7 Print On Demand Online T-Shirt Business Tips [LNIM267]

Speaker 1: 0:00

Episode two six seven late night internet marketing this week on the late night internet marketing podcast, we're going to talk all about starting your very own print on demand t-shirt business. I'm going to offer seven essential tips, not only for getting started, but also for being successful. All this and more, on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Speaker 3: 0:34

The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Speaker 2: 0:38

Bye. At the end of the day, your dreams burn in your sights. Keep it up and you will find that you're building your business one night at a time.

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And now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason.

Speaker 1: 1:23

Hey, hey, hey, how is everyone doing? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the little studio in yes, you guessed it Dallas Texas. Drizzling rain today in Dallas Texas. I'm going to enjoy the rain because they are saying that this is going to be a hot summer. Hot summers are tough for us here in Texas because the baseline summer, normal summer, is hot already. So when you get a, when the weather people start saying things like a hotter than usual summer, that's double tough for my crew because of course, we're going to be on the baseball field this summer and I am going to be sweating like a stuck pig. I guess you squeal like a stuck pig. I think I'm mixing my metaphors there, but you get the idea where we're going to be hot this summer. So we're enjoying the rain. That puts me inside in the little studio where it is not raining. Not raining inside the studio. No. Outdoor podcasting here at the little studio in Dallas Texas. Outdoor podcasting here at the little studio in Dallas Texas. We're just putting shows together here and I wanted to talk to you today about t-shirt businesses because it's something that I know about.

Speaker 1: 2:32

A friend of mine here in the community just randomly asked me about his idea for a t-shirt business. Now, that's a super secret idea that he's got. It's super exciting actually, and I'm not going to talk about his idea. What I want to talk about are t-shirt businesses in general. What is it that you want to look for? What are the tips? What do you want to avoid? How does the business model work? What would I do if I were starting a t-shirt business? And you know we've talked about this in my house but we've never actually done it. My daughter is artistically inclined In fact, I would describe her as very talented, but she's my daughter, so we'll take that for what it's worth. But she's pretty good at designing things like t-shirts. We've worked with graphics designers to actually design t-shirt designs and we've talked about starting an online print on demand t-shirt business with her designs and she's super busy, so we haven't gotten much further than that. We have some designs and we're still kind of kicking around the idea of doing this. So when my friend asked me about this, it was something I knew about because I had talked about doing it many times. I've actually been through some online learning around t-shirts and t-shirt businesses when I went through that with my daughter, and so I know a lot about it. So the first thing to understand is the most typical business model for t-shirts is the print on demand business model. It's exactly what it sounds like.

Speaker 1: 4:08

You know, when you're scrolling through Facebook or Instagram and you see an ad for a t-shirt, a really funny t-shirt usually you see these around a particular holiday. So right now it's close to mother's day here in the United States and you would see t-shirts about moms and things that you might buy for Mother's Day to give to a mom. Those are the kind of t-shirts that you'll see and then after that you'll see the Father's Day t-shirts and then you'll start seeing other things after that, and so this kind of interruption marketing is done to sell t-shirts. And basically you're scrolling and you see the t-shirt and you say, oh cool, that's a funny t-shirt, or that's a t-shirt in my niche. Like my wife is a photographer and in her feed she sees photography t-shirts that say things like never lose focus and they have a you know, a picture of a camera on there, something like that. So these cool kind of graphic tees you see these all the time on social media and the way the business model works is you, as the customer see the ad.

Speaker 1: 5:15

The t-shirt company has paid for an ad on Facebook. You see that ad. You click on the ad and you buy the t-shirt. The t-shirt usually costs. Click on the ad and you buy the t-shirt. The t-shirt usually costs between $20 and $30. Normally that's what you'll see. So you buy the t-shirt.

Speaker 1: 5:31

Because you were targeted, for whatever reason, with marketing, you buy that t-shirt. Usually it's an impulse buy for you. You didn't even know you needed that t-shirt, so you click the button and you buy the t-shirt. You pay a little extra for shipping a lot of times. Sometimes the shipping is free. You check out. Usually it's a Shopify website, but there are other choices. Sometimes it's Etsy, and then the t-shirt comes to you and unbeknownst to you.

Speaker 1: 5:58

When you ordered that t-shirt, that t-shirt didn't exist. The design existed. It was set up in a print on demand service, but the moment you ordered that t-shirt, the person behind the scenes approved that order and a print order was sent out to a print on demand t-shirt supplier who printed literally that one t-shirt and sent it directly to you. Now, this idea of ordering a product and sending it directly to the customer, that's called drop shipping. So this is a print on demand t-shirt. It was printed when it was ordered and it was shipped directly to the customer.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Now, why this is an interesting business model and why people like it is because you, as the business owner, you need the ideas for the t-shirt, you need to set it all up, you need to make all the things work behind the scenes, but you don't need to print t-shirts, you don't need to handle inventory, and customer service is pretty limited. The customer service questions you get in this business model are basically I didn't get the t-shirt that I ordered, or the t-shirt that I ordered is not what I expected, the quality is not good or the colors are weird or whatever, or the t-shirt doesn't fit. I think this third thing is actually the biggest problem is the t-shirt. I ordered an extra large and I really needed an XXL. Or I ordered an extra large, I really needed an XXL. Or I ordered an extra large and I really need a large. Those are the customer service questions that you typically get and we can talk about how to handle those maybe on another episode.

Speaker 1: 7:36

So when building a business like this, my buddy has an idea for a t-shirt brand and a topic for t-shirts and he was asking me you know, what do you know about this kind of business? So that's the model I would do. I would not take a gamble. I mean the way we used to do t-shirt businesses, and even in college I remember doing this. We'd come up with an idea for a really cool t-shirt and we'd order a thousand t-shirts and go out and try and sell them. You would order, put in a big order for t-shirts. T-shirts companies didn't do small orders and even if they would take a small order, the setup costs were so high you couldn't afford it. So you had to order a thousand t-shirts or 500 t-shirts or, you know, a couple hundred t-shirts, and now your dorm room is stacked full of boxes of t-shirts and you're out it panicked, trying to sell t-shirts. And now your dorm room is stacked full of boxes of t-shirts and you're out, panicked, trying to sell t-shirts. That's not the way it is anymore. This print on demand model has solved that and it's really cool.

Speaker 1: 8:33

So, regarding this model, I have seven absolutely critical tips that I'd like to offer you in this podcast episode in order to make your t-shirt adventure successful. The first tip is niche selection. You know a lot of people down here in Texas say niche. I say niche I don't know if that's because I took French in high school, but I say niche, the area of focus for your business. It's really important to pick something that is interesting, where t-shirts are currently being sold, where it makes sense to sell t-shirts.

Speaker 1: 9:11

And I think there's other advantages to being in a niche, because you can begin to understand what sells and what doesn't sell in that niche. If you're just operating on any old t-shirt design, that will work, but you'll be at a little bit of a disadvantage because if one day you're selling t-shirts to pet owners and the next day you're selling t-shirts to scuba divers, you won't know anything about either one of those markets. And I think one of the advantages of selecting a niche is that you can have a presence in that market. So let's say, for example, that you want to sell. Let's pick volleyball, because that's one of the things that I talked about with my daughter. If you're creating t-shirt designs for volleyball players or the moms of volleyball players, designs for volleyball players or the moms of volleyball players you can do better designs because you are part of the target market and you understand that target market and you can learn what sells and what doesn't in that market, because you're continuously testing products in the market. So I think niche selection is really important and don't be afraid to choose something super narrow, like high school volleyball players and further female high school volleyball players. That seems like a super narrow niche at first glance, but you can validate that by looking online, searching up t-shirts for that and seeing if those are being sold. And if you look at a place like Etsy, you can see how many of those t-shirts there are. And if there are a lot of them and they have a lot of reviews, meaning that a lot of people have bought those t-shirts. Etsy even gives you some statistics around that you can see whether or not your idea has merit, because if other people are making money in a niche, you can make money in that niche too.

Speaker 1: 11:08

Tip number two you need decent design quality. Now, this is not strictly true, right? You do occasionally see like stick figure t-shirts that have poor design. It's almost on purpose that they have poor design. But if you really want to have a business that is successful, that sells broadly across the entire internet in volume, you're going to want your design quality to be high. It doesn't mean your designs need to be complicated, but they need to be good, whatever that means.

Speaker 1: 11:39

When someone looks at your t-shirt, it needs to look good, and so you're going to want to hire a freelance graphic designer to create unique artwork for you. And the unique artwork part is important too, because you want to be careful about copyright. Obviously, you don't want to steal other people's work. What a lot of people like to do is I have this idea for a t-shirt. Here are five similar t-shirts that I like. Graphics designer, I want you to create me a t-shirt design in the style of these five that I like, but make it my own unique design. And then you're good, you're. You're inspired by five other t-shirts that are currently selling well, but you've got one that's unique to you. That's the way to do this, and you want to do that with a freelance graphic designer.

Speaker 1: 12:32

I recommend that you start on Fiverr F-I-V-E-R-Rcom. Maybe you know a graphics designer, maybe you are a graphics designer. Maybe there are graphics designers at your high school. I've said before, my kid goes to the largest high school in the state of Texas. There's a graphics design community inside that high school of young high school students that do graphics design. Maybe you can pay a high school student in your local area to do your graphics design. But whoever does it needs to be good at it, and the easiest thing for everybody to do is to go to Fiverr. Try out a couple of these designers and you will end up paying a reasonable amount per t-shirt for these designs maybe 10 or 20 or 30 dollars per t-shirt to get designs that work for you and as an investment in a business for startup costs, your main cost being 30 dollars per t-shirt for design. So let's say you could get 10 t-shirts in your store for three or $400. That sounds like much cheaper than going down and buying a McDonald's, for example. I think that's a really good approach. Fiverrcom, f, I, v, e, r, rcom.

Speaker 1: 13:45

The third tip I want to offer you is to make sure that the quality of your t-shirts is high, not crazy high. You don't need the absolutely most expensive $50 per copy t-shirt, right. But if you go to your printing partner and you're selecting a t-shirt which we'll talk about in tip number four if you go to your printing partner and you're selecting a t-shirt, usually the cheapest t-shirts is not what you want. You usually want something in the middle and you can look at the reviews inside your printing partner and you can work with your printing partner to select a t-shirt. That's a high quality t-shirt, but not necessarily the highest quality, because at the end of the day, you are going to need a profit margin for this business. No one's going to pay $100 for a t-shirt, so you're going to have to pick a t-shirt cost that you can handle, given the profits that you want to make. But I promise you, if you choose the cheapest t-shirt, you will have so many dissatisfied customers and so many returns and other customer service product problems will not be happy with that choice. So just take my advice up front don't pick the cheapest t-shirt. Spend that extra dollar or two or three per order to get a little better quality of materials.

Speaker 1: 15:08

Tip number four you really need a reliable printing partner now. Now what I recommend for print-on-demand t-shirt businesses is a straight-up print-on-demand service like Printful or Teespring, because they are known for quality and reliability when it comes to delivering, and basically particularly Printful, which is the one that I'm more familiar with, that's P-R-I-N-T-F-U-L. Printful is interesting because it's a clearinghouse or a directory of print suppliers and they're ranked in there, and so you can go in there and you can pick a service that has the terms and conditions that you're looking for for your business, and your relationship with them will be through Printful, and that's really nice, because then you have the power of Printful to back you up and it's a really good way to find a reliable printing partner for your t-shirt business.

Speaker 1: 16:22

Tip number five is branding. You know this was an interesting discussion that I had with my friend. We were talking about the importance of brand and I think there's sort of two levels to this. So when you're getting started, the way you're going to get started is by having a single t-shirt that people like and they're going to buy it, and it's not going to matter what the brand is around that t-shirt. You sold a t-shirt that people liked. It was clever, it looked nice, people wanted to wear it, and that's how you get started.

Speaker 1: 16:53

In the very beginning, the brand's not going to matter because you don't have a brand. But if you've got a great niche, after you sell them a t-shirt, you're going to have the opportunity to sell them a second t-shirt and a third t-shirt, and I think that's where branding really comes in. Your name's going to get out there. People are going to see that t-shirt that you sold, because one of the neat things about t-shirt businesses is that the t-shirt itself is a marketing element, because people are wearing it around and so if you have good branding, people are going to say, hey, where'd you get that t-shirt? Well, I got that at Joe Bob's Tees or whatever. Go to joebobsteescom and you can get one. So at joebobsts or whatever. Go to joebobstscom and you can get one.

Speaker 1: 17:36

So branding is important in the long run. It's not important to get started. So I wouldn't wait to start your business because you're doing a bunch of branding work. I would identify your branding and then get started and then build the brand as you go out. So that's an important idea. But you see these guys who have great t-shirt brands, like Trevor Bauer, who's a former Major League Baseball pitcher, very controversial, trying to get back into baseball. He has the Bauer Outage brand and I own Bauer Outage brand's t-shirts. They're really cool. I own his hats as well. He's got a brand around his personality and I think that's a great model.

Speaker 1: 18:14

If you are in a niche because you have visibility in that niche, then that's something you definitely want to leverage. You want to leverage the fact that you're in that niche and create a brand that's related to your position in that niche. That's super important idea. And so pick a brand name that you can market later. Make sure that you can get the domain name for that brand. Make sure there aren't trademarks around that brand. Those are the two pieces of advice that I would give you before you make a final decision on brand.

Speaker 1: 18:44

The next tip that I'd give you is you need to have a great marketing strategy. I think there are two that are immediately obvious. One is if you already have a presence in a niche, you have an Instagram following you can create a t-shirt that you think the people that are following you online would want to buy and you can sell it to them. And so if you have 10,000 followers on Instagram, maybe you can sell a t-shirt to 1% of those followers. So that's a great way to sell your first hundred t-shirts. That's fantastic, but that's not going to scale in the way that you'd like to see it scale, right. So what you're really going to need to do is to have a paid advertising strategy that's going to work, and that's what most people do with print on demand t-shirts.

Speaker 1: 19:37

So let's say again, going back to the volleyball example with my daughter. Let's say that she comes up with a clever volleyball t-shirt that says bump set spike, with a cool graphic on it, and she wants to sell that to volleyball players, and particularly their moms, because the moms are the ones that have the credit cards, they're the ones that are going to be making the transaction. She would create an ad showing the t-shirt or something like that on Facebook or Instagram and run that ad and people would click on that ad and buy the T-shirt. And the question is can you pay for the ad, sell the T-shirt, supply the T-shirt and end up with money in your pocket at the end. And so that's really the challenge around this whole business is having a marketing strategy that's affordable, that can sustain the business. So instead of selling a hundred t-shirts, you can end up selling a thousand or 10,000 or a hundred thousand t-shirts as you grow your business. So that's tip number six make sure you have a marketing strategy, and the marketing strategy that I recommend for this sort of thing is interruption marketing, ad-based marketing on a platform, a social media platform like Facebook or Instagram, maybe TikTok as well. And then, finally, tip number seven, have great customer service.

Speaker 1: 21:06

Look, I want to make sure that you understand this. When you sell t-shirts online, you are going to have customer complaints. This is true no matter what you sell, no matter who you sell it to. People are going to not receive the item as shipped. Someone's going to steal it out of their mailbox. Someone's going to lie about the fact that they didn't get it. Someone's it's going to steal it out of their mailbox. Someone's going to lie about the fact that they didn't get it. Someone's it's going to be mismanufactured. There's going to be all kinds of issues, but it won't be many. It'll be one or two or 3%, especially if you use a reliable supplier like Printful and you pick a good printing partner inside of Printful. You're not going to have a lot of returns, but you will have some, and it's really important to have good customer service.

Speaker 1: 21:50

When someone has a complaint, just fix it. I mean, there will be occasionally someone who's just trying to rip you off and beat you out of the $20 for the t-shirt, but really they're not beating you out of the sales price of the t-shirt. They're really beating you out of the sales price of the t-shirt. They're really beating you out of the cost of fulfillment, and usually it's easier just to satisfy the customer than to fight them about whether or not they get a return or whether or not they get a new t-shirt. You can help this by having a crystal clear return policy regarding your t-shirts for print on demand. I recommend that you do not allow any returns for anything other than the t-shirt was defective. If the t-shirt is defective it was printed improperly or something like that, or it was torn or something like that you'll give them another t-shirt. Otherwise, your return policy is all. Sales are final.

Speaker 1: 22:43

Okay, so those are the seven things that I think will really get you started. Pick a great niche, hopefully something that you have some connection to, so that you can leverage your unfair advantage, your expertise, in that niche. Make sure your designs are good, and I recommend that you just simply start out on Fiverr with a pay-as-you-go designer. Make sure you don't skimp on quality of materials. It doesn't have to be the best t-shirt that's ever been, but don't send a crappy paper-thin t-shirt out there. People won't like that. Make sure your printing partner is reliable for your print-on-demand business, and I recommend that you use Printful for that, because you can look on Printful and see what other people say about particular print providers. Make sure that you've got a branding plan, but don't let branding stop you from getting started, because you'll be able to leverage your branding later. Make sure your marketing strategy is sound and I recommend that, once you sell to whatever your audience is, you explore paid ads on social media. And, finally, make sure you are aware that this business has some customer service and do something that worked easily.

Speaker 1: 23:55

I would use a shopping cart. You're going to need a way to sell this thing. I think there's three ways you can do it. You can sell your t-shirts on Etsy and create a store on Etsy or Teespring or something like that. I wouldn't do that. It doesn't help. You build your brand. You're building Etsy's brand. I wouldn't. That's not what I would do. Okay, I would create a domain name and spin up an actual shopping cart.

Speaker 1: 24:35

Probably the most common thing that people do is they sell their t-shirts inside of Shopify and they use the Printful plugin in Shopify in order to move the offer from Shopify into order fulfillment. You can certainly do that and if you want to use my affiliate link to set up your Shopify store, you can do that. At late night. I amcom forward slash Shopify. That's the most common thing the problem with Shopify.

Speaker 1: 25:05

I love Shopify. It's amazing and it's powering so much e-commerce on the internet. There's nothing wrong with it. It is expensive and I think a cheaper solution that I like, that I would consider, is something called Cartsy, which is considerably more affordable. That's C-A-R-T-Z-Y Cartsy and you can find that, again an affiliate link at latenightimcom forward slash Cartsy. Know that in both cases, if you use those links and you end up buying from Cartsy or Shopify and subscribing to their service, I do get a commission, but it doesn't affect your price, and that's what I recommend. Anyway, I have been a Shopify customer. I do use Cartsy, and so I'm just telling you what I do. Again, those links are latenightimcom forward slash Shopify. Latenightimcom forward slash Cartsy. That's what I have for you today. I hope that's helpful.

Speaker 1: 26:02

I hope my buddy starts his t-shirt business. I'm pretty excited about it. I'm in his target market and I will probably buy a t-shirt from him. Maybe I will be his very first customer, which would be cool and so I hope that this inspires you to consider starting that kind of business. I'll give you one more pro tip on the way out, something to think about Once you've got the t-shirt business set up. Guess what else you can sell Mugs, print-on-demand handbags, print-on-demand posters, calendars, all the things Anything you can print on. Once your print-on-demand business is up and running, you can print on almost anything these days, until next time, ciao.

Speaker 3: 26:51

You can do it right when it's late at night. You've been listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Be sure to visit LNIMPodcastcom today to leave feedback for Mark, download special bonus content, access the show notes and more. See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business. One night at a time.

Speaker 1: 27:27

Hey, hey, hey, how are you doing? If you are hearing this and wondering what's going on? Maybe you are new to the podcast. This is the show after the show. This is when I just talk about whatever. I want to talk about. The first part of the show. I actually have an outline. I'm trying to make a point and I give careful consideration to what I'm going to say. This part is just for people who like to hear me ramble on. There are three of you. Thank all three of you. If you're still listening at this point, you know this. This is the after the show part. So yeah, here we are, and the first thing I want to say is I love these kinds of shows.

Speaker 1: 28:08

I love it when someone asks me a question, like my buddy did, and I go, boy, that would be a great podcast episode and I go right. I go home the next day. Literally, this is the next day. We talked about this last night by text message and I woke up this morning and recorded this episode. So I love that and you can do that. You can be part of that creation process by sending me an email at feedback at late night.

Speaker 1: 28:38

I amcom If you've got an idea for a show or a question. A lot of times what happens is I will answer your question specifically and then I'll make your question generic, like I did in this episode, so that no one knows you or what you're doing exactly, and then I'll answer the question generically in a helpful way that would be helpful to all listeners of the podcast. At least that's the goal. Mixed reviews on whether or not all the episodes are helpful to everybody. You can't please all the people all the goal. Mixed reviews on whether or not all the episodes are helpful to everybody. You can't please all the people all the time. You can only please some of the people all the time, and that's what I try to do. So, yeah, that's the story on this podcast episode and I love doing that and I'd love hearing from you feedback at late night. I amcom.

Speaker 1: 29:23

So this week I am really trying to get things cranked back up. You know the month of April was kind of a bust for me from a side hustle perspective. The margins just crashed in. I got a little tired. To be honest with you, this whole side hustling day job, family thing Sometimes, when you get squeezed from all sides, something's got to give and I just didn't get all the content out that I wanted to get out. I've got definite goals for this year. I'm still on track for those goals in the long term perspective, but I'm behind everywhere with regards to my online business and so I am working on that. I did have some good successes this week. I got accepted to some new affiliate networks and I'm working on that for some of my advertising part of my business. So I'm making progress.

Speaker 1: 30:14

But if you're like me, you probably have this feeling sometimes where you expect to get seven pounds of things done and it turns out you only get seven ounces worth of stuff done. Pounds of things done and it turns out you only get seven ounces worth of stuff done and it just. It can be a little bit demotivating, but you just gotta. You gotta stay focused and accumulate small wins and if you do that, day on day, week on week, month on month, eventually you're going to get where you want and you're going to be so much better off than you were a year ago when you started the process. So if you're like me and you're getting squeezed on time and margin and having trouble moving forward, just stay focused, keep going, keep swimming, as they say in Disney, who's that that's a Nemo, is it Nemo? Nemo is the one that needs to keep swimming. I guess Dory Nemo, I'm not sure, but one of those fish characters. Keep swimming and you'll get where you need to go and I'm going to help you get there. Ciao.