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| Christmas shopping isn’t only about Christmas-themed products. Holiday shoppers are also looking for gifts that match the people they’re buying for—book lovers, Mahjong players, cat people, cocktail fans, coworkers and everyone else on the list. That changes how I’m thinking about Q4 merch. |
I had one of those mildly horrifying print-on-demand thoughts today.
What if people aren’t actually spending November and December looking for Christmas-themed merchandise?
Obviously some of them are. People buy ugly Christmas sweaters, holiday mugs, ornaments, matching family shirts and all the usual seasonal stuff.
But that isn’t the same thing as saying Christmas shopping equals shopping for Christmas designs.
Most people are shopping because they need gifts.
And suddenly that makes me look at my Public Nuisance Apparel Christmas strategy very differently.
A Christmas shopper isn’t necessarily searching for Christmas
Imagine someone has five people left on their shopping list.
Their sister loves books. Their mother plays mahjong. Their friend is obsessed with black cats. Their coworker loves martinis. Their niece wants a new phone case.
That shopper may be doing 100% of their shopping for Christmas without searching for a single Christmas-themed product.
They aren’t necessarily typing:
Christmas tote bag
They might be typing:
mahjong gift for women
book lover tote
black cat gift
funny coworker shirt
martini lover gift
That distinction sounds obvious once you say it out loud.
It somehow wasn't obvious to me while I was busy thinking about what holiday designs I should make.
The numbers support the idea
We're still early enough in the 2026 holiday season that some of the detailed consumer gift surveys haven't been released yet, but Deloitte published its holiday forecast in September and expects U.S. holiday retail sales from November 2026 through January 2027 to reach roughly $1.70 trillion to $1.71 trillion. E-commerce alone is forecast at approximately $316 billion to $319 billion, growing faster than holiday retail overall. (Deloitte)
So the online holiday opportunity is very real.
But look at what shoppers were actually buying during the most recent completed holiday season.
Circana's 2025 holiday research found that 56% of holiday shoppers planned to buy clothing and accessories, followed by technology and electronics at 38%, beauty at 33%, entertainment at 30%, home products at 29% and toys at 28%. (Circana)
Notice what isn't on that list:
“Things with Christmas trees printed on them.”
Those are gift categories, not Christmas-design categories.
NRF found something similar during the 2025 season. Clothing and accessories were among the most common gifts shoppers had already purchased, along with toys, gift cards and books/media. Online shopping was also the leading destination for finishing holiday purchases. (National Retail Federation)
That is a pretty important distinction for anyone selling print-on-demand products.
Maybe my regular collections are Christmas collections too
This changes how I'm thinking about Public Nuisance Apparel.
I already have an actual Christmas & Holiday collection with designs like Booked for the Holidays, Merry & Unbothered and Yuletide Social Club.
I'm not getting rid of that. Seasonal merchandise still makes sense.
But I've also been treating collections like Mahjong, Book Lovers, Black Cat, Cocktail & Martini, Tote Bags and Phone Cases as basically separate from Christmas.
Maybe they aren't.
During November and December, those products become potential Christmas gifts whether there is a snowflake anywhere near them or not.
A Mahjong tote isn't inherently Christmas merchandise.
But to someone searching for a Christmas present for her Mahjong-playing mother, it absolutely is.
That's the shift.
Giftability may matter more than holiday artwork
This also makes me rethink what deserves my design time over the next couple of months.
Every hour I spend making another Christmas-specific graphic is an hour I'm not spending making something highly giftable for a specific person or interest.
And shoppers appear to be increasingly selective.
Circana reported in September 2026 that U.S. consumers are concentrating spending on things they either need or strongly want, while cutting back on purchases that sit somewhere in the middle. Unit demand fell even though retail dollars increased, which Circana interpreted as consumers being more deliberate about what feels worth buying. (Circana)
That seems especially relevant to print on demand.
A generic shirt that says Merry Christmas has to compete with approximately eight billion other Merry Christmas shirts.
A funny shirt that perfectly describes somebody's Mahjong-obsessed aunt has a reason to exist.
That's probably a stronger gift.
And people buy themselves things at Christmas too
Another mistake would be assuming every holiday purchase has to be a gift.
KPMG found during the 2025 holiday season that 57% of consumers planned to shop for themselves, with average self-spending rising substantially from the previous year. (KPMG)
So December isn't just:
“What can I buy everyone else?”
It's also:
“While I'm here, I want that.”
That makes evergreen funny shirts, phone cases, bags and hobby merchandise even more interesting.
The product doesn't necessarily need wrapping-paper energy.
It just needs to be something somebody wants.
This could change my holiday SEO too
There's a second part of this I want to test.
If someone is buying a Mahjong tote as a Christmas gift, the design itself doesn't need to say Christmas.
But the way the product is discovered may still involve gift language.
That doesn't mean stuffing every listing with “Christmas gift Christmas present holiday gift Xmas gift” until Zazzle starts sending me threatening emails.
It means thinking about actual buyer intent.
There is a difference between describing the artwork and understanding why somebody might buy it.
My Vintage Mahjong Game Night Floral Tiles Tote Bag, for example, already describes the actual product pretty well.
But now I'm interested in researching whether shoppers are searching more for things like mahjong gifts, gifts for mahjong players, mahjong gifts for women, or something completely different.
That is something we can actually investigate instead of guessing.
Christmas merchandise versus merchandise bought at Christmas
I think I've been lumping two different markets together.
There is Christmas merchandise:
Santa. Reindeer. Christmas trees. Holiday sayings. Seasonal graphics.
And then there is merchandise people buy at Christmas:
Something funny for Dad.
Something for the friend who reads constantly.
Something for the woman who hosts Mahjong night every Thursday.
Something for the person who collects black cat everything.
Something their boyfriend would actually wear.
Those markets overlap, but they aren't the same.
And the second one is enormous.
So I'm changing the plan
I'm still going to make Christmas designs.
But I'm not going to spend the entire fourth quarter trying to turn every product into Christmas.
Instead, I want to find out what people are actually buying as gifts this year — which interests are growing, which products are showing up in searches, which trends are turning into gifts, and which kinds of print-on-demand products fit naturally into that behavior.
Then I'll use both stores as testing grounds.
Public Nuisance Apparel can lean into the niches and collections I've already built.
Design Philosophy can react much faster to trends, obsessions, jokes and things people suddenly can't stop talking about.
That feels a lot smarter than producing my 37th variation of a Christmas tree and hoping somebody needs another one.
The holiday opportunity may not be:
Make more Christmas stuff.
It may be:
Make more stuff people want to give each other at Christmas.
That's what I'm going to research next.
