I wanted to take some time and talk about t-shirt manufacturing. I want to do this for a couple of reasons . First it is a good idea but there is not a lot of information out there. The second the information out there is pretty spammy and quite useless if you are thinking about doing something like this. This is an example of an Aviation T-shirt manufactured by V1 Industries. They are the creator of the shirt and its sold on Pilot Supplies sites such as Airspeed Junkie. I have consulted on the marketing of this line, so I will give you some insight on how you get from concept to production.
Idea
First the creator had an idea for an upscale concept of aviation shirts, he is an aviator and was bored with the offerings from all the traditional sites out there. So he sketched some rough ideas and came up with a plan for a line of shirts. Not just one shirt, but a small line to get started. You cannot put your eggs into one basket, so he made six or so different designs because you never know what will appeal to each person.
Creation
He then hired a designer or artist to do the designs. In the first case he knew someone, as time goes on he searched out t shirt designers on the Internet. A great place to start are sites like Odesk, Elance or even Craigslist.
Production
Next is to find a place to make the shirts, this is actually easy. They are everywhere and a great place to start is on Craigslist. All you need is your design in vector art format. They then can take that image and print it on a shirt. There typically is a minimum shirt order and that is different from vendor to vendor.
Marketing
Here is where the rubber meets the road. Getting this product was fairly easy, marketing it is another thing. V1 started with a simple website and put the shirts on there. As we all know, just having the site available does not mean you will get anyone to come look if you have no search engine presence. You need lots of eyeballs so that eventually someone will buy the shirt. You can look in the SEO section for more ideas on this, but it is an ongoing process of developing traffic which we will not going into here now. Instead here are some other techniques of selling the shirt that have been used with success.
- Sell to other vendors. V1 got to work and started asking other online vendors if they would like to carry his shirts. You really have to ask 10 or 20 before you get one to agree, but its part of the journey. Picking well known sites that have lots of traffic begins the cash flow process.
- Use Facebook to develop a contest. Start with a Facebook page and showcase your items. Then use Facebook ads to drive traffic to that page. Link to your site from your page.
- Use Ebay to sell individual shirts and give the buyers a discount coupon to the site.
- Plaster the images of your shirts on forums and ask people what they think. This will generate interest and feedback.
- Figure out your core demographic and find them. In this case it was pilots, so they approached different fixed base operators and asked the ones that operated small stores at the airport if they would carry the shirt. After a while 10 small accounts add to the cash flow.
- Wear the shirt everywhere you go
- Make a car sign that advertises your website and make sure its on the car as you drive around.
- Build a blog that talks about the root interest, in this case flying. This is paramount and one of the most effective ways to drive traffic.
- Make videos and put them on You Tube.
- Take pictures of women wearing the shirts and load them on sites such as Photobucket and Flickr. You want to appeal to men and men like women.
I hope this helps spur you on, we will talk about more t shirt manufacturing methods in future posts.
No related posts.
