T-shirts are the most basic yet most fundamental part of casual apparel. They can elevate the style of even the simplest outfits or give unmatched comfort for the warm weather.
No wonder t-shirt businesses have been booming recently. In the past, t-shirts are seen as basic clothing pieces, usually worn only at home. At present, t-shirts are a style signature that gives significant profit to entrepreneurs and visual appeal to the buyers.
Starting a t shirt business wouldn’t be easy. Just like any business venture, it involves many twists and turns too. You also can’t be fully digital-only since you need to produce physical goods. This means that you need financial investment in equipment and computer software to make your designs.
A t shirt business can be extremely profitable as long as you’re doing things right and with passion. Want to build your own t shirt business today? Read on to find out how.
How to Launch a T Shirt Business
First things first, you need to know how to start a tshirt business. This stage usually involved many interconnected steps, but we’ve made everything simpler for you here. As a bonus, we’ll also teach you how you can make your own ecommerce shop for your business. Don’t worry about the costs. The website builder we’ll use is available for free.
Here’s how you can kickstart your t shirt business:
- Get Into the Production Process
Depending on what type of t shirts you want to sell, you need to get into the basics of producing your own products. For example, if you want to offer t shirt customization services, then you must know how to make custom shirts.
You can easily hire an experienced employee to do all these tasks for you. But think about it. Isn’t it better for your business if you have first-hand knowledge of the production process? You need to learn how to do them due to various reasons.
First, you can easily assess the quality of the output. Second, it allows you to monitor the productivity to quality ratio of your business. And third, in case of emergency or heavy workload, you can engage in the act of producing t shirts for your customers.
- Know Your Audience
The next step is to answer this question - who are you selling to? You can provide an answer by conducting demographic profiling. This is a great way to understand who your target audience is, their locations and other psychosocial traits.
A t shirt company thrives on the needs of the consumers. With this in mind, you need to identify their needs or pain points, then proceed to define your best selling points.
Knowing what your customers want is extremely crucial because this would define the demand for your products and services. If your target audience wants brighter and louder prints, then pursue better printing technologies that could deliver this. If they prefer something darker or earthy tones on their shirts, you can source out new fabrics to meet these demands.
- Provide a Variety of Designs
Once you know how to make shirts, you can also venture into learning how to produce captivating shirt designs. There are plenty of ways to apply designs on shirts including using silkscreens or rubberized printing.
If you prefer to be more modern, you can use computer software and tools to create a variety of graphic designs. You can also use other computer tools to render how a design would look on a shirt.
If designing isn’t really up your alley, you can also source out talented graphic designers and buy their designs. The better option is to hire your own graphic designer and ask them to provide different styles for different seasons.
Having a variety of designs across your products gives you the opportunity to attract more customers. And, of course, having more customers mean better chances of having higher revenue and faster return on investment or ROI.
- Establish and Inventory Management System
With a variety of styles and varying t shirt sizes, the process of starting an online tshirt business can be a lot trickier. What you need is an effective inventory management system to keep track of your current stock and materials.
You need an inventory management system to monitor the number of resources you have left. You can also use it to determine which products are selling better and which aren’t. This provides you an insight on which t shirts to promote more on your t shirt business.
- Set Up The Retail Price
After learning how to make t shirts, producing shirts, and keeping a stock of your items, you need to determine their prices. A great gauge for your pricing strategy is to compute the total costs of your expenses per shirt (including overhead labor). Then, provide a reasonable profit margin.
Remember that when setting up a price, you don’t want to drive away customers by being too expensive. But you also don’t want to drop the price too low that you wouldn’t earn enough to sustain operations.
Since you’re a new t shirt business, it’s only natural to set your prices low. Once you’ve established a market and a brand name, then it’s time to consider increasing your prices.
Another thing to consider is shipping costs. If you have an online t shirt business, you may want to deliver orders to the buyers. You can add the costs to the retail price to offset the shipping fee during checkout. Or let your customers shoulder the costs.
How to Set Up an Online T Shirt Business in 4 Easy Steps
Now that you’ve learned the basics of building a t shirt business, it’s time to find out how to start an online tshirt business. Building an ecommerce store is challenging and this is often the toughest part of establishing your business. Fortunately, there’s Strikingly, a free website builder that is powerful enough to let you create an online store.
Read on and follow the steps to make an online t shirt business with Strikingly:
- Find a Template That Fits Your Business
For your t shirt company website, you need a template that best represents your branding. Strikingly has a wide array of templates you can choose from, each of them customizable to fit your preferences. For this example, we’ll use Strikingly’s Glow template.
Image taken from Strikingly product
The template above is perfect for a simple yet attractive visual and structure for your t shirt business website. As you can see on the image above, there’s a setting for “Layout” and “Background”. You can click “Background” to set the background image into something more related to shirts.
The best part about this template is that it already comes with the necessary sections you need for an ecommerce business. If you want, you can also add more sections and more pages.
The next part you need to learn is how to sell t shirts. You can’t sell your products without a reliable online store section on your website. With Strikingly, setting up an online store is extremely easy.
Image taken from Strikingly product
Just click on “Add New Section” and select “Simple Store”. Once you have your simple online store, you can now add your products.
From “Store” click “Products”, then “Add Products”. You will see the settings displayed in the image above. You can select the product type (in this case, its physical goods), then fill up each important detail for the product.
Make a unique name for each product and add a well-written description. Set your price, then add stock number based on your inventory. Finally, add a high-quality image of your t shirt.
- Use SEO to Drive More Traffic and Increase Sales
One of the best ways to produce high-quality traffic in your t shirt business website is to use SEO practices. SEO is also integrated into inbound marketing, which means customers come to you instead of the other way around.
Image taken from Strikingly product
Strikingly has an SEO Checklist that allows you to monitor if your t shirt website is fully optimized for search engines. You can find this under the “Promotions”. You may notice that there are options reserved for pro users only. Consider upgrading your Strikingly account to pro to unlock these options.
- Create a Contact Us Page
Communication and connection is integral to your t shirt business. You need a contact us page for various reasons. First, it gives your customers relevant details about who you are and how to contact you. Second, they give your customers a chance to ask you questions or send in feedback.
Image taken from Strikingly product
Strikingly’s contact us section is customizable, so you can add a map of your physical address. If your t shirt business has a physical location, this can help increase in-store traffic. This traffic will potentially turn into revenue.
Now that you know how to start a tshirt business, all that’s left for you to do is to head on to Strikingly, make a free user account, and apply what you’ve learned today. Building a t shirt business isn’t easy. But with Strikingly, the process is faster, more convenient, and more fun!
