I'm going to try to sell AI Christmas ornaments for 30 days.
I'll be taking you through the entire journey from generating art to manufacturing to advertising.
With people reportedly making hundreds of thousands of dollars, let's see how much money I can make.
The first step is to find an AI art generator.
I'll be using Leonardo AI, which can generate high quality images for free.
Let's generate a holly jolly Santa with a white background.
That's my boy.
Now the ornaments I'm planning to sell won't be your typical Christmas balls.
They'll be flat wooden ornaments with AI art and text printed on them in various fun shapes.
To create them, I'll be using Printful, a print-on-demand service.
They manufacture custom products from holiday decor to home decor to clothing.
They handle all of the printing, packaging and shipping for you and you don't need to pay anything upfront, as they only do it when you make a sale.
Here's how I'll be designing my ornaments.
I'm going to add a new product and upload the AI art that I generated directly to Printful's Design Maker.
From here, I'll adjust its size and position, remove its background using the built-in background remover and add some text based on my design.
I'll pick a few good fonts, transform them a bit, and boom!
Merry Christmas, Timmy!
The plan is to sell my ornaments on Etsy.
It is an online marketplace that focuses on arts and crafts and is a popular site to shop holiday gifts.
Printful is integrated with Etsy, so with just a few clicks I can easily list my ornament as a draft.
I'm telling you, Printful has the process down.
They are amazing, and I'm happy to say that they're today's video sponsor.
Recently, they released memberships that give you access to major discounts on their products, plus other benefits, so make sure to check them out.
Link is in the description.
Before I hit publish on my listing, there are six important elements that I need to edit.
The first is the photos.
I'm gonna use the mock-ups provided by Printful, as well as Photoshop, one of my own for the thumbnail.
It'll simply consist of the ornament in front of a Christmassy background, just to give it some color.
And voila, second on the list, the title.
I'm gonna type in popular keywords related to my ornament and its design.
I'll be doing the same with tags.
It's crucial to have good keywords as it helps your listing appear in Etsy's algorithm.
To find good keywords, I'll be using Etsy's search suggestions and Everbee, an Etsy keyword research tool.
Next up, pricing.
Ornaments on Etsy sell for around $10 to $20 on average, so I'm going to price mine in that range.
My aim is to achieve a 30% profit margin.
For shipping.
My initial plan was to offer free shipping as a way to attract customers, but it seemed like the numbers won't allow for it.
Usually when you offer free shipping, you cover its costs by marking up your product's price.
But if I did that, I think the ornaments would just seem too expensive.
So I'm gonna pass the shipping bill to my customers.
And finally, personalization.
For many of my ornaments, I'm gonna allow the text of the design to be personalized.
This will give the product more value.
To do this, I'm gonna click add personalization to my Etsy listing and write a few instructions.
Now, when customers land on my product page, they'll see a field where they can personalize their ornaments text.
Instead of Merry Christmas, Timmy, they can request Merry Christmas, Jimmy, or Happy Holidays, Vinny, or subscribe to Jensen Tongue.
That works too.
And publish.
My first listing is up.
I'm now going to spend the week cranking out as many ornaments as I can.
Here's hoping that Santa will gift me some sales over the next 30 days.
It's day seven, and I have hustled like an elf.
I've created 97 AI Christmas ornament listings.
Something interesting I found when researching ideas was that many people seem to buy ornaments designed to celebrate specific occasions like engagements anniversaries retirements, life milestones of that nature.
I presume it's because Christmas ornaments are often given as Christmas presents, which totally makes sense.
With this in mind, I've made all my ornaments target specific occasions.
I haven't made any sales yet, but it's pretty early in the challenge, so I ain't stressing.
Today's only November 16th.
I have a good feeling that as we get closer to December, sales will pick up.
Or so I hoped.
It's day 12.
I'm nearing the halfway point of the challenge, and I still have no sales.
It's still November right now, the 21st to be exact, so I'm not entirely surprised, though I would have imagined some people would have started buying Christmas ornaments by now.
Don't you think?
I'm sure they are, just not mine.
The thing with holiday products is that, while they have the potential to make you lots of money in a short period of time, you can only do so in a short period of time.
Every day until the holiday matters a lot, because the moment the holiday ends, your products basically become worthless and you have to wait a whole other year to start selling them again.
I think this leaves me with no choice.
I'm gonna turn on Etsy ads.
Now, I don't know if it was the ads or the Christmas spirit, but when December rolled around, it suddenly started snowing.
Snowing money!
I just got my first sale.
I sold a new baby ornament in the shape of a star.
The customer's from the UK.
Whoa, that's a long ways away.
This just in.
I got a second sale.
The customer bought a tree-shaped cancer survivor ornament.
And again, they are from the UK.
They are loving my ornaments over there, aren't they?
I just sold another cancer survivor ornament.
This time around, the customer is from the States and What is this?
I've been charged an offsite ads fee by Etsy.
Apparently.
When you turn on ads, Etsy automatically advertises your listings on sites and apps outside of Etsy.
All sales made through offsite ads are charged a 15% fee.
What?
If I knew that I would have opted out of offsite ads.
I didn't even know I was opted in.
It gets worse.
On my sales to the UK, I've been charged VAT by Printful.
Value added tax is a tax charged by the UK government on the sale of goods and services and is 20%?
VAT is not charged here in Canada, where I'm at, nor the US, so...
I did not account for it in my pricing.
These fees are eating up my profits.
Offsite ads fee plus VAT, that right there is 35%.
The profit margin of my ornaments are only 30%.
Just when I thought everything was going well, there was a catch to it all.
At this point, the only worst thing that could happen is if someone wanted a refund or something.
I just got an email from a customer.
It's not a good one.
Hello, I received my ornament but there's a significant mark slash dent in it.
I can't really give it to my friend as it doesn't look very nice.
I would like to send it back for a refund.
I've attached a photo.
Oh no, it must have been damaged during shipping.
This is bad.
I did technically state no refunds on my product page, but I'm going to have to refund her and cover the cost of my own pocket.
If I don't, she's going to leave me a one-star review and you can say goodbye to my Etsy account.
Oh my God.
For any products that arrive damaged in the mail, Printful is happy to send a replacement at no cost.
No way.
I just emailed Printful's support team and asked for a replacement ASAP.
Every second counts right now, because if the replacement doesn't arrive in time for Christmas, it's game over.
This has to work.
I wonder how... Oh my God.
They replied.
A reshipment has just been issued.
Holy.
That was fast.
I'm genuinely impressed.
Crisis avoided.
And with that, it's day 30.
The challenge is over.
Before I reveal how much money I made, here are my final takeaways.
If you're going to sell AI Christmas ornaments or any holiday products for that matter, whether it's for Halloween, New Year's, Valentine's Day you got to start months early.
I started selling in mid-November and although sales only picked up once I entered December I don't know if it was because that's when people buy ornaments or because that was the amount of time needed for my listings to finally show up in Etsy's algorithm
The Etsy listings you're paying for last, for four months anyway, so might as well make use of every day.
Also, while not exclusive, to AI Christmas ornaments.
I learned this lesson the hard way during this challenge.
Be very aware of your costs.
The offsite ads fee and VAT basically destroyed my profits.
And if I had known about them, I would have priced things very differently.
To be honest, I think I priced things too low in general, my ornaments and my shipping.
Okay, it's time for the reveal.
I sold a total of three AI Christmas ornaments one new baby ornament and two cancer survivor ornaments.
I earned a total revenue of $66.08.
For my expenses sales tax cost 864, manufacturing cost 2745, shipping cost 947, VAT cost 490 and Etsy ads cost 1721.
Etsy also charged me 614 in offsite ads fees, 373 in transaction fees, 273 in processing fees, 151 in tax on seller fees and 20 cents per listing in listing fees.
I had 97 listings, so that cost me $19.40.
In total, my net income for this challenge is negative $35.10.
Maybe I'll have better luck with the next holiday.
If you want to make my Christmas this year, give this video a like, subscribe if you haven't already, and happy holidays.
Peace out.
