5 tips & resources to help get your t-shirt company off the ground
You’ve identified your niche, registered your business, designed your shirts, and launched your online t-shirt store. Now what? If you’re like we were, you need some sales, you weren’t blessed with $20,000 of marketing money to buy pay per click ads from Google. These few tips should help save you a few headaches as well as give you a few ideas on how to market your product for free.
Don’t give away your shirts for free
Don’t give your shirts away for free to people unless you are guaranteed at least a write up in a blog or a link back to your site or some sort of return on investment. I can’t count the number of times we’ve sent free shirts to websites and companies who said they were doing t-shirt roundups and then never posted anything of the sort after we sent them free product.
If you have limited inventory like we do–reserve your inventory for sales. This may sound like we are slightly bitter, and that’s because we are. I designed most of the shirts on our site and I even pay for them. When you’re just getting started, you can only afford so many shirts. This means every sale counts. Unless you are going to get some sort of ROI on your give away, there’s no reason to do this. GoMedia has a great article about doing design work for the apparel industry that touches upon a similar subject.
GoMediaZine
I know I’ve mentioned them before on this site and in this post, but Go Media is a great resource for tutorials and design insight. If there’s one thing you can take away from this post it’s to subscribe to Go Media’s RSS feed. They’re the best at what they do. One article that I know can help for you people starting up an on demand t-shirt store is the tutorial that shows you how to make realistic t-shirt mockups.
Here at Assault, we were lucky enough to know a few photographers who would take awesome photos for our site, but if you don’t happen to know any photographers and don’t want your photos to look amateurish this is a great tutorial to get your design renderings onto realistic t-shirts.
Put yourself out there – Network in your industry and local area
Don’t be shy. Send emails to local magazines and websites that are similar to yours. What’s the worst thing that could happen? They don’t respond or they say not interested. It’s a numbers game. Not everyone is going to like your stuff. The people of QBN and Digg LOVE to slam our designs and site. It’s not big deal. Most of the time, they give good insight and can be quite humorous. Your friends and family are going to say your stuff is cool, but people who don’t care about you will be blatantly honest behind the protection of anonymity on the internet.
The first thing we did after launching our store was to send friendly emails to t-shirt blogs and design websites with links to our store and our blog and tutorials. The best way to find sites similar to yours in your industry is to do Google searches. We did searches like “t-shirt blogs”, “t-shirt resources” and “apparel design resources” and sent emails to sites that appeared to be open to reviewing our products.
Forget Myspace. It’s fine to have a myspace page to get in contact with bands for instance, but it’s useless for the most part as far as getting sales. Make friends with fellow designers on twitter. Download Twitteriffic or a similar twitter application and join in the conversation. Share links you find and comment on other t-shirt blogs’ posts. Thank everyone who comments on your products. Send personal emails back to your customers who comment on their orders.
Monitor your site traffic for forum post links
When you’re not getting much traffic it’s pretty easy to monitor your traffic and referrals. I recommend using something like Sitemeter since it gives you real time stats. (We also use Google Analytics) There’s been plenty of times that a user in some obscure forum posts a poll asking which shirt they should buy (with links to one of our shirts as well as other shirts they like)
Create an account and add a comment to the forum post with a discount or a coupon code to help persuade the users to buy your product. When every sale counts, this is a good way to get a sale.
Give coupon codes to sites that review shirts
Some of our top sales referrals are from sites that we gave non-expiring coupon codes to like Shirts On Sale and Hide Your Arms. They show up for many t-shirt related searches and users are often at their site to do exactly what you’d think–get coupons for t-shirts. It’s the best way to get exposure to your shirts directly to customers who are ready to buy stuff.
Why would you spend $1,000 dollars for Google Ad Words when you can get the same target visitors to your site for free? We’ve ran a few pay per click ad campaigns, and let me tell you that we’ve never even come close to breaking even. On the other hand, some of our top sales referrers are from a coupon code on a t-shirt blog that we didn’t pay a cent for.
Know of any good tips that I missed?
I know there are countless tips and tricks that I haven’t told as of yet (Maybe a part two?) I’m sure there’s also people who disagree with me on Ad Words, and giving away our product for free. If you have anything you’d like to add, or if you have your own site, post it in the comments!
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About the Author
Tim is the co-owner of Assault, and is responsible for the creative direction of both Assault Shirts as well as AssaultBLOG. Follow him on twitter @assault Email this Author | All posts by tim
Hey thanks for mentioning my twitter article. I’d just like to add that our blog is one of the few that doesn’t ask for free t-shirts for a review, unlike some of them out there I could mention :/ Cheers Tim – Paul from Buy-Tees.net
Good article and good advice.
*We do ask for free t-shirts to review. I feel like I should have an evil laugh after that statement.
@Paul & @Derek
No problem Paul. I think our issue is not with blogs asking for shirts so much as it is people emailing us about “t-shirts around the web” round ups. Some of these have been from some very very large sites and sure enough they always get pushed to the backburner. We send stuff to magazines and blogs if they give us a write up and we can see that we are getting traffic/sales from it.
We’ve sent several shirts to Hails & Horns magazine and the people at AMP magazine.
-Tim
Thanks for the mention, Tim. We’re happy to hear that Shirts on Sale is able to drive so much traffic to your site — like Paul never requiring something in return [cue rainbows and sunshine to counteract Derek's evil laugh].
This is a simple tip, but one of the most essential. Definitely do your research to pitch your store and story to appropriate blogs. If you’re able to couch your offerings in terms the content developer can understand, you’re already halfway to getting your exposure for free. If you’ve got the product to back it up, which you better believe you do if you’re willing to have a go at a start-up based on your ideas, then you’re all the way there.
You wouldn’t believe how many people reach out to us with a generic email that does absolutely nothing to sell their angle nor explains how the store/label/site is more than tangentially related to our site — which we find rather amazing considering the whole theory behind Shirts on Sale is pretty much summed up by our simple three-word name and address.
Anyway…I know it can be tough to figure out what to write if making art and not sales pitches is your thing, but there’s a great chance you’ll get a very high return on your time if you’re able to score some “free” exposure and support.
[...] subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Just the other day I did a blog post entitled, “5 Resources & Tips to help get your T-Shirt company off the ground.” In it I gave a few tips on how we got our store’s traffic flowing after getting our [...]
Tim,
Great artical! I find that starting your own line is a bit science project, a bit art and a bit luck..and really hard work. Best of luck to you guys and your shirts rock.
David
I have design for a few new T-shirt/apparel companies. This information is good for anyone starting out.
Dont forget the importance of having some totally rockin T-shirt designs!
http://www.link-creative.com
The free t-shirt for a review scam is one that hit us as well, now we are wiser.
Great article. As a tee blogger I can heartily agree that sending me an email and / or a coupon will be as valuable as sending me an actual tee. Even more valuable – send me photography I can use in my post.
Send me a tee AFTER I’ve posted about your design and you win a friend for life. Send me a tee BEFORE I see the design and I might just feel bad for not reviewing your bad shirt after you spent money printing and mailing it.
[...] back I posted a blog about a few helpful tips that would help get your t-shirt company off the ground, and I briefly touched upon a subject that I decided would make for a great post–when every [...]
[...] 5 good tips for getting your tee brand moving once you’re up and running: http://assaultblog.com/5-tips-resources-to-help-get-your-t-shirt-company-off-the-ground/ [...]
Wow this was some really good info..it will definitly help me..as i am about to release some tees..good stuff
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[...] 5 tips & resources to help get your t-shirt company off the ground [...]
[...] 5 tips & resources to help get your t-shirt company off the ground [...]
Thanks! everyday’s a school day