The Artist - This is a poor strategy and you'd probably be better off working as an actual artist/designer than spending hours for a few crumbs while Amazon eats whatever nice cake you've baked lovingly.

I am this and my FT day job is a graphic designer. I make all my own stuff so some weeks I crank out a lot, and some weeks I do nothing. Once in a while I get a trend or two that takes off and leads to nice sales. I've considered hiring out the design work but often times the time it would take me to create sketches or notes to send a designer, I could just do it myself.

I was "lucky" in that when I started Merch in 2019, I didn't do it to make money, I created an account to sell shirts for car clubs I was in to take the stress out of organizing 'group buys' for particular shirts. After that I made a handful of reaaaaally low effort designs that apparently sold enough to get me to T100 by the end of 2020. So when I got my profits for Q4 I thought maybe I'd give it a real go. In the past 5 months I've gone from $600 for Jan to over $3000 for May. Most of those shirts are trends that no longer sell like mad, but in that time I've made enough 'evergreens' that it should help sustain the momentum as I make more designs. I don't do so well for 'holidays' or birthdays or family type shirts bc those markets are so extremely saturated (tens of thousands already there) so I stick to goofy memes and trends, since I can crank out designs fast without having to hire that out.