Redbubble is a legitimate starting point for an artist with no existing audience: it puts a design in front of marketplace shoppers who were never going to find that artist any other way. The tradeoff is that every sale happens on a Redbubble-branded page, with Redbubble setting the base price and the artist earning only the margin added on top. Once an artist has built any following of their own (a social media audience, a website, an email list, a fan community), the math starts to favor a branded shop that keeps that audience under the artist's own name instead.
Redbubble makes the most sense for an artist with little or no existing audience who wants a design in front of strangers actively browsing a marketplace for something to buy. It is free to join, requires no minimum order, and needs no separate website. For that specific starting position, a marketplace's built-in shopper traffic is a real advantage a brand-new shop does not have on day one.
| Redbubble | Bear Grips Pro Shops | |
|---|---|---|
| Page branding | Redbubble.com, artist profile inside the marketplace | Shop under the artist's own name and logo |
| Pricing control | Margin added over a Redbubble-set base price | Full retail price set by the artist |
| Where the link points | A redbubble.com marketplace URL | A dedicated shop link the artist owns |
| Product range | Apparel plus stickers, phone cases, wall art | 63 apparel products |
Once an artist starts driving their own traffic (an Instagram bio link, a website, a newsletter), sending that traffic into a marketplace page surrounded by other artists' designs generally converts worse than sending it to a shop with the artist's own name on it.
Bear Grips Pro Shops: Custom Apparel for Your Team. No Minimums. Free Shipping.An artist with even a modest following (a few thousand social followers, a small email list, a regular commission client base) has already done the hard part: building an audience that wants to buy from them specifically. Sending that audience to a Redbubble page means splitting attention with unrelated designs on the same marketplace. A branded shop keeps the entire page focused on that one artist's work, with the artist setting the full retail price instead of a margin over Redbubble's base cost.
Nothing requires an artist to fully leave Redbubble to test a branded shop. Many artists keep a Redbubble account open for marketplace discovery while running a separate branded shop for their own following. Bear Grips Pro Shops gives every vendor a hosted storefront at signup, free to start at shops.beargrips.com, focused on 63 apparel products from $19.88 VIP, with the full retail price and margin set by the artist and free US shipping built in. See the t-shirt lineup or the hoodie lineup for the product-specific detail.
Free to start. Set your own retail price, keep the full margin. 63 apparel products from $19.88, free shipping.
Start FreeNot necessarily. Redbubble's marketplace traffic can be genuinely useful for an artist starting from zero. The case for a branded shop gets stronger once the artist has built their own following.
Yes. Many artists keep both, using Redbubble for marketplace discovery and a branded shop for their own audience.
No. The vendor sees the flat base cost per item and sets the full retail price on top, keeping the entire difference as margin.
63 apparel products: tees from $19.88, hoodies from $36.88, joggers, leggings, polos, and embroidered hats. Non-apparel items like stickers or wall art are not part of the catalog.
Bear Grips Pro Shops