How to sell something people actually buy

Choosing what to sell

Start with one product and one idea. A store with three good products sells more than a store with thirty you have not thought about, because you can only promote what you can describe in a sentence.

Sell to a group you already belong to. The designs that work are the ones a particular set of people recognise straight away — a course, a church, a team, a workplace, a band, a neighbourhood, an event with a date on it. A design that is for everybody is usually for nobody.

The blank you choose matters as much as the design. A mug costs KES 700 to print, a unisex tee KES 1,200 and a hoodie KES 2,800. The mug is the cheapest thing for a stranger to risk on you; the hoodie is the hardest sell and the one that needs the most trust. If nobody knows your store yet, start low.

One thing to rule out early: a design that leans on a logo, a brand or an artist you have no right to use. It is the fastest way to have a store closed, and it is covered in our terms.

Artwork that prints well

Resolution

The studio measures the resolution of your picture at the size you have placed it, not the size of the file on its own. Drag the same image bigger and the number falls. The printer wants 300 DPI. Above 150 the studio calls the picture good; between 100 and 150 it warns you that it will be soft; below 100 it tells you it is too low to print.

Enlarging a small picture adds no detail, it only spreads the detail that is there. If the studio warns you, either scale the design down or go back and export a bigger file.

It helps to know roughly what you need before you start. A design meant to fill the full 28.5 cm width of a tee at 300 DPI needs about 3,400 pixels across. The print areas are 28.5 × 38 cm on a unisex tee, 28 × 20 cm on the front of a hoodie and 20 × 8.5 cm on a mug.

Transparent backgrounds

Save artwork as a PNG with a transparent background. A JPEG cannot hold transparency, so whatever is behind your design is stored as solid white — and on a coloured garment that prints as a white rectangle around your work.

Check the corners and the gaps inside letters before you upload. A background that looks white on a white page is easy to miss. The quickest test is in the studio itself: switch the garment to a dark colour and look at the preview. Anything that should be invisible will show up at once.

Colour on dark garments

A design built on a white page behaves differently on black fabric. Dark outlines disappear, black text vanishes, and soft shadows that gave the design depth turn into nothing. If you want one design across light and dark garments, give it a version for each rather than hoping one copes.

Fine lines and small text suffer first. If you have to squint at it on screen at the real print size, it will be worse on cloth.

Printed colour never matches a screen exactly: a screen emits light and fabric reflects it. Expect prints to read slightly darker and less vivid than the preview. That is normal and is not a fault.

We use DTF printing for most apparel, which handles full-colour artwork and photographs well, so you do not have to reduce a design to a few flat colours the way screen printing would ask you to.

Pricing for profit

Your cost per print is fixed and shown to you again before you publish. You set the retail price, and the difference is yours on every sale. A price at or below your cost is refused, so you cannot accidentally list something that loses money.

Work backwards from what you want to earn rather than forwards from the cost. A tee that costs KES 1,200 and sells at KES 1,920 leaves you KES 720. Decide what that figure needs to be before you pick the price.

Two things eat into it. Paystack’s own fee comes off the transaction before it is split, so your margin is not quite the whole difference — their rates are on the pricing page. And a discount costs far more than it looks: taking KES 200 off that same tee is more than a quarter of what you were going to earn. Discount deliberately, not by habit.

Before you promote anything, order one yourself. A seller can buy their own product at cost with no margin, and samples are kept out of your sales figures. It is the cheapest way to find out that the print sits too high or the colour is not the one you imagined.

Describing and showing a product

The picture on your listing is generated from your design on the blank you chose, so it already matches what will be printed. What it cannot do is sell the idea for you. That is the title and the description.

Write a title that says what the thing is and who it is for. A slogan nobody would ever type is a bad title. Put the garment and the subject in it.

In the description, answer the questions a buyer would otherwise have to ask:

• What the item is — the garment, and how it fits.
• What the print is, and roughly how big it sits on the item.
• Which size to choose if someone is between two.
• That it is printed to order in Nairobi, takes one to three working days to print, and that delivery is included in the price.

Once your sample arrives, photograph it. Daylight near a window, a plain wall behind it, one picture of the whole item and one close enough to see the texture of the print. Those photographs are what you use when you post about the product or send it to someone directly — a picture of the real thing on a real person persuades in a way a generated preview cannot.

Getting your first customers

Nobody finds a new store by accident. The first sales come from people who already know you, and they only come if you ask.

1. Go to the group the design is for. The class group, the club, the team, the congregation. Post it where those people already talk to each other rather than where everybody is.
2. Send the link to individuals. A direct message to ten people who would genuinely want it does more than one public post to a thousand who would not.
3. Wear it. The sample you bought is an advert you are carrying around. People ask about shirts.
4. Ask your first buyers for a photograph. One picture of somebody else wearing it, used with their permission, is worth more than anything you can write.
5. Give it a reason to be bought now. A match, a graduation, a trip, a season. A deadline sells better than a discount.

Then leave it alone for a few weeks and look at what sold. Add products next to the one that worked, not in every direction at once.

If somebody comes back and asks for a few hundred of something — a team kit, an event, a uniform — that is past what a storefront is built for. Tell us what and when and we will point it at the right print partner.

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