Printful & Etsy
During the spring of 2020, amidst my quarantine with COVID, I found myself on the couch, channeling my creative energy into a long-dreamt-of t-shirt collection centered around my hometown of Narberth, Pennsylvania. The concept emerged from the ironic pride locals often express, claiming Narberth has everything when, in reality, its small geographic size makes it impossible.
With a playful twist, I designed a series of shirts featuring elements Narberth lacks due to its compact size, including a Marina, a Ski Lodge, and horseback riding stables. The idea was to humorously embrace my beloved town's limitations and perhaps, in a world filled with misinformation, extract something positive from fake news. If you’re a local and you see a shirt for the Narberth Marina, you’ll know it’s fantasy.
This was made possible because of a new resource I discovered: Printful. Printful is essentially an on-demand print platform that allows you to upload designs onto a variety of products and have people place orders for them on demand. This means no pre-paying for merchandise inventory ahead of time and just responding to what people actually order. My workflow was to create my designs on Canva, upload them to Printful, and then connect Printful to Etsy where I could share a public link to my shop and take orders. Etsy then sends the orders to Printful who fulfills them, without you lifting a finger.
I’m not ready to retire young on sales from my t-shirt shop as this has a very niche target audience and was created for a sense of community humor, but I did enjoy learning the workflow to create something like this and see how it could be a valuable marketing tool and/or collection of platforms for a business to launch from.
After creating this shop, I attended the Common Ground Country Fair in Unity, Maine. I proudly wore my Narberth Dairy Farm shirt amongst the farmers. Although I have not yet achieved my lifelong dream of having a farm, at least I have the t-shirt which is a good start! Here are a few favorites below, and a link to the ETSY shop for anyone who wants to check out what a Canva / Printful / Etsy mashup of a t-shirt shop looks like.
