If you are an artist, or just look like one, and can either draw something or write a clever phrase and typeset it, there are many websites now that will allow you to upload that design to their commerce platform. The website will take orders for your design on T-shirts, mugs, cell phone cases, and tons of other products, will print the items to order and ship them to the customers, and then pay you your percentage of the sale. The production method is referred to as Print-on-Demand (POD).
Services that provide QTYONE production of T-shirts and other items that can be printed using a color inkjet printer have been around for a long time, and the market has established that in most cases there are no upfront fees for the artist to use the service. All the artist needs to concentrate on is creating new work and promoting the work. The artist gets paid for each item sold and is making money right from the first item sold — a perfect example of QTYONE.
To provide an example of such a service in action, I have created a Spreadshirt.com shop that offers products with the QTYONE logo. Purchases of the QTYONE logo merchandise will help fund continuing development of this site.
This kind of one-off inkjet production of merchandise has been around for a while. Back in the early 2000’s, I had a CafePress.com store that sold merchandise with my ferret photography that I was doing for my magazine, Modern Ferret. The magazine promoted the CafePress store and the store provided thousands of dollars per year of revenue to help support the magazine.
Over the years, the ability to product QTYONE merchandise has improved — both in terms of the quality of the finished product and it terms of the number of products that can be produced. I think that this is still an area that will experience a lot of growth — as 3D printing becomes more popular and inexpensive there will be all kinds of new ways to produce QTYONE products and all sorts of innovative products created.
If you are interested in QTYONE production of artwork, here are some sites that you can get started with today: