There are many ways to make a DIY phone case. For example, you can use glue to fix various decorations on the phone case; stick various beautiful stickers on the phone case; or paint the outside with nail polish. Today, I want to talk about another DIY method: printing patterns on the phone case with a UV printer. This method does not require exquisite craftsmanship, and you can spend more time focusing on designing beautiful patterns and testing market feedback on design ideas. In this article, I’ll walk you through the process of phone case POD printing, and talk about some strategies to start your business.
The UV printer uses colored inks to print pictures or text on various surfaces such as plastic, wood, metal, or glass, while the printed pattern is exposed to strong ultraviolet light to cure. The first step is to stick a piece of white paper on the printing platform and print reference lines of the phone case on the paper. When designing a phone case pattern, you may need detailed reference lines, but when printing the phone case, only simple reference lines are needed. Align the blank phone case with the reference lines on the paper. Some phone cases come with protective film, so remember to remove the protective film first, otherwise, the ink will solidify on the protective film instead of the phone case. This printer can print multiple phone cases at the same time, making it suitable for printing custom-designed patterns on a small scale. Push the printing platform inward, and the print head will begin printing. There is a UV lamp next to the print head, which can quickly cure the ink during the printing process. In fact, we can design various hollow patterns on the image according to our needs, and there is a lot of freedom in image design, with the printed colors being very vivid.
Before starting a phone case printing business, we need to think about our business strategy. Which market do we want to target, the US or Europe? Which brand of phone do we want to focus on, Apple or Samsung, or other niche brands? Here, I will introduce several practical strategies.
The first strategy is to analyze the website traffic of the industry. Open Google and search for phone case. Find the top-ranking websites. If you have enough time, you can study the top 30 Google-ranked websites to obtain more comprehensive data. Copy the website link and check the website's organic traffic on SEMrush.
We can see the page with the highest traffic on this website. It is recommended to use the paid version in order to view more data. We may find the best-selling product pages and further study the characteristics of these product pages. Let's enter another website's URL to take a look.
We found that phone case traffic for Google Pixel 7 Pro and Huawei P30 Pro is high. We need to pay attention to which countries the traffic is coming from, as this is one of the most important points when doing market research.
The second strategy is to analyze the popularity of various phone models. To start up your phone case business, you need to know more about the newest trends in the phone market.
G.S.M. Arena is the most popular portal of smartphone news and reports. Its monthly traffic goes over 2 millions. Here we can find the latest phones and the devices with the most daily hits.
The data is based on the user of G.S.M. Arena. These data can help us quickly find those mobile phone models with high attention, but we still need to judge the real popularity of these models through the data of Google search. We can use Google Trends to get more detailed information.
If you want to do phone case business for phone brands other than Apple, you need to do some research about different phone brands. Some mobile phone brands, such as Samsung and Motorola, have too many models. It's difficult to determine which phone model has the best sales. Google trends can help us roughly identify the best-selling phone models in order for our phone case products to achieve higher expected sales.
The third strategy may be the best strategy: only make phone cases for iPhone. iPhone remains the most popular smartphone in United States for years. It continues to dominate the US market share with 57.22% in the first quarter of 2023. Despite the fierce competition in making phone cases for iPhone, this business still has a bright future due to its broad market space and the user's need for personalization.
Compared to phone case drop shipping, printing phone cases yourself can provide a greater profit margin. You can buy blank phone cases from Alibaba, customize them with UV printer and sell them on Amazon Handmade, Etsy, Ebay or create your own website on Shopify.
