Using Merch Momentum AI To Build Your Amazon Merch on Demand Business

Over the years Merch by Amazon has changed a LOT! Just the fact that I just wrote “Merch by Amazon” should be an indication of this, as they have rebranded to Amazon Merch on Demand.

From a name change, to Merch applications to get started, tier systems, product expansion and more, the landscape has really changed since we first started cover the world of print on demand.

One of the biggest changes over the last few months (or maybe the last year or so), the EPIC raise in popularity of AI (artificial intelligence).

Now we know what you may be thinking…

You are either all for AI and how it can help you in your Merch business, or staunchly against it (because of copyright/trademark issues, stolen art, etc).

But we are here to showcase what we believe to be the BEST use of AI with the launch of the Merch Momentum AI and how just today, we used this resource in combination with Merch Informer to come up with an idea to break into a very very large niche on Amazon.

What is AI? What Is Merch Momentum?

AI, put simply, is artificial intelligence. You may have read about it, you may have even used some of the applications on the market today, but by far the LARGEST use of AI has been ChatGPT. Chat GPT is a large language model based chatbot that was developed by a company called OpenAI and launched just a short time ago on November 30th, 2022. Since then, almost anyone with an internet connection has heard and may have even used this tool.

It allows a user to ask questions, prompt the chatbot for an answer, or structure a desired length, format, style, level of detail or language used in a response to an input.

While this is all well and good, this language AI model is so large and vast, that it requires VERY specific inputs for it to be useful in your print on demand business.

But what if there was a chatbot that used this AI model, that was trained on NOTHING BUT Print on Demand content?

That is where Merch Momentum comes in.

…and what exactly is Merch Momentum you may be asking yourself?

Merch Momentum (described in their own words) – is a combination of strategy guides to: help Merch by Amazon t-shirt sellers, KDP creators, Etsy store owners, and print on demand professionals across the POD ecosystem succeed through creative inspiration and innovate approaches to Print on Demand

You see, we have covered Merch Momentum multiple times in the past along with the founder Michael Essany.

Simply Put:

• 5 Years Ago: We Did an interview with Michael who has been publishing Amazon products just as long as we have been writing about them.
• 4 Years Ago: We published one of Essany’s strategy guides specifically for Merch Informer readers as a special edition (if you have not read this, it is still very much worth your time)

Throughout this ENTIRE time since then, Essany has been publishing monthly strategy guides. When Michael writes something, he writes a LOT of it and these guides have been used by thousands of people to dig into niches on Amazon they may never have thought of before.

But do you want to really be reading through over 5 years and thousands of pages of strategy guides for your Merch business? Our guess is no, and we wouldn’t blame you. That is a lot of time to spend, and we all know that time is money when it comes to business.

Which is why we decided to write up this guide!

Introducing Merch Momentum AI + Merch Informer

With the newest release from Essany, called the Merch Momentum AI – you now have a chatbot that is trained on all of the content that he has written over many years and has been publishing (on time we may add), every month and sometimes weekly.

Today, we are going to dive in and showcase how we used this tool just this morning to come up with, research, and start creating a product that we are certain does NOT exist on Amazon yet (though is in a very popular niche on Amazon).

Let’s do it!

First, you are going to need both a Merch Informer account, as well as a Merch Momentum AI account to follow our steps, so make sure you click the link above to grab it from Gumroad.

After you have both accounts, you need to come up with an idea to start. Remember, this is a chatbot that has been trained on thousands of pages of print on demand content, so the sky is really the limit.

Starting With An Idea

When we sat down to write this, we actually noticed that Michael had just posted something on Facebook.

It looks like Michael just posted another research guide!

Being a bit strapped for time ourselves, we knew it would be a good idea to read through the actual guide itself, but this is where the Momentum AI comes in handy….we didn’t NEED to right this minute.

Country Music + Print on Demand

This is a good starting point, and where a lot of people just end up going for it.

However, we need to niche down, do some research, come up with something UNIQUE, and then put all of that into practice by actually getting a product created.

The first thing that we did was head over to Momentum AI and ask it for some ideas on how to merge country music with rock n roll. You will notice as we walk through this exercise that many times, merging 2 niches together is a great way to find low competition but high demand products/ideas. Since country music is not OUR favorite (not that it really matters), there may be something here.

This gives us a few different mashup ideas, but since we wanted to poke fun at country music, we ran with bullet point 6: Which is to create some humorous designs.

So, we asked it to come up with 5 design ideas that are humorous in nature that poke fun at country music, but in the style of Michael Essany.

Right away the country music animals (bullet point 5), stuck out to us. There are a lot of “country” animals that can often be found on farms. So instead of poking fun at country music, maybe we could come up with a humorous design centered around country music and animals that would stand out.

Before we dive into that though, we want to ensure that country music is actually a niche that gets searched for on Amazon.

To do this, we used the Merch Informer keyword tool to see if there is searches and demand for country music shirts.

It turns out that there are thousands of searches PER MONTH for country music shirts, and if you do the same search for animal t-shirts, you will see the exact same thing.

We are on the right track here.

Country Music + Animals + Humor

So, we have the general idea here of what 3 niches we want to mash up into a single design.

Let’s re-visit the idea of animals playing music to form a country band.

We did a quick google search and came across this:

While this is not the style we are thinking about, it certainly sparks some ideas!

Next, we need to actually come up with a saying if we are going to create our own graphic design centered around a band of “country” animals playing music.

We headed back to the Merch Momentum AI and asked it for 5 sayings centered around country music and animals playing instruments.

It spit out 5 really good ideas for our shirt, but we want to make absolutely sure that our idea is unique, but ALSO low competition.

Just to see how many products on Amazon we would be up against in this sub niche, we entered in “country music animals shirt” into Amazon and right away we can see that there is under 1,000 products (and most of them have nothing to do with the rabbit hole we are going down).

Next, since we want to make sure we have a unique saying, we really liked bullet point #2 above that starts with “country music ain’t”, which sounds like the perfect text to start a phrase on our new design idea.

We went ahead and entered this into the Amazon search bar and look what pops up as an auto suggestion!

“If it ain’t country it ain’t music”

We added the word t-shirt to the end to get the most relevant results and this by itself has very low competition.

We then started looking through the actual Merch products that are on Amazon and they are SELLING with a few reviews on them:

Notice not only do these have reviews, they have a sales rank and they are using the same type of text fonts AND themes (such as cowboy hats and boots).

This basically forms our idea.

The text will read “If It Ain’t Country It Ain’t Music” in similar font, with a band of animals in the middle dressed up in cowbow boots, cowboy hats, playing musical instruments.

This could be a horse, a pig, a sheep, a racoon and a fox wearing these hats and cowbow boots that are holding a fiddle, drum sticks, guitar, harmonica and a banjo.

Before we jump into the creation side and do that, we also need to make sure that this phrase is NOT trademarked.

Since this phrase can be seen above in the title of the product, we can use the Merch Informer Trademark extension to run a quick trademark check.

Since nothing was highlighted red, we know that this phrase is safe to use and continue with the creation!

You can either create this design yourself, or hire someone to create it for you!

We often prefer to hire talented artists to help bring our ideas to life, which is exactly what we did here!

How To Use Upwork To Outsource And Scale Your Merch Business

Once we got the design back, we added our text, and just like that, the listing is live!

Wrapping It Up

Just like that you can see how we used this incredible resource (the Merch Momentum AI) in combination with a little bit of leg work to find and craft a very unique idea in a niche that gets thousands of searches per month and is incredibly low competition.

This was just a simple exercise and ONE way to use this tool in combination with your Print on Demand business.

You can see that not only did it save us a LOT of time and a LOT of reading, but it also allowed us to stand out from everyone else on Amazon.

If you really want to build a long standing Merch business, this can be thought of not as an “easy” button, but as your own little personal assistant.

Give it a shot, we think you will like it!

To your success,

Merch Informer