A month or two ago, I wrote a detailed description of how Redbubble is set up and how to get your work uploaded and ready to sell. While the location of the “Add New Work” feature is in the same place (while logged in, click your profile picture in the upper right, then scroll down to “Add New Work” (it’s a big pink button) in the small dark blue box that pops up), the layout of the store homepage has completely changed, and not for the better in my opinion.
The “public profile,” a.k.a. the long bio that you could previously add (to tell the rest of your artistic story) in addition to your 500 character short bio is no longer supported. You can still find it within your profile settings in case you need to copy any information out of it and into your short bio, but that will likely disappear completely soon, so time is of the essence if you want to save any information from that.
Your short bio and social media links are now all the way down at the bottom of your page (so someone would most likely have to be looking for it in order to see it), and clicking on the social media buttons no longer opens your profiles in a separate window but instead changes the current page (your Redbubble store) to that profile. I personally find this annoying because I don’t want to lose the page I’m on when opening external links. If you right click and then do “open link in new tab” it will open your social media profiles separately, but for less tech-savvy shoppers who don’t know that this has changed, I think this could be a pretty significant inconvenience (Ex: for my mother, if a website does something like taking her away from the page she’s on unexpectedly, she is NOT happy).
Your collections (with cover photos) are now listed just below your banner and profile picture (now in the center of the screen). There are arrows on the side so that you can scroll through them if you have more than will fit in that tiny space. There is also a “Collections” category at the top left that you can click to reveal the titles of all your collections, and you can in turn, click on each of those titles to see products from within that album.
There is no longer a “Porfolio” feature, so you cannot search by design unless you know the exact title and search it on the main site. For example, my most popular design is “Trippy Forest,” and you could search that title in the search bar at the very top of the page to look for that over the entire Redbubble site (searching among thousands of artists’ designs), but you can’t just look through all my designs within my own store anymore. The closest thing to that is looking at products within a collection, but you’d have to know “Trippy Forest” is filed under my “Drawings” collection in order to find it fast (you could, of course, just click through all my collections), and you still wouldn’t be able to sort it out among the rest of the designs I have under “Drawings.” I think that’s a significant downside to the new layout, and I’ve emailed Redbubble and told them so. The good news is that if you are a fan of mine and follow me on social media, I always post direct links to all the products I share. Basically, if you see a picture of it, somewhere in the description there will be a web address for it. I also include the titles of all my works in posts, so if you do want to see a design on other products, just search the title in the main search bar, or message me through a social media platform, and I will find a direct link for you.
I have discovered that in the same way that Teepublic and RageOn work/used to work, if you click on a product that has the design you want (even if you want it on a different product), you can then scroll down below the main project image on the screen it takes you to and click “Avaliable on +[insert number] products,” and it will bring up a panel of ALL products that have that design. Again, much less convenient that Portfolio view, but still a possible way of navigating to the item you want.
Redbubble customer support swears to me that they’ve done research that says this new layout helps people find what they like from a store more often/more quickly and should increase sales (if not for me individually, for artists in general). I don’t doubt they have done that sort of research, I just think the new layout is really going to throw past customers (particularly my close friends and family), and I really miss the Portfolio feature that let me view all the products I had for a single design in two clicks.
If you need any help navigating the new Redbubble layout, or the layout of any store I sell on (all 18 have buttons here: https://linktr.ee/okhismakingart), send me a message over Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and I’ll message you back as fast as possible with assistance.
The World of Print on Demand 