The Gift Lab Print on Demand Course Review: Is it Worth It?
If you already sell printables on Etsy—or you’re interested in starting an Etsy shop but don’t want to limit yourself to digital products—you may be interested in learning about print-on-demand products (POD). Keep reading to see my honest review of Gold City Venture’s The Gift Lab POD Course. This is an ideal time if you’ve been thinking about starting a side hustle or growing a business to a full-time income.
The Appeal of POD
I’ve sold printables on Etsy since 2020, and while I’ve always been interested in selling physical products, I’ve honestly been a little intimidated by it. It just sounded harder than selling printables — dealing with inventory, shipping, products, fulfillment, and everything else that comes with selling something physical.
But POD is different. You don’t touch a single piece of physical inventory. All you do is pick your products from a printing vendor, upload designs you create, and they take care of all the packaging and shipping.
When I had the opportunity to check out The Gift Lab / Print on Demand Course from Gold City Ventures, I was curious to see if it really could be as simple as it sounded.
After going through the entire course, I text my sister (who I message multiple times a day about all kinds of business ideas) and said:
Why haven’t I tried POD yet???
In this Gift Lab review, I’m sharing what I liked about the course, what surprised me, how I think print-on-demand compares to Etsy printables, and whether I think the course is worth the $197 sale price.
I am an affiliate for Gold City Ventures. I have personally taken this course and am sharing my honest experience and opinions. See Disclosures for more details.
What Is the Gift Lab Print on Demand Course?
The Gift Lab / Print on Demand Course is a step-by-step course from Gold City Ventures that teaches you how to create and sell gift products using POD.
The course walks you through the process from beginning to end, including designing products in Canva, researching keywords, setting up an Etsy shop, connecting your shop with Printify, creating listings, managing orders, handling personalization, and eventually scaling your shop.
There are eight modules:
- Getting Started
- What Can You Sell
- Keyword Research
- Designing in Canva
- Printify and Etsy Listings
- Operations
- Personalization
- Scaling
So this isn’t a course that gives you a few ideas for products and then sends you off to figure out the rest. It’s very thorough, walking you through the entire process, beginning to end.
Short Videos, Clear Steps, and Actual Products at the End
One of my favorite things about the course was the length of the videos. Most of the videos were only 2–4 minutes long, with a few that were around 5–7 minutes.
I love this format. Instead of having to carve out an entire day to watch a course (which you can do if you want – and which is what I did!), you can watch a few lessons at a time when you have availability.
I watched the entire course in about 4 – 4.5 hours. That did NOT include completing the assignments, so you’ll need to allow more time for that. But I was surprised at how quickly I could get through all of the course material.
Also included in the course is a Micro Niching Workbook to help you come up with your customer base and product ideas, as well as bonus Canva listing templates.
I also appreciated that the course doesn’t assume you already know how print-on-demand works. It starts with the basics and then builds from there. If you don’t already have an Etsy shop, there’s instruction on setting one up from scratch. [I already have an Etsy shop, so I skipped that portion, but it’s included for someone who is just starting out.]
For a few segments (like setting up your Etsy or Printify shops), you can just pause the video and follow the exact steps, which is what I did to set up my Printify account. It’s very fluid, intuitive, and easy to follow.
The assignments also encourage you to actually start creating and listing products rather than simply watching hours of content. Because the assignments are integrated into the course, you can start creating products while you’re learning rather than waiting until you’ve finished everything.
If you moved through the course quickly and completed the assignments, you could potentially be designing and uploading products within a few days to a week.
The Appeal of Giftable Products
This is probably the part of the course that interested me the most as someone who already sells printables on Etsy.
The focus is on gifts.
With printables, I sometimes find myself thinking about seasonal content and trying to figure out what people are going to want to download and print.
But gifts are needed all year. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Weddings. Graduations. Teacher gifts. Coworker gifts. Gifts for moms, dads, grandparents, friends, spouses, kids…the list goes on.
There is always a demand for a gift.
And I think that gives gift products a very specific advantage. When someone needs a gift, there is often a very specific pain point: if they’re searching on Etsy, they want something special, made just for the person they’re gifting.
Creating something on that level of ‘special’ is harder to do with a printable product. A printable can absolutely solve a problem, but it doesn’t really meet that gift demand or solve that pain point.
A physical gift that feels personal and meaningful is a very different buying decision. And if the design or wording really speaks to the person they’re buying for, people will pay for that.
Print-on-Demand vs. Etsy Printables
When starting this course, as an Etsy printable seller, I was genuinely interested in the printable vs. POD aspect.
I wanted to know if print-on-demand is easier – and if not necessarily easier, had a better ROI (return on investment) than selling printables.
From my perspective, the answer is yes for both, for a few reasons.
The biggest difference is that with a printable, your printable is the product. It has to carry everything. You have to think about the layout, colors, typography, functionality, printing, how it looks when printed, and whether the customer can easily use it.
I’ve spent (and wasted) plenty of time printing samples, checking colors, adjusting designs, and printing them again.
With print-on-demand, the physical item is already the product. Your design is being placed on a mug, shirt, ornament, sign, or another physical product. The object is the gift, and your design is what makes that particular gift appealing to a particular customer.
That means I don’t have to create an elaborate design just to justify a higher price point. I don’t have to worry about whether the customer can figure it out. I don’t have to test how the colors look on a home printer.
That was another thing I was pleasantly surprised by: how simple the designs can be. You don’t have to be an incredible graphic designer, you don’t have to create complicated illustrations, and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every product.
For these kinds of gifts, the sentiment and the wording are more important than having an elaborate design. The product itself is already doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
You still need quality designs, attractive mockups, and optimized listings, but the actual design process feels much simpler to me. And because the designs themselves can be relatively simple, I can see this being a great entry point for someone who doesn’t consider themselves a designer or an online seller.
And as for ROI, the price point for printables is very low, so you really need to create and sell a lot for it to be sustainable for an income.
With POD, you can earn more with a single design that is easier to create, is simple to modify, is easily transferable to other niches – which means you can fill up your shop with products faster than you could with printables.
There is definitely competition in print-on-demand, just as there is in printables. But I also think gifts give you an opportunity to stand out in a different way because people are looking for things that feel unique, specific, and personal.
How Printify and Etsy Work Together
I’ve always been a little nervous about print-on-demand because I’m so used to dealing with digital products. But it’s a very simple process. The course walks you through the actual process of connecting the different pieces.
Basically, there’s a three-step workflow:
Canva → Printify → Etsy → Customer orders → Printify fulfills the order
You’ll design in Canva, upload your design to Printify, and then have your Printify and Etsy shops connected. Printify sends the listing over to Etsy, but you’ll still want to go into Etsy and manually work on your listing information, including your keywords and text.
The entire process isn’t completely automated. There is real work involved on the front end, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think POD is passive and that you upload one design and done.
However, the automation really becomes useful once the customer purchases. If you’re not offering personalization, you can set your orders up for automatic approval and Printify handles the rest. You’ll still have to handle customer service, but the course goes into that part of the business as well.
Compared with what I had imagined, the whole process feels much simpler and more streamlined than I expected.
What About Personalization?
This is probably the biggest caveat I would give someone who is looking for truly passive income.
Personalization isn’t completely hands-off.
People love personalized gifts, so I absolutely understand why you’d want to offer them. But when someone orders a personalized product, you have to make those changes. You may need to go into Canva, make the personalization, download the file, and upload it to Printify.
There are tools such as AnywherePOD that provides a shortcut between your Etsy shop and Printify workflow, but personalization still requires hands-on involvement.
Personalized products may have great sales potential, but they aren’t as passive. If your #1 goal is to be as hands-off as possible once you design your products, I’d caution on how heavily to include personalization.
Could You Learn All of This Without the Course?
The honest answer is probably most of it, but I don’t think all of it. Gold City Ventures has a LOT of experience on the Etsy platform, and they’re experts for a reason.
You could learn print-on-demand yourself. You could research products. You could learn how to use Printify. You could figure out how to connect it to Etsy. You could research keywords. You could watch YouTube videos and read blog posts.
But here’s what I’d say: having all of that information organized for you, along with the research and step-by-step instruction, is worth paying for.
And I say that as someone who already has an established Etsy shop. I’ve had more than 3,000 sales and high ratings in my Etsy shop, so I’m not coming into this as an Etsy rookie.
I still think the course is worth it.
Why? Because it shortcuts the learning curve. And in a day of AI when things are moving at a mind-bending fast pace, time isn’t really on our side.
Instead of spending weeks trying to figure out which products to make, how to connect everything, and what I should be doing next, I can follow a process that’s already been laid out for me.
For $197 (which is the special offer available for this launch), that’s worth it to me.
Who I Think Should Take the Gift Lab Course
I think The Gift Lab course would be especially helpful for:
Someone completely new to Etsy. If you’ve never opened an Etsy shop or created products before, the course gives you a step-by-step path instead of requiring you to figure everything out yourself.
An Etsy seller who already sells printables. This is probably the category I am most excited about. If you’ve already learned how Etsy works and you’re comfortable designing in Canva, print-on-demand gifts could be a natural way to expand what you’re already doing.
Someone who doesn’t consider themselves a designer. The simplicity of the designs makes this feel much more approachable than designing printables. There’s still design skills you’ll want to grow at, but you can get started with very simple and mostly text-based designs.
Someone who is tired of the printable space. If you’ve been selling printables and you’re feeling like you’re constantly having to come up with something new—or you’re frustrated by competition—I think it’s worth looking at POD as another option. I’m not saying printables are dead. But I do think it’s smart to have more than one way to monetize your design skills.
Who Might Not Need This Course?
If you already have extensive print-on-demand experience and are comfortable researching products, connecting Etsy and Printify, doing keyword research, and creating your own workflow, you may not need a course like this.
But for someone who wants to shorten the learning curve and start with a roadmap, I think there’s real value here.
How Do You Sign Up
This course is open from August 10 – August 17, 2026.
The regular price is currently $297, and at the time I’m writing this, the course is on sale for $197 through August 17.
There’s also a payment plan that you can opt into.
My Overall Gift Lab Review
After taking the entire course, I came away very optimistic and genuinely excited and energized about print-on-demand products.
Sometimes I dread (and avoid) creating new printables because it feels like such a long process, constantly trying to come up with the next new thing. This felt much more simple and streamlined — and I can’t wait to give it a try.
When you find your right combination of customer + occasion + clever design, I think there is a lot of room to create products that feel personal and unique. I’m also loving the idea that the designs themselves don’t necessarily have to be complicated. Big plus.
If you’re an Etsy seller who has been thinking about trying print-on-demand, or if you’re new to online selling and looking for a way to short entry ramp, I think the $197 sale price is well worth it.
For me personally, this course has moved print-on-demand from something I was intimidated by to something I’m actually excited to try, especially heading into 4th quarter.
Click here to learn more about The Gift Lab / Print on Demand Course
Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions! I’m happy to answer them! 🙂
