Curated Muse
Behind every creative work lies a purpose. Behind every great collection, a story.
From Hyperlux Magazine comes The Curated Muse Podcast—where we share intimate conversations with artists, collectors, and experts in art, design, and curation. Together, we explore the deep connections we form with objects—why we collect, what we create, and how these pieces shape our lives.
Through honest, thoughtful dialogue, we uncover the emotional ties to art and design, the history behind cherished items, and the magic of intentional living. This is The Curated Life—a celebration of inspiration, purposeful collecting, and meaningful creation.
Curated Muse
The Dark Side of Prints & Print On Demand (POD) For Artists
Show Notes: https://hyperluxmagazine.com/curated-muse-podcast-the-dark-side-of-prints-print-on-demand-a-warning-for-artists-and-makers/
Hey wonderful humans, welcome back to the Curated Muse podcast. Thank you so much for all the feedback. We have got a lot of wonderful feedback on Instagram, as well as you guys have left reviews on Spotify. I know there's only one, but I want to thank the person who did that because it was unexpected and amazing since this podcast has only been going, oh, for a very short period of time. But we have a lot of episodes planned. We have a ton of topics to cover. And just the feedback that you have given us so far has really warmed our hearts. So in this episode, we are going to be talking about prints and print on demand and the dark side of it. Because prints and printing on demand come off as something that can be financially rewarding for artists. And there are a lot of things out there that are touting this. Just get yourself up a store, get all of the pictures of your art up there, and you're just going to sell prints left and right, and it's just going to fly off the shelf and you'll be making money. This also goes into the business realm where people are scamming people into things like dropshipping. I'm sure that you have seen numerous videos or posts where people are like, hey, set up your store and sell other people's stuff and just drop ship from Amazon or drop ship from this or that. And I'm going to tell you a short story in our other business, Rise Visible, which is a web design, SEO, and digital marketing company, which we've been doing for 26 years. We had a young man and an older guy get on a phone call with us because the older gentleman in his 70s was a truck driver, took out$10,000 to set up a website. And when I sat down with them, I was like, I had to explain that this is a scam. Believe me, if you could just set up a drop shipping store and hook up products from other companies and completely make bank, I'm pretty sure you, me, and everybody listening to this podcast would have already done it. The way these people are making money is selling you the idea and selling to you that they have information of how this is gonna work. And then when it doesn't work, they go dark, they disappear, they made their money off you and you're done. So in the art world, it's kind of the same. It's not as scammy, but there are different things that are predatory. And I'm not going to name any type of websites, but there are artist websites out there that tout, pay us$1,000,$2,000, set up the store. You get access to all of the people on our platform and you'll just start selling left and right. And then you see these ads and you see all of the comments from artists going, oh my gosh, I had an amazing time. I sold thousands of dollars when people don't realize that those aren't real people. They're actually bots. So when you are on the internet and you are looking at an ad and you see all of this favorable, positive responses to an ad, don't take it as factual information. it's actually often bots. Not that there aren't real people and not that there aren't maybe real success stories, but generally speaking, when there's a mass quantity, when somebody is trying to sell you something for thousands of dollars without any proof of return of investment, more than likely it's going to be a bot that has created numerous social media accounts that all look real. So even if you were to go to Susie Smith's account, it's going to look like she's a mom, she lives in Minnesota. She's got kids, but it's not a real person at all. Bots don't just create fake accounts that look fake. They actually look real. And it's very deceptive if you don't know. So selling prints right now is a really hard thing. A lot of people think if I just get prints up in my store, if I have a website and I can hook up Printify to my website, or I'm going to use Redbubble and I'm going to get all these products going, it is just not a thing anymore. The market is saturated. On top of the fact, a lot of people aren't even buying prints anymore because it's so easy now to steal prints online. Before, people could steal a print and if it did have, let's say, a watermark on it, they probably, if they knew Photoshop, could get rid of it. But if you put a low quality image up there, then they're going to get a low quality print, even if they were to take the file and print it professionally. But now you can just drop a picture, a really pixelated image, into any AI software that will clean it up, make it look perfect, and also give you a high quality image that's upwards of 6,000 pixels wide so you can print it very large. This is really impacting artists that used to sell a lot of prints. And prints are an affordable way as a gallery owner for people to be able to purchase art that perhaps maybe had already sold that they wanted to purchase but they were able to get a print. I just talked to a collector this week about it who shared a couple prints that they had based the fact the original work sold before they could snag it. But also there are people that don't have copious amounts of money to spend on art so they spend it on prints. And prints are great, but we have a joke in this house as artists and gallerists and curators and all the things that we do, as the minute somebody requests a print on Instagram, you know that the minute you print it and you get it ready, you're going to get it. They're going to disappear. Everybody always wants prints. This is known by a lot of artists. It's kind of an inside joke. Everybody wants a print until you get the print up there and then everybody disappears because it's impulsive. But print on demand is something that artists and creatives think is going to potentially create an income. We were working with an artist on their website recently, and they wanted to integrate that feature. And once I talked about the facts and the data in print, all of the setup time and information that you have to do to get all of that ready. The return of investment for somebody buying a 20, 30, 50, however much money you want to place on your prints based on if they are limited edition or they're open edition or they're on paper or high quality paper or they're on canvas. There are so many different variables in which you can apply to how you're going to do a print. And by the time you figure that out, you figure the size, you get everything ready, you hook it up, even if you're working with Etsy or Redbubble. What is the return of investment? A lot of people think, well, things are just going to sell and it's going to be passive income. And this is something that people do tout as a potential passive income option for artists. And some artists this does work for. I'm not saying that it doesn't. But there are so many people that think, if I just get those prints up there, they're going to sell. If I just get that available, I'm going to sell them. And it doesn't matter much. how far you are in your career. You could be a very well-known artist who's exhibiting in galleries, who sells out your work, and you still may have a very low amount of sales in prints. Maybe$100 a month. Maybe nothing. But everything you do as an artist and creative, I like to encourage you to think about the return of investment, the time you put into something. If you put in all of this time and you make$20 a month, was it really worth it? Or would it be worth it to take those hours that you took to set up that store and actually create more real work? Maybe create more real connections. Maybe create gallery connections if you don't have them or seek out other types of opportunities that can actually have a return of investment. The one last thing I'm going to say about prints, which is super important to note, is that prints sell great in person. If you are doing festivals, if you do anything, even if you do an exhibition and you have prints alongside of that, in person, prints are something that do sell. They are an impulse buy. Somebody can pick it up, put it in their hand. They're fairly reasonably priced and they can walk off with it. So I'm not saying prints are not a great seller, but they do much better in person than they do online. So I hope that this helped you. to understand a little bit more about Prince and where to put your energy and to realize that even if you do spend all that time getting an Etsy or Redbubble or getting integrations into your store, then it might not be worth your time. Where can you put your time so that you know that the energy you're putting into it actually creates some type of reward, even if it's not monetary? Maybe it's just building relationships. I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast and we'll be back again soon.