Okay, so check this out, I was super bored last weekend and decided, “Hey, why not make some funny political tee shirts?” Sounds easy, right? Well, buckle up.
First things first: I needed designs. I didn’t want to just rip off someone else’s stuff, so I fired up GIMP (yeah, I’m cheap) and started messing around. My idea was to take regular political slogans and twist them into something ridiculous. Think, like, “Make America Caffeinated Again” with a coffee cup instead of a flag. Get it?
I spent, no joke, like three hours wrestling with GIMP. I’m not a graphic designer, okay? Layers were my enemy. Text wouldn’t cooperate. It was a mess. But eventually, I had three designs that I thought were kinda funny. One was the coffee one, another was “Keep Calm and Impeach Everyone,” and the last was a donkey and elephant playing rock-paper-scissors.
Next up: finding a place to print these bad boys. I checked out a few online print-on-demand sites. Redbubble, Teespring, that kinda thing. They all seemed okay, but I was worried about quality. I didn’t want some cheap, scratchy shirt that falls apart after one wash.
So, being the overthinker I am, I decided to order a test shirt from each of the top three sites. Cost me like $60 bucks, but hey, gotta do your research, right? The shirts arrived about a week later. One was decent, one was kinda blurry, and one felt like sandpaper. Guess which one I didn’t go with?
Time to actually sell something! I picked the site with the decent shirt and uploaded my designs. They had all these options for colors and sizes, which was cool. I priced them at like $20 a pop, figuring that was a fair price for a funny tee. I even wrote some cheesy descriptions, like “Show your political apathy with style!”
Here’s where it gets real: promotion. I’m no influencer, okay? My social media presence is basically non-existent. But I figured I’d give it a shot. I posted my shirts on Facebook, Instagram, even tried a little TikTok (cringe). I begged my friends and family to share them. Mostly, I got crickets.
But then, something kinda cool happened. One of my friends, who’s way more online than I am, shared my coffee shirt on some obscure political meme page. And boom! A few sales trickled in. I made like, five bucks profit. Not exactly retirement money, but still, it was a sale!
The lesson learned? Making funny political tee shirts is harder than it looks. You gotta have decent designs, find a good printer, and somehow get people to actually see your stuff. But hey, it was a fun project. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll actually make enough to buy a fancy coffee with my profits.
- Design: Use something easy
- Printing: Test before you invest
- Promotion: Pray to the algorithm
Final Thoughts
Would I do it again? Maybe. If I had a really killer idea. But for now, I’m sticking to my day job. At least that pays the bills, even if it’s not as funny as a politically incorrect tee shirt.
