One of the biggest obstacles many people face when starting a creative business is knowing how much money to invest in it to get started. You’ve got all these idea for products you’d love to make but you cant necessarily afford to make one of each design into a physical item just yet, so whats the solution? Product Mock-ups!
Product mock-ups can make your newly launched business look super professional (it also saves time stressing over taking product photos and staging them to look just right, especially if you don’t have the funds for an suitable photography set up yet) and save you a ton of money in held stock. We’ve used them a lot in our own wholesale craft blanks business when mocking up blank products to show people what they can do with them.
My go to website for anything design wise is always Design Bundles and their family of sites, you cannot beat them for value for money and you know you are getting a quality file.
Ok so lets take a look at some examples of how you can use mock-ups shall we?
A time to use a t-shirt mock-up is when you work with personalized Items, you can’t make a demon of every single name/initial so that customer can see if they like something BUT you can mock-up the design (which honestly takes seconds) and send it to them for approval, once they confirm they like it and send you the payment for it (never start custom work without payment!) you can get to work on the physical item.
Another good feature of mock ups is that you can show multiple options to someone without having to make multiple items and the best bit? It hardly takes any time to do! Say someone comes to you and says, ‘I want some t-shirts made up for my business (lets pretend its a local gym), I’ve got an idea for a design but I want to be able to offer a few variations, can you do that?’ All you need to do is load up a t-shirt mockup and start designing
Lets go for a simple design in one colour
If the potential customer comes back and asks if you can do it in different colours and maybe add their business name then thats super easy, we jump back into our design tool,
change up the colours, add the business name and then change the logo orientation for them on another mock-up just for good measure. Once again it’s taken a few minutes to do but could make you 4 times as much in sales because you’ve been able to deliver professional looking options quickly.
Ok, last one – Using mock-ups to upsell an item!
As a general rule t-shirts cost less than sweatshirts so if anything you’ll make up a physical copy of a t-shirt but not the sweatshirt to save some money. BUT the mark-up on a sweatshirt is also higher so ideally you want to up sell customers to that. The best way to do that is to show them the same design on two different items, so grab a sweatshirt mockup, chuck the design on there too and show both images to the customer, it means you have zero costs to make up any item at all and they may choose the higher priced item anyway meaning more profits for you!.
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