Custom Mug Training - How To Make Trending Products To Sell

How to make custom mugs using water transfer paper

In this article I'm excited to reveal how a chance meeting in London with a millionaire mug maker led to me understanding how she was making in excess of 100,000K a month making and selling novelty mugs.

I recently attended an entrepreneurs summit where some very successful people shared how they made their fortunes and what they were doing currently.

I wasn’t expecting any of the speakers to be from an arts and crafts type background.  I was expecting to hear from people who were into Real Estate, Digital Marketing and Financial Traders.

I was there for the digital marketing people as I wanted to learn new ways to gain exposure for Mr Decal Paper.

So, it was to my surprise when a lady called Rachel Rofe took the stand and immediately told the audience that she had become very successful selling custom mugs on sites like Etsy, Amazon and Ebay.

Here she is giving her talk to over 2,000 of us at the ExCel in London.

       how to make and sell novelty mugs

Many of my customers purchase the Clear Inkjet Water Slide Decal Paper to water transfer text and images onto white mugs and the White Inkjet Water Slide Transfer Paper to do the same on black or darker coloured mugs.

 

What I was not expecting was how much money she was making. 

It was jaw dropping, shock and amazement all in one. 

Here’s a screengrab of one of her sales accounts from Amazon and her own Novelty mug website combined.

   Rachel Rofe income from selling Novelty Mugs

In one month (December) she recorded 7,899 orders with 8,126 mugs sold making a total of $124,439.70 in sales revenue! That’s around £96,040.52 in the run up to Christmas.  She sold even more in the run up to last Christmas in 2019.

Sure, it had taken her a few years to get to that level of sales but still, impressive right?

One of the first things that I teach arts and crafts sellers is not to ever make what you like personally and to take personal preference out of the equation.

Only make what sells!

And Rachel has become a master at precisely that…

If you want to learn from Rachel,  she has put together a mug making training video where you can learn how she’s doing it and how you can do it for yourself for a fun part time or a full time income.

Rachel quickly discovered that the best way to make sales on Amazon selling  custom novelty mugs was to find and reproduce mugs that were proven to record lots of sales.  Not duplicate them but just tweak or improve on them.

       themed novelty mugs

She would then tweak the mugs text,  upload her version onto sites like Amazon, ebay and Etsy, then upon making sales,  just copy and paste the details over to a “print on demand” company to make and post the mug to the buyer, then pocket the difference.

If you are unfamiliar with “Print on Demand” they are custom print companies that will print your text or images onto items like mugs, clothing and pillow-cases etc on your behalf and then post them to your buyer.

So what’s the big secret?  How is Rachel making so much money?

And the answer is simple. 

                                    The themed mugs do not exist! 

At least not until someone makes a purchase anyway.

You see it’s very easy to drop a few lines of text onto a picture of a blank mug.  It can be done in your computers “Paint” program.

      how to make custom mugs

How long do you think it takes to upload 1,000 mug designs onto Amazon. 

A few weeks? A couple of months?

Try 20 minutes.  If you have the designs and product details in a spreadsheet they can be bulk uploaded and up for sale in around 20 minutes with sales being made off the bat!

 

For Rachel, it did not stop at creating novelty mug designs.  When you have an interesting piece of text or slogan that sells, it can be put onto many more items to scale your business.

       low hanging system Rachel Rofe

And just in case you were thinking that you don’t know anything about Print on Demand Companies, Rachel now owns and runs her own.  She does this for her own sales and the sales of the people that she helps.  Everything you need to start quickly is in her training materials.

For Rachel, it didn’t stop at Amazon either.

When you have products that generate sales, they can be transferred over to other sales platform like Etsy and ebay.

Here is a snippet from one of Rachel’s presentations showing how Etsy stores can be opened to scale even faster.

               etsy store mug sales

So with themed mug sales from Amazon, Etsy and Ebay the combined sales have reached over 500,000K in just recent months alone.

 

Rachel uses her own print on demand company to create and ship the mugs that she designs which is great for people who just want to spend time creating designs on their computers and then list for sale.

But for Crafters,  we do have a choice.  And that choice is to handmake the mugs ourselves by buying mug blanks and then using the water transfer paper for the image transfer.

Total cost of a mug - $1   Total cost of a mug sized piece of decal paper? $0.10c

Total profit per mug?  $10 - $15 as opposed to just a few dollars using print on demand.

So,  if you enjoy paper crafting and creating,  why not combine her ideas for creating with your love for making and keep all the revenue for yourself less selling fees.

 

 


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