One of the most convenient and rewarding small businesses is to start your own custom t-shirt clothing line. It works best as a side hustle and helps generate a reasonable income.
However, you need to be good at online marketing because there’s so much competition.
If you have the budget, you can think of hiring an online marketing agency but if you are like most wannabe entrepreneurs, you will be short on budget. If you want to do it yourself, you can use this guide to promote your t shirt business.
Pick a Cause You Are Passionate About
Online t-shirt businesses mostly thrive off the message they are trying to deliver with the slogans printed on the shirts. Hence, choosing the right cause to support can make or break your business. Especially with the influence of social media in our daily lives, it is quite inevitable that people tend to catch trends faster than they used. Whether they are massive movements like climate change awareness, the fan following of a show or celebrity, or simply catchphrases that are popular – it has become easier to grasp people’s attention through fleeting trends. You just need to hold on to something at the right timing.
Build an Audience
Once you have found your cause, creatively express your ideas on social media – whether it is a website, Facebook, YouTube or Instagram. It has become more convenient to build an audience of like-minded people by posting relevant pictures and quotes that support your cause. Be patient during this period and interact with your audience to learn what they would like from your brand and how you can express their mutual interest more eloquently and effectively. It can be a great way to collaborate with artists and have their designs printed on your shirts as well – this will also expand your brand’s reach.
Make a Marketing Plan
Once you have launched the framework of your product and have taken surveys shows that people would be interested in buying your merchandise – you must stick with a marketing plan. Go easy on this step, for it may change according to your progress. But make sure how you want to go about it – whether it is through reaching out to members of the said micro-niche, using affiliate marketing or sponsoring your posts. Keep the timeline closest to the complete production of your t-shirts – for people tend to be fickle and lose interest through prolonged anticipation.
Find a Suitable T-shirt Printing Company
Test out t-shirt printing companies by giving them fixed batches to print out. Identify the type of printing you would prefer – whether it is screen printing, digital printing, heat transfer, direct-to-garment printing or embroidered printing. Make sure that you cross check the durability and quality of the shirts and prints, and add tags on how to wash them. Putting out your very first batch of shirts can be intimidating, for it will decide whether your first customers were satisfied or not. Hence, have a trail group experiment these before delivering them to actual buyers.
Look for Courier Services
Many courier services not only provide discounts for a long-term partnership but also provide the guarantee of safeguarding your products. Cheap courier services tend to deliver shirts haphazardly – this could damage your brand’s image. Moreover, make sure that the courier service you are hiring delivers the products promptly so that it does not bring down your rating. People hate waiting.
Additionally, choose courier services that can also provide shipping – in case you reach out to international clients, and need prompt delivery, no one likes missing out on those! But bear in mind that your courier service should suit your budget as well!
Get Customer Feedback and Improve Your Products
Finally, once your t-shirts have been manufactured and people have placed an order, take constructive criticism. This can be a rather daunting activity for most amateur entrepreneurs, for hearing harsh criticism on a product you have been working on for months can be discouraging. But bringing about the necessary changes will only increase customer satisfaction and will help build a more trusting and engaging brand. Thus, you must give leverage to your audience to openly praise or criticize your brand.
Finally, building a business from scratch is not easy – it requires a great amount of resilience and self-belief. But once you have the right tools, you can build a promising momentum and gain revenue.