Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Print on Demand Business in 2025

Are you curious how to start a print on demand business in 2025? You’re in good company—and the best part is, it’s easier than you think! Whether your goal is to start a brand of custom t-shirts or sell other original clothing on your website, in this article we’ll explore the fundamentals step-by-step. The good news for beginners is, you won’t need a warehouse, inventory or design experience to get started.  All you need is the right resources and a reputable print-on-demand apparel supplier to start a print on demand business.  Interested in seeing how it all works?  Let’s explore your path to success!

Understanding the POD Business Model

Before you get started designing and selling custom apparel, it’s essential to understand how the print on demand business model works. Unlike traditional manufacturing, POD allows you to sell custom products without carrying inventory. It is ideal for an entrepreneur getting into the custom apparel space who likes the idea of being able to start small, limit their risk, and be able to continually pivot in response to changes in the market. Let’s consider how it actually works—and why this might be a great option for beginners going forward into 2025.

The Mechanics of POD:

Here’s what happens when someone places an order in a POD setup:

1. A customer browses your online store and places an order for a custom t-shirt or hoodie.
2. That order is instantly routed to your POD supplier through platform integration.
3. The supplier prints the design, packages the product professionally, and ships it directly to your customer—no handling needed on your end.

Using this automated system allows you to run a clothing business without ever touching the product yourself.  You can save time and overhead expenses so they can be used on designing and marketing.

Key Advantages for Beginners

Starting a print on demand business in 2025 offers several unique benefits, especially for those new to ecommerce:

• The absence of inventory management means that you don’t have to buy or store mass quantities of products. This helps lower both risk and total capital. 
• Low startup costs allow you to start with a small number of designs and grow as you generate profits—no need for large budgets or to do a production run of bulk products. 
• Along with flexibility, rapidly designing products helps you make fast experimentation with different styles, niches, and trends. If something does not sell you can simply switch it out for something else—no dead stock. 
• Being scalable means that once your business is established, you can grow rapidly without adding substantially to the overhead of your business operations.

Potential Challenges (and how to mitigate them):

While on demand apparel printing has many upsides, there are a few common challenges you should be aware of:

• One challenge is every product has a smaller profit per item because we are creating individually. Consider offering bundles, premium designs, or upsells to help increase average order value. 
• Depending on the supplier for product quality and delivery times can affect your customers’ experiences. To lessen this risk, work with only trusted POD manufacturers who will be consistent on quality, fast turnaround and reliable service.

Understanding both the pros and cons upfront helps you build a more resilient and customer-friendly brand from day one.

Why Start a Print on Demand Business in 2025?

2025 is looking to be a great year to start your own clothing line; here’s why. The ecommerce industry is growing more rapidly than ever, and more and more consumers are shopping online for unique, customized, and personal products. Moreover, there is an increasing demand for sustainable and made-to-order fashion; therefore the print on demand market is the solution. 

Print on demand is most beneficial in that it has very little investment to start with very little financial risk; it enables you to brand your business, validate product ideas, and pivot offerings without e large amount of inventory. As a small business owner, content creator or future fashion entrepreneur, print on demand offers the least barriers and greatest flexibility for entering into the custom apparel market.

Step-by-Step: How To Print On Demand

Beginning a print-on-demand (POD) business in 2025 is a low risk and high potential way to enter the world of ecommerce. POD allows you to eliminate upfront production costs, and since you don’t hold any inventory, there is minimal risk. POD is perfect for creative entrepreneurs who want to either monetize their design work or expand a fashion brand. However, there is a great deal of work that goes into planning a successful POD business. From selecting a niche to finding a manufacturer, building your store, and marketing your brand, each is a big step in building a successful brand. In this step-by-step guide, we will provide you with the resources to make your creative venture profitable in 2025.

Choose Your Niche

Selecting your niche is the building block of your print on demand business. Having a well-defined niche such as gym wear, eco-fashion, or children’s clothing will allow you to hone in on your audience more effectively than a less defined niche. As we move into 2025, we will see saturation in more and more markets, which will necessitate tighter branding. Your defined niche will inform your product design, your tone in your marketing, and the identity of your store. To come to the right niche for you, conduct your research on existing trends, areas of needed products, or areas you have an interest or expertise in. You might also have some luck on tools like Google Trends or you can engage communities on Reddit and Instagram to help you define your audience interest and potential areas of need.

Design Your Products

Design sets your brand apart. Whether you create your own art, designs, or hire a freelance designer, make sure you stay in your niche and attract your target markets. In 2025, design trends appear to lean towards AI generated art, bold graphics, and clean minimalism for clothing. You must stay on top of current trends, use trend reports to stay aware, while also staying creative and innovative to have a fresh collection.

Speaking of collections, you cannot underestimate the importance of high-quality product mockups. High-quality product mockups help customers envision your things and help conversion rate by significant percentage. Ensuring you invest in high-quality mockup is critical to your sales strategy. You can use mockup generators with advanced features, or if you want to invest more money for a professional touch, hire a stylist and photographer for lifestyle photography. 

Select a Print-on-Demand Platform

Choosing the right print-on-demand (POD) site is vital in running day to day operations and scalability into the future. Popular businesses include Printful, Printify, and Gelato, which have simple apps to integrate with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce. When you work with a POD, they print, pack, and ship on your behalf while you focus on marketing and taking care of your customers. 

One of the downsides to Print-on-Demand sites is the lack of control in customization, quality of product and overall experience for your customers. If you want more control over your products and branding, you can partner with a custom clothing manufacturer directly. Working directly for a custom clothing manufacturer will give you access to better material selections, private labels, and a more premium experience for customers.

Find the Right Clothing Manufacturer

As your business expands, it becomes necessary to partner with a reputable B2B clothing manufacturer’s service. Apparel manufacturers tend to provide better quality, better turnaround times and discounts for bulk orders. Manufacturers also have a greater degree of flexibility, especially when it comes to product customisation. This is ideal for entrepreneurs wanting to scale their brand(s), launch capsule collections, or provide private-labelled apparel. When evaluating a manufacturer, you should think about their quality standards, production capacity, lead times, and customer support..

At Tack Apparel, we can assist pre-seed or emerging brands with our premium POD services, low minimum order quantities (MOQ), custom apparel production, private labelling, and speedy support. We build our solutions with the intention of growing alongside your brand – from your design to your customer’s doorstep.

Set Up Your Online Store

The last step is to take your brand online! There are plenty of options for launching an online store, and the following platforms allow you to easily get started, even if you’ve never set up a store before – Shopify (best with customization), WooCommerce (available for WordPress users), and Etsy (great for handmade/POD). 

Pay attention to store design to ensure it is clean, has mobile responsiveness, and has fast load times. Spend the time to create decent product descriptions that highlight the features as well as the emotional benefits of the products, and ensure your branding does not differ across logo, packaging, etc. A good store design means more trust, which naturally will turn visitors into customers.

Launch & Market Your Brand

Now that you have your products ready and the live store opened, it is time to make use of marketing. Use platforms such as Instagram and TikTok to show off your designs. This will connect you to potential customers to purchase your designs. Use micro-influencers in your niche to create organic promotion and they will find customers genuinely excited about the designs. Try and use some very basic SEO tactics such as creating keyword rich product titles, create a blog that has some relevant project ideas, all of these elements help organic traffic, customer reviews, testimonials, and user-generated content (UGC) go a long way for your credibility. A tactic that gets overlooked is using giveaways and free product samples. Giveaways create buzz, free product samples will help you establish your brand identity in the 2025 POD sellers marketplace.

How a Custom Clothing Manufacturer Can Help You Scale

As your print-on-demand business begins to grow, it is important to start working with a custom clothing manufacturer that can help sustain that growth. Whereas most general POD platforms will do their best to allow you to grow your business, working with a dedicated manufacturer means you are going to consistently get high-quality products, allowing you to build a professional, trustworthy brand. They can also help fulfil bulk orders! This will probably be a much-needed to help meet customer demand once your print-on-demand business gains traction.

In addition to being able to grow, custom clothing manufacturers can give you much more control over your products, including your fit, fabric, and finishes. This means you can now develop a unique look and build a trusted brand. If you want to change the stitching on a garment or change the fabric to a more responsible and eco-friendly product, you can now do that. The biggest benefit of taking this step is a wholesale custom clothing manufacturer will help you transition and grow from POD to private label, ultimately to become a known fashion label.

How Much Does It Cost to Start a Print-on-Demand Business?

Starting a print-on-demand business is one of the most affordable ways to start an ecommerce business. Unlike retail, there are no up front inventory costs, or minimum production runs, therefore reducing the dilemma of upfront investment significantly. Depending on how you want to go about getting started, you can expect to spend somewhere between $100 to $500 on average to start a printable on demand business. 

Basic operating costs to start your own clothing line include buying a domain name, ecommerce platform set up (Shopify, WooCommerce), as well as a product mock-up or design. Other optional costs (hiring a graphics designer, running ads, ordering product samples, etc) may increase the size of your budget accordingly, but permits a higher level of professionalism and trust in the brand. One of the best aspects of POD is that it is easily scaleable, you can start small, testing variations to get things to work, and slowly re-invest your profits into your business as it develops. 

Final Thoughts

Starting a print-on demand company in 2025 is not only possible—it is also one of the easiest ways for novices to start an online brand. The initial financial barrier is low, and there is comparatively less of a risk, meaning you can easily dabble with your creativity and test product ideas without being completely tied to the idea yet. Your greater success in the long-term will depend on picking the correct niche, good branding, and working consistently with good partners that are focused on your success. Are you ready to get started? Even if you are not, start your planning for your designs and make them happen. 

Looking to bring your designs to life with high-quality apparel? Contact Tack Apparel – your trusted print-on-demand manufacturing partner.