How I Started My T-Shirt Business and What I Wish I Knew If I Had to Start Over

what's up my name is rich welcome back to another video in this video right here i'm going to discuss if i had to start over in the t-shirt business what would i do differently and where would i start so before we even get into it we got to define the way that i found my way to making sales in a t-shirt business first and foremost i am nowhere near an expert at making sales i'm nowhere near an expert in a t-shirt business i'm nowhere near an expert in the t-shirt industry the only difference is that i just keep it moving man that's it um so in the beginning it's easy to beat yourself up and feel like you can't do it for myself i used to beat myself up pretty badly if like you know i run into a wall or something but i didn't have a job i never did uh i mean there's other ways i've made money because i've had the skill of being a graphic designer you know almost my entire life at this point i'm 30 now um i've been doing this since i was about 13 14. so so i've always had that skill but i didn't want to just be in the graphic design like service field i didn't want to just provide graphic design services so when i got into doing t-shirts you know i didn't have a choice but to figure it out so i need to really beat myself up pretty badly and that right there is an issue but at the same time it's kind of a blessing in itself because you don't have a choice but to figure it out so you just gotta keep moving that's all i ever did that's all i ever do and when i first started to be honest i failed at first it's because i didn't really do t-shirts i had a vinyl cutter i had a us cutter vinyl cutter but um i didn't know it was the same thing you used for heat transfer vinyl for t-shirts i used it for vinyl decals so i was trying to make the the decals the little stickers and whatnot so you know you could put it like on a window on a car all that um that was kind of frustrating for me i made a couple cells here and there but it didn't take off like i thought it was going to but um i kind of got irritated with that process because like when i was weeding the stickers and whatnot and if it touched another portion then it ripped everything then i got to cut it again i wasn't that great at that uh ended up selling that vinyl cutter a few months go by and then uh it hit me i was like heat transfer vinyl t-shirts i was like i need the vinyl cutter back so i ended up getting the same vinyl cutter again and a heat press this time i got the vinyl cutter back i tried to do a fitness brand um that didn't work out for me so i lost some inventory and all that there and then um i did another brand a kiss going back and it worked out pretty decent for once started scaling that up slowly it wasn't the greatest amount of income in the world but it was an additional two three grand a month in groves that i was making that was just off of t-shirts and it was pretty cool and i did all of that based off of instagram and the way i even got customers to begin with is because i did influencers but i didn't reach out to like famous influencers and whatnot i reached out to moms who are photographers who also had toddlers so they just like taking pictures of their kids and they're pretty good at it but at the same time me just giving them clothes was just a plus for them so um they will take pictures of the clothes they will post it on their page in turn i get a great photo and that's how that started but eventually i found out at the same time about etsy this was like 2014 15 or something like that uh i tried to post some of the brand clothes on there and it didn't work out um so i just started going on sec and what other people were selling and honestly i just got lucky it was like back to school season i just posted up a school related t-shirt and man that first month that was my first month selling t-shirts online well not online but on etsy and i did ten thousand over ten thousand dollars worth of t-shirts and that blew my mind from then on i was just in shock and from there i just kept attacking etsy kept going and going and kept increasing and from there i just kind of gave up on the kids brand because the kids brand took like a lot of tedious work i would do the neck tag label i'd have to send it to the influencers um it was just a lot of stuff in comparison to like doing t-shirts on etsy just get the design on the shirt ship it out that was it so um eventually i gave up on the kids brand i wasn't 100 passionate about it anyways i just did it because uh my firstborn at the time he was a toddler so i just making clothes for him and it just happened to work out it wasn't something i necessarily wanted to do a brand on but it just ended up falling in this place however at that time i felt like i just needed to focus on one thing so i kind of went away with the kids brand and started doing a whole bunch of etsy eventually found out about amazon started selling on amazon doing all kinds of t-shirts on marketplaces taking advantage of marketplace traffic which is just like using a search engine because at the time i wasn't an expert on facebook ads at all and influencing on instagram only took me so far so that's pretty much how i got my start and started making a decent amount of income selling t-shirts was just like on etsy which was about five almost six years ago now so where would i start if i had to start again well a lot of the things i learned along the way helped me have the experience and knowledge that i do now because along the way i did the vinyl and then i was like man i need to produce a lot of the same design and i got into screen printing found out that wasn't for me did that in the garage that it didn't end up being for me did that for like i think like six seven months or something went away with that did direct to garment and i was like man this isn't for me neither eventually i got back to vinyl and i was like i need to find a way to produce one item quickly and then eventually i found out about screen printed transfers i started with fm expressions and man that thing was gold for me and it still is you just can't beat 15 25 35 single color transfers so if i was to start again one of the frustrating parts was um investing your capital into equipment when you don't really know if you're going to make sales or not i did it because you know i didn't have a choice and i didn't know about print on demand yet i knew about teespring i sold some t-shirts through teespring but i didn't know that was like a thing i still want to control and at the time teespring like their profit was like awful so i was making a few dollars here and there and side note real quick i did the same thing on teespring i'm cambodian that's my nationality so you know i did some cambodian t-shirts and i went to an instagram page that was pretty popular for memes on the culture and i paid them 50 bucks for them to post it and i did like two 300 bucks on sales and i did similar things a few more times with teespring but i didn't really know that i was like considered print on demand i didn't really understand it i was just kind of winging it but if i had to do it again you know i'd start off using like principal or something um because the most important thing is knowing that you will get sales it will suck if you invest your money into equipment especially if you're still on the border if you don't know if you want to be in the t-shirt business or not and you're just like let me buy this heat press let me buy this vinyl cutter let me buy this printer it's going to make me some money that's not necessarily true just because you purchased some equipment that's not going to make you some money um you really got to understand how to get sales first of all whether it's shopify plus facebook ads shopify plus influencers or marketplace traffic like amazon or etsy where you're posting products depending on what they're going to search for so that's how you get your traffic on the marketplace so the most important thing at first is getting those sales whether you have the equipment or not just find a way to fulfill it first of all so that way you can start with very low capital you don't have to invest yourself into some kind of equipment as of yet so use print to find use like a local printer anything just make sure whenever you sell something you have a way to fulfill it from there after you get your first one or two sales try to replicate what you did rinse and repeat do the same few things and try to get some more sales under your bill try to make it as consistent as possible but once you start building it up a little more a little more then you can start investing in some kind of equipment whether it's a heat press or a vinyl cutter or some kind of printer just invest in whatever it is that you can afford you can start off with like a two three hundred dollar amazon heat press there's nothing wrong with that it's gonna make you your money for sure all you gotta do is scale up take a few small steps here and there but before you purchase anything make sure you understand the profit margins that you are going to gain by you bringing this in-house and understand the fact that you will be losing time by you doing production unless you're already at the point where you can hire somebody out but if you're just starting understand the fact that you're going to be losing time by taking on this production as well so whatever time you was putting into gaining sales you're going to lose some of that time and the amount of time that you put into gaining sales it won't necessarily decrease but if you lose your focus on that and just only focus on production then you know you're gonna lack some sales you're gonna have to go back and focus on that so understand this just because you bring in more profit doesn't mean you're gonna bring in more sales you're gonna have to work twice as hard now now you're gonna focus on still getting sales on top of now focusing on doing the production so that right there is the pro and con from doing print on demand versus doing it yourself and like i mentioned earlier that's also one of the things that i wish i knew about quicker was heat transfers pre-made heat transfers from my 613 originals super color fm expressions um what are you buying from somebody with a direct film printer nowadays since it's like the new thing right now but i wish i knew about that earlier instead of me doing like 20 uh vinyl cut designs and weeding all of them out i wish i knew about pre-made heat transfers beforehand because they are a very cheap investment that saves you a whole lot of time and up your profit margins please invest in pre-made heat transfers whenever you see an item start to sell a lot and i really really mean that because this is going to save you so much time and this is still my goal till this day whenever i get a lot of sales you have to invest in these transfers or go get it screen printed but whenever you invest in these transfers you have control you have a lot more control a lot of people always compare the time that it takes to make the transfers versus like you making it yourself say if i had a direct film printer or screen printed transfers myself i can't afford the high-end equipment that's going to produce me 2 000 transfers within two days but a company like 613 originals or something like that can they can get you thousands of transfers done within like two days and get it shipped to you um i always pay for two-day shipping within like four or five days so within four or five days that's a reasonable amount of time for me to get those transfers on a t-shirt and get it to the customer so a lot of the times i will state on my website or shopify etsy whatever that it takes me between four and eight business days to get the item shipped out so as soon as i see something picking up on that first day guess what i'm ordering transfers and i'm ordering a little extra then i should because it's pretty affordable anyways it's pretty cheap but anyways i'm ordering a little more than i should it's going to take usually 613 originals i've used them a lot because they typically get it out within two days but as soon as i touch it as soon as it's in my hands you know i got a team of people pressing on t-shirts get it out the door so it will arrive within that window that i tell the customer and it's printed on demand quote-unquote on-demand not like from a from a print-on-demand company principle or some on-demand like by ourselves so it's already profit i don't have an investment in any type of inventory i also purchased the t-shirt so i use alpha brother that's local to me i can get it the same day or i can get it the next day so um everything for me is always for profit that is one thing that i did right i suppose and i highly recommend it i always get asked like what color t-shirts did you start off with what should i keep an inventory kept nothing in inventory i'll order it when i get in order but you know um when it comes to offering colors i'll do like between like four to six or seven just the primaries a lot of the popular ones will be your gray your black your navy your white a lot of the matte colors are popular such as like um for bella canvas it's going to be like matte type colors like the muted pink and the light purples things of that nature so one other thing i didn't mention to begin with is that everything i did was direct to customer i didn't do business business i didn't print t-shirts for another business i only printed directly to customer so yeah that's pretty much it for that and i didn't have a label printer to begin with and use you know your regular inkjet printer uh printed on a regular sheet of paper taped it to the box then ended up finding out you can go to walmart do the four by six well it's not four by six it's the half sheet with the stickers on it they have that at walmart's avery sheets you can print on half of the page eventually ended up finding out about the dymo the rollo all of that and waited until i could afford to invest in that type of stuff so a lot of everything that i'm saying is if i was to start again is just to make sure i could get the sales first after that make sure i know how i can fulfill the product to the customer if i don't have the equipment yet from there i would scale up and sales you know do the best that you can and then purchase some equipment the next thing before purchasing the equipment is understanding that there's a pro and con to every single print method there's a pro and con to everything screen printing you can do a whole bunch of designs quickly but it's going to be hard to do one offs when it comes to one offs you could do that with like a vinyl cutter but when it comes to a vinyl cutter you're limited on the the intricacy of the design itself and the colors so then you got something like your your dye sublimation printer but you can only do that on light colors so you have to understand there's pros and cons to everything and even when it comes to purchasing the equipment there's a pro and con to doing it yourself you know you might get a little bit more profit but you're gonna lose time you're gonna lose that amount of time that you're using to focus on sales uh and from there if you are purchasing a heat press make sure you invest in some kind of heat transfers i don't care what company you use just understand that heat transfers really are going to be your goal so if you have a design and if it's sold for at least three four times quickly within a week that means that item is popular that design is popular especially if it's one two colors get it turned into transfers immediately i promise you it's gonna save you a whole lot of time and it's gonna up your profit margin and the reason why i say three or four is because at that point you're doing about 40 to 60 bucks worth of sales which is enough for you to be able to afford the transfers let's say if it didn't sell after you got the transfers you'll have about 50 transfers or so ready to go but you'll also be at a break-even point that's okay that you made those 60 bucks but now you lost the 60 bucks because you purchased the transfers but that's your investment now you have that stack of transfers and it's so quick to get it done you can even try to run sales on your items lower the price at that point you can start doing those 9 10 11 shirts and try to rank that item back up into like the marketplace at least for me in the marketplace should i rank it back up with the low cost uh let it be your loss leader for a little bit let the sales rank go back up just because it's so cost efficient and it's so easy to do and you already broke even on it um you still make money at 11 12 bucks still profit but it's just so quick to do i don't even know how to explain that it's just it's just very easy to manage and i just wish i knew about that earlier like when i first started i wish i was one of the things i knew when i first started so get sales understand the pros and cons of everything beginning to equipment invest in some heat transfers and from there make relationships if you don't want to print forever make relationships with your local printer your local director garmin printer your local screen printer especially if they do fulfillment not only that but if you start scaling up you start getting employees or something make good relationships with them make sure that trust is there and man if i had to start over i would almost do everything the same but i just wouldn't beat myself up as much if you're putting in the work you're getting a few extra sales every single day then the process is working you got to trust the process and anytime you hit a brick wall or something it's just a part of the learning curve and at those points and times just understand that you're putting in the work and you're still educating yourself then it's just a learning curve you'll get over it you get around it and you'll get back going for the most part it's going to be a long slow climb i mean unless you're running facebook ads and whatnot sometimes it blows up pretty decently but at the same time if you don't have the infrastructure to handle it you might collapse and you might beat yourself up a little too hard so make sure you don't beat yourself up too hard trust the process keep going and that's pretty much it and once again i'm not an expert not even close i just kept it going that's pretty much it man my name is rich if you enjoyed this video comment like subscribe see you next time hey hustle ninja thanks for watching remember if you want to support the channel and have the chance to win a giveaway to help your clothing brand be sure to check out onlyninjas.com also make sure you like comment and subscribe and stay hustling

Channel: Hustle Ninjas

Views: 231,148

Keywords: starting a tshirt business, starting a tshirt business mistakes, mistakes tshirt business, what i wish i knew tshirt business, tshirt transfers, tshirt business success, how to start a successful t shirt business, t shirt business success story, successful t shirt businesses

Id: 1_fU0lNBXhQ

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021