How To Start An Online T-Shirt Business
Beginning an online t-shirt business is a very lucrative business venture and you can find considerable success if you play your cards right and take the right steps going forward. Beginning a company is more fulfilling than doing a monotonous 9-5 but only when you can sustain the business enterprise. The garment industry, no matter how you’d like to approach is hyper-competitive, whether you’re talking an online t-shirt company or selling shirts through traditional brick-and-mortar stores. There is still enough money to be and considerable success to be had, but there are no guarantees and since businesses often see more failures than successes, here are a couple of things to note before beginning your online t-shirt business.
1. Ideation
After you have convinced yourself that you need want to swim in these testing waters, you need to get down to the details of doing so. T-shirts will always be a crowd favorite for all ages and genders but do you have anything that is going to enjoy considerable success on its own. This is the time to brainstorm along with your designers to narrow down some ideas that promise growth and profitability. You will do well yourself to research the market meticulously to know the seasonal trends, fads and consumer preferences’. This will give you a more definitive idea of the kind of products you intend to sell, your goals in the long term, and the strategies you will eventually adapt.
2. Target Market
T-shirts have an extensive market but you can’t possibly market to all demographics. It is far from feasible and has all the essentials of a failure, because often you learn from experiences in life that, ‘trying to become will ensure that you end up becoming nothing’. You need to do enough brainstorming and soul-searching on your own along with a rational analysis of your interests and strengths to figure out the niche for your business. Ecommerce is ruthlessly competitive and establishing a niche about your business is the only way of success. There are infinite options available for anyone who is using the internet to buy t-shirts or any other essentials of clothing, therefore it is integral on your part to create a niche which stands out from the crowd. You should know the interests and purchasing preferences of your target audience and launch products which have a higher likelihood of being received well by them.
3. Manufacturing
Once you have ideated enough and have narrowed down on the niche that you would like to explore, manufacturing is the next thing that you need to get sorted. There are a couple of alternatives that you can explore before choosing the option best suited to your requirements in the long-run. You can either source ‘blanks’ from your shirt suppliers or choose a manufacturer who offers the option of producing t-shirts according to your requirements. Both options have their own advantages and disadvantages, and it will depend on your business plan and long-term goals to make the right choice for yourself in this crucial aspect. Enter into mutually-benefitting relationship with reputed names in the market like oasis shirts turkey, which will ensure that you source quality and deliver it to your target audience, which will help in building the brand of your company through positive customer reviews and favorable ‘word-of-mouth’.
4. Printing
It depends on your relative experience on how you would like go about this aspect but even if you’re inexperienced there are plenty of options which will ensure that your enterprise doesn’t end up dead in the water. If you don’t have the requisite machinery to begin printing on your own, you can always outsource this to screen printers in close proximity to you, which will ensure that logistics don’t end up becoming a nightmare for you. Whatever way you go about it, you need to ensure that you only print or get quality, something which begins cracking or fading soon, will result in adverse ‘word-of-mouth ‘for you, and won’t augur well for your plans for building a profitable and sustainable business model. You need to design and print t-shirts meticulously because well-made products don’t need a lot of branding to sell well. When it comes to designing, you can do it yourself or outsource this to local designers or t-shirt design online businesses, but you should have unwavering focus on quality as this can make or break your business.
5. Price
Before your meticulously designed prints are ready to hit the market, you need to ensure that the price is right. The prices set for your products need to ensure a healthy return for you to ensure that you can continue with a sustainable business model, but you also can’t afford to make it prohibitive and beyond the reach of your target audience. Here’s where the aforementioned aspects are critical to ensure that your operating expenses are low enough to pass the benefit of cost savings to the end-consumer. The pricing strategy also depends on who you sell to, whether it’s retail or wholesale. Keep your t-shirts affordable in the beginning to lure in the masses and when you are sure that you have a substantial share of the market segment, you can choose to hike up the prices too. It all depends on your business plan and long-term and short-team goals because no two entrepreneurs think alike and not many businesses function alike.
6. Inventory
Inventory is integral to the success of a clothing business, regardless of the space it functions in. You need a solid infrastructure to source from your t-shirt manufacturers and then to deliver to your target audience, all the while ensuring that you suffer little or no loss in transit. Depending on the size and scale of your operations, you can pick the storage space best suited to your interests and it can be anything from your basement to your storage space in the office or home, before you make it big and need to own a rented space to deal with your inventory. Your inventory also depends on your business model and the kind of risk appetite you can afford as an entrepreneur.
