How To Build A T-Shirt Business in 24 Hours

As an entrepreneur, I find it hard to do nothing. I always want to be building something. I need to be building something. That’s why, during the process of documenting #TheGreatBuild project I became frustrated so many times.

One evening while I was waiting and I really couldn’t move forward on the project. I was frustrated. I made a decision to build another ecommerce business

The Background Story

For those that are maybe just reading my blog for the first time and don’t know, my new ecommerce business which I have been documenting through a blog series called #TheGreatBuild is called Finch Goods Co. Many people have asked me where the name Finch came from and why I choose Finch Goods for the name of my new business. Truth be told, it was the name of the street I grew up on. It was the place I lived, the place I played, and it was the place of my first dozen entrepreneurial endeavors, mostly in the form of lemonade stands, vegetable stands, a makeshift hockey card pawnshop and garage sales. The name Finch Goods Co. is a tribute to my early entrepreneur days.

Finch is also the name of the closest subway/bus station, and up until I had a car, it was my access point to the rest of the world. If I wanted to go anywhere I passed through Finch Station.

Because of my sentimental attachment to Finch I designed a t-shirt based on the typography, colors and tile pattern of that station in late February.

Fast Forward

Fast forward a few weeks to a night in April. I was working on #TheGreatBuild project (Finch Goods Co.) and getting close to launching. However, I was stuck. Everything was ready to go except I was waiting on some inventory I intended to launch with from a supplier. I had nothing to do.

As an entrepreneur, nothing to do is a terrible feeling. It feels it exact opposite of progress, probably because it is. Growing anxious to launch Finch Goods Co. and not being able to, I stared blankly at my computer for a few minutes, my screened darkened and went to sleep. In the reflection of my black screen, I saw my shirt, Finch.

Remembering the few compliments I got on the shirt I wondered if people actually were interested in hyper-local t-shirts that represented their local community, right down to their local subway station.

Validation

The idea of hyper-local t-shirts was one I was sure people were interested in. Our city definitely has a lot of pride and after some cursory Google searches, I found nothing similar. The closest was a series of vinyl wall decals with the various stations typography. Searching for that companies name on Google I found several online news articles about them. They had been running their business for 5+ years so in theory they were doing well.

The thought of getting wrapped up in a new business while still trying to launch Finch Goods Co. was a little intimidating. My time was very limited at this point. Because of this, I came to the decision. If I were to build a new business there would be several rules:

• I had 24 hours to build it – No more, no less.
• It had to be fully automated once live.

Under these rules, building the entire business would essentially act in-itself as the validation.

It’s Go Time… 23:59

With these rules in mind there were several things to figure out:

1. Which ecommerce platform was I going to use?
2. How would I print the t-shirts and ship them in a automated way?

For me, number one was easy. Unless number two forced my hand another direction, I would use Shopify. It’s the platform I know and love, it’s the easiest to use in my opinion and it offered the most amount of app integrations, which I knew is likely where I would find a dropshipping company to print and ship custom shirts for me.

I immediately headed to the Shopify App Store and searched for “t-shirts“. The search returned approximately six t-shirt printers/dropshippers. After scanning through all of them, their integrations, their t-shirt options and pricing, I decided on Printful. Printful it seemed had the most seamless integration, best selection of shirts and reasonable pricing. They also had the ability to print other products like canvas prints and bags should I ever decide to expand my product offering.

With my ecommerce platform and printer/dropshipper decided upon, it was time to work on the designs. Now, Toronto has over 60 stations and I completely underestimated how grueling and exhausting it would be to design all 60, luckily, many of the designs had a similar style. Over the next 6 hours I cranked out all 60 designs for almost all of the stations.

With all 60 designs complete, I thought I was done. However, I quickly realized that very few people would buy a design without knowing how it looked on a t-shirt. With that in mind, I headed over to my favorite graphic design marketplace, Creative Market. I searched for “t-shirt template” and quickly found a really slick template for $8.

Now that I had the t-shirt template and all my files, it was once again a manual process of applying all 60 of my designs to the t-shirt template and saving each file.

With all my t-shirt designs completed, it was time to build the website. I signed up for Shopify’s 14-day trial and got to work. I already had a theme I had purchased for Finch Goods Co. so I might as well use it for this project as well. When it came naming a business, I know it can sometimes take weeks. I didn’t have that long. I decided to allocate 3 minutes to naming this business. As confusing as this was (mostly for my friends and family) I decided to call this business, Finch’s. Again, this was named after the street I grew up on, the subway station closes to my childhood home and, it just so happens that Finch Station is the first station on the subway line.

Finally, after 5 coffee’s and close to 14 hours straight, Finch’s was born:

The last step before I launch and market my new online store was to integrate my store with Printful. This was an easy enough process. I installed the Printful Shopify App, and from there it automatically pulled in all my products. All I had to do at that point was upload the design file to each product and select the type/style of shirt I was going to use.

Marketing

At this point, I was pretty tired and really had no idea what I was going to do for my marketing. However, I did remember that just the previous week, the subway celebrated its 60th anniversary. Could I use this to my advantage? I did some searches on Google to see who covered this event. One stuck out immediately. It was a pretty popular local online blog and they just wrote an article about the subway systems 60th anniversary. I figured the author of that post might want to hear about to my newly released shirts.

I found the author on Twitter and asked for his email address. Later that evening, I emailed him the following:

Within the hour he replied asking a few more questions. It was late and I was exhausted. I decided to leave the response until the morning. Besides, I still had a few things left to set up in my Shopify account before launch.

The next day, I woke up to the dinging sound of emails coming into my phone, *ding*… *ding*… *ding*. After ignoring the first few, I finally rolled over and checked my phone. To my surprise it was a bunch of emails from customers asking about my shirts, shipping and pricing… customers? I haven’t even officially launched yet!

I quickly opened my laptop and discovered a big spike in traffic to my site. Although I had not “officially” launched, my site was live, however, I still had not turned on checkout, so no one could actually checkout.

First priority was to turn checkout on and complete a test order to make sure everything was no working. After I did that, I checked to see where the traffic was coming from. Turns out, the writer went ahead without my email responses and published a post about my store.

Here was his post, click through to read:

I also received a handful of other emails from people interested in collaborations and promotions with my line of tee’s.    

Furthermore,that day  I also received some favorable social media mentions from BlogTO as well as a local Hip Hop radio station and a handful of other locals.

Costs & Sales

I have broken down my total costs below for this 24 hour business. My fixed costs amounted to a staggering $24. My variable costs were $13 per shirt to print each. My revenues for the first 24 hours of business were $347.71 for a total profit (in the first 24 hours) of $210.71

Total Costs:
$16 – Font for Typography (Fixed Cost)
$8 – T-Shirt Mockup Template (Fixed Cost)
$104 – 8 x $13 for t-shirts and printing (Variable costs)
____________________________
$137 Total Costs

Total Revenue In The First 24 Hours:
$347.71

Admittedly, after the spike in sales from the initial media coverage, sales dropped. In fact, since that first 24 hour sales period, I’ve only made a few hundred more dollars, however, I have done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and everything is 100% automated. I have not, and I have no need to login to anything for sales and orders to be taken care of.

Going Forward

Since my initial email that sparked my initial sales I haven’t done anything else for marketing. That one blog post continues to deliver a small trickle of sales each week. Most of my time now is spent on my new project, Finch Goods Co. so I have almost no time left for this project. However, when I do get some time, I am going to focus on SEO around some keywords I uncovered that I believe have potential to deliver a steady stream of high quality traffic for people looking for localized Toronto t-shirts. Again, I want to keep this project as automated as possible so SEO is going to be the biggest opportunity to achieving that.

Why You Should Start An Online T-Shirt Business Right Now

T-Shirt entrepreneurs get a bad rep (I’m looking at you reddit) however, I believe t-shirt businesses play an important part of the online entrepreneurship ecosystem. They are in many respects, a modern day lemonade stand (no pun intended), they are can be started quickly and with no money.

The biggest problem I find among online entrepreneurs is:

1. They don’t know what to sell online – They spend months and months looking for a product, before giving up.
2. If they do find a great product and start their first business, they have no idea how properly market their product and business to drive traffic and convert that traffic to sales thus a great product or idea is squandered.

Starting a t-shirt business helps with both of those factors. First, if you’re struggling to find a product to sell, you will automatically have a product, t-shirts (these printer/dropshippers also usually offer other products as well, like canvas prints, mugs etc.). Second, an online t-shirt business gives you a way to start understanding online marketing, before you sink some real time and money into a more serious business.

Remember, and never forget, you’ll learn 100x more from actually starting a business, than you ever will from just consuming articles, blogs, books and podcasts. There is no substitution for real world experience of building traffic and learning to convert it.

How To Start An Online T-Shirt Business Right Now

The 3 Pillars of Success

Before starting your own online dropship t-shirt business, there are three important things to consider:

• Niche: Choosing a niche is absolutely vital for success in the over-saturated t-shirt industry.
• Design: No one will buy your shirts if the designs don’t look good. This doesn’t mean you need to have complex images though and it doesn’t mean it has to cost a lot.
• Quality: This includes the quality of the t-shirts themselves as well as the printing.

Choosing Your Ecommerce Platform 

There are plenty of options available for your actual selling platform. Platforms like Teespring have become popular lately, however, options like this aren’t good if you’re trying to learn more about digital marketing and branding. Going with a platform like Teespring means your product ideas live on the Teespring platform and doesn’t give you the option for your own branding, deep analytics or conversion optimization.

If you’re serious about building a brand or learning more about digital marketing & optimization and strategy, you need to go with a more customizable option. I can’t recommend Shopify enough. Not only is Shopify one of the easiest platforms to get started with but it’s app store is the most robust and has a host of integrated t-shirt printers and dropshippers.

Choosing a Printers/Dropshipper

There are a few considerations when choosing a printer/dropshipping partner for your new online t-shirt business. These considerations include the t-shirts they have available to print on, t-shirt/print pricing, shipping pricing and quality of t-shirt prints.

Check out the following Shopify printer/dropshipper apps:

• Print Aura
• Printful
• Merchify

Choosing A T-Shirt

If using a printer/dropshipping like I did, you t-shirt selection (type/style/quality) will partially depend on what you printing/shipping partner have chosen to stock. Most will provide a range of shirts to cover several levels of quality and price points.

USA made American Apparel is largely considered the best quality however if comes with a much steeper price point which will significantly cut into your margins. For my 24 hours business, I went with a medium quality/price t-shirt style/brand.

You can choose to order a few samples before deciding on your t-shirt but I would recommend you check out this review guide on the most popular t-shirts for printing to get started.

Mocking Up Your Designs

There are literally hundreds of t-shirt mock-up templates available online, both free and paid. Here’s a list of 50 free templates, or if you want to use the same one I did, just go to Creative Market and search for “Realistic-T-Shirt-Templates”. It should be the first one.

Step-By-Step Video

Followup Learnings And Resource Roundup:

If you are too lazy to read everything above, I have rounded up all the resources below that you can use to build your own online t-shirt store, fast!

Start by reading this (I wrote it):

• How To Start An Online T-Shirt Business: The Ultimate Guide

Take these courses. They are cheap and should help:

• A Staple of Branding: How to Start Your Fashion Company by Jeff Staple, Founder, Staple Design.
• Hey, Cool Shirt: Designing Effective T-shirt Graphics by Chris Delorenzo, Lead Designer for Johnny Cupcakes.

Build your store with:

• Shopify (14 day trial)

Choose a t-shirt printer/dropshipper:

• Printful
• Gooten
• Merchify

To choose a t-shirt blank, check out this T-Shirt quality reviews guide:

• Picking The Perfect T-Shirt Blank

Inspiration for t-shirt designs can be found here:

• Teeview
• Zazzle Bestsellers & Zazzle Popular
• Redbubble Popular
• Skreened Trending Shirts
• Snorg Bestsellers
• Kickstarter T-Shirt Campaigns

If you need to hire a designer, try these services:

• Dribbble
• Behance
• Freelancer
• Elance

Or, be lazy and buy some designs from here:

• Designious
• T-Shirt Factory

You may also want to check out general graphic design marketplaces but keep in mind if you plan to sell your t-shirts, you’ll need to purchase a commercial license.

• Creative Market
• Graphic River

Mock up templates for your shirt designs can be found here:

• GraphicRiver T-Shirt Mockups
• Design Inspiration Magazine – 40 T-Shirt Mockups
• Design Bolts – 50 T-Shirt Mockups
• (Web Based) Shirt Mockup

Another great options for tasks like this is to enlist help from someone on Fiverr for $5. Just search for t-shirt mockups.

Conclusion

There you have it. A new business born in 24 hours with only $24. All in all, I had fun building it. The challenge of building a fully automated business in 24 hours was pretty exciting and the fact I was able to generate over $300 in sales in the first day was well beyond my expectations.

Granted, this business will never make me rich and margins are generally slim however, as I pointed out before, I firmly believe a t-shirt business has it’s purpose, even if that purpose is just practicing for something bigger.

Now it’s your turn. If you’ve been thinking of starting an online business but have been stuck in the “I don’t know what to sell” stage for more than a few months,  I am challenging you to build a a t-shirt business, for no reason other than to start. Start building something, start marketing something, start converting something. Start.

Go!

I Will Be A Success, I Am A Success

Prosper While You Sleep!

Good Day Women of Excellence,

ProsperWUS

I am sharing this amazing ebook with you, Prosper While You Sleep, by Michael Lee. It is filled with eye-opening mind-shifting and journey soaring real life short stories and strategies that can help you prosper while you sleep!!! 

I received this ebook from Mr. Lee a little while and it is absolutely a phenomenal read. 

I hope you will take the time to read Prosper While You Sleep at your leisure as it will make an enormous impact in every area of your business and life. I hope you enjoy it and apply at least some of the strategies listed throughout the book.

ProsperWUS

You will find your saying being a greater success than you already are!

Blessings,

Cynthia

Or Is Your Business In The Perfect Place

Should you be further along in business?

Are you asking yourself this on a weekly or perhaps monthly basis? Maybe you’re saying to yourself, I should have been rich a long time ago?

Here’s the thing; you, God’s Virtuous Women Entrepreneurs, are already rich. We all have always been rich. What makes us rich. There are many factors that make you rich.

Let’s Dive in and Discover What Those Wealth Building Business Components Are.

For one, we are awesome women of God shaped in His image. Secondly, we have within us the great ability to accomplish our goals effortlessly because we do what we love and we love what we do. Thirdly, we have been equipped with all of the components necessary to erect buildings while at the same time building our stand alone empires.

Listen, when you decided to start your business, it was right then and there that you made a wise choice and that choice should have led you to a rich reservoir of abundance and prosperity to change your life. Your reservoir is like a bank vault that contains infinite wealth and never ending possibilities. Your wealth and riches get replenished every time you delve into them. They are there for you to use and everyday you should be tapping into and pulling out whatever you need to build your empires. These essential resources are a part of your overflowing and abundant wealth.

Plan and Incorporate

If you incorporate the tools of gifts, talents, skills, ability, infinite potential and knowledge that God has so graciously gifted you and apply understanding into your businesses you are going to experience, encounter and enjoy the fruits that come from working your businesses.

It is also important for you to implement God’s principles into your businesses that you can use as your compass to help guide you as you brilliantly navigate your entrepreneurial journey blazing your brand, YOU!

Believe

During this amazing season of harvest, it would be wise for you to promote your businesses to the masses to help grow it exponentially. You have all of the tools and resources along with the courage and confidence instilled within you. You just have to make up your mind to do it and use your heart to execute it.

What are you waiting for Entrepreneurs?  Don’t be afraid to do what God is calling you to do.  After all, He has equipped you to be great and do phenomenal things. This is your set time in a season that is telling you to roar and soar! I believe in you. I hope you believe in you too!!!!

Trust in Him,

Cynthia

How and Why I Started My Businesses

With thoughts of helping stay at home become work at home moms, I created and designed Moms in Slippers to do just that.

The Closed Door

After being terminated from my position as program coordinator of the Internal Medicine Residency Program I went home and stayed home. Determined to start my own business I began typing and transcribing various reports and term papers for professors and students.

Magic Fingers, as I was called at my place of employment, was birthed and I was excited. Right after its birth I discovered the gift of design. My days at the hospital taught me much more than just typing a schedule. It taught me that I had infinite potential to get wealth. What I did not know was that wealth had been in me all of my life.

During my time in the Department of Medicine I was told that I would be responsible for typing up the residents’ monthly schedule. On a typewriter. If I made a typo I would have to get white out or tape to correct my typos. Unacceptable to me and beyond time consuming, I decided to type the schedules on the computer not knowing anything about the computer.

Lessons Learned.

Even though I had no clue as to how to use a computer or how type a schedule on the computer, much less in portrait or landscape form, I was committed to making the schedules look professional and easier to read than the antiquated method that was in place. The other secretary was totally against me making this change, but I felt it was necessary. It was then that world war 3 broke out, but it was also right then and there that my whole new amazing world of doors started opening up for my good. People who worked in the hospital started coming to me for my computer expertise and I was elated to share my knowledge with them. Even some doctors inquired about my computer savviness. I was doing typing work for doctors at home and was making a lot of money. So when I was terminated from my job because of the major changes had taken place I welcomed the close door. I had just lost my father and my young school-aged children needed my presence at home.

Starting To See Clearly

When I was let go from my position I collected unemployment for almost a year. This gave me ample time to figure out what I was going to do with my life. I knew working for someone else was not an option for me until I was forced to find work due to my inconsistencies running my business. I took a job at an elementary school doing absolutely nothing which paid me $11.95 an hour. This was extremely difficult for me because I was accustomed to being home, but hubby and I had just bought a new home and we needed the money. I can honestly see why some people get divorced over their financial struggles. I thank God that this was not in His great plans for my life.

I worked this embarrassing and demeaning job for a year and quit. I just could not continue driving to a job that had no substance. I decided that I was going to start, grow, work and promote my business like never before. That was until depression crept in. I was so down and out that I didn’t know which way too turn. Most of my adult life has been me trying to find my way. First of all let me say this. I had no faith in myself, in God, my skills nor my abilities, but this was because I had no idea what faith meant. I never heard the word faith growing up even though I attended Sunday School and church on a regular basis. I don’t think my friends knew anything about having faith.

Slowly Building my Businesses Through Faith

I grew up in a very loving Christian home with two of the most phenomenal parents ever to grace my life and this planet. The neighbors and their children adored and loved my mother and father as did I. Let me tell you that having faith in God is imperative to your life if you have plans to soar forward in your business.

Back to my depressed state. I was too depressed to do anything in terms of running my business although I had a reservoir of resources available to me I was just down from not being able to generate the kind of money I envisioned. I desperately need to have income flowing into our home.

Now in our new home with a $2000 mortgage I had to get this thing called my life together. It was then that I started to piece together Cyndi’s Digital Palette which quickly became Cyndi’s Light Work Designz. I started getting calls from customers, but it was totally and completely opposite of what my goals were for my design business. I was trying to sell art work, but customers wanted me to create works of art for their businesses such as headers, buttons and even website design and I was happy to do it.

Getting My Wealth

I realized my design business had the potential to be greater. I saw the potential to have fountains, not streams, pouring from and into my design business for years to come. It was then that I opened up a few online stores as well as tee shirts stores. I did very well with my online businesses and I was/am and have always been grateful because you see, throughout all that I have done and been through I have learned how to use my God given gifts to bless others. I love to share my business savvy with other women and young teenage girls. I love being able to share priceless information that is of great value to others who have plans of starting a business. I think it’s important to share what God has gifted us. It’s important for me to give from my heart, truth and sincerity. This is the reason God’s Virtuous Women Entrepreneurs was founded. I wanted to share my own life and business experiences with you because I believe in my heart that it will be to you amazing, life changing and business building lessons.

Let me tell you that I absolutely love what I have been called to do which is to bless, warm and transform women’s lives while helping them to erect buildings and create and design businesses in a profound and impactful way. For me business is more than just your regular social media, email marketing, newsletters and every other normal business component that can drive traffic to your website and make you money. I will always believe that business is all about writing masterpieces, speaking encouraging words into your mind allowing them to sink deep into your heart while clothing and feeding your entrepreneurial spirit you work to build your empires. It is also about journaling. Oh the importance of journaling. It is you writing in your journal those things that have given you the power and positive mindset that promises to take you into greater while being awesome women of God and doing phenomenally brilliant things that can shape and hold up your business on a firm, rock solid foundation where God has placed His name and can never be shaken.

And so Moms in Slippers came into existence as did Magic Fingers Secretarial Services and from there Cyndi’s Designz followed and now Beauty and the Face, Love for the Skin, my new line of body butter cream in addition to my blogs that thrive and have their being. Now, with a new year and season preparing to make its entrance into our lives I am excited to give you a little more when the time presents itself to prayerfully gift to you.  I hope you accept it.

As one of the greatest entertainers told Miss Katherine, his mother, he was filled with music, I too am filled with so much wealth I have to use it and as I use it I just keep getting more. How I balance it all is another story for another new brand.

Be blessed.

Cynthia Boyer

TH-6-Sample-Marketing-Plans-eBook-1

Thrive Hive

Marketing Plan Specialists

Let’s Journal!

Journaling is a great way to help you to stay focused on your goals.  It’s also an amazing to manifest your dreams. 

COMING SOON!