While you can make money with Spreadshirt, I think the real question is: “Is it worth it?” I’m going to save you some reading time and say, “No”.

I have received some payments from Spreadshirt but getting it was much more of a problem that it given me headaches. I wish I had spent my time doing something that was more productive. You should know that there are many people making money off of Spreadshirt however, most people do not.

I will go through the good and bads and maybe my experience might help some of the aspiring artists out there that are trying make some money off their talents understand what they are getting into.

It may sounds simply or even easy. You make a couple of nice designs and let the come money rolling in. Wrong. It is not that simple or easy at all. While using Spreadshirt sounds good on paper, it can turn into a really huge mess. Everyone starts off with a standard shop where you can upload your designs that will be inspected and wait for them to see if they are within regulations.

If you are looking to make any money, you need to learn how to make vector designs. Vector designs are unique designs that can be resized and retain their quality. Raster designs on the other hand get blurry and pixelated when resized. Vector designs need to be inspected in order for the plotting machine to accept the design. And you have to do vector designs saved in .EPS format. Sure you can upload raster designs but they look like crap and they get horribly pixelated when resized. Oh, and you are only allowed to use 3 colors for your vector designs. Black and white counts as colors too. You can quickly see how your artistic vision gets limited quickly.

You begin with creating a vector design using 3 colors, and exporting it into .eps. Then it is time to upload. Then the waiting game starts and then you find out that your design was rejected because the machine would not accept it. Apparently, some of your lines or curves come too close to one another, or that they are too sharp of an angle for the plotting machine to cut. You can see how this would get irritating fast. After a couple of changes and re-uploading, you design might be accepted. If it is then that is good. After that you can put your design on products(t shirts) and publish them onto your shop. You will also have an option of publishing your design on the Spreadshirt Marketplace where it is a huge mess. Another annoyance that you may encounter is that you are limited by the amount of designs you can upload. So you have to “upgrade” your account to get unlimited design uploads and a designer shop. The designer shop seems cool at first, but it’s pretty much useless. It is a gimmick in my opinion.

When you get your shop set up, you now have to promote it. Meta tags and optimizing can only do so much. Google adwords can get expensive fast and after spending some money on adwords I quickly realize that I was selling more from the marketplace, or rather other shops than my own. This made me realize that the upgrade was a waste of money. The best advantage of the upgrade is that I suggest you have your designs ready, buy 1 month of the upgrade and upload your designs all at once. If I had to do it all over again, I would have left my designs on the marketplace and left it at that. Hopefully, the designs do sell themselves and aspiring shop owners will use your design in their shops.

I consider myself an above average user on Spreadshirts and they admit that most shops that get started fail because of poor designs, layout, etc. Considering that I made some money on Spreadshirt I can not say that it was a complete failure. However, i do value my time and in all honesty, I believe Spreadshirt is a complete waste of time. If you are thinking about making money on Spreadshirt think realistic. To get anywhere, you will need to invest time and energy and a lot of it. Consider current events and trends. Right now the economy is at a low. People are going to tend to save and downsize. I am sure everyone at Spreadshirt are hurting, even the ones at the top.

This is the realness. My personal experience. Your’s may vary.