• Photo editing
• Aug 26, 2023

Using AI to Create Print-on-Demand Designs That Sell

By 2033, the global print-on-demand market will reach $75.30 billion. The demand for unique, customizable products is exploding worldwide. 

Plus, with artificial intelligence (AI) in the game, standing out from the crowd isn’t difficult. While many view AI as a trendy technology, with POD, it enables you to achieve a competitive edge. It transforms how you create, scale, and sell POD products. 

Whether you’re launching a new custom t-shirt store or managing an established business with thousands of product listings, AI tools can:

1. Automate design creation
2. Eliminate creative bottlenecks
3. Help you produce unique designs that actually convert

Keep reading to learn how. 

The Print-on-Demand Landscape

With the POD market, the numbers tell the entire story. 

Valued at $12.96 billion in 2025, with over 228,000 active POD stores, experts predict the market to grow at a 25.3% CAGR through 2033. 

Despite this enormous uptrend, only about 24% of POD shops survive beyond three years. 

The difference between those that thrive and those that fail often comes down to one thing — who can create distinctive and high-quality designs at scale.

Traditional POD design methods hit three major pain points:

1. Design bottlenecks slow everything down – Manual design creation takes hours per product, limiting the speed at which you can test new ideas or respond to trends.
2. Generic templates kill differentiation – When everyone uses the same stock graphics and fonts, products look identical across stores.
3. Scaling quality becomes impossible – As you add more products, maintaining consistent visual standards becomes a full-time job.

 

This is why AI is a big hit in the industry. And most successful, farsighted sellers adopt AI-powered tools quickly to achieve design consistency at scale.

How AI Flips the POD Design Game

AI transforms POD design from a manual, time-intensive process into an automated, scalable system. Now, instead of spending days creating individual designs, entrepreneurs like you can generate unique, on-brand concepts in minutes at scale. 

Here’s what makes AI different

• Speed without sacrifice – AI design tools can create professional-quality art in a matter of seconds with tools like Midjourney and Adobe Firefly. You simply give text prompts to generate unique designs and test ideas faster than ever.
• Originality at scale – Unlike template-based tools, AI generates genuinely unique designs without relying on recycled stock images. All you have to do is give specifications, and each result is a new creation.
• Quality consistency – AI models train on your images over time, understanding design principles, brand colors, and composition to ensure each design meets your professional standards.

What do you get?

A 60% reduction in design time and 30% improvement in conversion rates. 

AI-Powered Tools You Can Use For POD

From initial concept to final product mockup, AI tools can help you bring your design time by over 18%. In fact, there are so many tools out there to automate every stage of the POD workflow.

Let us give you some resources for different processes:

1. Design Generation Tools

• Midjourney: Create original, artistic designs with diffusion of models to generate unique artwork from text prompts. Midjourney makes itself accessible to the masses with pricing starting at just $10/month.
• Adobe Firefly: Commercial-safe AI generation trained on licensed datasets that reduces any copyright concerns. Firefly integrates directly with Creative Cloud apps, making it ideal for designers already using Adobe tools.
• DALL-E: Create detailed, photorealistic images from text descriptions on ChatGPT itself. The latest DALL-E versions enable you to produce high-resolution outputs that are well-suited for various print application.

2. Background and Image Enhancement (Always slazzer)

• Slazzer’s AI Background Remover: Eliminate messy backgrounds from product photos in seconds, and also keep details of your image (from hair strands to fabric textures) intact. 
• Slazzer’s AI Enhance: Automatically improve your image’s quality by sharpening details, fixing exposure, and boosting color vibrancy to make designs look crisp.
• Slazzer’s AI Background Maker: Don’t just remove background. With Slazzer, you can also create custom backgrounds that make your products stand out. 

1. Mockup and Visualization Tools

• Printify’s Mockup Generator: Create very real-looking product previews from multiple angles to help your customers visualize designs before purchase.
• Placeit: Create AI-powered mockups for over 11 product categories, including POD products such as apparel, tech accessories, home decor, and more.

1. Content and Copywriting Support

Automated copywriting allows POD sellers managing hundreds of products to create consistent, SEO-optimized descriptions. AI tools like Jasper can generate product descriptions, but also help create social media posts and conversion-driven marketing copy.

How To Create Successful AI-Driven POD Designs (In Six Steps)

Creating POD designs with AI that will sell and fetch you record-breaking revenue will require you to strike a balance between automation and strategic thinking. 

Yep, that’s difficult and vague. But we’ve got an approach to it.

Step 1: Research Your Market And Pick A Niche

Before you start generating designs randomly, understand what sells. 

Tools like EverBee can help you analyze trending POD products and identify profitable niches with lower competition. 

If you’re thinking of using generic quotes on t-shirts or mugs, we definitely recommend you take this step seriously. Because current high-performing categories include micro-niches like:

• “Goblincore” aesthetics
• Eco-humor designs
• Eetro tech references 

Step 2: Strategize Design Development

Now that you’ve picked a niche, define your visual brand before creating individual designs. This includes:

• Choosing color palettes that resonate with your target audience
• Picking typography styles that match your niche
• Finalizing design themes that create cohesive product lines

AI works best when you have clear parameters. Creating a defined style guide will enhance consistency in output.

Step 3: Create Designs With AI

Start with text-to-image generators.

Write detailed prompts that specify style, mood, colors, and composition. 

For example, instead of prompting the tool to create a “t-shirt artwork with coffee cup,” try “minimalist line art of a coffee cup with geometric patterns, warm earth tones, suitable for t-shirt design.”

Generate multiple variations of each concept, and test different versions of a product to identify what resonates with customers. AI and POD business model make it easy and affordable. 

Step 4: Enhance and Optimize Images

Use Slazzer’s AI Enhance to ensure your designs meet print quality standards. The tool automatically:

• Adjusts resolution
• Sharpens details
• Optimizes colors for different printing methods

For designs that require background removal or replacement, AI-eraze by Slazzer delivers professional results in seconds. This is particularly valuable for creating lifestyle mockups that show your designs in realistic contexts.

Step 5: Create Mockup and Test

Create multiple variations of your design on different products or in various settings. 

For example, create designs for custom swimwear and reuse them for pants and hats. List them on your store and see which ones sell better. 

Step 6: Quality Assurance and Iteration

Always review AI-generated designs for quality and ensure they align with your brand. 

While AI handles the technical aspects, it needs human oversight. Always stay on top to ensure the designs meet your standards and appeal to your target audience.

Best Practices for Selling AI-Generated Designs

As we mentioned above, success with AI-generated POD designs requires more than just creating visually appealing images. You need to balance it with strategic thinking. You must position yourself in the market to stand out and play with customer psychology. Here are some tips:

• Focus on micro-niches: Generic designs will get lost in crowded marketplaces. Instead, target specific communities with unique interests. 

• Maintain consistency with your designs: Create cohesive product lines rather than random individual designs. Customers are more likely to purchase multiple items when they see a consistent visual brand across your products.

• Test, test, test: AI makes it easy to create so many design variations quickly. And with the POD model, you can create and sell multiple versions of a design with different colors, layouts, text treatments, or even on different products for free because there’s no upfront inventory. Use marketplace analytics to identify which variations perform best, then create more designs in that style.

• Optimize for your selling platform: Different POD platforms have different audiences and algorithm preferences. What works on Etsy may not work on Amazon or Shopify. Use AI’s speed as an advantage to create platform-specific variations.

Ethical and Legal Considerations

The legal landscape around AI-generated art is still evolving. But POD sellers must stay compliant in every way possible. Here’s a list of several key principles to keep in mind:

Copyright and Ownership

As of 2024, AI-generated artwork without substantial human modification cannot be copyrighted in the U.S.. 

What this means is that AI-generated art receives limited legal protection. However, since others also face the same limitation. You can strengthen your position by:

• Always modifying AI outputs with human creativity
• Keeping detailed records of your prompts and edits
• Using AI tools with clear commercial licensing terms

Platform Compliance

Some marketplaces like Etsy and Amazon don’t favor AI-generated content much. There’s a lot of scrutiny and criticism around it. You can ensure compliance by:

• Adding a human touch to all AI-generated designs
• Avoiding explicitly mimicking existing artists’ styles (like Miyazaki’s Ghibli-style art)
• Ensuring designs avoid trademarked or copyrighted characters

Quality Standards

AI knows no bounds, but we also know that it produces terrible results when left unchecked. Set design standards for your business to ensure quality by:

• Thorough review of all AI outputs before listing
• Sample order check for print quality
• Target-audience appropriate designs

What’s Next For AI in POD 

You may say that AI’s everywhere, but it’s still emerging. And the future of AI in this domain is simply exciting. With more and more businesses adopting these tools, expect:

• • Advanced personalization: AI will soon enable real-time, customer-specific design generation. Imagine customers describing their ideal t-shirt design in plain English and receiving a unique, print-ready design in seconds.
  • Automated trend detection: AI models will analyze social media, search trends, and marketplace data to predict which design themes will become popular, giving early adopters a significant advantage.

• Quality assurance integration: Future AI will automatically optimize designs for specific printing methods and materials, ensuring consistent quality across products and reducing returns due to print issues.

• Sustainability optimization: AI will help POD businesses minimize waste by predicting demand more accurately and optimizing material usage, addressing growing consumer demand for eco-friendly products.

Conclusion

AI is bringing a significant shift in POD design-making since the advent of digital printing. With AI-powered design-generating and image-editing tools, as well as growing marketplace platforms, there’s a whole ecosystem where individual creators can compete without large design teams.

As the POD market will continue to grow, so will competition. The key to success won’t be in just using AI tools. You’ll need to be strategic (and creative, too) in how to add the human element so the designs resonate with your audience and set you apart. 

Try out using the different tools we mentioned in this article today because the question isn’t whether to adopt AI for your POD business, it’s how quickly you can get started.

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