Ryan Hogue Passive Income Podcast

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Forget the frustration of picking commerce platforms when you switch your business to Shopify. The global commerce platform that supercharges your selling wherever you sell. With Shopify, you'll harness the same intuitive features, trusted apps, and powerful analytics used by the world's leading brands. Sign up today for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/tech. I'll lowercase. That's Shopify.com/tech. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Looking for an easy workout? You're in the wrong place. Peloton Tread has what you need to challenge yourself, need to be pushed to your limit, their elite coaches will keep you on track to break past your goals. Whether you're looking to get stronger or faster, Peloton Tread has everything you need to become everything you want. Find your push, find your power, Peloton. It's at 1 Peloton.com to learn more. Welcome to another episode of Ryan's Method Passive Income Podcast. Here's your host, Ryan Hogue. With everybody talking about Amazon merch's new tumblers, I want to make sure we don't overlook a product that's been a staple in the merch catalog since it was released. It's something that likely everybody watching this video is probably using, and it is phone cases. This video is a deep dive into phone cases. I'm going to show you everything you need to know, including my favorite way of designing phone cases that you're not going to want to miss. So let's get to it. I almost forgot to mention that this is that time of year when new phones are dropping. Okay? Now, even if Amazon merch doesn't have the iPhone 16 case yet, we know they will, right? It's too big of an opportunity for them not to do. So we need to be on top of this, all right, plus there is big potential to sell multiple products to one customer. Of course, if you buy a new phone case, you got to get a new pop socket. I was going to show you my pop socket, but of course it fell off a couple of days ago. So that was a fail, but the phone case plus the pop socket combo guys, there is potential. So let's get started. We're going to be in merch dominator. Each dominator is the best tool when it comes to researching, well, number one, trends, but number two, it's one of the very few, if not the only tool that tracks different product types than just standard t-shirts. So I'm going to go to MBA and KDP and click bestsellers. Up here on this side of the screen behind me, there is a product dropdown. I'm going to go ahead and click phone case. You notice that they have all the other product types except tumblers, but I'm sure that's coming. Behind me, we've got all the best selling phone case designs in order. So the first thing you should probably just take a second and look at is the design style. It's a departure from how we typically design phone cases. If you're like me and you optimize for t-shirts and then you just take your t-shirt design, you put on a phone case, that typically looks something like this, where we just have the design once, then you can go ahead to the color selector and you can change the background color of the phone case to whatever you think looks best. If you guys didn't know, there is a preview button, which I think helps with lining up your designs and making sure they don't get cut off. Like you can actually see it's getting cut off just a little bit there. So I might come in and just adjust it a little bit to the left. Okay. Maybe that was a little bit too much. Either way, you guys get the point, right? That's how I typically go about most of my phone cases. But if we're serious about phone cases, I mean, we see that these designs are optimized for all over print and for patterns. Okay. Now I have a tool that I really like for turning anything into a pattern. I'm going to show you that in this video in just a second, but let's scroll through here. So we've got a, what is this, what is this niche? We don't have to, you know, you don't have to sell in every niche, but it's worth noting. So this says vintage mosaic collage scrapbook tiles. Y2K. All right. Noted Y2K theme. The next one just looks like a fall themed, you know, pumpkins, flowers. Next one is like camo. It says southern style. It's a dog hunting dog, you've got the fall pumpkins. You've got the Halloween here. It says boo. It's got pumpkins, pink pumpkins. It's kind of got that like Western Halloween vibe because there's some cowboy boots there as well, cheetah print, be careful with your keywords, by the way, a lot of the, everybody knows about the Amazon merch content policy, but a lot less people know about the secondary content policy, which is less about the niches and more explicitly about the certain words you can't use to describe your design, like the word neon, the word glow, the word glitter, the word gold. I'm pretty sure all those are in there, and it's because we used to be able to do that and it resulted in a lot of returns because people thought they were getting something that they didn't get. So I think that is especially relevant to phone cases. So just make sure you check out the content policies. They may or may not explicitly state those words, but I know that, you know, you got to be careful with how you describe your designs. Anyways, the prevailing, I would say, theme is definitely a fall theme, you know what I mean? Whether it's a lot of pumpkins. Let's say pumpkins. Let's just agree on that. Some, you know, mid-journey-esque style designs, like this one right here, it's got like that 3D effect. Anybody who's looking in phone cases last year and the year before, like the 3D effect in these images that are most likely generated in like mid-journey or whatever AI generator you use, definitely a popular design style. So anybody using AI, write that one down the 3D effect if you weren't already using it. By the way, you'll see some designs duplicated. It's because like there's different models. You know what I mean? If we open up one of these listings on and look at it on Amazon, what you'll notice is that it is going to cover pretty much all of the iPhones. Now they did recently announce they're getting rid of the Samsung cases. You know, it is what it is. I've ordered a Samsung like once in my life and I just returned it. So I don't know. Maybe that's what it was. I don't know. I don't know. But you'll see the iPhones are still going strong. I also had an iPhone once and that was it, one and done. But iPhone 15, 15 plus, 15 pro, 15 pro max wait, there's four different versions of the same phone. Interesting. Going all the way back to the iPhone 12 and I'm sure eventually they're going to have the iPhone 16. Hopefully I had a Christmas that's just going to represent massive, massive sales potential. If you're going to go ahead and sell these phone cases, I would definitely make sure you enable pop sockets as well. Okay, don't forget the pop sockets and the phone cases go together hand in hand. I used to think pop sockets were dumb until I honestly, the honest story is I bought one to review for a YouTube video, popped it on my phone and I was like, damn, these really are useful and I've used one ever since up until now when it fell off a couple of days ago. But anyways, that's phone cases, that's merch dominator. I don't know what other tools giving you access to this and you can just scroll and scroll and scroll and continue to look at best selling phone cases for inspiration. Now I did mention, I wanted to show you guys, oh yeah, I wanted to show you actually when it comes to designing. There is a resource page here on Amazon merch, okay, and on this page, they actually have design templates right here. So anybody who likes to be really involved and hands on in the design process and not just outsource all of it to mid journey, you should know that this exists here on the merch resources page. The dimensions for a phone case are 1,800 pixels by 3,200 pixels, okay. They need to update this because it still says Samsung phone cases. And if you pull this in, I typically use Photoshop so you can see they've got a lot of really valuable design templates. I think it's a little bit overkill. The one that I'm more likely to use is the one that's just optimized specifically for the size that it needs, 1,800 by 3,200. But of course, even without this guys, as I showed you a second ago, you can definitely upload phone case designs like this. And again, just use the preview button to see it preview in real time of how it's going to print and save yourself the headache is most likely how I think we should go about it. Because you know, time is money, right? It doesn't pay to spend five hours here in the templates. That's just me though. Now when it comes to designing patterns, there is an app called Repper. I have done a video on this in the past. I don't know that there's a better tool. Is this an AI tool? I don't even know if it's technically AI either way. This allows you to make patterns so easily from a single image. It's got so much different capabilities in terms of like how it functions. Well, you can actually see in this demo, they selected a small portion of the design and you can see over here how it reflects just that portion that it's selected in real terms like or in real time with a pattern. Now, let me just show you. I was experimenting with this 3D snowman, this 3D knit snowman. And I can actually like zoom in, zoom out. I can change the pattern style. You guys ready to see some cool stuff? I can go to pattern and I can change how it tiles, right? So over on the left hand side, there's different pattern names and literally I can select this and then I can change what portion of the image is selected. As I showed you initially, I can again zoom in, zoom out and again, however the zoom is is when you download it, what it's going to look like. So this stuff is super cool, especially with like the winter theme designs because you get all the different snowflake patterns and it tends to look really good. Let me show you a couple more, this one's called pyramid, this one's called honeycomb, this one says Arabesque, this is octagon, ladder, Cairo. You notice how it's still got the snowman in there, they're just like transformed quite a bit. Cross weave, this one's called high five. There's just so many different ways to play around with the patterns guys. And there's, I mean, you can do more than what I'm just showing you to. These are seemed patterns. So this is just called rectangle grid, I can click this, zoom out and then you got a million little snowmen, essentially you decide what looks best. You've got oblique grid right here, diamond grid, hexagon grid, fence, playing cards. Is that playing cards? That's weird. We're playing cards of those centipede. There's just so many tapestry, okay. And if I select tapestry, I can still again zoom in if I want to, however I want it to look. They've got a 3D preview right here of what the finished product will look like with your pattern on it. And again, you can even preview it in like real time, the changes. That's what they were showing us on the homepage. So I just wanted to let you guys know that this is out there. If you didn't know, if I didn't make it this clear, my source image is just this image right here, which is in no way, shape, or form patterned. So I'll put a link to repper in the description. If you're like me and you want to optimize your designs mainly for t-shirts with repper, you can truly easily turn them into winning patterns that are going to look good, not only on phone cases, but of course, pop sockets, of course, throw pillows, tote bags, and probably not tumblers as much, but it's still early, right? I've seen some cool stuff with the tumblers. Anyways, guys, let me know your thoughts in the comments. I'd love to hear from you. Don't sleep on phone cases. This is the best time to sell them. Q4 just coincides with the release of the new phones. So right now, phone cases needs to be on your mind. Guys, thank you for watching. Please like and subscribe, and I'll see you soon with another new video. [MUSIC]

In this episode I'm deep diving into how to increase phone case sales & how to turn t-shirt designs into patterns optimized for phone cases!

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