How To Start Your Own T-Shirt Brand

admin    T-Shirt Articles     Start Your Own T-Shirt Brand, T-Shirt Articles, set up t-shirt brand, setting up a t-shirt brand, t-shirt branding

Last summer Ryan Kovac set up Beau Clothing, here’s how he did it:

“I came up with a massive list of things to accomplish in order for Beau to launch. I broke up everything I needed to accomplish and learn into 3 sections: brand, website, and legal.”

Brand: Assuming that you are creating your own brand, you probably have an idea of a niche or target audience. It is key that your brand fills that niche, or offers something unique in it’s own right. Brand development comes in three stages: your brand logo, planning, and shirts.

Logo: When making a logo, you want to create something that depicts your brand, but also incorporates what your brand is about. With Beau, our logo was created to show our minimalist designs and their simplicity. A logo is a key tool for brand recognition, a memorable logo can keep your brand fresh in the consumer’s mind.

Planning: For most Indie start-up lines, finances can be limited. Personally, Beau was brought to life by the two of us working all summer long. A sacrifice has to be made. Currently we are college students and are making ends meet financially out of our own pockets. We put all of our funds towards bringing our fans and customers the best possible product we can. Don’t let it scare you though, it’s a very rewarding feeling to have somebody enjoying what you put a lot of hard work and time into. The key is to create a plan, like I am drawing out here, with your finances. Microsoft Excel is a great tool to keep track of everything. The best tip I can give you is to be as organized as possible.

Shirts: Artistic talent is essential, if you have little you can always sketch your ideas out and use artists to create your designs. But that doesn’t have to stop you. Beau Clothing was lucky enough to use Cameron Hagedon, one hell of an artist and designer and friend. Places like Emptees.com are places where you can find talented artists. If you don’t know any artists personally, they can help you create your clothing’s art. Just remember that there are always resources out there to utilize.

Printing: Do your research, our biggest tool was google. We lived on sites like bandwagonmerch, and t-shirtforums just asking questions and gathering information. Prior to Beau, I knew nothing about Plastisol inks. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Email anybody and everybody whom you think would have valuable information. God knows how many emails I wrote just acquiring information on what material went best with what inks and what tagging sizes were recommended for each size of shirt. One tip for everybody: American Apparel. It is just gold made of fabrics. Everybody loves it and, frankly, if you are selling to somebody who doesn’t know much outside of Gildans and Hanes, they will put your shirt on and fall in love. Most likely, they will never take it off.

Shipping: If you plan on shipping out shirts, which most indie’s do, packaging is the last chance to make a positive impression. If financially possible, make something amazing and memorable. However, for most cases, including Beau, that is hard to accomplish. Just remember, with every penny you earn, put that penny back into your brand. Including packaging. But, until then, make sure your shipping does not hurt your image. Make sure it’s secure, doesn’t fold, and makes it there quickly. Uline.com provides a lot of products for packing, folding, and shipping your shirts nice and neatly.

Website: The first thing a consumer will see is the quality of the site. Bigcartel.com and Storenvy.com provide a great template and a cart. If you know web design at all, you know that building a fully functional cart is kind of a hassle. For Beau, we were forced to pick up a CSS book and learn from scratch in order to make our site stick out from the cookie cutter ‘Bigcartels’ of the world. Jquery is no fun, but there are plenty of tutorials online that help teach. Sohatonaka.com is one of my personally favourites. Soh is a genius and very helpful as well. As for CSS, check out this site; again a lifesaver. If possible, we advise that you leave it to the professional and shell out the dough.

Domain: As far as domain names go, try and purchase one that is unique and memorable. If that happens to be your brand name, perfect. For Beau, we went with thebeautee.com as a little play on words to create the”beauty” in a sense. And if you do decide to use a Bigcartel, the folks over at Indielabs are very helpful at providing set up to link your new domain name.

Legal: At first we thought this would be one of the most difficult parts, it turns out it was the opposite. Make sure to get a hold of people who know something about business law – an accountant, lawyer or, in our case, your business professor. You can figure out a lot of the basics via Google and forums, but legalities are not something you want to mess up. It would be the biggest buzz kill to have to shut down everything you have worked so hard for just because you didn’t fill out the right paperwork. From our experiences we have learned a little. You should be alright with just a DBA, but you’re much better off filing for a Limited Liability Corp. (LLC). But again, check with a pro. In the UK this would be a Limited Company, check other countries for legalities.

The biggest thing to take out of all of this is to sit on your computer and do hours upon hours of research. Become an expert in your niche and field. We are not saying we are, but we are striving to be. And another thing, there are tons of people willing to help you. When you tell anybody in your community that you’re going on this adventure, they will do almost anything to help along the way. Don’t waste that help, it’s a life saver. Never be afraid to email and ask questions!

Ryan Kovach,
Beau (http://www.thebeautee.com/)

A Kindred Spirit at Kindred Market

admin    T-Shirt Reviews     kindred market, kindredmarket.com, sell your own tees, set up t-shirt brand, t-shirt business, t-shirt start-up

Now, I get a lot of submissions here at Buy Tees from Cafepress and Spreadshirt designers and time and again I explain to them that one of the major reasons I won’t review them is that I don’t see the point of passing on kudos and PR if it simply goes down the drain of a corporate behemoth with a marketing budget that could feed a small country. Besides any company as big as say Zazzle doesn’t really give a damn if you make money as a t-shirt designer, all they want are premium store fees and more and more online traffic. The usual advice is to use a third-party merchant like Big Cartel and then print your own or use someone local. But, and here’s the biggest but I’ve seen in a while, I did come across another alternative recently, KindredMarket.com, at first I guessed their site was simply feeding the general public the usual hype, but I’ve been studying Kindred Market in a little more detail recently and I have to admit I am impressed – and here’s why.

They offer a top-notch service for beginners at the t-shirt business, they don’t drop any of the usual bombshells on you that their competitors like to do so often, right now they have just 17 brands on their books. Yes ‘brands’ – they treat each designer as a brand, just the way it should be, and I’m not sure how the application process is carried out because as far as I can tell they have a handful of superb designers on the site. (and then some not so good ;) My problem with most services of this kind is that they seem to go more for quantity over quality, some like Spreadshirt have almost abandoned the idea of supporting their creative users and simply offer a D.I.Y application for any idiot strolling by. KM seem, at least on the surface, to be pulling out all the stops in order to build up their reputation in the t-shirt industry as a truly high quality print to order t-shirt company. In fact even if you have your own stock they’ll still help you sell your wares.

Here’s a breakdown of their profit-sharing scheme:-

* If they sell one of your t-shirts at their online store you receive 32% of the income. The rest goes to cover their costs such as stock, printing, site administration and advertising.
* If they sell your brand to a boutique (shop with less than 10 stores) you receive 16% of the sale before shipping costs.
* If they sell your brand to a Medium sized Retailer (has more than 20 stores) you receive 8% of the gross sale before shipping costs.
* If they sell your brand to a Mass Retailer (has more than 200 stores) you receive 4% of the gross sale before shipping costs.
* If you’ve printed your own stuff they take a 30% commission excluding shipping and taxes (Which will be your responsibility).
*What’s more they also offer to sell your artwork at a 10% commission, plus 3% Paypal costs.

Unlike many similar companies out there they let you keep full rights to your designs which will come as a big relief to many of you I am sure. If you decide to deactivate your account they will have 60 days to fulfil any outstanding orders and then you’re free to hit out on your own. I must admit I am a little disappointed with the URL structure, if these are truly brands I’d have expected sub-domains at the very least, but that asides I doubt you’ll find a company that will go this far to placate their designers. Oh actually one more problem, a small technical error I am sure, when you select how many brands you want to see per page you get a line of PHP output, one for the programmer to take a look at there.

KM’s site is well designed, comical, humorous, quirky but clean. They even feature a brand every week at the top of their homepage, you can vote on their brands too if you need a ‘Threadless fix’. To make it real easy to get started you can read their short tutorial here. Now here’s the most important point, I get quite a few emails asking about alternatives to the usual range of high-priced graphics software packages out there, well KM have taken care of that for you too. They offer all their brands free usage of their online Phoenix image editor from Aviary.com which more than passes most people’s requirements. Imagine Photoshop 7 but a little more user friendly. So if you’re desperate to start your own t-shirt brand, are not impressed by the major print to order labels out there, then I’d recommend you follow the lead of these featured brands and set up your own at Kindred Market today! read more