Design Drop is no longer available and I have not found a replacement.
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Today’s post comes straight from my inbox – and it is related to the best way to deal with customers and online mockups. Here’s the email:
“Hi Christine! As my customs business is growing, I’m having a hard time keeping mockups and the changes that need to be made straight. I’m currently doing them by email, but I’ve had a few customers approve designs that had errors in them and it’s time consuming for me to go back through emails. Any suggestions for better workflow?”
Yes! There are several online mockup management tools that work great for keeping track of changes for mockups and keeping a record from both parties. The one that I have used most recently is called Design Drop. I’m going to show you how it works from both sides (the designer and the customer).
What You Do at Design Drop as the Designer
- Visit designdrop.com and upload a mockup to show your customer.
- After you upload your mockup, you’ll be given a shareable link as shown in the image below. Click it.
- On the right hand side, add a comment telling the customer that this is the design that will be placed on their custom made order. Instruct them to write “I approve the design” if everything looks good. If they need changes made, they simply need to leave a comment. The image below shows what my comment looks like:
- Send the link to your customer once you are ready to show them the mockup.
How a Customer Sees Design Drop
- Customer receives the link you send and clicks on it. The page they see is similar and shown below. They do not have to sign up or log in to leave a comment. They are able to annotate directly on the image and leave comments. If everything checks out fine – you start the order, if not – you make the changes.
If you’d like to see the client end of the mockup above, click here. Feel free to annotate or leave a comment to test it out.
I’ve used Design Drop in the past and love it for a few reasons: 1) It’s free. 2) If the customer has an error on the custom made design, I can log into Design Drop and reference their approval. This allows me to charge them for a replacement item since the error was on their part. 3) It keeps all my mockups in one place, no digging through my email box.
Need help creating mockups? See this post, this post, or this post.
Do you use a mockup management system? Let me know about it in the comments.
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Great idea! I just left you a message on the Design Drop…
Isn’t it so easy?!
Question: do you keep “running graphics” on the site, or just one? Meaning: if a customer tweaks the design, she’s only adding text, correct? If I wanted to change your word from Slurp to Slurpy, there would be a running dialogue, but what if I, the customer, wanted to see the word Slurpy on the mug? Would you, the seller, remove the existing image and add a new?
I usually don’t remove the original images until I’ve received feedback of some sort from the customer, or a month or so passes. I would upload the new image. Hope that helps!
OMG, love this! And, it’s free?! THANK YOU! Would you suggest this with ETSY customers as well or keep that dialog in “conversations” on ETSY?
If you sell on Etsy and want to keep your mockups more organized, I’d just be sure that you send the customer the links through Etsy conversations. YES, FREE! 🙂
This is great. Thanks.
My pleasure, Ana!
This is a game changer! Thank you!
Awesome! I hope it makes dealing with mockups easier for you, Tammy!
Christine this is great!! My etsy mockup students will love to hear about this. I’ll be sharing your post for sure! I use some tools at my day job like Invision, and some others, but they are all paid-for (by corporate). So a good free tool like this is perfect for individual shop owners. Love it! I also love your important tip to a commenter above about sharing links to the mockup tool in Etsy conversations so it’s all tracked. Great work as always 😀
Hey Sarah! Isn’t it awesome?! Thanks for the compliments, it means a lot coming from you! 🙂
Thank you! My question is, once I design something in Cricut Design Access, how do I then turn it into a JPEG to share with a client? Thank you for all that you share. 🙂
From Design Space, the easiest thing to do is take a screenshot.
Thank you Christine for ALWAYS having such GREAT content on your site to share with us!!! <3
My pleasure! Thanks for stopping in!
Hi Christine,
I found your post about DesignDrop and was so excited. I just visited the site and discovered that it no longer exists. =( Do you have any other suggestions for mock-up management? Thanks so much!!
I haven’t found a good replacement, despite looking for some time.