Full disclosure up front:
Karim, Trendlytic’s founder, emailed me directly after reading my Amazon Merch guide and offered free access to the Pro plan to test. There’s an affiliate link below if you decide to sign up. Same standard as every product I write about on this site: I test it myself first, and that doesn’t change based on who reached out or who didn’t.
Here’s what actually held up under testing and what didn’t.
Short version: Trendlytic pulls trending and best-selling designs across Amazon Merch, Etsy, Redbubble, and TeePublic, scores niches for demand and competition, and runs a live USPTO trademark check on any phrase. The trademark checker is the real reason to use this, it correctly flagged a genuinely trademarked term and correctly cleared a safe one when I tested both. The demand data is read entirely through t-shirt sales, which is a reasonable methodology but worth knowing going in, it’s not separately ranking mugs against phone cases. It’s a new company with no independent review footprint yet, so weigh that alongside everything else here.
What Trendlytic Actually Does
At its core, Trendlytic searches four print-on-demand marketplaces at once, Amazon Merch, Etsy, Redbubble, and TeePublic, and tells you what’s actually selling for a given niche or keyword, not just what’s uploaded. Search a niche, “Deep Carrot” was one I tested, and you get real listings with real prices, real review counts, and a plain-language verdict at the top (mine came back rated a niche worth entering with a specific angle, based on new designs already getting first sales against the existing competition).
Everything runs on a shared credit system. The Pro plan, $19 a month, gives you 500 searches and 300 trademark checks monthly, searching all four marketplaces at once costs 4 credits, one marketplace alone costs 1. Starter is $9 for 100 searches and 50 trademark checks, Business is $49 for 2,000 searches and unlimited trademark checks. For a solo seller testing niches before committing design time, Starter or Pro covers it.
The Trademark Checker Is the Reason to Care About This One
I ran “SpaceX” through it specifically because it’s a genuinely bad idea to print, and it needed to catch that to earn any trust from me. It did, correctly, showing it’s registered in Class 25, the exact class for clothing, with the actual registrant (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.), filing date, and expiration pulled straight from the USPTO database. Then I ran a niche phrase through it that had no trademark conflict, and it came back clean instead of throwing a false-positive scare to look thorough. That’s the distinction that actually matters, a checker that flags everything isn’t useful, and one that missed SpaceX would be actively dangerous to rely on.
Every result in the search tool also carries a small badge showing whether the exact phrase leans on a name someone already owns, and clicking it runs the same live check. For a Merch seller specifically, where a trademark strike can get your whole account suspended, this is the single feature worth the subscription on its own.
The Niche and Design Research
Trending Now shows what’s climbing across all four marketplaces right now, refreshed hourly. Best Design Instant ranks the strongest current winners into three tiers: Gold (proven champions in niches that are hot right now), Rising (a top seller that was also uploaded recently, the freshest room to actually enter), and Solid (reliable evergreen performers). That distinction matters more than it sounds, Gold tells you what’s already crowded, Rising tells you where there’s still room.
The same Rising and Rising fast badges also show up on regular search results, not just inside Best Design Instant. When you see one, it means the design is both recent and already selling somewhere real, not just a fresh, unproven upload. If you’re trying to decide what’s actually worth your design time this week, that badge is the more useful signal than where something happens to rank in a search.
Keyword Research pulls the actual tags and phrases best-selling designs use for a niche, then scores each for demand, competition, and trend direction, with an opportunity rating (Great, Good, and so on) so you’re not just staring at raw numbers. Worth knowing: these scores are relative positions within that specific search, not fixed industry benchmarks, the tool says this directly rather than implying more precision than it has. Related Niches then branches outward from your keyword to adjacent ideas you wouldn’t have thought to search, which is genuinely useful for breaking out of an obvious-niche rut.
The POD Calendar rounds this out with a running list of upcoming seasonal events and exactly how many days out you should start designing for each, tied directly to Trendlytic’s own research tools so you can jump straight into niche research for that event.
The AI Studio: One Standout, a Few Decent Extras
Trendlytic bundles five AI tools into what it calls AI Studio, drawing from the same credit pool as everything else. The Niche Finder takes a broad interest and returns twelve specific niche ideas, each with a one-line reason it works and a sample design concept, genuinely useful for someone starting from nothing.
The Listing Generator is the best feature in the whole product, and it’s the one I’d lead with if you’re on the fence. Open any winning design and it doesn’t just hand you that design’s existing listing to copy, it generates a new slogan, a new design prompt, and a full title, description, and tag set built around that new output. That’s the right way to research a winner and build your own version without drifting into copying someone else’s actual work, and it reinforces the trademark-safety angle running through the whole product.
The Slogan, Quote, and Description generators are fine, functional starting points in the pun-heavy tone POD listings actually use, but they read as AI-written if you look closely, and I’d treat them as a first draft to edit rather than something to ship as-is.
What It Doesn’t Do
Two things you should consider before you sign up.
First, Trendlytic reads demand entirely through t-shirt sales. On Redbubble and TeePublic the same design automatically extends to mugs, phone cases, and other products, and on Merch sellers carry designs to hoodies and other items themselves, so a winning niche on tees is treated as the same niche across those products. It isn’t separately ranking mugs against phone cases as their own category, I confirmed this directly with Karim rather than assuming.
Second, this is a young company with little independent track record so far. However, everything I tested worked as described, and Karim answered every specific question I put to him directly and accurately.
Who This Is Actually For
If you’re running an Amazon Merch, Etsy, or other print-on-demand shop and doing niche research by manually scrolling bestseller lists, this replaces a genuinely tedious part of that process, and the trademark checker alone is worth having before you upload anything with text on it. If you’re not yet doing POD at all, read the relevant guide first and come back here once you’re actually choosing niches to design for.
Ready to try it? Sign up at trendlytic.io, the Pro plan covers most solo sellers comfortably.
Frequently Asked Questions
In my testing, yes. I ran a phrase I knew was actively trademarked (“SpaceX”) and it correctly flagged it with the exact class, registrant, and filing dates pulled from the USPTO database. I also ran a clean phrase and it correctly cleared it instead of over-flagging. That’s the combination that matters, catching real risk without crying wolf on everything.
It searches and reports across four marketplaces, but reads demand specifically through t-shirt sales, treating that as the demand signal for whatever else a design gets printed on (mugs, phone cases, hoodies). It doesn’t rank those other products as separate categories. I confirmed this directly with Trendlytic’s founder rather than guessing from the interface.
Three plans: Starter at $9/month (100 searches, 50 trademark checks), Pro at $19/month (500 searches, 300 trademark checks), and Business at $49/month (2,000 searches, unlimited trademark checks). Searching all four marketplaces at once costs more credits than searching one at a time.
Based on hands-on testing, yes, the core features work as advertised. Now, it’s a fairly new company, with little independent review history yet outside its own site, however, everything I personally tested held up, and my conversation with the founder did not raise any red flags. In fact it was rather refreshing how open and straight forward he was about his business.
The Listing Generator, inside AI Studio. It turns a proven winning design into a new slogan, a new design prompt, and a full original listing rather than just handing you the winner’s existing text to copy. That’s the feature that actually helps you build something of your own from real demand data instead of copying someone else’s work.