Both are managed POD marketplaces where you upload designs and they handle printing, shipping, and customer service. Redbubble gives you control over your royalty rate and has a larger, more active buyer community across stickers, fan art, and casual apparel. Society6 skews heavily toward home decor and fine art prints, with a more curated aesthetic that attracts a different type of buyer. Most designers who take POD seriously run both.
Society6 and Redbubble look almost identical from the outside: upload a design, set it live on dozens of products, earn a cut when someone buys. But the buyers on each platform have different tastes, the royalty structures work differently, and the products each does best don't overlap as much as you'd expect.
If you're deciding where to focus first, or whether both are worth the effort, this breaks it down.
How both platforms work
The core model is the same on both. You create a free account, upload artwork, and your designs become available on a range of products. When a buyer purchases something, the platform handles production, shipping, and any customer service. You earn a commission or royalty per sale, paid out monthly above a minimum threshold.
Neither charges you to list. Neither requires you to buy stock or hold inventory. The risk is essentially zero. You invest design time, not money.
Royalty structure: a meaningful difference
On Redbubble, you set your own royalty percentage on top of their base price, typically anywhere from 10% to 30% or higher. The default is 20%. You have real control over what you earn per sale, and you can adjust it per product or across your whole shop.
On Society6, the royalty on most products is fixed at 10%. The exception is art prints, framed prints, and canvas prints, where you can set your own price above their base. For everything else: phone cases, pillows, tapestries, apparel. Society6 sets the commission and you don't change it.
In practice, the 10% fixed rate on most Society6 products is lower than what you'd earn on Redbubble at 20%. The trade-off is that Society6 attracts buyers willing to spend more on home decor items, so the base prices, and therefore your absolute royalty per sale, can be higher even at 10%.
Product catalog compared
Both platforms offer a wide range of products, but each has categories where it clearly leads.
| Category | Redbubble | Society6 |
|---|---|---|
| Stickers | Market leader | Limited selection |
| Art prints | Strong | Premium quality, larger sizes |
| Home decor | Available | Core focus: tapestries, rugs, pillows |
| Apparel | Higher volume | Available but smaller audience |
| Phone cases | Consistent demand | Available |
| Home furnishings | Not available | Unique: duvet covers, shower curtains, rugs |
Society6's home decor range genuinely has no equivalent on Redbubble. Wall tapestries, throw blankets, shower curtains, area rugs. These are higher-ticket items that Redbubble simply doesn't carry. If your designs work well in interior spaces, Society6 opens up a product range that Redbubble can't match.
The buyer audience
The platforms attract meaningfully different buyers, and this shapes what sells on each.
Redbubble's audience skews younger and more pop-culture-oriented. Stickers, fan art, fandom merch, ironic text designs, and niche interest communities are all very active. The buyer mindset is identity-driven and casual, often impulse purchases at low price points.
Society6's audience skews toward home decorators and art collectors. They're spending more per transaction and making more considered purchases. The aesthetic that performs on Society6 is clean, contemporary, or fine-art: botanical illustrations, abstract paintings, photography, geometric patterns. The same fan art sticker that sells hundreds of units on Redbubble might find almost no audience on Society6.
Neither audience is better. They're just different, and the best designs for each are genuinely different too.
What sells where
Redbubble is strongest for stickers in any niche, fan art and fandom designs, text-based slogan apparel, phone cases, and niche identity products. Discovery happens through specific keyword searches, so volume and tag quality matter most.
Society6 is strongest for art prints and wall art, home decor with a cohesive aesthetic, fine art and illustration, photography, and abstract or geometric patterns. The buyer is decorating a space and wants something that looks intentional, not mass-produced.
If your design style is illustrative, abstract, or photographic and works well as wall art or on home items, Society6 deserves real effort. If your designs are pop-culture, text-based, or niche identity, Redbubble is the stronger starting point. Most designers find they have work that suits each platform rather than everything fitting neatly into one.
Discoverability and SEO
On Redbubble, discoverability comes primarily through tags and titles, and the platform has a large active search volume. Getting tags right is the highest-leverage thing you can do for a listing.
Society6 has a smaller buyer community but the buyers who are there tend to spend more and browse more intentionally. Society6's search is also tag-driven, but the platform promotes work through editorial features and curated collections that Redbubble doesn't have. Getting featured by Society6's editorial team can drive a meaningful spike in visibility.
Both platforms have their work indexed by Google, which means a well-tagged listing can also pick up organic search traffic from outside the platform entirely. This is a bigger factor than most sellers realise.
Mockups and listing images
Both platforms auto-generate product mockups when you upload a design. On Society6 in particular, the quality of the auto-generated room setting mockups for art prints is decent, but decent is the ceiling.
For art prints on either platform, uploading a custom lifestyle image showing the print framed and displayed in a real room consistently outperforms the auto-generated preview. It removes the guesswork for buyers trying to picture the piece in their own home.
The poster mockup guide covers the specific mockup types and room settings that work best for wall art. Using Scaylr to generate multiple room variations quickly means you can test which image performs better without committing hours to the process. The free template library has wall art and poster templates ready to use.
On Society6, your art print listing image is often what buyers see first in search results and on social media shares. A lifestyle room photo will stop someone scrolling in a way that a flat design preview almost never will. It's the single easiest way to improve performance on an existing listing without touching the design.
Which platform should you start with?
If your designs are sticker-friendly, niche-identity-driven, fan art adjacent, or text-based, start with Redbubble. You'll build volume faster and get real data on which designs sell before investing more time. You also get control over your royalty rate, which Redbubble gives you and Society6 mostly doesn't.
If your work is fine art, illustration, photography, or abstract and looks at home on a wall or in an interior, start with Society6. It gives you access to premium home decor products Redbubble doesn't carry, and attracts buyers willing to spend more per purchase.
The honest answer for most designers: list on both. The upload process on each platform takes maybe 30 minutes per design once you have the workflow down. Running both from the start doubles your surface area without doubling your work in any meaningful way.
Redbubble and Society6 are more complementary than competitive. Redbubble wins on volume, royalty control, and the sticker and apparel markets. Society6 wins on home decor range, premium art prints, and the interior design buyer. If your portfolio has range, both platforms will find buyers for different parts of it. There's no good reason to choose just one.
Lifestyle mockups for both platforms
Generate room setting images for your art prints and wall art designs — works for Society6, Redbubble, Etsy, or anywhere else you sell.
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