T-shirt (teespring) is my plan realistic?

[Reef215]

After going through countless trainings I think people underestimate the importance of finding the right design to audience combination. We know its important, but has anybody ever sat down and provided the numbers it takes to find that right combo?

Here is my plan. It will cost about 35.00 per PROFESSIONAL design. I can negotiate to about 20.00-25.00 but until I build up rapport with this designer by bringing him consistent work it will cost 35.00. So What I do is search on http://www.Teescover.com, http://www.Teespring.com/discover, GOOGLE IMAGES (after looking for a keyword such as Pitbull T-Shirts), Amazon, Ebay, Redbubble, etc. And I look at as many shirts as I can see and I also attempt to come up with my own.

My goal is to come up with 25-50 shirts and narrow it down to the best 10 shirts that i feel can sell. Now to get each of these shirts designed it will cost 35.00 so thats 350.00. I still dont know which one of these shirts will sell, I just HOPE that one of them does. And in order to do this is to set up different Ad campaigns for EACH shirt doing split and double split testing to see if any one of the shirts get sells. Now each test will cost you 5.00, maybe 10.00 but lets say 5.00 because you are doing split testing making it 10.00 and double split testing making it 20.00. So our total is 35.00 for design + 20.00 in Facebook Ad Spend to see if it will sell = 55.00 multiply that by 10 shirts = 550.00 and your hope is to find a shirt that you can scale to get shirts sold a minimum of 50/week or 200 per shirt run if its only ran 30 days at a time. So if you are able to sell 200 shirts at 7.00 profit after accounting for Ad Spend it would mean its 1400 profit - 550 to start = 850/200 shirts sold in a 30 day period

Now if you are able to hit a homerun and get a shirt that sells 200/wk or 800+ in a 30 day period then obviously everything increases (profit per shirt).

The downside is of course finding out that NONE of the 10 shirts you got designed were a winner, or you barely broke even on it. And to loose 550.00 when you are working a low paying job is brutal.

So if you dont have a good design eye to know which 10 give you the best chance to sell, or you or your designer cant come up with an original kick ass tee, and/or you don't know how to properly target the audience in Facebook Ads you are going to be shit out of luck.

That is where I find myself today. Do I invest my last 550.00 to do the plan above or seek another way.

Oh and dont tell me you can do it for lower, because if you break down the plan the most expensive item is the design cost but it is SUPER PROFESSIONAL and will get lowered if I am able to do more.

Any suggestions

[zaff]

I think 35$ for a tshirt design is too much.Try to search on fiverr for a couple of designers and check their work.Plus there is not guarantee that if you pay 35$ for a tshirt,that it will be a success.For 1 "professional" 35$ tshirt you can get 7 pretty good tshirt designs from fiverr.Some designs have very little text or a simple image and make a killing.
Just my 2 cents.

[rhqman]

Not sure about your goals. Sound reasonable to me, who is not doing t-shirts the teespring way.

What I can tell you is this:

A relation, here in the UK, is approaching the tshirt business differentrly, after failing with teespring. She now operates with a website and is sharing part of a shop in a non-competing business. Paying half the costs of the shop. No upfront fees, just moved in with the agreed first months payment.

Shop is doing well, averaging 157 sales in the past 4 months. Short time scale but that's how long she has been running the business. Time will tell if it works out.

The website is not so good, hitting just 19 sales over the same 4 month period. The site definately needs some sork and this is being looked into.

The most profitable part of her business though is party plan. From 27 parties to date, 434 tshirts have sold. These are premium tees, high quality and personalised. That's personalised in any way the customer wants, Can be from a photograph or any other printed matter the customer can supply.

The other service used is to sketch any family or friend and turn that sketch into a design for the tshirt. It helps that Sally is also a pretty damned good artist!

The personalised sketch tshirts sell for £39.99 to as much as 95.00. Maybe this is the way to go, if you have the artistic talent?

[dk2011]

Like @zaff put it, it's not the "perfect" design that'll sell t-shirts, more important is the right audience you target. Remember, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

If you cut costs down by 80%+ on the designs, you can invest more into ads, which I think will pay more.

And one more point...the start of your post is written in highly enthusiastic tone, motivated, pumped...the more I read, the more enthusiasm vanishes. Your plan is solid and need no one to tell you go for it, or not. It's you who's gonna do the work, from research, design picking, ads split testing, all is on you...so do it and report back ;)

[Reef215]

(02-12-2015 09:50 PM)zaff Wrote:  I think 35$ for a tshirt design is too much.Try to search on fiverr for a couple of designers and check their work.Plus there is not guarantee that if you pay 35$ for a tshirt,that it will be a success.For 1 "professional" 35$ tshirt you can get 7 pretty good tshirt designs from fiverr.Some designs have very little text or a simple image and make a killing.
Just my 2 cents.

• You're definitely correct, and the designer told me that he would do between 20-25/design if I can do bulk ideas
• And that is the crux, I am going to pay (lets say 20.00) for a design that I dont know if even will work. But I do know what is working and 75% of the designs that are working are awesome which leads to my next point
• A lot of the fiverr guys, THAT ARENT BUSY (thats key), do have really good ORGANIC designs that they come up with. You basically have to tell them what to come up with and how it should look. You can't tell them I want a worded shirt that says "blah blah blah, im special a, special b, special c, blah blah - i'm a nurse" with a nurse logo and expect it to be top quality. BUT you can have them mimic or copy another existing shirt. I did try that but for whatever reason it didn't yield any sales.

Oh and Max Rep for replying to my thread!

[Reef215]

(02-12-2015 10:03 PM)rhqman Wrote:  Not sure about your goals. Sound reasonable to me, who is not doing t-shirts the teespring way.

What I can tell you is this:

A relation, here in the UK, is approaching the tshirt business differentrly, after failing with teespring. She now operates with a website and is sharing part of a shop in a non-competing business. Paying half the costs of the shop. No upfront fees, just moved in with the agreed first months payment.

Shop is doing well, averaging 157 sales in the past 4 months. Short time scale but that's how long she has been running the business. Time will tell if it works out.

The website is not so good, hitting just 19 sales over the same 4 month period. The site definately needs some sork and this is being looked into.

The most profitable part of her business though is party plan. From 27 parties to date, 434 tshirts have sold. These are premium tees, high quality and personalised. That's personalised in any way the customer wants, Can be from a photograph or any other printed matter the customer can supply.

The other service used is to sketch any family or friend and turn that sketch into a design for the tshirt. It helps that Sally is also a pretty damned good artist!

The personalised sketch tshirts sell for £39.99 to as much as 95.00. Maybe this is the way to go, if you have the artistic talent?

Thanks for replying - max reps!

But yeah I definitely am looking for something online, you said that the t-shirt business only sold 19 shirts via the website, what does their FB ad campaign look like?

And I am not as artistic as it would take to do something like that in a brick and mortar store anyway. Thanks for the idea tho!

[tlandn]

Hi op, if it's your last 550$ then don't need to do it, too risky. You can save money and do it later :-)

[Reef215]

(02-12-2015 10:05 PM)dk2011 Wrote:  Like @zaff put it, it's not the "perfect" design that'll sell t-shirts, more important is the right audience you target. Remember, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

If you cut costs down by 80%+ on the designs, you can invest more into ads, which I think will pay more.

And one more point...the start of your post is written in highly enthusiastic tone, motivated, pumped...the more I read, the more enthusiasm vanishes. Your plan is solid and need no one to tell you go for it, or not. It's you who's gonna do the work, from research, design picking, ads split testing, all is on you...so do it and report back ;)

• I know that its the audience but its also the tees, its so weird. You can find an audience that buys to the tune of 500 shirts per month like the 2nd Amendment Audience or the Crossfit audience but you will see someone elses Tee do very well while yours get No hits. and with the way Facebook is set up now (custom audience being all but eliminated) its really the same interest that everybody have available to them (am i wrong) so basically you and someone else have pretty much the same audience give or take an interest/liked page/group and one person sells 500 shirts and the other 5. The only thing I can point to is T-shirt design
• And you are absolutely right. After spending 2k and seeing only about 2k back i was lucky to get back what i put in. The whole "scale until you cant scale anymore" seemed to stop very early for me. And it was discouraging coming up with DOZENS of designs (or made) and have next 0 profit. So I am still excited at the opportunities but it does get discouraging following directions and thinking you're doing a good job yet dont seem anywhere NEAR the same results
• MAX rep man, thanks for responding and the encouraging words!

[Reef215]

(02-13-2015 01:42 PM)tlandn Wrote:  Hi op, if it's your last 550$ then don't need to do it, too risky. You can save money and do it later :-)

its not my exact last but pretty close to it. And this was me saving money LOL. But its either this or spend it on stamps to mail letters for my real estate business which is also a crap shoot LOL. gotta love business

Reps thanks for replying!

[profits]

One thing is to use teesprings Audience Intersect which will help in not hitting the same target as everyone else in the same niche. "I just HOPE that one of them does" should answer you question. Sounds like rolling the dice. Business shouldn't be a gamble, that's what casinos are for. Personal opinion after 12 years of selling shirts online and yes using teespring for a year or so is to build a small niche store with multiple designs and build a solid recurring income continually adding new products and creating a customer base of your own. Teespring is also filled with thieves and if you get a fast selling item you can be assured someone will be selling your same design almost instantly. There have been some weeks when I have been targeted by as many as a dozen different sellers pushing the exact same design. A lot of illustrators I work with that have nothing to do with teespring see their designs pilfered and selling there. I've seen 5 of my own copyrighted designs that I never put on teespring show up there.

I know selling 1000 shirts a month sounds good but there are a lot of websites selling 100 to 1000 shirts in a day, there's even sellers on ebay and etsy that exceed 50K or more sales in a year within a single niche.

I know we are all marketers here and scarcity, hot niches and all that is what we learn but the real money in selling shirts is just plain consistency. If your chasing a fad that market is already over. Pick something your passionate about and it shows thru in your brand. Find someone local or even online that does direct to garment printing (there's no minimums and no set up) until sales merit screen printing, since your passionate about the niche you know where your potential customers hang out and engage them. Get their opinions on potential products, let them feel they are part of the process and you'll garner true fans that can be worth hundreds and thousands of dollars each as time rolls on.

Also, if that is near your last bit of money, how do you plan to scale up if you come up with a good seller? You have $200 for testing advertising and you won't have any cash flow until after you tip and the orders are filled. If you look closely at the better info products about teespring they spend a lot on ads to get to those numbers. As long as the sales make more than the ad spend it's all good but if you don't have the the money to really scale up you're going to be using credit or friends and family which is not an ideal choice. If you are thinking about just doing a bunch of small campaigns and have a winner by the time you run the second and third round your niche could be saturated with copycats.

Not saying it can't work, it sounds a lot like the TEE TITAN course and there is money to be made on teespring. If you enjoy the rush of finding hot niches, pillaging them and finding another and then another then go for it 120%. One thing I've learned over the years is if the barrier to enter an opportunity is low then there will be a lot of people mucking it up and if the barrier requires work there is smaller competition since most don't want to work. I'm kinda an old fart who prefers putting the work in once and profiting from it for years or decades to come since that is what has worked for me.

If you have the confidence, anything will work because you'll do everything you can to make it happen. I look forward to hearing about your success in whatever you choose to do. Keep hustling.