I know a lot of people who have lamented to me that oh, ***“This Print-on-Demand business is just too boring!!!” ***
And honestly? From my mind of mind? (if there’s anything like that 😅) I agree with them.
I mean, think about it. All you ever do in the POD business is to study the market movement, find niches, find quotes, create designs, upload to the marketplaces, and hope that all of your sweat counts for some zeros$$$.
Don’t get me wrong, building the POD business can be very easy. But at some point,** it gets too easy and boring because the process is the same.** A continuous loop of an endless solo track.
Imagine listening to one song on repeat. It might be cool for the first 5 times. Just wait until you have to hear it for a whole year. Exactly! Now you get the picture!
Also, **the process can be very time-consuming. **Trust me, it is pretty easy to get distracted during a product or idea research.
*Let me make a confession! I cannot count how many times I have ended up on YouTube for many hours, all in the name of idea research. *
I bet that I’m not the only one in this boat. Yeah, I got you too! 😂
We all do it. And it saps our time. Concentration requires much more discipline these days.
Another Bermuda Triangle that mysteriously sucks your time and energy is creating designs.
The process of creating the design itself is relatively easy. But when you have to create hundreds of designs, it begins to take a toll on you.
So, it’s much better to hire someone.
Take it from me, if you are not good at designing, you will take many hours to create designs. And don’t get it twisted, ‘many hours’ do not mean that you will inevitably end up with a great design.
So, you might end up spending lots of hours on a single product design only to come up with vomit in a visually graphic form.
Instead of wasting time and effort,*** why not hire a graphic designer to do the work for you?***
I mean, you don’t have to hire Chris Do or Sagi Haviv or some of these big guys. If you have a tight budget, you can start small and feed your designer more later when you make some sales.
I know what you’re asking, how exactly do I go about this? Right?
I’m willing to share some of my time-proven strategies for hiring and working with a graphic designer.
So, grab your pen, journal, or note-taking app. Or, you could bookmark this post. It’s about to be an avalanche of information!
Do you still need a graphic designer for print on demand?
Let me answer this honestly up front, because the answer changed since I first wrote this guide.
I don’t hire graphic designers anymore. Not one.
For the simple text-based designs that make up the bulk of print-on-demand sales — “Best Engineer Ever” on a mug, that kind of thing — PODtomatic creates them automatically as part of building the product. Nobody needs to make those by hand now, and paying someone to do it is paying for something software does for free as a side effect.
For anything more artistic than text on a mug, I use LzyPOD. You describe what you want — something like “a samurai cat under a red moon, vintage Japanese print style” — and it generates the artwork as a high-resolution transparent PNG, up to 4K. It builds the product mockups and lifestyle photos too.
Those are just design files, so they go wherever you sell: Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, Etsy, your own store. It isn’t tied to one marketplace. Plans run from $19 to $199 a month depending on how many designs you need.
Between those two, the design job is covered. That’s the honest 2026 answer, and if it’s the answer you came for, here’s how the whole automation stack fits together.
So why keep the rest of this guide?
Because plenty of people still want a person — for brand work, for a look that’s genuinely their own, or simply because they’d rather direct a human than a prompt. And because I hired designers for years and learned things about it that are worth writing down.
Everything below is that. It’s what worked when I was doing it, and it’s still how I’d hire if I were hiring.
Breaking Down the Working Process
Before you start considering hiring a graphic designer, I think it’s very important that you understand the print-on-demand business’s general working process.
With this knowledge at hand, you would know where the graphic designer fits in and why you should hire one. So, I’d explain the whole working process in brief. That’s ok, right? Cool!
Here we go.
The process of creating a POD business begins with market research. This involves everything around studying the market – such as what’s selling? Are there any holidays? Or any events that might influence a buyer’s search query?
This can help you find the buzzing area to create products for a particular time.
Another part of this is performing niche-based research. This is research for low competition areas where not many products are being created.
The Print-on-Demand niche can be a profession, a hobby, or a pet love. For instance, you would find less competition selling **Civil Engineer Mugs **than just selling regular white coffee mugs.
You can create POD products for yoga lovers, dog lovers, or cat lovers. The list is endless!
From here, you can begin to find the appropriate quotes for the product.
Finding quotes has become much easier now, all thanks to the internet. While you can get a couple of quotes from a few clicks, you might have more concerns about creating thousands of product listings.
Once you have your quotes, the next step is to create the designs for all of the products.
If you have a hundred different quotes, that hundred different designs. And oftentimes, we end up with more than a few hundred. We can have as many as one thousand quotes.
Thinking about the time, you would spend on creating just one of these products. **I would suggest you just hire a graphic designer. **But I’d get to them in a minute.
Now that your quotes must have gone through the hands of a designer or your hands, it’s time to **upload them via a product uploader. **
This is where PODtomatic comes in. It uploads thousands of product listings to Amazon, Walmart or Shopify for you — and these days it handles the niche research, the quotes and the designs as well, which is why I no longer hire anyone for those steps.
**This about sums up the whole process of creating a POD product. **
From here, it’s your SEO and luck that would do the rest of the trick.
How to Hire a Graphic Designer for your Print on Demand Business
Consistency is one of the integral ingredients of building a successful POD business.
Hiring a graphic designer helps you step up a steady automated system of workflow and product creation.
I never had it as easy as when I resorted to hiring someone to get my product designs done for me.
I was able to focus more on building SEO and other marketing strategies and other important aspects of the business.
So, there is a lot of good in hiring a graphic designer than having someone to tell what to do.
At the time, the advantages of having someone wholly dedicated to your product designs clearly outweighed the cost of hiring. (Software has since taken that job, but the reasoning below is still how you’d evaluate a designer today.)
There are a couple of things that you need to know to before you can execute a successful graphic design hire. Let me walk you through some of the things that have worked (and are working) for me.
Understand the type of Designs first
The first thing you must understand about the POD business is that majority of the designs that sell well are mostly **simple text-based designs. **
All you need is to ensure that the design is** clean and made with the beautiful font(s).** You should also keep the arrangement beautiful and easy to read.
Many people buy print on demand products because of the message.
When it comes to designs, one thing that I’ve found is that** ‘legibility’** sometimes trumps ‘creativity.’
Let me put it this way. Creativity is trumped when the message is not legible. A design stops being functional when the people it is intended for can barely read what it says.
This is why I often prefer to stay within the safe confines of a simple text-based design.
Also, these products are pretty small in space compared to an open canvas.
Hence, the space constraints might only showcase a simple text design properly rather than the picture of a red dragon riding a rainbow in a blue Italian suit.
Stop! Stop trying to imagine it. 😄
It’s silly. I know! 🤣
This simple text design doesn’t take much time to build, but it’s boring to do it all by ourselves.
Designs can be easily created using self-help apps like Canva. You can create simple designs on your mobile phone while sipping hot coffee on your couch.
Yeah, it’s that easy! If you have a basic knowledge of Photoshop, that’s a plus!
But, if you need to create hundreds of those, you might have to get some help regardless of how easy they are.
No need to find a highly talented designer who can create a masterpiece
As I earlier stated, you don’t need to hire a highly talented and well-renowned designer.
All you need is someone professional and experienced enough to give you what you want.
You are not searching for a design guru. Focus on finding someone that gets you and understands what you need.
You are not looking for a digital ***Michelangelo or Picasso! ***
Hire Graphic Designer NOT the artist.
You don’t have to use complex or very beautiful art for the print on demand products.
Most of the time, simple text-based designs sell best. I have sold over 20,000 simple text design coffee mugs in the past Mother’s and Father’s Day.
So, the idea is to keep it simple.
They just have to know** how to use Photoshop or Canva** and know** how to create a simple text design quickly**.
The designer must also have** a sense of responsibility.**
Better to find the one who can do the work in the long term
Before I start working with anyone, not just a graphic designer, I always like to know if they can work long-term.
I prefer to build a strong business relationship with one person for years then change workers like I change my shirt.
Once I find someone who gets what I want and delivers quality work, I stick with them.
This would help them get much more accustomed to my work as time goes by such that they can begin to work for me without much supervision.
Here’s where you can find them.
Freelancers and independent experts are becoming a pretty inevitable part of today’s business systems.
Onlinejobs.ph is your one-stop-spot for high-quality freelance graphic designers. What’s more? You can get highly experienced designers at a very low cost.
It is a great hub for professional graphic designers who would deliver great work for you.
You should know that the freelance designers here majorly Filipinos. They are straightforward to work with.
Graphic designers here are different from Upwork or Freelancer.com, charging you a much higher price. Here you get it cheap and fast.
At least, my experience there has been nothing short of amazing. So, I think I can give good feedback on them. However, you should also pay attention and scrutinize properly before hiring.
You don’t want to end up with the wrong person.
Let them do the trial work.
Before you hire a graphic designer,** try to give a test job** to have a heads-up on what you should be expecting. Get a couple of designers, shortlist them and give them a test job.
Let them create designs for about 10 quotes. When they deliver, review the designs and also check how long they can get the work done.
If it matches your expectations or beyond, then you’re good to go! If it doesn’t, well, there are a lot of people that you can hire.
Select the one you like and iron out other details. I recommend that you also save the others you like to a list if the one you hire disappears. Who knows?
Then, negotiate the price.
Always try to get the best deals from negotiations. Once you both agree to a good starting price, you can make other kinds of negotiations to ensure that you spend less over time.
When it comes to hiring graphic designers online, the high price is not always high quality.
**Since the kind of designs you would be doing are simple and straightforward text designs, the cost should not be high. **
As long as you can explain it to the graphic designers, they will understand and accept the lower price.** **
You can get up to 50 designs for just $10.
For one, you can pay by the number of works and promise them how many words you can feed them per week or month.
However, you can also make a deal stating that more work would come as long as the designer makes it a lower price per design.
So, he or she gets a steady in-flow of work, while you can great discounts. It’s a win-win.
You can also provide the designer with beneficial design tools to help them design better, faster, and make the cost cheaper for you.
For example, by giving access to the tool like Canva or Adobe SparkPost, the designer can create the designs faster, and he or she can accept the lower price.
As I said, these are just a few tips from my several years of working with designers.
While hiring can add a new financial needle to your pocket, it would prove to be a much-needed investment in the long run.
So, you should begin this process.
Conclusion
For years, having a designer on the team was genuinely required to run a print-on-demand business at any scale. Consistency is what makes this model work — steady products going out, week after week — and back then a human was the only way to get it.
That’s no longer true, and I’d be doing you a disservice to pretend otherwise. PODtomatic makes the text designs. LzyPOD makes the artwork. Neither takes a holiday, needs managing, or stops when you stop paying attention.
But if you do want a person — and there are good reasons to want one — then hire the way I’ve described here: someone reliable over someone brilliant, briefed properly, kept for the long term. The designers I worked with were excellent, and hiring them was one of the better decisions I made at the time.
Just don’t hire one because you think you have to. That part has changed.
—Bank K.
