Design Brainstorming
If you are a beginner, I would begin by creating t-shirts based around your passions, hobbies, past experiences, and the niches of which you are extremely familiar with. This way, it will be easier to design t-shirts that will sell. Essentially, very few people can compete with you this way. Only go this route, however, if you find t-shirts that are selling at least once a week (at least a BSR of 500,000 or less) within your chosen niche. Make sure to not infringe on any trademarks. Depending on how familiar you are with the given niche and the amount of interest or demand the certain niche has, it may take over a month for any sale to be seen. Therefore, I would suggest to only create 2-3 designs, if you are a beginner, around t-shirt designs based on your interests, and then create more if they sell.
After the research step, you should act quickly to create a design based upon the several designs of which you have found to be ranked below 300,000. To come up with ideas for this design, take a look at the designs that are doing well. Most of the time I find that the shirts under the 300,000 BSR are extremely well done, creative, and funny. The other half of the time, however, I see shirts which are very average or are just text-based shirts. As a matter of fact, there are shirts out there which are purely text-based which have sold thousands of times. Go back to the Merch Informer search bar and search for nothing, which will show you all relevant Merch results. From the front page, you will see several text-based t-shirt designs which are selling incredibly well.
Now, as stated before in the research step, you should only be choosing designs which are below 300,000 ranking and those which you can improve upon or offer for a slightly lower price. From the designs presented to you on Merch itself, you can begin to brainstorm how you will begin to design and re-create these designs to improve them. Often, you will see images on Merch designs which can be found in Pixabay with a simple search and/or a transparent background filter on Pixabay.
Never forget that Google is your friend for brainstorming t-shirt design ideas. Search for the title of the shirt design you are looking to create and go to the images tab. Spend a few minutes looking at the various designs and create a shirt which is similar to a design that you think will do well. This process works on Pinterest as well. If you have multiple ideas, then simply create multiple shirt designs and upload the ones you think will do the best first. This was mentioned before in more detail in the Research chapter.
More Brainstorming Ideas
Redbubble, Teespring, Spreadshirt, or any other POD (print on demand) service are great options for brainstorming t-shirt design ideas. Simply search the general phrase for whatever phrase into the search box. You will either receive no relevant results, a few relevant high-quality designs, or a large list of high-quality t-shirt designs depending on what you search. The first three links provided, in specific, are great for getting inspiration from high-quality and creative t-shirt designs, of which you can then outsource to your designer to improve upon at a later stage in your Merch career.
DO NOT copy shirt designs directly or obviously recreate them. The original creator on merch can get your shirt removed and you will get a strike. If you copy a design from an external site, your shirt design may be removed as well. Continue reading to learn more about trademarks and how to avoid them.