Personalised product Side Hustle Run Down:
There is certainly a trend for personalised products lately! You see baby announcements on onesies, family branded t-shirts for holidays, cups and glasses with names for wedding parties, personalised engraving on chopping boards for house warmings – and so on! It seems whatever can be given as a gift, add some personalisation and its 10x better! I always thought that they looked amazing, but was never sure how it was done until I learnt that it’s just one very handy machine that does it all! You can run this side hustle from home and have a lot of fun making products.
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PROS AND CONS OF A PERSONALISED PRODUCT SIDE HUSTLE
PROS
- Easy to make great looking products!
- High demand, everyone and everything seems to be being personalised these days!
- Not difficult to do – certain machines have easy instructions, tutorials and youtube videos to show you how to do almost everything under the sun with them in no time!
- Can choose products to suit a niche audience
- Many places you can sell including marketplace, at markets, on a website, through Facebook, Instagram, Etsy, Gumtree.
- Can all be done from home
CONS
- It’s been growing with interest over the last year or so, there’s a number of people out there already doing this! (Doesn’t mean you cant! You just need to be unique or do it better!)
- Need to purchase a cutting machine and materials which might seem to be a more costly start-up than others. (don’t forget resale value of your machine though!) Take a look on Marketplace as someone may be selling a cricut machine or similar second-hand if they have upgraded.
Effort Required To Start A Personalised Product Side Hustle
To get started: Moderate
To get started, you will first need to buy your cutting machine which will cut out the words and shapes in specific materials you need. Cricut machines are some of the most popular at the moment and offer a range of great machines with different levels of capabilities. You will need to have a play with it and spend some time learning how to use the machine, which really could be a lot of fun!
From here, you can decide to set your items up on marketplace and create a Facebook page for your side hustle, or choose to sell through a different avenue such as Etsy, eBay or your own website. Keep in mind some of these selling platforms charge a fee per sale. You will need to spend some time working on your social media following to get your name out there and show people your fantastic personalised products!
Ongoing: Moderate-high
If you decide to only sell a niche product with select slogans or sayings on them – you can probably get ahead of time by pre-making some items before you attend markets or before orders come in online. However if you are going with the fully customised route and people will be telling you what they want on their item – you will need to be reactive and create their orders as they come in. Each item does have to be printed and then applied by hand; time taken will depend on the complexity of your designs and what materials/products you are working with!
Personalised Product Side Hustle Earning Potential
Earning potential is moderate-high. You can purchase your base items quite cheaply – even more so if you buy in bulk – and then by adding your personalised wording or designs, you can increase your margins significantly. For example I was gifted a beautiful personalised tracksuit when my daughter was born. I know the tracksuit was from a local chain-store which would have cost the creator $8. Once it was personalised with her name and initials, the creator was selling them for $45. Time and materials need to be accounted for, but if she was making 10 of these a week, that’s a nice $370 in her pocket. Doing that every week for a month – that’s a cool $1,480 in her account. This was just one of her products, so if you can offer more variety and keep high margins on your products then this could be an awesome side hustle for you. (Margin means the difference between what you charge and your expenses – ie, your profit)
It is becoming slightly more competitive, so people are differentiating by lowering their prices to get more work – so picking a niche and a unique product is a fantastic way to avoid having to do this.
Cost Required To Start
To get started we recommend you look into which cutting machine will be best for you and suits your needs. We highly recommend the Cricut series, just as we know they are easy to use, have heaps of materials and are used by lots of other makers so there is lots of information and help out there!
OLD CRICUT VERSIONS ARE ON SALE (still work with all the tools but heaps cheaper at the moment with the new ones being released!
Cricut Explore Air 2
Cricut Maker Machine (original)
Otherwise there are new ones that have been released – with the main difference I find is the cutting length and cutting speed. These are faster and can do up to 3.6 metres in length.
Cricut Maker 3 : Can cut over 300 materials, and can engrave products and can cut up to 3.6 meters (great if you want to do signage!). If you’re wanting to work with wood, this is probably the way to go!
Cricut Explore 3: The model down from the maker, but can still cut over 100 materials and cut up to 3.6 meters (previous models couldn’t print this long!). If onesies and t-shirts are more your thing, this machine should do the trick for a hundred dollars or so less.
Materials for your product (depending on if you’re personalising glass products, clothing, wood, etc.) Sign up to Spotlight here to get a $10 off voucher on sign up, and use Shopback for a little extra in your account!
How Do I Start My Own Personalised Product Business?
– Get started by thinking about what products you would like to sell or make. Do you want to do drinkware (glasses, stubby holders etc?), Onesies and baby clothes? Family Clothing? Mugs? Wood? Christmas Decorations? Find something you’re passionate about!
-Buy yourself a Cricut Machine and the materials you need, have some fun testing it out and learning how to use it!
-Think of a brand name for yourself – what will you be called? Create a logo for yourself.
-Decide where and how you want to sell. Is that through Facebook or your own website? Set this up.
-Promote your products. Online is a great way to start, but markets are also a fantastic way to get your products and brand in front of people and start to build a customer base!
GET STARTED TODAY
Ideas To Boost Your Personalised Product Side Hustle
- Offer free gift wrapping and gift delivery (be sure to never include payment information if it’s a gift!)
- Get some business cards and stickers printed so when you send or package up your products they look professional and people can keep your details for future orders! Vistaprint is fantastic for this.