As the year draws to an end, I've been reflecting on the year that was, both professionally and personally. And this year, the biggest piece of wisdom that served me is : Don't put all your eggs in the same basket.
It's an advice I have been giving a lot on Quora over the years when it comes to selling your art, especially on PoD because not doing so could cost a designer very dearly. This year I have gone through a few kinks that has made me very grateful to practice what I preach. The biggest one being with Society6! They have been going through several changes in the past 2 months that has left loads of designers like myself a bit stressed, not a good move before the Holidays season if you ask me, but a solid reminder that diversifying your presence is now a must more than ever.
Because, flash news, you can't take your presence on ANY platform for granted. Here is what went down with Society6 that should be a lesson to all creatives out there :
In October, they decided to migrate their whole platform to Shopify and while they were doing so, the artist studio (the place artists use to upload art) became out of commission for a week. Right before the Holidays shopping season when all of us wanted to upload as much of our new work as possible no less.
That kink was thankfully short lived but came with a side effect of glitch that caused (and still does) all designs in artists shops to show at random, out of order if they show at all, not the kind of thing you really want happening just before people start to shop for Christmas.
By then I think we all thought the worst had passed and oh boy were we all wrong! They decided to completely revamp the Artist Studio one week before Thanksgiving and the biggest sale of the year. This move has seen many artists throw the towel because for weeks, yes WEEKS it was impossible for a significant percentage of artists to upload anything using the new uploader. But that wasn't even the worst thing that went down with that move. In an effort to move all artist tools and features to the new platform, several credit card details didn't fully migrate over and when the time for the subscription plan renewal came, several artists, myself included found themselves unable to add a new credit card while the new platform couldn't use the old details to renew the plan.
I brought it to their notice right away but it got lost in an ocean of complaint and a week after the first payment failure was issued my account was immediately downgraded to the free plan with just 10 designs to my name instead of 650! GASP!!!!!!! I managed to re-subscribe then, but couldn't re-upload anything because of the uploader's glitch, so I took to Instagram and sent them an angry comment that got their attention and thankfully they managed to restore all the designs they deleted in the downgrade.
It fortunately ended well enough, I didn't loose too much skin in the game, but as I type this, their platform is still plagued by glitches and probably will be for a few more weeks and it's going to keep impacting artists until they sort it all out.
This goes to show that you never really know when something is going to go kaput, and if you were an artist solely relying on that one platform, you would risk loosing it all, for good.
Because PoD platforms tend to come and go, since I started selling on them back in 2017, I've seen Cupik, Paintcollar, Colorpur, Instanote and Neon Earth all either shut down completely or do away with the artist program. This year it's Symplico that has pulled that trick on me. They contacted me in May to start selling my patterns on fabric within India, and just a few days ago I got an email informing designers that they were suspending all operations.
As an artist or pattern designer, you will always have to deal with these kinds of things, if it's not a platform shutting down completely, it could be a change in policies that could make selling with them less advantageous like with the shipping fees and paid plans from Society6 or the fees levied on entry tier accounts on Redbubble. Or, it could be a product being withdrawn entirely, like the pet bowls in the picture above that once were a Redbubble product but are no longer. Print on Demand platforms review their products offering at regular interval and this year a lot of them got completely removed from several platforms. If you were the kind of designer wanting to specialise in just one type of items this could be bad news. I've seen several questions on Quora where people really want to just specialise in t-shirts and stickers, which are probably the safest PoD products along with coffee mugs, but by doing so you narrow down your potential for sales to an insanely tiny margin and the day a platform decides to kill the item you were making the most sales on, you will find yourself in a serious pinch. This is yet another case of not putting all your eggs in one basket.
This is a good reminder to all designers, new or old to never loose focus of what it is that you are really selling : your art. And to not pigeon hole yourself into one line of business, or one single stream of income. Keep on expanding, and keep on saying yes to all kind of opportunities.
This year alone, I joined Spoonflower, got invited to join Symplico and Framer Art (formerly Shutter/speed). Spoonflower is doing fairly well for my first year, Symplico just shut down and Framer Art is yet to bring me a sale.
The plan for 2025 is to start pitching my portfolio to manufacturers and get licensing deals and to keep on being open to collabs and new platforms to sell on.
It's because I have been diversifying for years that the Society6 blow was just a minor kink in the system and didn't send me into full panic mode.
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