From failing stores to $100k; this is April Duplantis’s TikTok Shop success story

2 Stores, 1 hard lesson

Before TikTok Shop or Print on Demand, April ran two brick-and-mortar boutiques – one for women and one for kids. The stores weren’t runaway successes. “They made a little bit of money, nothing impressive,” she said.

When COVID hit, the struggle was real. She eventually closed both locations and started selling online. But the bigger takeaway was the math behind inventory and operational costs. Those expenses don’t wait for a good month – they show up whether you’ve sold ten items or a thousand.

After the boutiques, April tried online dropshipping but lost her entire business in a single day due to a copyright violation. She then started making t-shirts from home. Sales picked up fast, but the work itself didn’t fit how she wanted to spend her time. “I realized I did not enjoy making the t-shirts,” she said. She wanted a way to sell without having to press, pack, and manage every order.

She came across a video of two creators discussing Print on Demand and immediately dove into the research. Every night, while rocking her infant daughter to sleep, she watched tutorials for two to three hours straight.

That’s when Print on Demand started sounding like a way forward. “When I saw Print on Demand, I held on. There’s no inventory cost, and there’s no overhead. This is incredible,” she said.

Breaking into Etsy’s most saturated niche

When April opened her Etsy store in 2023, she went straight into the teacher niche, widely considered one of the most competitive categories on the platform, and became a top seller within six months.

The strategy that got her there was personalization. Not just adding a name to a shirt, but niching down far enough that each product felt made for a specific person. A generic teacher shirt wasn’t going to cut it. She listed shirts for science teachers, art teachers, school nurses, and office secretaries. The more specific, the better.

“If you don’t have their name on it, please do not make a teacher shirt that just says ‘teacher.’ It needs to say ‘art teacher’. It needs to be special,” she said.

She also made every design decision based on data, studied what was already selling, looked for gaps, and built from there. “Do you want to design things you like, or do you want to make money? It’s not what you like, it’s what everyone wants.”

Switching from Etsy to TikTok Shop

April didn’t find TikTok Shop on her own – Printify did. Specifically, her account manager, who had been watching her Etsy numbers climb, thought she was ready for a new channel. 

She was approaching 40, had never used TikTok, and had no interest in going LIVE in front of strangers. Her exact words were “TikTok is for kids.” Her account manager asked three separate times before she finally agreed to try it.

She started small. She added some products, turned on a few settings, and leaned on affiliates to generate early traction without videos of herself, LIVE sessions, or a big launch. With just products in a shop, the right collaborations hopped on board.

The platform moved faster than Etsy, the sales came in differently, and the ceiling looked nothing like what she had been working with before. “It hasn’t even been two years yet,” she said. “I’m coming up on my two-year anniversary on TikTok Shop.”

The first $28,000 month without going LIVE

April started her TikTok Shop by treating it like a distribution method. She didn’t spend weeks filming herself. Instead, she leaned on affiliates and product samples to get her shirts in front of the right buyers fast.

She kept it targeted to creators who already posted the kind of casual, mom-life content her customers watched. She’d message them, offer a free shirt, and let them do what they already do – make a short video and tag the product.  “No one has ever said no,” she said. “I sold $28,000 that month on TikTok Shop,” she said. “I had never gone LIVE. I wasn’t really posting videos. I was just using affiliates.”

For sellers who freeze at the idea of going LIVE, her early results showed that you can get traction first, then decide how visible you personally want to be.

Open collaborations and refundable samples

After those early affiliate wins, April doubled down on the two settings she thinks most sellers ignore. The first is open collaborations, which let affiliates promote your products without needing back-and-forth approval from every creator. 

“Anyone sleeping on open collaborations is making a mistake,” she said. “You literally have so many people working for you that you don’t even know about.”

The second is refundable samples. This feature wasn’t available when she started, but she uses it now across her store. It changes the affiliate’s incentive – they buy the product, but they get refunded if they sell enough units. 

April sets her commission at10% and has refundable samples turned on for every product in her store. She also still reaches out to affiliates directly when she spots someone who fits her market, but with open collaborations running, she doesn’t have to. Creators find her products on their own, buy them, and start promoting without any involvement from her.

Her first viral product came that way. An affiliate she had never contacted bought a shirt on their own and posted a video. April woke up to 100 sales that morning. By the end of the day, that shirt had sold 500 units. The sales kept coming for weeks.

Going LIVE reluctantly, then relentlessly

April’s TikTok account manager eventually convinced her to go LIVE. His advice was simple: just get on and make mistakes. That’s how you learn.

She took it literally. Her first LIVE session came with a banner that read “This is my first TikTok LIVE. Be nice.”

“I told them, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing,’ And they helped me. Viewers told me I hadn’t put anything in my cart, that I should try flash sales, and that I might want to do a giveaway. A lot of those people still join my TikTok LIVEs now. I call them my OGs.”

That first LIVE brought in a little over $200. She thought that was great. She went LIVE again a few nights later. Within months, her LIVE sessions were regularly generating $5,000 in 2.5 hours. She now goes LIVE four nights a week. A single LIVE has brought in $30,000.

Five rules April lives by in every LIVE session

April has developed a clear set of practices that separate productive LIVEs from forgettable ones. These are things she tested herself and still applies.

• A professional backdrop matters. It doesn’t have to be expensive, but it needs to look intentional. April invested in a rose wall. The point is that you want to look like you take your shop seriously.
• Price for volume, not margin. In a LIVE, the goal is to sell a lot of items, not to maximize profit per unit. April keeps everything in her cart on flash sale during LIVEs. She’d rather sell 50 shirts at a $5 margin than 10 at $10.
• Repeat yourself constantly. In a typical LIVE, the average viewer stays for about three minutes before scrolling away. Whatever you said a few minutes ago needs to be repeated, since it’s a new audience.
• Acknowledge every single purchase. This is what April considers the biggest differentiator. When someone buys, she says their name, says what they bought, and thanks them every time. It signals to everyone watching that purchases get noticed, and it creates a reason to buy.
• Find your energy before you go LIVE. April is tired most nights before she starts. She has two kids, she’s been working all day, and going LIVE is the last thing she feels like doing. But she has a moment before every session where she mentally switches gears.

“Forget everything for two hours. You’re smiling because you’re about to make a couple of thousand dollars.”

How she decides what to sell

Everything April lists on her Etsy or TikTok Shop starts with what she can already see people buying.

On TikTok Shop, she browses as a customer would. She searches a category, looks at what’s already in thousands of carts, and pays attention to what’s moving. 

She gave a recent example from one of her LIVE sessions. She spotted a leopard print shirt with a trademarked word on it sitting in over 2,000 carts. She couldn’t use that word, but she could take the same design concept and swap it for something that wasn’t protected. That shirt became her bestseller in her very next LIVE.

The same logic applies to Etsy. Bestseller tags, save counts, and search results all tell her where demand already exists. “Base every decision on research. Don’t make something just because you think it’s cute. Make it because you can see people already want it,” she said.

Why Printify is the backbone of the whole operation

April doesn’t describe Printify as just a nice tool in her stack. She describes it as the reason the stack exists. Without it, the numbers she puts up – $100K revenue months, $30K from a single TikTok LIVE, and $3M in total sales through the platform – wouldn’t be possible for someone running everything from home.

“I have seven figures worth of inventory and hundreds of people working on production, and I didn’t spend a dollar on any of it. That’s only possible through Printify,” she said.

The scale she’s reached explains why she talks about Printify like infrastructure. “If you sell 10,000 shirts in a weekend, can your business ship them out in two days? Printify can.”

Also, moving from Etsy to TikTok Shop doesn’t have to be a rebuild. If your products already run through Printify, the transfer is mostly a workflow task. “It’s integrated right into your Printify account,” she said. “It’s all very simple to keep up with both.”

In Printify, she selects the Etsy products she wants, copies them over to TikTok Shop, and publishes. Then she finishes the setup in TikTok Shop, updating mockups if needed, selecting the correct category, uploading the size chart, and publishing the listing. “They’re there in like 30 seconds,” she said. 

Know the rules before you go LIVE

TikTok Shop has a set of content rules, and violations don’t come with much warning. April learned this firsthand during an early LIVE session.

Violations affect your shop score, and a damaged score is hard to recover from, especially when you’re new and still building momentum. April advises reading the rules before your first session. That includes being careful about mentioning other brands even casually. If someone compliments something you’re wearing and you name the brand on camera, that can be enough to trigger a flag.

On the product side, she sticks exclusively to items that meet TikTok’s two-day shipping SLA. A high late dispatch rate can quietly damage your shop before you realize what’s happening.

The freedom that comes with doing it your way

April doesn’t frame her story as a perfect climb. She talks about starting overwhelmed, getting sidetracked, and having to force simplicity into her day. She advocates for starting small, staying focused, and not spiraling into overthinking.

“I remember being really overwhelmed in the beginning,” she said. “I would get lost… and become so overwhelmed.” Her fix was simple: pick a manageable daily target and finish it. “Today, I’m going to add these five things… then check that off,” she said.

Over time, the business stopped being extra money and became something that changed her household finances. She says she paid off debt, bought a new house, and took her kids to Disney twice in the past year. “The financial freedom… is so incredible,” she said, “and the fact that literally anyone can do this.”

What she comes back to most is control. Not having to answer to a boss. Being able to show up for her kids. Working when she can, not when someone else decides. 

“You just need to get started,” she said. “The hardest part is just getting started.”

She came into this after losing everything in a single day. She leaves it having built something nobody can take from her overnight. That, more than any monthly revenue figure, is what she’d want someone to walk away with.