My Oddly Popular International T-Shirt Designs that surprised even me!

I've been a graphic designer for well over 3 decades now, and yet, I've only recently come back to designing fashion lines in the last few years. After years of selling my designs outright to vendors like Urban Outfitters (who'd go on to produce, sell and profit from my designs), I've committed to spending considerable time expanding and creating new T-Shirt designs to sell at many popular Print On Demand (POD) resellers that seem to be everywhere these days. A few years back, someone perfected the inkjet printing on fabric system (including the hard to replicate white undercoating required for printing light colors on dark shirts), and now everyone is in the game of slinging individually printed shirts (and cannibalizing traditional silkscreen printers). You'll note my sales numbers below reflect SEO sales only, no advertising or promotion was done for any of these designs - the customer found it and bought it on their own, which I find to be a strong influence on potential advertised sales.

<rant> The most annoying thing about almost all POD resellers is that they give you zero customer data post sale. You don't know anything besides approximate date, color and size of the shirt usually (which only belies how fat your customers are). No search terms that led to your product, customer zip codes, or customer emails that might be extremely useful to a new, small business. Success story designs come out of nowhere, and resonate in countries you never expected them too. And you'll have no idea why, who's linking them to your product, or what about your product resonates with this untapped audience... </rant>

Let's See Under's Designs

One of my earliest designs POD designs from 2020 (part of a series of the dumbest things to imprint on a shirt), and way underpriced at the time, this Archery Target Design on a Shirt somehow found success in Italy. I never listed the product as available there, but my POD vendor automatically expands markets in the hopes of filling design quotas. Since then, the aptly titled (is it?) 'Bersaglio di tiro con l'arco sul tuo petto Disgusto di sé Maglietta' somehow has sold 26 shirts for a profit of $59.56!

I'm gonna expand on this theme (British Rail Symbols of London Train Lines), but for now, the Underground UK Train Symbol T-Shirt version sells best to the US audience (prolly more virtue signaling than English Train fan), whereas the Elizabeth Line UK Train Symbol T-Shirt one sells better in the U.K. (due to recognition alone, I'd guess). The entire series of five designs have collectively sold two dozen since their introduction just under a year ago. Considering I have a hundred live designs that have never sold ever, this is a good omen. I am having a hard time getting new designs approved for sale mostly due to my relentless keyword stuffing the descriptions.

Speaking of hundreds of unsold designs; The entire series of my Initials.Love line has a whopping 676 designs (26 letters of the alphabet x 26 letters of the alphabet again) and is expected to have literally hundreds of unsold designs; i.e. I never expect to sell a I ♥ Z.Z. However, the highest selling design currently is I ♥ K.G., and many of these sales happened in Japan. I do not know who K.G. is referring too. (Get in touch if you do!) My second highest selling design in this line is I ♥ N.Y., which sells more internationally, mostly due to the customers mistaking it for New York State's famous I ♥ NY logotype (which doesn't have periods, and a rounder heart symbol). I'll take the sales, nonetheless.

This entire series of designs of Movie Ratings Cards was deemed copyright infringement in the US, so I only listed them in international markets where the MPAA didn't operate. Imagine my surprise when the G rated version began to sell well in Japan starting in 2023. So far, we've sold 60 units (in Yen), and only recently upped our asking price to make a reasonable profit on sales (from $1.94 to $4.47 per unit). We even sold a few of the NC-17 and PG-13 versions (also in Japan), but shockingly, no R rated versions ever!

Ok, this was probably not as big of a surprise, although 22 months later, I'm sorta stunned at the numbers on this design. Knocking off the local convenience store logo from Wawa, our Jawn (a Philadelphia-based slang term for just about anything) is the one consistent seller month after month. It's part of the first five designs in the Jawn line, and as of this writing, we've sold 312 units of Jawn Food Market Logo Knockoff. We raised the price on this one due to it's shear success, which hasn't slowed down sales at all.

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