One thing I did not anticipate about Redbubble is that it does not automatically link the artist or shop name of a creator to their work in any searchable way. When I started, I assumed that searching “OliviaHathaway” (my store name) would bring up all my work. My brain just figured that’s how it should work, but that was not the case. I had multiple friends searching my name on the site then messaging me to tell me they couldn’t find my stuff. I gave it a shot myself and found that even if you searched my shop name with exactly the right capitalization and spacing, what would come up was a main screen that appeared to show no search results (shown below for a bunch of random letters I searched) with the addition of some tiny print at the bottom that said something along the lines of “but we found a shop with this name.” + a link to click it. It’s so small compared to the “no search results screen” that most people wouldn’t notice it.
This is one of the only things I’ve ever been really irritated at Redbubble for, but really it was my fault for not tagging my work with my name (they give you total control of your title and tags, so there’s no reason to expect any automatic tagging). I had over 370 designs uploaded at this point, and I thought I was going to have to go back and add the tags in to each individually. I was determined to do it because people not being able to easily find my work was definitely going to stunt my ability to sell it. Thankfully though, Redbubble has the “Manage Portfolio” feature.
To find it, you hover over your tiny logged in profile icon in the upper right corner of your home screen (next to your followers, favorites, and sales stat icons) then scroll down to “Manage Portfolio.” This is the screen it takes me to when I click that:
The “Quick Edit” feature in the upper right opens up the title and tagging data for all my designs and lists them in columns. I can then just edit the title and tags directly from there instead of going to each design and opening up the big edit screen that includes things beyond that information (like positioning of images, background colors, etc.). This greatly sped up the process of adding my new set of tags to all my designs. For my work, I decided that all my designs should be tagged with my name (with and without spaces – olivia hathaway and oliviahathaway), my main social media handle (okhismakingart), and the name of my Etsy store and the associated Facebook page that I started when I was 14 (ohartisticoddities). Searching any of those in the Redbubble search bar now brings up all of my work.
In short, “Manage Portfolio” was a life saver (I just wrote out the tags in a list once, then copied and pasted them down the columns), but it is much easier to just properly tag your works from the start. It’s important to include your name in particular because family and friends can be a major source of sales, and they’re most likely going to remember your name better than your shop name or social media handles (especially if you have older relatives interested in your stuff).
P.S. “Manage Portfolio” can help you do some other mass edits as well. You can select all works displayed on a page with the tiny little check box at the upper left, or you can select designs individually with the white check boxes in the upper left of their display images. Selecting one or more works then opens options in the bar above the designs. You can use them to mass-move things to a collection, mass enable designs on certain products (this does not work well for me), set the default product that customers view when they search your work, and/or use the “More” option to mass edit the privacy/maturity settings on your works. You can also use the trash can to delete many designs at once. The settings gear symbol that appears in the upper right corner of each design also gives you some of these same options for that individual designs, but there’s an additional one called “Copy” that’s worth going over briefly.
Clicking “Copy” will take the settings you chose for that design and use them as a template for a new one. For example, if you used a logo-type image as a design and had it printed on your products as an offset grid, when you click “Copy” on that design, it will open up a new upload screen with the title as “Copy of [previous design’s name]” with the same image and all the tags that design originally had. If you then click the main image and upload a new one to replace it, it will upload and keep the grid lay out, the spacing, and the background color that you chose with the previous image exactly the same. This only works if your new image is the same size as your old one, but if you follow my advice on image sizing from the previous post, that shouldn’t be a problem. I used the “Copy” function A LOT when I was creating my collection of “Electric Field Art Repeating Designs”:
As you can see, between these floor pillows in “Electric Field Art III Repeating” (left) and “Electric Field Art II Repeating” (right), all I changed was the main image and the main background color. The grid pattern and sizing was left completely the same (and it worked that way on all products).
Links to my example products:
Note: the floor pillows only come as pillow covers and require separate purchase of stuffing/inserts, while pillows in any smaller size can be ordered as covers or “with insert.”
Electric Field Art II Repeating Floor Pillow: https://www.redbubble.com/people/oliviahathaway/works/38983889-electric-field-art-ii-repeating?asc=u&c=1112189-electric-field-art-repeating-patterns&p=floor-pillow&rel=carousel
Electric Field Art III Repeating Floor Pillow: https://www.redbubble.com/people/oliviahathaway/works/38981434-electric-field-art-iii-repeating?asc=u&c=1112189-electric-field-art-repeating-patterns&p=floor-pillow&rel=carousel
The World of Print on Demand 