5 Low Competition Merch Etsy Niches for Back to School Season

About this video

He argues generic terms like ’teacher shirt’ have thousands of results, so he shares five narrower back-to-school niches where the same buyers shop with far less competition. Niche one is school support staff — classroom aides, lunch ladies, bus drivers, custodians and crossing guards — citing examples like a lunch lady listing aged 4 months with seven sales and a school bus design aged one month with 2,000 views. Niche two is subject-specific teachers, such as special education and PE teachers, rather than ’teacher’ in general. Niche three is homeschool families, including homeschool mom, dad and kids. Niche four is parents of kids in clubs — marching band, robotics, debate, cross country and chess — extending to dads, grandmas and aunties. Niche five is personalized first-day shirts for kindergarten through later grades, which he says can bring repeat buyers each year and, on Etsy or a website, sell as custom designs for $25-$30. He checks demand via listing age versus sales, views and conversion, and Amazon hot new releases / BSR, repeatedly warns to check trademarks and copyrights, shows using Ideogram inside what he calls Code AI to develop original concepts, suggests family ‘squad’ / ‘crew’ sets to raise order value, and urges uploading now because Google Trends interest peaks around mid-to-late August.

Key takeaways

• Go sub-niche instead of ’teacher shirt’: target support staff such as lunch ladies, bus drivers, custodians and classroom aides.
• Specify the subject teacher — special education, PE, math, music and similar — to cut competition and speak directly to that buyer.
• Serve homeschool families and proud club parents (marching band, robotics, debate) including moms, dads, grandmas and aunties.
• Use personalized first-day-of-grade shirts for kindergarten onward, and build family squad/crew sets so buyers purchase multiple shirts at once.
• Validate demand by listing age, sales, views and Amazon BSR, always check trademarks/copyrights, and upload early ahead of the mid-August trend peak.

Episode details: published July 21, 2026 · 15:49 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are RJ Martinez’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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