Selling Tshirts Online is NOT as Easy as it Sound!

Selling Tshirts Online is 

NOT as Easy as it Sounds!

In Fact...Nothing is Ever as 

Easy Online as it Sounds!

I found this article about getting into the business of selling tshirts online. It is well-written and comprehensive.

I've taken an excerpt from the article and included a link at the top and bottom, if you want to read the entire article in its original form on the UnitePixelWorkers.com website.

Dispatches from the Union
So You Want to Make a Whole Bunch of T-Shirts

FEBRUARY 20, 2013
 66 COMMENTS
Update, April 2, 2015: Whoa. We just updated this series with part three over on Cotton Bureau. If you want learn how to make and sell *even more* t-shirts, follow me.

Two years ago, we warned you that making t-shirts ain’t all fun and games. But did you listen? No. You went out and made yourself a little side business selling shirts. Maybe you created a Kickstarter to launch your new store, or you run a popular design website with an equipment shop, or maybe you’re not hitting that kind of volume yet, but you see it around the corner and don’t know what to do. Relax, we’re here for you. Get ready to take a crash course in selling and shipping 1,000 tees a month.

shirtpile

We’re not Threadless, but having grown two orders of magnitude since starting this little union, we know the pain of scaling in every part of our operation. What’s the difference you ask? Everything.

Printing
Let’s start at the beginning. Before you can sell a shirt, you need to have a printer. We’ve been through three printers in less than three years, so trust us when we say, you need the right printer. When we started, we did our research. We wanted someone local, someone good, and someone cheap, so we looked around Pittsburgh and found someone who met all three criteria—or so we thought. We definitely found local and cheap, but good eluded us. Don’t get us wrong, at the time we thought our shirts were great. Today, we look back and cringe a little at the quality. Sometimes it’s subtle things like color fidelity and registration clarity. Sometimes it’s big things like plastisol caked on so heavy you could swear you’re wearing a hockey sweater. Unless you’ve been in the garment industry your whole life, you’re going to want to find a printer who knows more about ink, fabric, and production than you. Don’t settle. Look around until you find the right team. They’ll make you better, and your customers will thank you.

You know how I mentioned “production” as something your printer needs to know about? Yeah, that’s a big one. In addition to some less than sharp printing we had in the early days, we were also plagued by issues with quality control. In fact, our entire first guest design batch had to be re-printed because of a problem with the curing process. Needless heartburn, all around. Those kinds of issues eventually forced us to switch to a company in Kansas City that has a tremendous reputation for professional, high-quality work. And they deserved it.

We used them for one big print run before realizing that Kansas City is a long way from Pittsburgh. What if we wanted to drop by for a press check? What if we wanted to talk strategy, fulfillment, long-term plans? You can see our dilemma. Thankfully we bumped into a guy who ran a print shop that met all three of our needs. He was local, he did great work, and his prices were even better than we had been getting before. A hat trick! For the last year-and-a-half we’ve been humming along with Clockwise Tees as the printer of record for United Pixelworkers. As many a Pixelworker can attest, they make a mean shirt. Like any relationship, we’ve had our share of problems, but because our printer is nearby, we can work them out with the least amount of disruption for us and our customers. You want to make and sell a quarter-ton of t-shirts a month? Find a good printer.

Selling
It’s not enough to design a sweet shirt, you’re going to need to let people know and have a rock-solid website to receive and process orders. Letting people know is what you might have heard referred to before as “marketing”. It sounds scary, but it’s actually really simple. That’s why we like to call it “letting people know”. When we got started, we sent friendly emails to the people in the industry we admired. In addition to mentioning how much we liked the work they did, we sent each of them a shirt. That got us started, but it takes a lot more than a bit of early reciprocity to see a healthy six figures in annual revenue and nearly 7,000 followers on Twitter. Selling anything, whether it’s a physical product, a website, or an idea requires trust. One customer sale is noteworthy, two is a relationship. When your best customers come back for more every month and voluntarily spread the word to friends, you know you’re doing something right.

Read the entire article, here.

A word from Tim R Walls, 

owner of Design by Timmy Tees

I have been online for well over a decade. There have been periods of time when I have earned my living solely from the internet. And I can tell you, from personal experience, that anything you attempt to do, business wise, is never as easy as it sounds, online or off. And it involves far more hard work than most of us are ever willing to put forth.

And everyone who has anything to say in an article or video, will never tell you how to succeed in your own online business endeavor. They cannot but describe the elements of their own success, if they have, indeed, achieved success. The reason they cannot tell you how to succeed is simple.

You are the success or failure that drives everything you do in your own life. You are the mystery that has to unfold before your own very eyes!

Do you have the burning desire, passion and drive
to do whatever it takes, however long it takes
to succeed in an online business of your own?

And only you can answer that question.