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[Last Updated 15 February 2024]

Knowing how to find profitable t shirt niches is the reason I was able to sell well over $2,438,085 with Teespring and about half that again on Fabrily. And that's before even mentioning the mulitiple 6 figures I've sold on the old Shine On platform and the 7 figures I did on Shopify or the $732,701.35USD with ShineON Jewelry on their new platform and our Shopify Store.

I am not sharing that as a flex. It's to show you that you are reading an article by someone that is actively selling in the industry and has been since 2013 when POD really took off.

Now, If you start looking in any groups on Facebook you can be forgiven for being overwhelmed and thinking every t shirt niche in the world is saturated.

I am here to tell you that this isn't the case. There are tips, tricks, and ways to research t shirt design ideas that allow you to unlock niches almost on demand. I am forever seeing classic designs still selling by the thousands.

So what are you going to learn from this article? Ideally, how to make money, and lot's of it! I am about to give you the keys to opening the door on any niche;

What you will learn in this article;

• How to spot a profitable t shirt niche
• How to find best selling designs
• How to never run out of design ideas
• 3 Secret Niches to Your First $10,000 Online

[BEFORE WE BEGIN] Bookmark this page! You'll be coming back. 

How to Find Profitable T-Shirt Niches

You are at a fork in the road…Which way will you go?

Firstly, there are 2 ways to approach making money online. The first is a paid marketing first approach or an Etsy first approach. The main difference between the 2 is that paid marketing requires a much bigger upfront investment.

Whereas, with Etsy for $10 you have been able to list 50 products! Why? Because each new listing is only 20 cents each. This changes the game and allows you to become confident in finding winning products for a very little investment.

Once you've found those winners then you not only have the confidence that, you now have profit that can be deployed into paid advertising.

Which way will you go? Both discussed below.

Profitable t-shirt niches with a Paid Marketing First Approach

Finding niches to wrangle is the single most important aspect when starting out with print on demand or drop shipping. It forms the backbone of what you will achieve whilst building a scalable, long-term business.

No matter which niche you target the ones that will be the most profitable will be the ones with the most passion and pride. A lot of the bigger passionate, pride-filled niches have thousands of products being promoted to them every time they open their social media accounts. Niching down is where the biggest opportunities lie.

For instance, instead of focusing on the broad law enforcement niche, you need to drill down into sub-niches.

• Law Enforcement>Police Officer
• Police Officer>Dog Handler> Californian Dog Handlers.
• Nurse>Registered Nurse
• Nurse>Pedeatric Nurse
• Motorcycling>Harley Davidson

Most sales in this industry are driven hugely by passion. Focusing in deep on a niche that is full to the brim of passionate individuals will make your success that much faster. Just going into the 2nd tier of the niche you can find a lot of joy.

It's not always the most creative designs that win, often it's not. Simple designs with heavy text and a niche-relevant image will in most cases sell better, especially when you're first unlocking it.

Removing excessive colors and other design elements allow it to appeal to a much wider audience.

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Interests Facebook has Removed

While the list provided is massive it must be noted that any interests that were found with 3rd party vendors (i.e. Acxiom, Oracle Data Cloud (Datalogix), Epsilor, and Experian) will be removed and as such won't be targetable.

Further to that, any targeting parameters including purchasing, in-market audiences, and so forth will also be affected.

For most people, this won't be of too much concern and if you're looking to crack another niche (obviously you are) then it's just a matter of testing…as it always has been.

How to create an Untapped Niche on Demand

There are literally THOUSANDS of untapped niches on Facebook, it is just a matter of testing and measuring what they are.

How do you find them? Find those bigger audiences (like Motorcycles or Hunting) then drill down by crossing it with other big audiences.

Take for instance Nurses that love Labradors…or Harley-Davidsons…or roller derby… or kayaking.

How to judge the passion within a niche.

The easiest way of judging passion is by seeing how many competitors are in that niche. Industries like nursing, pets, politics, sports, etc are all indicators of above-average passion.

Particularly, when targeting people within those niches that are actively purchasing niche related products.

When I was first starting, and even to this day, one of the biggest niches that continually buy is nursing(not to mention politics. Politics really is the niche that keeps giving especially in today's climate).

In part, this would be due to the demographic predominantly being made up of women in the 24-54 year age bracket. That age range is a massive sweet spot.

Being profitable in niches like nursing comes down to a few different elements, a new super product, niching down or having built a brand around both.

My personal Shopify success comes from the nursing industry where I was able to sell in excess of $300,000 of one product in a matter of weeks. It can still be done. But unless you have an exclusive on a new item I would suggest niching down as I explain below.

A good supplier constantly adds to their product catalog, and jumping in early can help marry solid phrases with new, innovative products. The better print on demand companies that do this are usually built by internet marketers themselves.

Hobbies can be broken down into profitable sub-niches often resulting in faster success;

Judging profitability on the size of the niche.

Bigger niches allow for scaling. Scaling allows for much bigger paydays and longevity. The key to making sub-niches work is by focusing on the category as a whole. That's right, focus on nursing.

BUT, instead of making a generic shirt that says, “Nurse, because badass butt jabber isn't an official title” you'd create a shirt that said;

• “Registered Nurse, because badass butt jabber isn't an official title,” or,
• “Pediatric Nurse, because badass butt jabber isn't an official title”, or,
• “Emergency Nurse, because badass butt jabber isn't an official title”…

You get the idea. Instead of creating one shirt for the parent niche, you've now got 3 babies to go out there and make money for you. Once you start getting success in a sub-niche make sure you do hit the broad as well.

Your pixel will be getting optimized with the sales you're bringing in which will result in better conversions. Once you've dialed in the print on demand niche and have sold multiple items consistently to them that is when you can start focus on the broad category.

Focusing on the parent niche will prove to be much more lucrative than focusing on one sub-niches, but it's not the way to get started.

Verifying a niche is targetable [Facebook]

As Facebook will be our main traffic source for testing it is imperative to make sure we can, in fact, find interests related to it. This is as simple as pulling up your ads manager and typing in your niche, i.e. “Black Sphynx Cat”

Test 1 = FAIL.

Based on that I would definitely revise whether or not to run a “Black Sphynx Cat” shirt…

Instead, search for the parent niche “Sphynx Cat”.

It's not a bad-sized audience to tap into. You could still try “Black Sphynx cat” by targeting that larger audience. As we all know, pet owners like to spend money on their pets. And if, within that audience, we're lucky enough to find the black cat owner…we will no doubt find a sale… or 3.

I think I said “Cat” far too many times in that explanation.

And that brings us to our next point, is the niche willing to spend money…?

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Cashed up niches.

The Sphynx cat is a perfect example of a niche that's willing to spend money. When you consider that a purebred Sphynx sells for in excess of $2,000, you can understand that these cat owners are willing to spend money.

On the other hand. Targeting graduating high schoolers or Bey Blade lovers will likely result in a lack of sales. Why? It's due to the readily available means of funding. If they are too young for a credit card, you are introducing an unnecessary barrier to entry.

The people within that niche will need to ask permission from someone with available funds, which slows down the process of converting a prospect into a paying customer.

Choosing the Super Low Cost Etsy First Approach

Using a tool like eRank, you can quickly search to see if it's worth listing your products on Etsy.

By simply searching your niche, i.e. “Nurse” you can see if there are indeed searches.

The above screenshot is from eRank. What we can see when we look at this is that there are quite a lot of searches each month for “Nurse”. Yes, you've verified it but you have another question that you need to ask yourself…

“Should I target this niche?”. Looking at the search results based on the broad category term would suggest you have quite a lot of competition. Again, by niching down just that next step you allow yourself a point of difference.

Diving Deeper on Etsy Opportunities

In this particular instance you have a couple of opportunities. By targeting a term like “Nurse Tumbler” you can start testing by just offering tumblers focused on Nurses until you find a design that sells. This is because the competition shows that it's quite low and you could stand out quite quickly.

I would start either by targeting “Registered Nurse” as the main keyword. You have a lot of opportunities to be brought to the front when someone searches “Registered Nurse Gift”. I explain more on how to optimize your Etsy listings in another article.

Once you've chosen the keyword to focus on, head over to Etsy and do a quick search.

Using a tool like Everbee helps to validate that sales are being made on that keyword before spending time creating your own designs.

Here you can see this particular tumbler is make $8,860 a month and validates the keyword to pursue.

The strategy from here is to create 5 designs each week for this keyword until you find your own success.

And if you're looking to see how successful you can be on Etsy…check this out…

Untouched Niche Markets

Believe it or not, finding untouched Niche Markets in 2021 is not only possible it is downright easy. All it comes down to is blending niches i.e. Roller Derby + Nursing + Pitbull or Horse Riding + Mermaids etc.

Whilst you won't be able to find single interests that are untouched, niching down will provide you a little extra firepower as those people would never have seen a product for them so specifically. A quick note, great designs will stand out in any niche.

The Best Product for Print on Demand

ShineOn Jewelry remains our go to when it comes to products of choice. There are several reasons why we choose them;

• Margin is great
• Retail Price Point is neither too high nor too low
• Made in the USA
• Fast Delivery
• You get a sword when you hit 5,000 sales haha

The more margin you can get at a lower cost product the better. It's easier to sell, you can run ads longer increasing your chances of success.

You can sign up to ShineOn Jewelry Here.

How to find best selling t shirt design ideas

Now you know how to find niches (really, it's not that hard and I've seen hundreds of beginners just get started and immediately blow it up), let's take a look at crafting a scalable campaign with some t shirt design ideas.

I am literally going to all but give you a fist full of cash with this. Finding 1 scalable saying is great, but finding the holy grail is what we would like to be able to do, not just the once, but consistently.

So what is a scalable saying? Take our previously mentioned nurse shirt above. Targeting our badass nurses and the sub-niches gives us the ability to create multiple designs/campaigns from the one saying.

This is how I was able to have the success that I have had online. By consistently crafting campaigns that were scaled out to dozens of sub-niches each and every week.

So how do you craft these sayings that haven't been done to death?

Simple! Research the best selling t shirt design ideas and blend the sayings together to create a new, unique phrase that hasn't been seen before.

As an example, I found the shirt below on Amazon.

It's a very generic shirt, funny, but generic. So how could we niche this down? Just like this;

• “Being a Register Nurse gives me enough money to live comfortably….”
• “Being a Mechanic gives me enough money to live comfortably….”
• “Being a Guitarist gives me enough money to live comfortably….”

Those sayings have never had shirts designed for them (that I know of). Be the first, then come back here and thank me for creating your first series of scalable designs.

This method will continue to work for you. It costs less to have created once the original design has been done it's just a matter of changing the niche image and a couple of words. While it may not work in every niche, it only needs to scale within 1 or 2 to make the overall campaign a success.

So where can you find places to find sayings for your t shirt niches like the one above?

• Sunfrog Shirts
• Amazon Best Sellers
• Teespring Marketplace
• Zazzle
• Wanelo
• Redbubble
• Pinterest

The list is endless. Just get researching and once you have the system down, outsource it to your VA's.

Spy Tools for Print on Demand

To make your life easier there are 3 spy tools you can use to see what is selling right now. These tools aren't designed for you to copy the products that are selling. It's to help you see what is relevant, what's connecting, and to be inspired to use a similar phrase in your own niches.

• SpyPro
• TeeSpy
• DMMSpy

Increasing your profitability with family reunion t shirt design ideas and multi buy designs.

Increasing profitability with t shirt design ideas is a great way of making more bang for your buck on your designs. We have had huge success with “Husband & Wife, bikers for life” type campaigns.

Conclusive Conclusion

And there it is. To top it all off, I am giving you 1000+ t shirt niches for you to research. You will never use them all. What I suggest is going through and taking out the ones you find interesting or would enjoy creating campaigns for and expanding out from there. At first focus on 5-10 niches and work with getting 5-10 designs into each, each week.

If you have any questions please comment at the end of this post and I will answer. Good luck and godspeed on your niche quest.

If you found this article helpful make sure you share it with your networks! Afterall…sharing is caring! 

BONUS: How to create your shell campaigns in Facebook Business Manager.

The way in which we have always launched our ads, and have continued to do to this day is the same. We always started with a Purchase conversion ad with 2 adsets in each. 1 x Broad i.e. Nurse, Nursing, and 1 x Specific ad set i.e. Mighty Nurse, Funny Nurses, Lippincott's Nursing Journal, etc.

In each of those adsets, there are 4 identical ads.

These days we are doing a slight variation of this again. Instead of having just the 2 adsets, we duplicate them 3 times so we have 8 in total @ $5 per day budget.

To take the thinking out of cutting we also have rules in place.

They are;

• Add to Carts >$7.50 are turned off
• Purchase >$30 ads are turned off

This is based on the jewelry we're currently selling and the margin therein. Shirts would be much leaner.

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Massive T-shirt Niches List

Careers

Hobbies/Passions

Family

Animals