just a greater supply here. So let's do that quickly. We'll click continue to details. We already filled this out and note you can generate with AI as well. And then these are the prices now for all the different variants, right? So we're still making that roughly 50% profit margin per, but people can buy larger or smaller ones depending on what they want. So we just clicked publish and then you can see that this is just loading here and this is officially in the Shopify store. So then if someone goes and purchases this on the store, then Gelato takes care of the rest. Again, their team does it all. They print it, they create it, they ship it and then the customer ultimately will receive it likely within five days. So I'm going to go ahead and repeat this process for the two other designs that we created. Okay, so I've added the other products to the store and this is what's on my Shopify website. This product actually looks like so I can just buy with PayPal or whatnot. Now, what I want to touch on next is, well, how do you actually sell? Because you can create infinite products. The question is what to create and how to actually go and get sales on those units if you are trying to start a print on demand business. And what I would recommend off the bat and this is kind of critical is tap into pre-existing demand. And this is what I've tried to do with the BU designs that we created today. Whereas I don't have to create a market for this. I already know who the customers are. I am one of them, right? So I can just go to friends, I can go to events and I can advertise this to get it sold. That way you don't have to create a brand from scratch or just tapping into this existing market. And then generally in terms of marketing, right? There is organic or earned kind of media and advertising. And then there's going to be your paid advertising as well. So paid advertising is going to be things like your PPC ads. And if you can get profitable, pay-per-click advertising going on your store, great. That's a whole subject for another video. But that right there is just kind of the money printer. If you can get it working as far as print-on-demand products go. And then organic advertising, right? Your earned viewership and sales. That could be something like content and social media. For example, if a trend, a new meme has come out recently you can just be very in the know about what's going on in that sense. And then you just create products, print-on-demand products based on the meme that became popular. And then you go and create content about those designs, right, or linking to those designs. Or you sponsor influencers that would be more paid advertising as well. And that could be your whole pipeline for a business. So again, for me at least that all taps back into, well, find a market that already exists and then create products and designs that are tiered toward said market. And so that is just my little two minutes feel on marketing for print-on-demand. Okay, so we created the merch and now I'm just waiting for it to arrive. I will be doing a follow-up video on print-on-demand where I'll show you the actual products once they arrive. So if you wanna see that, do make sure to subscribe and otherwise we are aiming to hit a million subscribers in 2025. So make sure to subscribe to see that happen. And to get started with Gelato, given all the advantages of the platform that we have talked about today, just go to gelato.com slash John, or again, that's just going to be the top link in the description. And I'll see you next time.