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A Quick Journey Update: A Day of Milestones from AmazonMerch
I’m going to keep this pretty short so I won’t have a TL;DR.
A few of you may remember one of my first posts [about the potential of Merch and my journey since starting.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonMerch/comments/6sv6lu/merch_does_have_potential_heres_my_journey/).
I thought I would give a quick update because today was certainly a combination of a lot of milestones for me. I’ll remember October 26th for at least a couple weeks… maybe longer.
Today was a first in a few areas. Here they are:
– [I maxed out my tier](https://imgur.com/a/83bCy). I’m sitting at T1000 with exactly 1001 shirts live. I intentionally push one more through than my max just because it made me feel like a first world #MerchAnarchist – oh, um, I mean I accidentally did one more than I should have. I’m speculating there will be maybe one more tier up before next year. I’m hopeful that I’ll have the sales when that happens. As of today I lack 160 sales. Hopefully those come in the next couple weeks. Until then I’ve got around 300 designs in draft and many more ideas to keep my designers busy for the next few months.
– I crossed 100 sales in a 7 day period threshold. Even with all the cancellations yesterday I was still able to break this milestone. I’m happy that I’ve got a decent average profit but I had to firesale a few designs so it brought my average down. Crossing this hurdle was helped majorly by the next milestone for today.
– I sold my first “set” of shirts. I currently have 4 design sets (more than a *couples* set) that are supposed to be purchased all together. People are really weird because up until today I had sold 1-2 shirts from each set every couple of days. They weren’t doing it right! Today I sold my biggest set – 13 total designs – all at once. I was *to the moon* excited. I even texted my wife and all she said was “oh, nice.” This is partly why I’m creating this post… I need people who understand me! It’s a holiday theme so hopefully I’ll sell more as we lead up to Kwanzaa… erp, I mean Festivus… umm… nevermind I don’t want to give away all my secrets!
– [I filled up my design sketch book](https://imgur.com/a/wd6m3). A couple months before I got my Merch invite I bought a set of these little booklets which I carry around with me everyday (with a *pocket pen* of course). I divide each page into fourths and make little sketches whenever I get ideas. It’s kinda weird since I’ll literally pull over sometimes to draw a design on the way home from work but some of those designs have made me a few hundred… so I guess it’s worth it. I paid my son $5 to count all the design sketches last night. He told me there were over 525 ideas in the book. Many of those are scaleable concepts so I’ll have plenty of spaghetti to throw at the wall for the foreseeable future. I’m starting book 2 today which is exciting in it’s own way.
– EDIT: I had my best sales day ever. Finished the day with 36 total sales (22 of which I’ll count as organic which is still better than my best of 18).
– EDIT: I blasted past my first “purely organic” $1000 month. I’ve hit $1000/month before but it usually involved some ads, buying myself & forcing my family to buy.
I’m going to leave out the meat of the post because I’m short on time and have work to do. You’ll have to settle with knowing that this month I’ve already sold more than my first 5.5 months combined and I’m about half way to replacing my wife’s income.
Again, if I’m being honest I’m nowhere near where I wanted to be by this point (I was really hoping for $4000/month by now) but that’s really out of my control. I’ll just settle with coming up with ideas, throwing them on the wall, hoping they sell and testing, testing and more testing.
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I know I keep promising a post on how to find good designers… I promise it’s coming. My boss is out of town next week so I’ll try and get it all formatted by then.
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**QUESTIONS:**
– Does anyone else have any shirt sets? If so, do you find that people will just buy a random one sometimes?
– What’s your biggest Merch Milestone you’ve reached so far?
**EDIT: thanks to everyone who said it was a great post & a pleasant read – I appreciate that. I’ve got two novels that I have yet to publish because I’m afraid people won’t like my style. It’s good to know that KDP may be a platform I can explore! (we might bump into each other at r/selfpublish but I go by another username over there – I’m funny that way I guess).**
EDIT #2: what a good day. Thanks everyone for letting me brag a bit.
