Customer personas as taught in marketing courses — a fictional named customer with a detailed backstory, a stock photo, hobbies, and a full day-in-the-life narrative — are genuinely overkill for a solo POD shop, and building one that elaborate is more likely to become a fun one-time exercise than an actually useful, regularly-referenced tool.
A stripped-down version that's actually worth the time: three or four bullet points covering who's realistically buying from you, based on actual evidence rather than pure imagination — what you can see in review content, what platform demographic data (if your platform shows any) suggests, and what you already know about your specific niche's typical audience from general familiarity with the space.
The point of even this simplified version isn't the document itself — it's having a quick, concrete reference point when making real decisions: does this new design idea fit what this audience actually wants, does this product photo style match how they'd want to see themselves represented, does this ad targeting option (if running paid ads) roughly match who you already know is buying.
Where this genuinely helps in practice: it's a fast gut-check against scope creep and vague, directionless expansion. A new design idea that clearly doesn't fit any version of your actual known audience is worth a second thought before committing real time to it — not necessarily a hard no, but a reason to pause and ask whether it's genuinely a smart expansion or just something that felt exciting to make without a clear sense of who it's actually for.
Revisiting this occasionally (not obsessively, maybe every few months) as your review content and sales data accumulate keeps it accurate rather than static — your actual audience can genuinely shift over time as your catalog and marketing evolve, and a persona built once at launch and never revisited can quietly become outdated without you noticing, especially if your shop has grown or shifted focus since then.