How Much Money I Make Selling Merch

What's up guys? It's Graham here. So, about 10 months ago, my buddy and I met up for lunch and came up with a wild original concept that's never been done before here on YouTube: selling merch. After all, it seems like pretty much every YouTuber is doing it, some of which are making millions of dollars from their clothing lines.

Since I would like to consider myself a somewhat savvy business person, I figured I must be missing out on a huge potential revenue stream if I don't join the ranks and offer my own merch too. Because let's face it, you're not a real YouTuber until you print your logo on a t-shirt. But there was a bit of a problem.

See, I'm a real estate guy, and I know absolutely nothing about how to run an e-commerce clothing business. In fact, I knew there would be a very steep learning curve if I just tried to figure this out on my own, not to mention all the time it would take me to figure out what I was doing. So, I enlisted the help of a buddy, Vince Wang, to help take over the reins, run the business, and set up the infrastructure.

But first, we needed to meet up and discuss the details. The first thought that crossed my mind to sell merch was to go the conventional route and make a Teespring store. After all, that seems like the best way to sell merch with very little involvement from me whatsoever, because Teespring handles everything. For those of you not familiar with how this all works, the concept is very simple: Teespring is a platform that operates by volume, and they source a lot of their products from Honduras, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

They then ship them to the USA, and the prints are stamped in Kentucky as they're ordered. This prevents them from ever printing more than they sell, which helps keep costs relatively low. Because they operate on such a mega scale, the entire process is really just as automated as it could get. And then, for the creator, all they need to do is come up with the design, upload it on the website, set a price, and that's it.

Plus, they offer pretty seamless YouTube integrations so that your merch shows up as an ad below your video and makes it easily accessible to your subscribers without seeming too in-your-face. I'm not gonna lie, the profits from Teespring are pretty decent and very straightforward. Here's how that works: depending on how much you sell, they have a fixed price for all of their products, and then they leave it up to you to decide how much you sell it for.

That means anything above their fixed price just becomes your profit. Now that all sounds really good, and I was on board at first until I started thinking about some of the downsides. At first, because Teespring is its own platform, you're only able to send people to their website, their landing page, not your own. That was a bit of a deterrent to me because I wanted to build up my own merch infrastructure in the event I wanted to expand in the future.

The second concern I had was with quality issues from Teespring. I've seen some manufacturing issues in the past, and if I was gonna sell anything, I absolutely didn't want anyone unhappy with their order. So, I wanted a little bit more control about where I was going to be sourcing products from, and I couldn't necessarily get that through Teespring.

The third issue is that Teespring tends to take a little while to actually send out their orders. In fact, on their website, it says they typically take nine to twelve business days for a customer to get their order. That works out to be almost two-and-a-half weeks, which is way too long for my taste. Even though Teespring could be a really great option for a lot of people, I decided I wanted to make things difficult on myself and go a slightly different route.

That's when the Graham Steppin store was born. Vince and I determined that Shopify would give us the best results and options that I was looking for. It gave us more control on the user interface, we could source more products in the future if we decided to eventually expand, and it gave us more thorough follow-up and retargeting options in any event we ever wanted to pursue those.

From there, we hired a graphic designer and gave him a few concepts that were specific to the channel. Within a day, we picked out the ones we liked the most and wanted to test out on the website. But then came the monumental decision to decide where to actually source the merch from.

After a quick discussion, we decided on Printful. This is a company that operates in a process known as print-on-demand, meaning they're only gonna print and prepare the products once it's actually sold. That way, I don't need to take over any inventory, I don't need to preorder anything, and they will handle all of the fulfillment. Not only that, but the clothing is manufactured from Bella+Canvas, which is known for their high-quality products and not using sweatshops, and the majority of it is all manufactured here in the United States.

Obviously, because it's manufactured locally, that means there's a much smaller profit margin for me, but I figured that was worth it to ensure product quality. I also figured it was worth the cost because there's a much shorter shipping time, and people would be able to get their orders that much faster.

Now, in terms of how the back end all works with this, it's fairly simple. When you go on the site and place an order, it is immediately received through Shopify. Shopify then has an integration with Printful, which tracks the unit and SKU number for the order, and all of this data is received in real-time.

Printful will also see when the payment goes through, so that way they could begin processing. The order is then quite literally printed on demand and made to specification. This entire process is done in batches and rotates every few days, which is why they have a few-day window for fulfillment. For instance, on Mondays they might do t-shirts and hoodies, on Tuesdays they do crew necks and hats, and then on Wednesdays they do mugs and phone cases, and so on.

From there, the order ships, and depending on your shipping preference and location, is how fast you're going to be receiving the order. I don't collect any profit for shipping, so whatever you pay is directly towards them, and that's exactly what you get. Then, if there's any issues with your order or you need any assistance with something or if you're just lonely and need someone to talk to, then Vince's team member handles all communication.

This way, I could do my best to remove myself from the day-to-day operation and let someone else handle it full-time. Now, for the moment you've all been waiting for: how much money do I actually make from doing all of this? Well, within the first month of launching the site, which would be in January of 2018, I announced the new merch store in a YouTube video about why I didn't do well in college.

Throughout that entire month, we did about fifteen hundred dollars in total revenue. However, the profit there was a little bit different. Admittedly, the cost of goods is something that eats into a decent amount of that revenue. For instance, my cost is almost $27 for a hoodie, a t-shirt costs me about $13, and a hat is $16.

In addition to that, I also pay a processing fee of 2.7 percent of the total order plus 30 cents. Then I pay an additional $79 to $120 per month for Shopify, and then 10% of whatever is left over goes to Vince for setting up the store and making sure everything is running smoothly.

So anyway, I'm not gonna drag you through this video any longer. Here are the final profit numbers that you came to see: in January, I made five hundred and eighty-five dollars after all expenses. February made two hundred and eighty-six dollars and seventy-five cents. March made two hundred and seventy-four dollars and two cents.

April made fifty-eight dollars and thirty-eight cents. May was actually a crazy month because, despite the fact that I sold some stuff in there, after all expenses, I lost twenty dollars and forty-eight cents. But in June, I made it back for a total profit of one hundred and seventy dollars and twelve cents.

In July, I made two hundred and twenty dollars and thirty cents. August, I made two hundred and eleven dollars and forty-nine cents. In September, I made two hundred and forty-three dollars and fifty. That means, in total so far for 2019, I have made two thousand twenty-eight dollars and seventy-three cents selling merch.

Here's what I have to say about that: at first, I realized that my cost of goods is pretty high and my total profit could be much more if I brought those costs down. However, the entire point of doing all of this was that I could try out a proof of concept and test out demand to see if this is something even worth pursuing. There was no sense in me going and buying a thousand units and tying up several thousand dollars if no one was going to buy my merch or had any interest in it.

So, this allowed me to see how much demand there was and gauge which type of products people wanted the most of, which according to my analytics is the "Do Epic" t-shirt. If I were going to go all out with this and really dedicate my time to sell merch knowing what I know now, I would probably just end up pre-ordering a whole bunch of the most popular items in bulk, go with a fulfillment center like 3PL, which would handle all of the supply inventory and shipping, and then they would just charge a small fee per order.

Doing that would give me much better profit margins in terms of selling merch. Secondly, being completely honest, I thought selling merch was going to be a very easy thing to do. It seems like every YouTuber is doing it, so I just assumed it was gonna be a super viable business right from the start. But I was wrong.

I thought this was something I could just throw in the description and it would start selling itself, but nope, it doesn't work that way. In order for sales to go up, I need to be continually mentioning the business in order to bring up its awareness.

That brings me to my third realization: I'm just not a great salesperson, and I don't feel good constantly pushing something down your throat. Like, I have to literally force myself to mention that I have a program I sell every now and then, link in the description, but otherwise people just don't even know it exists.

Doing something like this does not come naturally to me, but I also understand I have to mention it, otherwise nobody is going to know about it. So, at least for me, I found that there's got to be a really fine balance between how many times you could mention something before it starts getting really annoying.

So, given all that, I was faced with a very sobering realization: I don't want to pitch a product all the time, so when I do actually go and mention something, I have to be very selective about it.

The fact is, if I am going to pitch something, it's a lot better for me to pitch my program than it is the merch line, which is pretty low ROI. All things considered, so that, you guys, is exactly how much I've made selling merch and exactly what goes on behind the scenes just to bring you a hoodie that says "Avocado Society" on it.

There was a lot more that went into it than I initially realized, and I was thinking about selling merch, but it's been a very eye-opening experience to see how this business operates and how it runs. In terms of my store, I'm still gonna be keeping it going and keeping it available for anyone out there who just wants to get some merch, and I'm still gonna be coming up with new fun designs just to keep it fresh and exciting.

Plus, it's really cool to be out there and see people wearing it and doing epic and joining the Avocado Society. As always, smashing the like button for the YouTube algorithm if you have not done that already.

So, with that said, you guys, thank you so much for watching! I really appreciate it. As always, if you have not already subscribed, make sure to subscribe. I post three videos a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So if you want to see those videos, make sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell.

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So, that means if you want to see a new video from me every single day, just go and add me on that channel over there. Lastly, if you guys want free stocks, use the link in the description from Webull; they will give you two free stocks when you deposit $100 on their platform, and one of those stocks can be valued up to a thousand dollars! That means you may as well just go on, put a hundred bucks, and get two free stocks. And then from there, if you want to cash out, you can cash out.

Or, they're a pretty decent zero-dollar stock trading program; I like them. So feel free to use that if you want to. Thanks again for watching, and until next time!