If you're ready to start a tshirt business, you should consider the following:
Shop around to purchase the lowest priced, best quality tshirts – shop around on the internet at places like Shirt Champ. Also look for blank canvas tote bags, baseball caps, jackets, sweatshirts, pillow casings, dog coats, and more at wholesale prices.
Look for great transfer designs or design your own. There are thousands of designs to choose from and lots of categories to choose from at sites like this one: Art Brands. It is nice to offer your clients a selection of quality transfers. You should also provide them with instructions if they want to use their own transfer design.
You will need a merchant account. You can start with your local bank, or you can sign up for PayPal, or shop for the best prices online at sites like Authorize.net, Paypal, merchantexpress.com, Goemerchant.com and more.
You will need a website and hosting. There are several ways to approach this. You can set up a wordpress blog with a custom interface quickly and very cheaply, but if you want to sell online, you will have to set up a shopping cart and a payment gateway like Authorize.net or PayPal. We highly recommend hostmysite.com and GoDaddy.com, which have affordable and scalable hosting packages.
You need a marketing plan. Part of the plan will be to get your site to rank well on search engines, run pay per click advertising, and use social sites to market on the internet. You can find great discussions about marketing your tshirt company on the tshirt forums here: http://www.t-shirtforums.com/t-shirt-marketing/t7533.html. Another part of your marketing plan will be to find local churches, sports teams, companies and other groups who will purchase bulk tshirt orders. In order to do this you will want your website to have a good local presence on Google maps, Yahoo local and MSN Live.
You may want to sign up with a "call center" to take phone orders 24 hours a day- 7 days a week. You can start with a service like OneBox.com which routes all your calls from an 888 number to your cell phone, and work your way up to a fully staffed call center like http://www.goacanow.com/. At that point, you'll never have to speak with a customer! The call center will know everything about your product, to include wholesale prices, quantity discount rates, etc... They will even charge your customers credit card - you won't have to do a thing! Big orders typically come by phone so you better have someone in place to answer it when it rings.
There are really two ways to run the business. You can outsource all your tshirt production to a place like CafePress.com or you can make an investment in equipment and use your basement or garage to set up shop. You will need to purchase a Heatpress Transfer Machine that is at least 16" x 20" in order to create large items such as t-shirts and jackets. The transfer press is heavy duty and equipped with an automatic timer that lets you know when the shirts are done. Take a look at the presses at http://www.hotronix.com/.
Shop around to purchase the lowest priced, best quality tshirts – shop around on the internet at places like Shirt Champ. Also look for blank canvas tote bags, baseball caps, jackets, sweatshirts, pillow casings, dog coats, and more at wholesale prices.
Look for great transfer designs or design your own. There are thousands of designs to choose from and lots of categories to choose from at sites like this one: Art Brands. It is nice to offer your clients a selection of quality transfers. You should also provide them with instructions if they want to use their own transfer design.
You will need a merchant account. You can start with your local bank, or you can sign up for PayPal, or shop for the best prices online at sites like Authorize.net, Paypal, merchantexpress.com, Goemerchant.com and more.
You will need a website and hosting. There are several ways to approach this. You can set up a wordpress blog with a custom interface quickly and very cheaply, but if you want to sell online, you will have to set up a shopping cart and a payment gateway like Authorize.net or PayPal. We highly recommend hostmysite.com and GoDaddy.com, which have affordable and scalable hosting packages.
You need a marketing plan. Part of the plan will be to get your site to rank well on search engines, run pay per click advertising, and use social sites to market on the internet. You can find great discussions about marketing your tshirt company on the tshirt forums here: http://www.t-shirtforums.com/t-shirt-marketing/t7533.html. Another part of your marketing plan will be to find local churches, sports teams, companies and other groups who will purchase bulk tshirt orders. In order to do this you will want your website to have a good local presence on Google maps, Yahoo local and MSN Live.
You may want to sign up with a "call center" to take phone orders 24 hours a day- 7 days a week. You can start with a service like OneBox.com which routes all your calls from an 888 number to your cell phone, and work your way up to a fully staffed call center like http://www.goacanow.com/. At that point, you'll never have to speak with a customer! The call center will know everything about your product, to include wholesale prices, quantity discount rates, etc... They will even charge your customers credit card - you won't have to do a thing! Big orders typically come by phone so you better have someone in place to answer it when it rings.
There are really two ways to run the business. You can outsource all your tshirt production to a place like CafePress.com or you can make an investment in equipment and use your basement or garage to set up shop. You will need to purchase a Heatpress Transfer Machine that is at least 16" x 20" in order to create large items such as t-shirts and jackets. The transfer press is heavy duty and equipped with an automatic timer that lets you know when the shirts are done. Take a look at the presses at http://www.hotronix.com/.
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