Outsourcing Designs
As most of your applicants will be outside of the United States, it is vital that you have proper screening questions so that you can judge their English skills. Communicating clearly and effectively to each other on Upwork is a must. Ask questions which require substantial amounts of writing. A couple of great examples which require thinking, some research, and are indications of authenticity are below:
“Could I please see some examples of your work in the past?”
“How long have you been designing and what programs do you use?”
“Who was the last United States President to die?”
“Which design program is your favorite and why?”
Afterward, make sure the “Cover Letter” box is checked and post the job. 24 hours is usually all it takes to receive a good amount (10-25) of job applicants.
When looking through the applicants do a quick scan for the “key” keyword which was required for applicants to respond to in the job posting. Next, look at the responses to the questions that were asked. Judge for yourself whether the English skills they demonstrate is adequate. In addition, make sure the questions are answered correctly. Ignore anyone who does not pass these requirements, as they do not deserve your time and money. You should look at their sample work as well, if it was provided, and judge for yourself the quality and originality of it. If you are outsourcing your designs, I would expect you to be familiar with good t-shirt designs by now. If the sample designs provided are filled with hand drawings, then I would ignore them as well, as typography, graphic and text, and text designs perform the best on Merch.
Surprisingly, this process filters out a lot of the applicants, but this is good news for you, as you should only be expecting the best designers. With the pool of applicants that you now have, it is time to start “interviewing” them. All you have to do is to simply send them links to 2-3 Merch by Amazon t-shirt designs and ask them to recreate the phrase/quote/saying/image or “idea” in their own original creative style. Personally, I would send them links to t-shirt phrases which are uncommon and very unsaturated so that they would be tested to their fullest extent.
You should be very clear on what you want from the applicants. State that you do NOT want anything copied from anywhere and that any graphics or even font used should be available for commercial use. This ensures that the designer does not infringe on any trademarks or copyright infringement. In addition, tell them to create designs within the 4500*5400 px dimension Merch requires for uploads. After a couple of days, you should finally be able to narrow down your pool of applicants to the best designer. Finally, you can hire him/her and begin dominating Merch even further!
After hiring, I would start sending them links to Amazon Merch designs which you have thoroughly researched for them to recreate. I would start off slowly, in smaller batches of daily required designs being sent to you, and then increase to a reasonable amount as time goes by depending on what you can afford and what you require. In the end, if you are new to Upwork, this process may be somewhat irritating or may even give you a headache. Fortunately, if you find a great designer (which you should after the above process), you will be able to upload high-quality designs daily and will have the capability to maximize your daily uploads at higher Merch tier levels. After a couple of weeks with a good designer, you will see a substantial increase in your income.