A quick search for AI or making money with AI on YouTube will turn up a gazillion videos telling you that POD is the way to go. But, can you use MidJourney for print on demand items? How well does this work?
Can I Use MidJourney for POD?
In short, yes, you can use MidJourney to create images for print on demand. If you pay for a MidJourney account, you’re permitted to use the images for commercial use, which includes POD. You’ll need to generate a quality image, upscale it to the appropriate size and then upload it to a POD store to add the image to items you wish to sell.
Is It Possible to Be Successful with POD?
This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. You’re not likely to make money overnight by simply popping out designs on MidJourney and slapping them on some shirts. Let’s take a look at the nitty-gritty of this business.
Research What Sells
Don’t rely on someone else to do this research for you. Look on Etsy and get an idea as to what is selling well on the platform. Read the reviews to find out what people liked or didn’t like about products.
Depending on the platform you intend to use, you should see if there are ways to maximize your profits. Pick the bestsellers and move on from there. Research, done yourself, is key to success.
Look Into Platforms
There are dozens of POD platforms available, so how are you supposed to pick one? From Redbubble and Zazzle to Printful and Printify, you have a ton of choices. Not all of them are great, either, so I highly recommend spending weeks talking to other people about their experiences and reading reviews.
You should take the time to look at what products are offered, the method of choosing a provider (some sites have multiple providers available, and what shipping times are like. It’s also a good idea to look at whether the platform sells items on its own interface or if you have to sell on your site. Some, like Printful and Printify, offer integration to common sites, like Etsy, to make it all easier for you to create the product and then sell it.
Make It Unique
Everyone and their dog is selling t-shirts with AI designs on them these days. That means you need to really stand out in the crowd. How are your designs different? What makes them special?
A few ways you can stand out in a crowd:
- Create personalized items
- Branch out from shirts and mugs and focus on other items
- Pick designs very few people are doing, such as goth or dark aesthetic
- Focus on a very specialized niche
This is where market research comes in quite handy. It will allow you to find out just where the money is and who your target audience is.
Finding your niche is important. For example, everyone is making Mother’s Day mugs right now, but what if you made mugs that were targeted at moms who are also nurses? What if you designed shoes for Mother’s Day instead of yet another mug? Or offered personalized welcome mats? These will require more research, but could offer even more rewards.
Learn Marketing Methods
Most people like to think they can just set up a few POD products, list them on Etsy and they’re good to go. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea. It’s what a lot of YouTubers are promoting, so of course, people are setting up stores and then waiting for the money to roll in.
If you want to be successful with POD, you need to market. It’s the best way to let people know you exist. This may mean paid ads, it could mean doing videos on TikTok and other social media sites. Learn to market and you’ll already be a step ahead of all those people who simply leave it up to chance.
How to Get Print Quality Out of AI
MidJourney is great for generating some impressive graphics that would work well for print on demand products like shirts, mugs, hats, etc. However, there’s one big issue, the images are usually not high enough quality to print on items without becoming blurry or pixelated. You’ll need to change this by upsizing outside of the AI. Then you can use the image anywhere you like.
MidJourney, along with other AI art generators, creates small images at first. This allows it to work faster and you can select the image you like best. You may have noticed that MidJourney images change when you upsize them . . . that’s because the AI has to invent new pixels to fit the image and make it work, since it’s being blown up. However, the max size for MidJourney and most other AI generators is still too small to print nicely on a shirt.
The size of an image in the grid is 512 x 512 pixels. When you upscale the image, you get 1024 x1024, and if you go to upscale to max, you can boost it to 1664 x 1664. The Beta upscale redo gives you 2048 x2048 pixels. But what does this translate into for inches?
Print quality usually means 300 dpi, so if you divide your pixels by 300, you have the approximate inches that it will measure. In this case, the absolute largest you’ll end up with will print nicely at 6.8 inches wide. That’s not good enough quality for a shirt, much less a larger item like a blanket or shower curtain.
Fortunately, you can upsize AI images (or any image for that matter) far more by using more AI. There are a number of AI upscalers available online. I use AI Image Enlarger. This lets you boost your image up to 8x in size. It uses AI to fill in those missing pixels, so you don’t end up with something that is too blurry or lacking in detail.
From there, you can upload the image to your POD program and add it to the desired product. Then you’re ready to sell.
So, Should You Use MidJourney for POD?
This is certainly not the simplest way to make money with MidJourney and it is an area that can be pretty saturated until you find your niche and your audience. That being said, I’m not one to shy away from a little hard work.
I feel like if you’re willing to put in the work and do your research ahead of time, rather than just leaping into what someone else said was good, you can go far. It has a lot of potential and you can create some very original art in no time.
Have you used MidJourney for print on demand? How did it go for you?