Hi! Cześć! What’s popping?
Ever wanted to start your own brand? Maybe you’re curious about how I make all my products at HiJohnny.com… well here’s a video showing how I do it.
Johnny Michael from HiJohnny.com shows how he uses Printful and Shopify to create his products at his online shop.
Ok, let’s cut through the monkey fluff… it’s totally twofold. I’m sharing how I do this, yes. But I’m totally showing off and sharing my brand. It’s sharing with a selfish motive. Can you blame me? Meh, it’s a fair exchange… at least that’s how I’ll justify creating this piece of content from which I labored over and put up on the internet for free.
For me, creating stuff is also about practice. Until now, I’ve yet to make a video that involved a screen recording and tutorial, so that was a new fun thing to test drive. I like testing myself, does the creative mental muscles good. Talking in front of a camera is another valuable thing I’m trying to get better at. I can’t help but notice some nervous quirks… Is it charming or does it make me appear like I’m lacking confidence? But why should I have confidence? I’m just starting, my Hi apparel sales are close to nil… I’d want to appear confident when I have a damn good reason to be confident on camera. But maybe I’m wrong about that approach. If you’re curious about what’s happening inside my head when I watch myself and edit these things. There’s that. A rambling of insecurities. I’m a human after all and so are you…but let’s move on shall we?
Quick story time about why I love the possibilities of Print-On-Demand… Back in the day I started a brand with a good friend of mine and that brand not only didn’t make any money, we lost money! And no, that exclamation mark does not mean I’m the least bit excited about that result. Even worse, we lost momentum for the dream of the business. We had to buy shirts in big bulky boxes. Take those bulky boxes to a shirt printing company in an industrial district in Chicago. Get those shirts printed. Then take those printed shirts and put some labels on them. To do that we unwisely hired a lady who didn’t speak English at a dry cleaner to sew the tags on the shirts, and she didn’t want to do it, so she gave the task to her disgruntled daughter. To our demise happened to be some careless creature who probably wasn’t even in high school yet… Most likely feeling imprisoned and punished to the task and chore of our sewing tags onto our dream t-shirt business, she ruined all the shirts and quite possibly ran the sleeves under a lawn mower rather than a sewing machine. It was a mess. Thousands of dollars worth of products were mutilated. Our dreams of a t-shirt business were battered to hell, we were taken to the cleaners… But after that mess, we learned and we stayed friends. Plus I taught myself how to sew, and now I can sew tags on shirts 100 times better than a dry cleaner’s daughter. #neveragain.
Yadda yadda yadda… point is… in about 10 years time the landscape of starting a merch brand has become something amazing to see. The challenges and limits exist in the imagination, creativity, building trust, and community, and then marketing the products to the world. Having the product creation process streamlined like this and not having to struggle with upfront costs gives so many artists, business owners, and creative individuals access to opportunities that never existed before. E-commerce is something to truly be excited about. There’s also a part of me worried it’s a giant distraction that’s a total waste of my time…. but hey folks, here I go again.
Armed with tools from Printful to create products, mockup photos, and sync them all to an online store and I’m able to open up new possibilities for the Hi brand and potential ways to build community, spread friendliness and build something fun.