How to Turn Your Art Into Merch People Actually Buy

Putting your art on a t-shirt has never been easier or less profitable. The platforms are free, the setup takes an afternoon, and most artist stores sell almost nothing. LP Lucas, who teaches Social Media for Artists on Twotap and runs his own print-on-demand store, is unusually candid about why: he made the standard mistake first, then fixed it, and the fix is visible in his before and after designs.

How print on demand actually works

Lucas uses Threadless, and has worked with Printful, naming Redbubble as another option. The model is the same across all of them, and it is worth being precise about because it changes what the risk is.

You create an account, upload designs, and build products using the platform's mockup tools. You get your own store address, in his case lplucas.threadless.com. Nothing is printed until somebody orders. When a sale happens, the platform takes a percentage and you take a percentage.

So there is no inventory, no upfront cost, no boxes of unsold shirts in a cupboard, and no storage to manage. What you are risking is not money. It is attention, which is the resource that actually constrains an artist.

The catalogue is wider than t-shirts

He walks through what one of his characters can be put on: a jacket, a trucker hat, fine art prints, blankets, and a shower curtain, which he clearly enjoys imagining. Different products suit different work. A detailed illustration that fails on a shirt may be exactly right as a print, where it is viewed up close and hung on a wall.

The mistake nearly everyone makes

Here is the part that decides whether a store sells.

"In the beginning I thought that I just needed an illustration, take any illustration and load it on the platform, and the product was ready. But I quickly figured out that it was not that simple. An illustration might look beautiful on a wall, your website, on a post on Instagram, but that doesn't mean it'll make a great t-shirt or a great mug. You have to adapt your illustration to fit the product."
LP Lucas, in the lesson Selling Your Stuff from Social Media for Artists

A post is viewed on a screen, held at arm's length, by someone who can zoom in. A shirt is read across a room, on a moving body, at a glance. Those are different design problems, and the second one is much less forgiving.

What adapting actually looks like

Lucas shows the same jokes in both forms, and the changes are consistent enough to be a rule set. His series is called "dumb questions for artists", each entry an illustration plus a question artists get asked.

• Promote the series name to the headline. On the original posts the phrase "dumb questions for artists" is incidental. On the products it becomes the largest element on the garment, so the concept is legible before any detail is.
• Shorten the line. "Did you have to study to become an artist?" becomes "Do you have to study to do that?". "If we are an artist, how do you make money?" becomes "How do you make money?". Each cut removes words without removing the joke.
• Make the text big enough to read at distance. He is explicit that in the original the question was small, and on a shirt you could hardly read it.
• Rebuild the layout for the product. These are not crops of the illustration. The composition is rearranged around the garment.

One of them became a pin rather than a shirt: "can you teach me that in one hour?", which is a smaller surface and therefore an even harder edit. He also mentions redesigning and reordering a shirt he had already made, because the first version was not good enough.

The test to apply before uploading anything: could someone read this, get the joke, and know it is a series, from three metres away, in half a second?

Order your own products

A small habit with an outsized effect. Lucas orders the products he designs so he can wear and film them, on the reasoning that it is better to promote something when you physically have it.

A shirt shown on a platform mockup looks like a listing. The same shirt on the artist, in a video, is a demonstration that the thing exists, fits, and is worn by someone the viewer already likes.

Where your buyers live changes which platform to use

This is the consideration most guides skip entirely. Lucas is in Brazil, and Threadless products take a long time to reach Brazil, sometimes with expensive taxes on arrival. That is a real cost borne by his local audience.

His response is not to switch, it is to check the data: about 8 percent of his audience is Brazilian, and the rest is spread across the United States, the UK, India and elsewhere. So the international platform stays, because that is where the buyers are, and he separately looks into a Brazilian service to serve local followers faster and cheaper.

Look at your own audience geography before choosing a provider. Fulfilment speed and import taxes decide whether a browsing follower becomes a buyer.

Setup is a day. Promotion is the job.

He is blunt that opening the store, uploading designs and organizing products is quick work, perhaps a single day if your files are in order. The difficulty is entirely afterwards: if you want to sell products, you have to promote them constantly, and the designs have to be good.

That ordering explains most empty artist stores. The easy part gets done, then the store sits there, and the absence of sales gets blamed on the platform.

Be honest about who your designs are for

The most useful thing in the lesson is Lucas assessing his own merch unsentimentally. His shirts are aimed at people who already know his content and are subscribed to his channel, and he recognizes that jokes about artist life are hard to sell to people who are not artists. So merch is not, and will not become, his main income.

He contrasts that with artists like Steven Rhodes and the studio Ilustrata, for whom product sales are a major income source, and gives two reasons: the designs are strong enough to stand on their own to a stranger, and they promote them relentlessly.

So the real question before you build a store is which of those you are making. A design that only works for people who already follow you is a nice thing to offer your community. A design that works on a stranger in a shop is a business. Both are legitimate, and expecting the first to behave like the second is what makes merch feel like a failure.

Before you upload

• Pick a platform based on where your audience actually lives
• Choose products that suit the work, not just shirts
• Redesign each piece for its product rather than uploading the illustration
• Make the recurring concept the biggest element
• Cut the words down until the line reads instantly
• Order one yourself and wear it on camera
• Plan the promotion before you plan the store

LP Lucas walks through his store, his design adaptations and the rest of his income mix in Social Media for Artists on Twotap.