Print on Demand children’s products: small but mighty

Print on Demand children’s products: good things come in small packages

When it comes to Print on Demand Children’s products, pint-sized clothing could make you a substantial packet. Children’s products are extremely lucrative, yet shockingly undersold, sector of the market. Moteefe features more children’s products than most platforms. Five different items are available: babygrows, baby T-shirts, children’s T-shirts, children’s sweatshirts and children’s hoodies.

One of the things that make this sector so profitable is that the buying pool is constantly being renewed and refreshed. Worldwide, there are approximately 385,000 babies born each day. Every new child comes with a host of family and friends who want to celebrate his or her birth and lifetime milestones.

Q4 is when print on demand children’s products really come into their own. The last quarter of the year is packed with enormous events such as Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas, which are all centred around children and family. To put it simply, the huge potential of children’s products in Q4 cannot be overstated. Sellers are massively missing out by not taking advantage of this enormous opportunity. Christmas requires family and friends to buy a vast amount of gifts for specific relations. Any inspiration you can provide has a strong chance of being appreciated.

Let’s take a look at some of the things that you can do to successfully branch into children’s products.

Get a custom name store

If you haven’t got a custom name store, set up your shop now. Buyers of POD family products are often repeat purchasers who buy multiple items at each checkout. Make sure you are set up to capture these highly valuable email addresses, and you may just secure yourself a number of lifetime, big buyers.

In every store you run, make several new children and family sections (for example, ‘Babies’, ‘Children’, ‘Children’s Christmas Sweaters’, ‘Halloween Babygrows’). Think about making tabs for individual family members too, for instance, ‘Mums’, Dads’, ‘Aunts’, ‘Uncles’, ‘Grandparents’, ‘Siblings’.

Consider featuring children’s products in your store banner. There are lots of companies out there that can create product mockups at speed. If you’re going to use a model, make sure that they represent the audience you’re trying to reach.

Cross-sell

Children’s products make excellent, cross-sell items. To use this feature, go to your dashboard and view all of your active campaigns. Create collections using the ‘Add to Collection’ button at the top left of your screen. Tag two campaigns so that they drive traffic to the main campaign. The two extra campaigns will display as cross-sells on the original campaign.

You can also remove the store tag from a product that you are sending traffic to and then select four other children’s products to cross-sell. Only two products at a time will be shown in a customer’s cart, but once they have added one of these products you want to have another available to take its place.

In addition, this will allow you to show the maximum number of available cross-sell products in confirmation emails. For every campaign, you run, create one baby product for each niche and tag it to the product you’re driving traffic to. Next, do the same for a children’s product (hoodie, T-shirt or sweatshirt) and a homeware product such as a mug. Play around with your selection by removing and adding tags until you see a combination that you like in the cart. The system will offer the product that has the most sales, or in the absence of sales, the product that has been most recently created. Choosing four products will give you a little more choice over what gets offered.

Custom text

Custom text will sell big in the Q4 children’s products sector, and it can sometimes justify a slightly higher price on a low-cost item. Make sure that text is easily readable by people scrolling on phones. In particular, ensure that ‘a’, ‘o’ and ‘r’ are clearly identifiable if using cursive or handwritten font type. Contrast between product, design background and text colour will also need to be taken into account.

Make them cry to make them buy. The family and children’s products buyer group respond well to emotional messaging. Sentimental text designs stand a strong chance at success, as do designs commemorating milestones and first events.

Inspiration

When it comes to text, the possibilities are endless. Here are a few ideas to get you started: ‘The apple of my father’s eye’, ‘Baby’s First Christmas’, ‘New mother’, I’m a father’, ‘Call me Dad’, ‘My favourite aunt gave me this’, ‘Crazy Uncle Sam’s first Christmas with Billy‘, ‘My big brother has my back’, ‘X Family Christmas’, ‘It’s my first Halloween, I came as a baby’, ‘6 months and 16 pounds’, ‘Grandma’s first grandchild’. Anything related to sibling rivalry or baby gender reveals.

In terms of design, think baby animals, cartoons, rattles, dummies (pacifiers) and soft pastel colours (particularly pink, blue and yellow).

Scale up

Children’s products are infinitely scalable. Find something that works and then scale up.

Scale with new languages and markets: you have a great chance of quickly doubling your sales by translating a successful campaign into other languages. Think about branching out into Polish, German, French, Italian, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian in particular. If you think you have a great design, but it doesn’t work in one language, try another. Online translation services can help you get your designs ready for a new market.

Thanks to its local fulfilment centres, Moteefe will give you an advantage in many markets, especially those in Europe. You’ll find that you have more flexibility with Christmas shipping cut off dates than sellers using other platforms.

Target

Target parents by interest. You can target people who have just had a child within 6, 12, 18, 24 months and beyond. Think about what sort of pages and products parents might like and select these as interests. For example, look for pushchairs (prams/strollers), baby harnesses, baby milk/formula and maternity items or groups. You can also look for people who have liked anything to do with family activities, festivals or holidays.

Target by age group. A quick Google will tell you the average age of parents by country. Add a margin of 15 years either side to this. You can also do this for grandparents by selecting married people over the age of 50.

Test

Aim to test five new targets every other day and let the ad sets run. Shut down anything that isn’t getting traction (clicks, adds to cart, initiate purchases) within the first $5 or so. For more on how to test and scale-up, watch the Advance Facebook Advertising Live Stream.

Don’t worry too much about testing for engagement. Social proof won’t contribute much to sales. Instead, concentrate on finding a winning design.

Get creative

Be creative about how to market your product. Consider creating email campaigns based on Christmas jumpers with family surnames and target to past buyers. Build a new parent group with lots of dedicated content. Anytime you sell a custom text baby product to a customer, email them with another product featuring the same details.

Team Moteefe