Back to School and Broke

First off, thanks to persistence and patience and some good ol' industry experience, it all paid off. I'm officially accepted into a design program at VCC. I'm so excited and even though for the first month or so I'll be repeating what I've learned, I can't wait to dive into the real meat of the program- design theory! It's going to be an awesome school year come September. I'm thankful for everyone's support.

I'm happy to be going back to school but at the same time I know it's going to affect my income. My work hours will be cut (probably in half) since I will be schooling full time. I'll also have to pay for tuition, books, etc but it's a good investment and I'll make every cent worth it.

So what now? Time to start brainstorming on ways to make a secondary income to support myself. I'm sure someone will hire me as a contractor to do some freelance work. I can probably attend to that. However I do hope to develop my tshirt business during this time even if it means starting up slowly.

Here's what I plot:

Option 1: Design tshirts for my own business (Zazzle). I can start some designs and sign myself up with zazzle.ca. Zazzle allows anyone to have their designs printed on a variety of different products: mugs, tshirts, hats, etc. The best part in doing this is there's no inventory required on my end as they provide products and I just supply the design. Anytime someone decides to buy a product off me Zazzle would print it and ship it for me. The down side is that I would have to set the mark up price a bit higher in order for me to make a few dollars per shirt.

Option 2: Design tshirts with own inventory. This might not be the best idea considering it's my first time doing this. If I do decide to print my design through a printing company and I print 100 shirts, there's always the chance that I won't sell all 100 shirts. So I guess it's better to do a poll/survey of consumers' interest before I go print any shirts. If there's a high demand it's a good option if it's low demand I say stick with Zazzle.

Option 3: Enter contests. Whether I do option 1 or 2 I can still do option 3.

I haven't finished designing a graphic tshirt yet but I did submit a tshirt slogan. If my slogan gets selected for print I get $500. After the slogan contest I'm going to try to take some time to submit a tshirt graphic design. But for now please take the time to vote for my tshirt slogan.


It's at Threadless and you can vote by just clicking here.
My slogan is: "nothing is impossible? i've been doing nothing for years!"

It only takes a few seconds to sign up if you don't have an account. I promise!
This link will be available on my side menu too if anyone else wants to vote in the future.

Anyway with that being said, if you have any good secondary income ideas feel free to let me know! Thanks for voting if you've already done so!