Online T-Shirt business
Business Attempt #2
I, like most, wanted to try my hand at a T-shirt business. I thought I could make some locally recognizable t-shirt designs that Kansas Citians would enjoy. This would branch out to other cities and sports teams and such. Once I realized that you can easily get around trade mark infringement by using different colors or blurring things but keeping the same general outline, I thought I’d struck gold. (double check this yourself, as I never confirmed it) I started with a KC Royals designs which I only sold one shirt of … to myself for testing the system. I still get compliments on the shirt today. Anyway, I hired a designer from Craigslist named James Belk of Bornarts.com who was supposed to be down to make many more designs in the future for the $50/design fee we discussed. (Found the old email convo and turns out he didn’t ghost me, I ghosted him once the cardinals lost.) He did a great job of taking what was in my head and making it sign on the canvas. I then did my favorite part which was the operations aspect. I setup a website: www.localets.com, built a shop on shopify and then found a drop shipper that would allow me to upload the graphics, choose a few different brands and sizes of t-shirts and then it handled printing and shipping them for me. It sounded great, all I had to do was create new designs, send of my rough ideas to the designer, he’d give me back a brilliant looking graphic to which I would upload and bam, I’d be making 90% passive income… But of course, there are a few major missing pieces to this puzzle. People can’t buy what they don’t know about. Marketing I realized with this business is my Achilles heel. Hiring a true marketing person is outrageously expensive and they never seem to articulate what is they’ll be doing for those thousands of dollars besides “posting daily to your social feeds”. I believe I tried some Facebook ads to sell the kc royals shirt but no such luck. And then gave up after a few weeks of no sales and shut it down because I didn’t want to keep paying the $25/mo. Shopify fee. I still have the Facebook page and have recently had thoughts about restarting this idea with a bit more effort and budget and combining it with another few t-shirt based design businesses like Exotic car silhouettes and viral video meme slogans.
Some lessons:
