Easy Gearbubble Necklace Upload – A Simple Way to Fit Your Design Into The Mock-up

Launching Print-on-Demand (POD) products on Gearbubble is fairly easy.  You take a PNG file with a transparent background and upload it on top of a mock-up on their website.  Fill in a few fields and you have a product you can sell.  No system is perfect however and sometimes taking a design an getting it “just right” on the Necklace mock-ups can be tricky.   Here is an Easy Gearbubble Necklace Upload method that solves the problem of aligning your PNG design image on top of the Gearbubble’s mock-up.

Background

Gearbubble is a Print-on-Demand company.  They allow you to create a design image and upload it to mock-ups of shirts, mug,s necklacess, travel mugs, short glasses and more.  Gearbubble automatically creates a Sales Page and allows you to sell the resulting product.   If someone buys it, Gearbubble manufactures it, ships it and collects the money.  You get any money above the base price of production ans shipping.

One of Gearbubble’s products is a 1 inch necklace.  They have several styles in two colors – Gold Plated and Sterling Silver Plated.    You need a large (at least 3,000 x 3000 pixel) image at 300 dpi with a transparent background. Once you have the PNG image, you can upload the image to the necklace mock-up and launch the product.  Often sellers have an image with white letters that they created in order to launch a t-shirt or a black mug and it would be nice to use the same image and quickly launch a necklace using the image you already have.

The Problem

Looking at the best-selling products on Gearbubble, it is easy to see that the Round Silver Necklaces with a black background and white lettering consistently show up at the top of the best-seller lists.  The issue is how to get the black background.  It would be seem to be simple.  You just use your image editor (like Photoshop Elements), add a black background and upload the image.  The problem with doing this way is that the black background hides the mock-up.  The images always start on the Gearbubble smaller than the mock-up.  You have small tabs you use to stretch the image until it fits the mock-up.

The Mock-up

Gearbubble Necklace Mock-up

A Simple Design For Our Example

Here is a simple design we will use for our example necklace.  I am showing the letters here in black so that they are readable.  We what white letters on our necklace.

A Simple Design

 

If I changed the letters to white and put them on a t-shirt, I would have a product that you may have seen.

Here is the same design with white letters and I’ve added a black background to try and upload it to the necklace mock-up.  This design is taller than it is wide since that is what we would usually use for a t-shirt or Hoodie design.

Tall Image with Black Background

Photoshop Elements Sidebar – Creating a Black Background behind an image

 In Photoshop Elements you can easily add a black background.

    1) #1 Click on LAYERS — #2 NEW FILE LAYER

2) #3 Click on SOLID COLOR

3)  I usually don’t bother changing the title and I skipped that small popup window here)

4)  In the Color Picker pop-up  Enter 000000 in the #1 box where the cursor is, #2 Check the resulting color  and #3 press OK

5)  #4 In the Layers panel on the left you may need to drag the black lay down behind the image layer;  Note: This layer was already there.  It won’t appear for you until you press the OK button.

 

That looks easy enough.  Now let’s upload the design.

Upload Design with Black Background

 

The arrow is pointing to the tab you use with your mouse to stretch the design until it fits the mock-up..

Lets increase the size by dragging the tab so that the design fits the mock-up.

Enlarged Design with Black Background

You can probably see that there to two problems here.

  1. The image has been resized until it is tall enough and there is still some white peeking around the sides of the design.
  2. It is hard to see just how much to stretch the image since you can’t see all of the mock-up edges.
    There is one more problem here that you can’t see.
  3. Sometimes when you upload a tall image and go to the NEXT step, Gearbubble will chop the top and bottom off of your design.

Let’s go back and Resize the Image Canvas (the background) and make the image square.  (Note:  There are times when you need to crop the image as well since there is a limit to how much Gearbubble will allow you to stretch the design.  If you have too much blank space around your design you may not be able to enlarge it to fill the mock-up.  In that case  you need to crop off the excess blank space.\

Photoshop Elements Sidebar – Changing the Canvas size\

1) Click on the IMAGES Menu at the top of the Editor

2) Click on RESIZE

3) Click on CANVAS

4) Change the width to match the height

5) Press OK

If you end up needing the crop away extra blank space, there is a crop tool near the bottom left in the Tools Panel.

Design with a Square Background.

Now, let’s upload this version of the design and try to enlarge it to fit the mock-up.

Uploaded Square Canvas Design
Gearbubble Round Necklace

This took care of the white space peeking out from the edges of our design, but it made the problem of fitting the design to the mock-up even worse.   When you go to the NEXT step, Gearbubble will chop off the excess black.  99% of the time you will find that you haven’t put the design in the right place or you haven’t sized it “just right.”   You can try by trial and error, but often that means trying over and over.  There should be a want to do an easy Gearbubble necklace upload.

THE SOLUTION – Easy Gearbubble Necklace Upload

This easy Gearbubble necklace upload method involves a two step process.

Step 1– Upload a round pure black circle image.

 

Mock-up with a Black Circle PNG uploaded.
Easy Gearbubble Necklace Upload

Stretch to “just fit” the edges of the mock-up.

Mock-up with a Black Circle Uploaded into it.

Step 2 – Upload your design with a square transparent background and white letters (or any design that shows nicely against a black background.)

Design Stretched On Top of the Black Background

 

FINAL RESULTS FROM OUR EASY GEARBUBBLE NECKLACE UPLOAD

Final Product (with a couple of Tweaks)

You can use this Easy Gearbubble Necklace Upload method on the Circle Necklaces, the Square Necklaces and the Heart Shaped Necklaces.

To make this easier, here are links to images that are the right shape (especially the Heart Shape image) for Gearbubble

  1. Round Pure Black Image
  2. Square Pure Black image
  3. Heart Shaped Image

You simply save these images where you can find them.

Here is a short, two minute, video that walks you through the same steps.

The Easy Gearbubble  Necklace Launch Process – step by step.

  1. Make sure your image has light letters – usually white.
  2. Make sure your is large enough (300 dpi around 3,000 by 3,000 pixels)
  3. Upload the black background and stretch it to just fit the mock-up
  4. Upload your image and stretch and position that image.
  5. Complete the Gearbubble launch process.

One person I shared this with on the Gearbubble Facebook page commented that this was a “Gamechanger.  I launched 20 necklaces in about an hour.”

Of course you can buy one of these.   🙂   (How silly do you think I am?)

Necklace:  Click here to buy  (Note:  There is a drop down menu that allows you to select the gold necklace)

Hoodie – Click here to buy    (Note:  There is a drop down menu that allows you to select other shirt styles and a way to pick different collors.)

MugClick Here to buy.   ( (Note:  There is a drop down menu that allows you to select a different size.)

Boxer Necklace (with links to t-shirt and mug) – Click to Buy Here   (You didn’t think I would forget this did you? 🙂  )

I hope you enjoyed this.  There are more tips to come – Oh Hale Yes!

 

 

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