I’ve been doing a wee monthly roundup of my most popular designs (last two February and March). This month is slightly different.
One of the rules of thumb when building an Etsy store is to stick to a single product type, say, in my case, shirts, or tightly related types, say, shirts and hoodies.
Then why mugs?
My store is a year old. I’ve built a portfolio of hundreds of designs. And I’ve been getting a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. But I am still at the shirts-only stage. What I have been grappling with is getting some designs into hands – as stickers or posters or something physical and with more long-term presence than a shirt one wears episodically.
I was talking to a colleague who used to work at Gelato and she asked if I was selling mugs. I told her that I was considering a new product line (yes, and likely starting late summer) but also mentioned my challenges to be more in folks’ hands.
She then said that mugs were wickedly popular.
Limited run
That’s when I had the idea to not turn ALL my designs into mugs, but really only the most popular. And I came to a nice round number of 7 designs. Ok, I had started with the round number of 5 designs, then just had to add two more. I will stop there unless there’s demand.
The winners
For the single designs, I put the design on both sides of the cup (I am a lefty, but most are righty, so decided to make it visible to the drinker and the one watching the drinker, regardless of what hand you use).
Of course, the first mug I made was my popular Raspberry Pi 5 design. Tho, with this one, I made two variants – one that wraps and clips the design on the whole mug, and then one that mirrors the other single designs with a smaller version of both sides.
You’ll notice thru my store I might do different treatments of a single design. Dunno, but sometimes designs call for me to do different treatments (artist thing?).
In any case, I’ll see which one sells best. Haha.
The other single designs are the amazing AD570 chip from Analog Devices (shirt here), the much-loved ESP32 (shirt here), and the hot RP2040 (shirt here).
The last three designs were multi-element, and look good wrapped around the mug. These were the fun Field Guide to Adafruit Boards, a collection of historically famous chips, and variant pairs of diodes (shirt here).
Note for 09 May 2026: I have not released all the mugs yet, but they should all be available by 22 May 2026. I release new designs on Mon, Wed, and Fri. They will all be in my Mug section here. I’ll keep updating the links on this page until they are all public. If you are eager for one, lemme know and I can bump that up the queue. You can also follow my store to receive notifications.
What do you think?
I’ve made a montage video below for you to see all the mugs. Go check them out. And also keep in mind that each mug has a shirt with the same design. The link will be in the description of the mug.
Enjoy.