That’s an important decision to make because obviously if you release your products in collections, you can’t release as often as if you’re releasing your products one at a time.

The frequency that you want to release your products or collections is going to depend on a few things – and the main three that I want to highlight today are 

– your niche or market,

– the type of product you sell,

– and your capacity or preference.

1. What niche are you selling in?

The first thing to consider is the niche or market that you’re selling in – let’s talk about two examples here.

Example 1: Toddler clothing

So let’s say you’re in the fashion market selling toddler outfits. When you launch your shop, you might start with a collection that’s a bit evergreen and works year-round — you might have some sweatshirts, some pants, and some shorts.

But in this type of niche and market you want to follow the demand – you are selling in a niche where seasons and trends are very important. 

You will have your obvious seasonal trends of people wanting to see more shorts in the summer and more jumpers in the winter that you want to respond to.

In addition to satisfying your customers, releasing seasonal collections is going to really help when you do seasonal marketing campaigns.

You also want to respond to market trends – new patterns and colors that are trending that people want to find when they shop for toddler clothing, that you will want to work into your seasonal offerings.

Now of course when you’re just getting started, maybe you don’t have the capacity to be creating new products all the time because you’re busy with marketing and making products to fill orders. 

But even if you don’t have time to do a new collection four times a year, it would be great to release a group of new products once or twice a year. You might initially just have a small new release for spring/summer and then a small new release for autumn/winter. And these could stay in your store year after year as well. 

So you’re essentially building up a bigger autumn/winter collection and a bigger spring/summer collection. 

Example 2: Candles

Another example would be candles, which is a totally different scenario than toddler clothing. 

You might decide that you prefer to work in collections: so you might release your “ocean collection” of candles (I am just making those names up obviously), and in another few months release your “forest collection”. 

Or you might prefer releasing candles individually. You may decide that every month you’re going to be releasing a new scent, and so you’ll release 12 new products – 1 per month – over the course of a year. 

So in this specific scenario, whether you choose to release in collections or individually is less important. 

2. What type of product do you sell – digital or physical?

The second thing you need to consider when deciding how often you should add a new product or collection is if your product is physical versus digital. 

Typically if you’re selling digital products and you’re selling things like patterns, printables, and other downloadables… once that product is made, you don’t need to spend time remaking it every time you get a new order, that’s the beauty of selling digital products, right? 

Since you’re not spending time remaking a product each time you get an order, you will want to reinvest this time in creating more new products. 

This means that if you sell digital products you should be releasing products much more often than makers who are selling physical products because you have more time. 

You want to build up a really great catalog so that you increase your chances of finding bestsellers – then learn from the ones that sell and create more like that! 

If you sell printables or graphic design templates and things like that it’s important to have some seasonal releases as well; get some holiday and season-based designs out there…

When you first start, it might initially feel like a lot to be releasing products weekly or monthly but as you develop more products you’ll probably find that you have “templates for your own templates” and be able to create new products quickly. 

For example, the first time you create a calendar or planner template pack, you’ll need to create the actual layouts and calendars, etc. but the following times – you can keep that same structure and change only the illustrations and decorations on those files. 

If you’re selling physical products, it’s different because it takes more time and money — you’re going to need to invest in new materials and resources to actually make those products and find the time to make them, so you’re not going to be releasing products as often as you would if it was digital. 

3. What is your capacity, and your preference?

The most important thing of all is something that I think not enough people consider, and that is your capacity and your preference.

It’s so important that you need to find what’s going to work for YOU. You all have different kinds of life situations — you might be working a full time job in addition to opening your shop, you might have kids, you might be working full time on your handmade shop, you might not like your current schedule — no two of you are in the same life situation. And based on that, realistically, some of you are not going to be able to be working on new products as often as others.

Your decision will also depend on your preference – how you prefer to work. For some of you, the creative work of thinking, testing, trying, creating new products is something you like to do a little bit of every week or every month, so you’ll have a few hours here and there where you work on a new product, and then you release it when it’s ready. 

Others of you may prefer to not think about a new product or new collections at all for like three months, but then you take a month and make it a project for that month to come up with a new collection because you need to be in that flow, in that creative space where you really dedicate more time in a big chunk to that work, to actually come up with a collection. 

So you will need to factor all of these considerations into your decision of how often you will be adding new products or new collections to your shop.

How Often Should You Add Your New Products?

Now I know some of you are thinking “But Deb can you just give me a definite number so I know how often I need to add products to my store?”

But as you may have gathered by now, there is no one answer, no rule of “this many per month” that you can follow.

The answer lies in finding the flow that works for you instead of thinking that there’s this amazing perfect-way formula that you need to follow to be successful.

Yes – for digital products I would try and release new products every month. You can strive for once a week or once a month as a group of items – it’s entirely up to you. Of course, life will get in the way and it’s perfectly fine if that doesn’t seem realistic for you right now – but with digital products you do want to release more frequently than you would with physical products. 

For physical products you need to sit down and look at your market and your niche, then think about what your capacity is – for your unique life and your unique situation – and come up with a plan that will work for you in the long run, a plan you can maintain given your life situation.

Next Step: Product Collections

Now if you are considering creating product collections, you will want to read my article about common handmade product collection mistakes that you will want to avoid to be sure that your collections maximize clicks and sales!

Thanks for reading, and until next time, aurevoir!