How To Start A T-Shirt Business, Part One – Getting Started

Selling T-Shirts has become big business and it’s a growing industry on the Internet where there are already thousands of shops and websites where you can purchase almost any design or T-Shirt style imaginable. Thanks to the many T-Shirt companies that now print and create the T-Shirts for you, with no risk involved, many people have been able to start their own T-Shirt business without having to invest any money. This however, has turned the T-Shirt business online into a fierce, competitive battle against all T-Shirt shop/website owners.

There are now millions of T-Shirt websites online for customers to choose from and this is why starting your own online T-Shirt business can be stressful, disappointing, and very difficult to
attract customers and make the sales that you are expecting. Now, I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying it’s going to take a lot of time, effort, and maybe even some money for you to get started and get customers visiting your shop/website.

There are many things you need to consider when starting your own online T-Shirt business. Simply creating a design, putting it on a blank T-Shirt, and expecting it to be a big seller isn’t going to do the trick and bring you many sales, unless of course, you are a very lucky person, whom I can assure you, there aren’t very many of them around. If you want to start a T-Shirt business just to make easy money fast like many other schemes on the Internet claim, then you’re looking at the wrong business. There is no such thing as easily making money fast and you’re always going to have to put in the effort to get the results you are looking for, especially for a T-Shirt business.

Now, I’m not trying to scare you from owning your own T-Shirt business, as there are many successful individuals who have started their business in the T-Shirt industry and are doing very well. I just want to give you the facts of reality so that you’re not disappointed when your business isn’t doing as well as you thought it would. You may succeed at one aspect of the business, but fail in another, or you just might be that person who is successful at all the aspects of the business, which will obviously make your business a success. Either way, you’re still going to have to spend the time and work very hard to achieve success.

Below I’ve listed some of the things you need to consider before you setup or start your own T-Shirt business:

Business Goals

Before you start your own T-Shirt business, you need to think of your business goals. These goals should be realistic and they should point you in the direction you would like your business to go and what you hope to accomplish. An example of a goal would be to have 100 visitors visiting your shop/website a day or to create two new designs a week and put them up on your website. Whatever the goals may be that you have set for yourself, you then need to strive for them and once you have accomplished your goals, then you know you’re on the right track.

Passion

You have to have an interest in what you are doing or you’re not going to enjoy spending the time and effort your business requires. Everybody has a passion in one thing or another whether it is creating the designs, promoting, or any other aspect of the business, but you should have an interest in it. If you’re not passionate about a certain subject, then you need to think of another theme that you would be more interested in doing. Remember, you are going to spend a lot of time on the subject/theme that you choose, so if you aren’t passionate about it, then you’re going to get bored very fast and it’s not going to be enjoyable.

Subject/Theme

This is very important in the T-Shirt industry as some subjects/themes do much better than others and receive more customers, but like all styles, they come and go. It’s possible to have a general subject/theme, but it makes it harder for you to market/promote your shop/website. I suggest choosing just one subject/theme to begin with as you can start adding other subjects/themes later when you are established. You should by all means choose a subject/theme that you are knowledgeable about and have a passion for, like I mentioned under the passion paragraph.

Target Audience

Who are you targeting? Will you be targeting a certain age group, occupation, style, general public, etc. Finding out who your primary target audience will be or is, will help you with marketing/promotion. This will also help you with creating and designing your T-Shirts and shop/website to suit your target audience. Once again you can choose to go for a general audience, but this will only make it harder for you to market/promote your shop/website.

Research

You need to always do your research and find out what’s new, what’s not, what’s in style, what kind of designs people are looking for, etc. You also need to keep up-to-date with your subject/theme as some change on a regular basis (Example: Politics). Keeping informed and up-to-date will give you the leading edge over your competitors, bring back customers time after time, and most importantly it will make sales.

Third Party shops Vs. Your Own Website

Should I invest in my own website or use a third party website to host my T-Shirt designs? If you are thinking about doing every aspect of the T-Shirt business yourself (including making the T-Shirts), then I suggest you invest in a website (not a free website hosting service), but first try out a third party website that makes the T-Shirts for you (no risk involved or investment needed) to see if you can make your business a success. Once you’re confident in your business, then you can upgrade to making and owning your own website.

There are many online third party websites available on the Internet that you can choose from that will create and ship the T-Shirts to your customers (risk free with no money invested) and therefore, save you the hassle of actually having to deal with the customer aspect of your T-Shirt business. There are as many cons as there are pros when using a third party service. Some of the cons are: You don’t get your own website and you are in some way connected to them, you don’t make as much profit (you have to pay them to do all the work, like printing the T-Shirts and shipping), and they make all the rules (Example: not providing you with the E-mail address of your customers or refusing any designs that you create). When you sign up with one of these third party services, you are actually working for them and that includes promoting their site. The customers that purchase your T-Shirts are actually their customers meaning they have full control and every time you make a sale, they make a profit. In other words, these third parties depend on your success and if your business goes under, theirs doesn’t because there’ll always be someone else to take your place.

Marketing/Promoting

This will be your biggest enemy in the T-Shirt business and many businesses fail because of this. I suggest you do your research on the web for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and about how the basic search engines works, as there is a lot of information about them. Do not just resort to search engines as being your source for traffic as there are many other websites that can help bring in quality targeted traffic to your website like T-Shirt ranking sites (Example: T ShirtShowdown.com).

The major search engines (Example: Google) are complicated in how they work and many people have been trying to figure out how they work for years. The search engines change their algorithms on how pages are ranked every once in a while so you’re better off not focusing your attention on just getting to the top in the search engines.

If you do manage to make it to the top and are very successful, then your marketing/promotion shouldn’t stop there. You have to always be marketing/promoting your site one way or another because it won’t take long before someone else over takes you, simply because links can die and you need incoming links from other websites to get traffic.

T-Shirt Ranking Websites

Do ranking sites work? Yes, ranking websites are a great way to market/promote your T-Shirt designs and shops/websites. Many people don’t want to waste their time searching all over the web
trying to locate websites that sell specific designs that they are looking for. This is where T-Shirt ranking websites come in handy and allow customers to view thousands of different T-Shirt designs and styles from many different websites. Ranking sites are a great way of bringing many unique and different T-Shirt websites/designs together and help to bring the buyers to the
sellers. T-ShirtShowdown.com is a great example and offers many different categories to choose from including: Animal, Artistic, Attitude, Automobile, Biker, Computer, Floral, Funny, Holiday, Kids, Logo, Misc., Movie, Music, Novelty, Occupation, Offensive, Patriotic, Pets, Political, Religious, Sports, Unusual, Vintage, and Western.

Many T-Shirt business owners think that they can just upload their T-Shirt designs to a ranking website and expect to receive sales. This is a myth and it’s not true. Ranking sites, like www.T-ShirtShowdown.com, bring high quality targeted traffic to your website, but it’s your T-Shirt designs in the end that have
to convince the customer to buy/purchase the product. T-Shirt ranking websites only make it easier for you to market/promote your site/designs and to get the high quality targeted traffic that every business wants.

The next article in this two-part series outlines some advice, problems, and solutions from other T-Shirt businesses that they encountered when they were starting their own T-Shirt business.

About the Author: T-ShirtShowdown.com – The Ultimate T-Shirt Website On The Internet. You can Rank, Vote, Comment, E-mail, Visit T-Shirt Websites, Auction, Bid, Sell, Buy, Promote/Market T-Shirts and more.

Source: isnare.com

Permanent Link: www.isnare.com/?aid=60014&ca=Business

How To Start A T-Shirt Business, Part Two – Case Studies For Success

For MindTrix the hardest part for starting out, besides money,was finding a “nitch”. Our first line of T-Shirts was all over the map, so starting your own clothing company can be hard. I had to do and learn everything on my own. I over came this obstacle by going to tradeshows, surfing the Internet, and reading magazines like Sport and Street, etc.

MindTrix has grown beyond just T-Shirts due to the fact that everyone including their moms have a T-Shirt company. When I would go into stores trying to sell my T-Shirts, I would always get feedback, like what makes these any better than the other 90,000 brands we have in here, which most of these other brands people have heard of, and that is why we graduated to cut and sew as well as any higher end T-Shirts.

You have to stay ahead of the pack to survive.

myspace.com/mindtrix

Advice for Promotion: Don’t be afraid to advertise. Create buttons, stickers, give them out and be sure people remember you. Tell people about it, you’d be surprised how many people would be willing to help you out.

Advice for Designing: When designing A T-Shirt, there are many points to keep in mind, but the following factors are some technical stuff overlooked by companies starting off: The Number of colors used & what material will be used. Most screen printers charge in the $10-$40 range for every different color you use. It can get really expensive for someone (Example: music bands) to get several T-Shirts printed. They then have to sell the fans $36 dollar T-Shirts just to cover the costs and make
some profit.

The Material used: Usually each material/brand/size comes with a set of colors that they’re printed on. There isn’t one that provides you with every single color in existence. It would be a great idea to ask the client what material they can afford and then research it, or familiarize yourself with the more popular brands that are being printed on (Examples: American Apparel, Fruit Of the Loom and Hanes). I’ve had several problems with this when I began, so don’t just go creating something that only looks good on a red background that you can’t easily fix, or something that looks good on a T-Shirt color that’s almost impossible to find. This will save you so much time and trouble.

Lastly, but most importantly, just be original. Keep the designs more personalized, deeper and more meaningful.

myspace.com/deathby_santiago_

1. Vision. You need to know who you are, what you’re doing, why, etc. This will define how you market your product, how it looks over all, and all the little details within that you need to do. Yep, so figure that out and then go nuts because you can’t go wrong with a big idea, as long as you know what the big idea is.

2. Marketing. It’s essential in today’s design world. You might have a good product but if its weak on branding, labeling, packaging, shelf appeal, matching coat hangers, etc., it’ll look bad. Consistency also needs to be achieved across the spectrum including same font, same style, etc. Designing is totally open to new creations and ideas, so anything goes, but there are some
boundaries that you don’t want to cross, while others you need to break through.

3. E-commerce. Yes, it’s fully possible! It will take some setting up though, but I’ve recently realized how I can just pick up the phone and order a set of hoodies, wait four days until they’re on the doorstep, pay for them a month later online, etc. Also, I can call up the fabric company down the road, or one in wellington, get them to send me samples of denim, call them back and order a set amount of denim to be sent to my garment manufacturer, and then call him and tell him how many of what I want right from my rocking chair at home.

4. Online selling. Totally possible if you use ebay or know how to set up an E-commerce website yourself, but getting the credit card system sorted out is a major cost. Lots of girls shop online now, you just need to know how to market it right and get your products noticed.

5. Promo. Get it out there! Make sure your friends buy your products or you could give out freebies. Put stickers, advertising your shop, wherever you can. Be shameless because designers are really admired (as opposed to being a ’salesperson’), especially if your product is favorable.

6. Don’t waste your time on silly details. I’ll let you figure out what those are.

7. Get your accounts sorted out now. Segregate your personal and business spending, so you can claim back GST with no problems. Make sure every transaction (sales, purchasing, spending, etc.) goes through your account, so you can see how well you’re doing by looking at your bank statement. Use the ATM machine for petty cash; your accountant will love you one day for this.

8. Have fun! It’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t work out. I was just thinking how involved my life is at the moment with my T-Shirt business. My life revolves around it, which is crazy, but if it all fell apart and closed down tomorrow I’d be the same person and I’d find something else to do! I make sure I take one day off during the week to do what I love that doesn’t involve my work. I love doing my work, so I’m very lucky in that aspect, but sometimes it gets boring or tedious so I make sure I stay fresh and focused.

9. Work hard. I still do after three years. I work my butt off and hardly make any money off it, but I know it’s worth it in the long run and the things you learn along the way are invaluable.

10. Give away free stuff! People love free T-Shirts and sponsorship goes a long way. It’s also your duty, being in business and generating wealth, to share that with society in some way (Example: Old stock goes in recycle clothing bins, etc.).

Check the story out at involved… choice!
www.involved.co.nz

If you’d like to copy this article and place it on your website or pass it around, then you are FREE to do so as long as you copy the article in it’s entirety, keep the links intact, and don’t make any modifications whatsoever.

About the Author: T-ShirtShowdown.com – The Ultimate T-Shirt Website On The Internet. You can Rank, Vote, Comment, E-mail, Visit T-Shirt Websites, Auction, Bid, Sell, Buy, Promote/Market T-Shirts and more.

Source: isnare.com

Permanent Link: www.isnare.com/?aid=60019&ca=Business

Engaging Your Visitors Will Sell More Tee Shirts

When someone gets involved they tend to be more committed to something than someone just passing by. When people interact online they may be doing a multitude things like instant messaging while surfing the web. As a web site owner, you really have no idea whether you have a visitors full attention since you are not physically together. What you have to do is come up with something that gets them involved.

To engage you visitors may be easier than you think. Since social networking sites have taken over the web, blogs, discussion groups, surveys and forums are part of most internet users daily activities. These are all ways to get a visitor to stop for a moment and interact with your site on an increasing basis. If you get them to become a regular visitor who wants to interact with your site it will start to fell like a home to them. They will start to take pride in contributing to your site and they will feel the sense of ownership.

Several forms of marketing like direct mail use strategies that include what is called an involvement device to push prospects to become engaged. It is normally something a prospect can feel and touch and designed to get their participation. It might be as simple as a scratch off section of a call to action card or peeling a sticker and pasting it onto an order form to signal an acceptance of an offer.

It might seem like an overly simple approach to try and increase sales, but it does do just that. If a prospect becomes engaged in a sales process they are more likely to devote their attention and follow up with a purchase. A prospect’s resistance to a sales pitch becomes lower if they become involved and commit to an action.

Of course, not just any involvement device can be used and must relate to what you sell. Facebook is an excellent example. There is a growing popularity of applications which engage people in participation. Those are involvement devices and if there is a web site’s address associated with an application, users are engaging with that site.

Probably the most successful example of using involvement devices in the t-shirt industry is Threadless, which has built a strong community from them. Submitting designs, voting for and critiquing designs, communicating with other users and many other methods that Threadless uses are basically involvement devices that keep their members engaged and coming back. Just a quick visit to http://www.threadless.com will demonstrate the strong identification that members have with the company. Threadless has gained the success they have by pushing to the front their many involvement devices almost to the point that t-shirt sales seem to be secondary to the community.

The key for Threadless is that all of the involvement devices that have been employed directly relate to t-shirts. Now while your business model may not go to the lengths of Threadless you can still employ involvement devices. Getting a comment on a blog is getting a person to take an action and involves them with your site. Will you make a sale from that? Probably not, but maybe down the road as the visitor continues to return and their resistance lessens. The best involvement devices will be related to what you are selling and get your visitors engaged.

Anthony Marsh is the owner of Popular Threadz and Crack Smoking Shirts. He runs the online resource TeeBiz.com and the t-shirt community TeeBurb.com.

VIDEO: The Right Way To Reclaim Screens

Chris Martin of Merchspin gives a guided tour on reclaiming screens.

How to Properly Clean a Screen from Chris Martin on Vimeo.

VIDEO: Interview With Threadless

An interesting interview with Jake (co-founder) and Jeffrey (early employee) of threadless were they talk about how the company came about and the community they have built around t-shirts.

Become a Millionare Selling Custom T Shirts

The American dream is to strike it rich as a self made millionaire. While in theory this is a fantastic idea, the truth is that there are few industries left where people can start from scratch and make themselves a millionaire through nothing but their own perseverance and skills. Furthering this dilemma is the fact that a lot of those jobs require a very high level of education and more importantly the years spent obtaining that education. I’ll let you in on a secret, I have a bachelor’s degree, and although I do not down play the importance of education for the vast majority of people (especially my children, who already think they know everything), I did not need that degree. I could just as easily started doing what I do now with nothing more than a GED. The wholesale T-Shirt industry is truly a way where a hardworking, motivated, and personable individual can make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

How? I started out selling T-Shirts as a part time job to supplement what can only be considered a dismal income. I was actually turned on to the idea from a good friend of mine who makes as much as I do now. All it took to start from scratch was a small amount of money; remember at this point I was living from paycheck to paycheck. I used this money to buy some business cards and register the name of my company. I then sat down and started calling local businesses in the phonebook. A few of these companies went on to be my first customers and many of them continue to do business with me to this day.

With a base of customers, I needed suppliers. I needed suppliers, textile manufactures. This wasn’t hard. They’re in business to sell you their clothing, and they make high quality products. From there it was a matter of getting a contract screen printer to do the printing for me.

That is the long and short of how my business began. I bought t-shirts and paid a contract printer to do the screen printing. I then sold this product to my costumers. I came to think of myself as adding value to the t-shirts and bringing buyers and sellers together; all the while I was making more than I would have thought possible years earlier. I needed very little cash because I didn’t buy anything until my customers had committed to buying the custom t-shirts. If they wanted to pay with credit card it worked even better because I knew I already had the money. There was never very much risk and the potential for reward was fantastic.

Eventually my company was making enough money and taking enough time that I left my previous job as a trader to do it full time. I hired a secretary as soon as I could financially justify it and this freed up my time to seek and meet with customers. My company allowed me to make enough to grow the business and still never worry about my financial situation. The most beautiful thing about doing it the way I did in terms of growth is that I never felt like I was risking anything I couldn’t afford to lose.

About fifteen years after I started I got to a point where I was making enough money to try another expansion. I decided I would move into the screen printing myself. I currently own my own screen printing equipment and have a full time staff to do the contract printing for others that I used to have done for my own customers. I currently am in the process of setting up other companies that do what I started to do. I sell these companies to other ambition individuals and work as their screen printer. They go and get the customers for themselves, and I offer advice and the contract screen printing. We set up the new companies with their own website that offers pricing and quotes built in to it. We do the screen printing at special prices because of the special nature of the relationship that we have with these companies. Our websites allow the companies to decide what price they want to sell the shirts. This relationship benefits everyone because they don’t need to go thru the hoops of finding the printer and setting up the company and website, and it generates business for our company too.

This is where I currently am in my own business. I have attempted to show you the evolution of my business. I have made more than enough money to live comfortably, help put my children thru college, and save for retirement. The best part is how much I enjoy my job. I have woken up every day for the past ten years and known that I am my own boss. My destiny is my own hand and I answer to no one. I firmly believe getting into this industry was one of the best choices I ever made. Think about that all of this the next time that you wake up dreading going to work or the next time your boss is any four letter word you’d like.

Mike Thompson
Taylor Made Graphics, LLC
taylormadetshirts.com and entirelytshirts.com

Article Source: articlesnatch.com

10 Tips for Launching Your Clothing Label

1. Do your reasearch.
Make sure you know a few things about the clothing industry before you dive in too deep. At least have a general understanding of how business works. Another key thing to research is how other successful companies became so successful, and some guidelines and tips for running a successful business.

2. Plan everything.
Before you get started, have a clear idea of what you plan on doing. Try to decide things like what kind of t-shirts you plan on selling, who you expect to buy your tees, whether they’ll be availible online only or if you’ll be selling in stores.

3. Know your competition.
You should always know what other clothing labels you’ll be competing with. If you’re starting a label based on humorous t-shirts you should watch what all the other funny t-shirt labels are doing. Keep track of things like their design variety, pricing, and promotion.

4. Create products people would actually buy.
It seems this step should be obvious, but you’d be surprised at some of the t-shirts you can find these days. Test the quality of your t-shirts by getting honest opinions from others, preferably people who are within your target audience.

5. Know the finances.
Once you know what you plan on doing get an idea of how much everything is gonna cost you. When you start producing and selling t-shirts, keep track of all of your expenses. Alot of this should help you decide how much you should charge for your clothing.

6. Come up with a promotion strategy.
See, you wanna become a t-shirt millionaire. The only way to do that is by selling millions of t-shirts, and the only way to do that is by telling millions of people about your shirts. But how? Figure out a way to spread the word. For starters, your strategy can include PPC ads, press releases to blogs, and social networking.

7. Find partners.
You might start your business on your own but you should find partners to help you maximize your potential and help you reach your goals more efficiently. Have people working with you on your label and also collaborate with other businesses that may be of some help to you.

8. Set business goals.
How many t-shirts do you plan on selling this year? How about this month or this week? A successful business sets goals of success. Set a goal and believe in your ability to reach it. If you know you’re gonna get it, you’re gonna get it.

9. Don’t quit because your not seeing sales the first day.
That’s a good way to get you nowhere. Try to figure out ways of improving your designs, your strategy or your work habits. When you’re just getting started you’re still learning so keep at it. Winners never quit and quitters never win.

10. Have fun.
If your in it just to make a quick buck you’re probably not gonna get too far. Love what you do and do what you love, and if you’re a real tee maniac then this is definitely the right profession for you.

About the Author:

T-Shirt Magazine is the premier source for everything surrounding the t-shirt culture. Published weekly as a free online magazine, T- Shirt Magazine is also a web community of t-shirt fans and collectors as well as designers and entrepreneurs.

VIDEO: How To Design T-Shirts And Get Them Ready For Print

This video takes you from concept to printer ready art. Gives an overview of how to design T-shirts in Illustrator and making a preview of the finished product in photoshop.

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