Can I Start a Sublimation Business From Home?

Short answer: yes. And we don't say that as a marketing line. We say it because it happened at our kitchen table.

This is one of the most common questions we hear from people eyeing the sublimation world, and most of the answers floating around online are some version of "Of course! Here's the $3,000 equipment list you need to buy first." We want to give you a different answer, because our family has lived this question from both sides. Our daughter Abby built a phone case brand from our garage that has since done over $2 million in revenue. And today we also own Innosub USA, the B2B supplier that sold Abby her very first blanks years ago. We've been the wide-eyed beginner and the supplier shipping boxes to thousands of beginners just like her.

So when someone asks us whether they can really start a sublimation business from home, we don't answer with a spec sheet. We answer with the actual story, receipts included, and the handful of things we've learned that genuinely separate the people who make it from the people who quit.

The honest version: it didn't work the first time

Here's the part most "success story" posts leave out. Abby's first attempt failed.

Back in 2015, when she was just thirteen, she started a little phone case venture called Print This Shop using her birthday money. We still have the original budget spreadsheet, and it's a beautiful little artifact of how cheap and fast a scrappy start can actually be:

• Heat press: $139.17
• Sublimation printer: $275.00
• Initial cases, blanks, and supplies: roughly the rest

Her total expenses across that whole first run came to $969.67, under a thousand dollars, all in, funded entirely by birthday money. Her core equipment kit, the press and printer together, was about $414.

And it worked, in the small way a thirteen-year-old's business works. She sold $10 to $30 monogrammed and personalized cases to family, classmates, and her gymnastics teammates. Her biggest single order in that early ledger was $90, from a coach. By the end of that first ledger she had recovered 100% of her investment. The spreadsheet literally has a cell where she calculated that she'd earned back every dollar she put in.

And then it fizzled. After about six months, Print This Shop quietly wound down. Life happened, she was a kid, and the spark went out.

We tell you this on purpose. If the story were "she started a business and it instantly became a $2M juggernaut," it would be useless to you, because it wouldn't be true and it wouldn't be repeatable. The real story is that the first try didn't stick, and the thing that eventually became a real business came years later, built on what that first failure taught her without her even realizing she was learning.

The relaunch: April 2019, back in the garage

In April 2019, at sixteen, Abby decided to try again. This time she launched an Instagram account (@abbyrosecases) and started making cases in our family garage, hand-writing the address on every single package that went out.

That's the entire origin of what is now abbyrose. A teenager, a garage, a heat press, and an Instagram account.

What happened next is the part worth paying attention to, because it's the actual engine of the whole thing:

• She hit 100 Instagram followers within three weeks.
• By that October she'd launched a real website, with all the product photos shot by her brother, Zach.
• By the end of December she posted her first TikTok, set to a sound that said "17 and started my own business!"
• By February 2020 she was at 10,000 Instagram followers. By June, 50,000. By August, 80,000. Her TikTok crossed 100,000 the following summer.

She moved out of the garage and into a small office in March 2020, which, in hindsight, was either terrible or perfect timing, because the pandemic hit days later. Everyone was home, everyone was on their phones, and a young woman making cute, personalized phone cases and posting about it constantly was suddenly in exactly the right place. 2020 became her best year ever, just over $500,000 in revenue.

She left for college that fall. She went first to Baylor on an acrobatic gymnastics scholarship, then transferred to Texas Tech, where she graduated with a business degree in 2024, and her older sister Aubrey took over daily production. The business followed Aubrey from San Antonio to Austin to Dallas as she went through school herself. Somewhere in there it stopped being a teenager's side project and became a real family company.

How she actually got her first customers

This is where we want to be specific, because "start with your network" is advice everyone nods along to and almost nobody sees proven with receipts.

Abby was an acrobatic gymnast. That mattered enormously. She didn't start by trying to sell to strangers on the internet. She started by selling to the people right in front of her: family first, then school classmates, then her local gymnastics teammates. You can see it in that original ledger, full of orders for monograms and team-themed designs sold to the kids she trained with.

But here's the leverage point. Acro gymnastics is a tight-knit community with connections across the entire country. So when she launched the Instagram account, it didn't just spread to her town. It spread through her sport, to gymnasts in other states who already trusted her because she was one of them. She had a built-in national niche community before she ever sold to a single stranger.

You almost certainly have a version of this. A sport, a hobby, a church, a fandom, a profession. Some community you're genuinely part of, where people already know you and share an interest you could design around. That's worth more than any ad budget when you're starting out.

What we think actually separates the people who make it

Now to the question underneath the question. We sell blanks to thousands of people trying to do what Abby did, and we've watched it up close. Here's what we honestly believe matters, and a couple of these might surprise you.

Not knowing it was "supposed to be hard"

We attribute a huge amount of Abby's success to naivety, and we mean that as the highest compliment.

She was so young that she didn't know the "right" way to do most of this. She didn't know there were rules, or industry best practices, or reasons something "couldn't" work. She just figured it out as she went and trusted her gut. She didn't know it was supposed to be hard, so a lot of the time it simply wasn't. She'd try the obvious thing, and the obvious thing worked.

There's a real lesson buried in this for adult beginners, who tend to over-research and talk themselves out of starting. You can absorb so much advice about the "correct" way to run a sublimation business that you become paralyzed before you've sold a single case. Sometimes the person who just starts, makes a mess, and adjusts will lap the person who's still perfecting their business plan.

Making mistakes and course-correcting fast

To be clear, naivety also means you'll get things wrong, and she did. Early on, for example, we paid designers commissions that were way too high, the kind of arrangement that quietly eats your margin alive. We didn't agonize over it. We noticed it, corrected it, and moved on.

That's the actual skill. Not avoiding mistakes, because you won't, but staying loose enough to spot them and fix them quickly. A home business run by a teenager survived precisely because nobody treated any decision as permanent.

Selling what you actually like

One of the pieces of advice Abby gives most often: sell things you personally like and enjoy.

This sounds soft, but it's deeply practical. When you genuinely like your own products, you make better designs, you talk about them more naturally, and you don't burn out posting about them every day for years. A huge amount of Abby's growth has been organic and social-media-fueled, and you simply cannot fake enthusiasm on camera for thousands of posts. She liked the cases. That came through. People bought.

Posting everything, everywhere, because you don't know what will hit

If there's one tactical thing Abby preaches now, it's this: post everything, everywhere, and let the algorithms surprise you.

You think you know which piece of content will perform and on which platform, and you're wrong, constantly. Something she threw up on a whim outperforms the video she labored over. A post that flops on Instagram takes off on TikTok. The platforms change the rules every few months anyway. So you stop trying to predict it and instead treat content as a volume game: more shots on goal, distributed everywhere, with no ego about which ones land.

Her own history backs this up. She's been on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and TikTok, almost by accident, ended up being the single biggest driver of her growth. She didn't plan that. She just kept posting.

Inspiration, Yes. Copying, No

If we had to name the one thing we see go wrong most, it's this: people try to copy exactly what's working for someone else.

We've watched businesses copy some of Abby's own original ideas, like her mashup designs, almost beat for beat. It rarely works, and the reason is simple. The thing that made it work for her wasn't the design itself; it was that it came from her, her taste, her community, her voice. A copy is always a step behind and visibly hollow.

Take what you see others doing as inspiration, then make it genuinely your own. The whole game is authenticity, and authenticity is the one thing a competitor literally cannot reproduce. Build a real community around the real you, and you've built something nobody can knock off.

So, can you start a sublimation business from home?

Yes. And here's the thing we most want you to take away: you can start far smaller and far cheaper than the internet will tell you.

Abby's first real kit was a press and a printer for about $414. She started in a garage, sold to people she already knew, posted relentlessly about products she actually liked, made plenty of mistakes, and stayed loose enough to fix them. The first attempt failed entirely. The second one became a brand that hit half a million dollars in a year and has done over $2 million across its life (abbyrose alone, separate from anything on the Innosub side), and it's still, to this day, family-run. Abby runs abbyrose with her sister Aubrey handling production and her mom doing tech support.

Along the way the story has picked up some outside attention we're proud of. Abby was featured on Business Insider for her experience pitching the business, and in 2025 she appeared on Guy Raz's How I Built This Advice Line, the same show built around the founders many of us grew up admiring. Not bad for something that started with birthday money and hand-written shipping labels.

The full-circle part still makes us smile. Abby's very first supplier, all those years ago, was a company called Innosub USA. In 2025, the owner, who needed to leave the country and couldn't keep it running, reached out to ask if our family wanted to buy it. We did. So now Abby's dad and brother run Innosub, supplying blanks to the next generation of people standing exactly where she stood in that garage, while Abby keeps building abbyrose on the very same blanks she started with. The supplier became the family business. You can't script that.

If you own a heat press and you're sitting on the fence, our honest advice is the least sophisticated thing in this entire post: start. Start small, start with the people who already know you, sell what you love, post it everywhere, and don't let anyone, including the experts, convince you it's supposed to be too hard for you to begin.

Abby didn't know it was hard. So she just did it.