Distributing Swag Globally

I've been sending some of the Training Tilt trucker caps to customers and friends around the globe. While it is something that I personally like to do, it can be a pain having to bulk order, get to the Post Office, and send out. It doesn't help that I have to wait two weeks for a batch of trucker caps to be made. I can't just order one at a time because of single orders being so expensive.

I've found a great solution to make sure that I can send Training Tilt coaches and friends a trucker cap cheaply and easily. You just need two main platforms: Printful and Big Cartel.

This solution is a "drop shipping" set up so I never even have to handle the caps myself and single on-demand orders are much cheaper.

In the video, I show you just how easy it is to get your products or swag manufactured and distributed internationally without having to handle the gear yourself.

You can also start selling it where you control the price if you want to make a profit or simply just sell it at cost.

There are two steps I didn't cover in the video which are connecting your payment provider to Big Cartel (Stripe) and adding credit to your Printful account. You only need to do these steps if you want to allow people to buy directly. If you are just using Printful to order and distribute then you don't need these steps.

If you are interested in buying one of these Training Tilt trucker caps you can get them at cost price here on my Big Cartel site. Pricing all in USD.

The base product I used for my design is this one on printful

Transcription

Hey there. Cam here from Training Tilt. Today, I wanted to talk about distributing branded products like this trucker cap here to your customers across Europe, the U.S. or internationally.

Distribution Pains

So I've got this problem where sometimes I like to give these hats away to customers or friends, and they often live in other parts of the world.

What I've had been doing is getting them printed, getting them delivered to me, and then I get their address, take it to the Post Office, pay for posting, often International from New Zealand to the U.S., New Zealand to Canada, New Zealand to Europe. And then that whole process takes me a long time.

I normally have to wait two weeks before the hats will be completed and delivered. Sometimes, I even go and pick them up. Each time I send one, I have to go to the Post Office. Obviously, that's a pain.

So as much as it's nice to buy local, all of my customers are distributed around the world. So local to them is different to local to me.

Distribution Solution

So, I found the solution that enables me to have my trucker caps manufactured or printed locally to my customers, not locally to me. So, for example, I want to give the hat to someone in the U.S., I can use this platform to send that hat to them.

All I do is go through the process, pay for it, and then enter their address. And then they handle the delivery of just one hat, which is great because normally I have to buy maybe 20 hats to make it worthwhile. This way I can actually get these hats delivered to the customer/friend faster and cheaper than I would if I had to order 40 of them at once. So it's a great option. No brainer really, and you only need two different platforms.

Printful to Manufacture & Ship

For this one, it's Printful. I'll link this up under the video or above the video. The great thing about Printful, aside from the fact that it gets the job done, is that you can sign up for free.

Designing your Product

So when you're in Printful, go over to product templates. I've done my product template already, but to do it, you create a new product template, and then say whatever you want here. They've got loads and loads of different stuff. So this is great. I'll probably set up some other stuff. Maybe some shirts and socks, and that sort of stuff as well. But for now, I'll just do hats.

I've already had a bunch of these delivered directly to me because I tested them out first. So I had 10 delivered to me through this platform to make sure they were good before I sent them off. And they're awesome. They're actually the same hats as that I've been getting delivered anyway, locally. So trucker hats.

Let's pick this one. and it's this one, here five-panel trucker cap here. This the canvas one. So pick your base color. This is the one I want: black main section, white mesh on the back.

Then you can upload your file. You'll need a logo or whatever you want to be printed on that. And you can use something like Canva to create the logo or some other editing tool. But you might even have a logo that matches already. If you've got something printed before you might have that already. So you upload your file. I've already got mine here, but you would just click upload and upload it from somewhere else.

Then so I will choose this one. So, just a note, the first time you do this with a hat, you'll have to pay a little bit extra to get the first version of it. I forget what they call it, but they make a they make a copy of this and then store it to their account to match the colors and stuff for the embroidery. So you can see here, it actually has shown you what it will look like embroidered, which is really nice.

So then you can click on it and you can make it bigger or smaller within the allowable embroidery area. When you're happy with the size and placement, we can go continue and save product template there.

Ordering your Product

So, once you've got that in there you can go off and you can order these for yourself. You don't need the next step to actually order these for yourself. So if you're in the U.S. or Canada or Europe, this would be a better way to get your products delivered to you anyway. If you want to distribute them manually, this is probably the cheapest way that you'll find. That's only $13 US dollars, which is about the cheapest that you can find for this high-quality cap.

So I'm going to move on to the next step now if you want to be able to distribute these or allow other people to buy them actually. So what I've been doing is I just make this order here and then I fill in the details, I pay for it, and enter the customer or a friend's address and it gets sent off to them.

So, if all you need is to be able to send them to people and pay for them yourself, then you're all done here. So that's printful.com.

Big Cartel for Customer Shopping

But I'll show you another way where you can actually allow your customers to buy it themselves and get to the ship to themselves. So remember, you only need to do this if you want to allow other people to purchase the products. You can offer these products at a discount or at cost or with a margin. You can control the price. So if you want to sell products to your customers and give it to them at cost, you can do that. Or you can sell them for a little bit of margin on the top.

So this platform is called Big Cartel -- bigcartel.com -- and I picked this one because they have a free version and they integrate directly with Printful. So this is like an online store platform. If you sign up for free here, then you can connect your Printful account that we just had before to this store and then add your products to here.

Connecting Big Cartel and Printful

We need to go back into the Printful dashboard, go stores and connect an e-commerce platform. Then choose your stools platform. Be sure to choose Big Cartel, and NOT Big Commerce. Just follow the steps here. Connect to Big Cartel. Allow. And because we're already logged in, then this should just magically work like that. So now we're connected.

Adding Products

We want to add a product to the store. So we can do that from inside Printful as well. Click on add product, my product templates. And I'm going to use this black one that I created earlier. Continue.

I want to make sure that it's stocked in all the available places, USA and Europe. I want to go proceed to mock-ups. And I quite like this mockup. She looks cool. And I'm going to use JPEG. I tried it with PNG before and that failed because of the size. So I'm just going to use JPEG. That's only for the mock-ups.

Proceed to details. I'm going to put in 'Training Tilt Trucker Cap'. And then I'll say, 'Wear this trucker coaching racing and chilling.' And I will now go proceed to the pricing to New Zealand dollars. I might change that later on to the US dollars. You can decide what your retail price is. This is what the actual cost of the hat will will be, but you can say choose your own retail price. And then you'll get an indication of profit on each hat here. I don't want to make a profit on these hats. I just wanted as many people to buy them as possible and get wearing them. So now submit that to the store, and that should go off and send that.

Ordering Products in Big Cartel

Now we should be able to go into Big Cartel. We've got our product in there, so let's just open that up. All the details are in there, etc. And here we can see the link that I will use. I will share this with people so they can buy my trucker cap for a bargain price of $22 New Zealand dollars. So that's it.

That's a great way if you want to either with Painful get some cool products printed with your designs on them, and get them sent to yourself so you can distribute them or so you can send them to whoever you want the send them to around the world without having to get them delivered to you. So you can also do that through Printful. But if you want other people to be able to buy them themselves, then you also need the Big Cartel account, which is free for up to five products. So that's what I've got here.

This is great way to get your products around the world. So I might post this link in here. So if anyone wants to buy one of these hats, remember it's at cost, so I'm not getting any money out of it. But I would love for as many people as possible around the world to be wearing them. If you're into that then that'd be great. They are nice caps. They're really good quality, and they last a long time.

So anyway, thanks for watching and I hope this is useful. I'll talk to you again tomorrow.