(Journey) T-shirt Printful Adventure.

I think this will be the first real journey that I have done here on BHW, some fizzled out very quickly but I hope this one will be here to stay.

I'm going to start a t-shirt shop on Shopify and possibly list the products on other marketplaces like Etsy too. We made the decision to start this up tonight to give us an income that is a lot more passive. This should give us more time to enjoy and improve our land. We hope to have a fully functioning shop that is making sales by the end of the week. We can easily maintain it with our potentially limited internet and MacDonalds wifi runs

We are right at this very moment choosing a name for the business and will be making a list of all of the things we want to get done over the next few days to launch. We will be starting off with a really simple concept of text based designs and will try and create at least 24 listings to launch. We will aim to launch Wednesday morning and get any bugs out before doing lots of promotion on the weekend.

I'll keep a record of everything spent. If anyone can list a few good threads I should read I would appreciate it. I have been looking at a few threads and have learned some valuable tips. I look forward to putting them into practice along with some ideas of my own. I'll post more tomorrow after I have started setting up the foundation of the business. As soon as it is open I will spend a few days creating designs and uploading as many as I can to gain traction. We have done ZERO so far, we have wasted way too much time thinking of a name already. It's 11pm here so I expect we will both be up for hours setting up social media and creating some content for promotion.

I hope that the info I share over the coming months is useful to you. If you have any questions or comments please post them below and I will answer what I can.

I would like to make a goal of $10,000 revenue by the end of the year. Hopefully with it being the best part of the year for sales that will be achievable. I think that this is a sensible goal to have from a standing start. I would love to say $50,000 but I have never sold t-shits like this before so I'm sure there will be a steep learning curve this close to the holidays.

Wish me luck.

Good luck! Will be following.

Are you designing them yourself?

Also, how many designs/week (or month) do you plan to put out?

My Brother her in third world country made exactly like this he handle printing the margin of the shirt is very low now he Target resellers because this
one brings more Huge order in a Daily Basis! he has now 20 employee non stop printing of shirts with designs because he targets resellers better than 1 or 2 buyers. and he uses fb ads non stop everyday Hope this one help on your strategy

All the best William. I own a POD and can offer a more economical and flexible alternate than Printful. Please check your PM

spazzumes said:

Good luck! Will be following.

Are you designing them yourself?

Also, how many designs/week (or month) do you plan to put out?

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Thank you. Yeah my wife and I will do everything in terms of the designs. That's a really good question, I should set a daily/weekly goal for new designs. I have not done this yet but I will so I'll put it on my list.

Speedlearner said:

My Brother her in third world country made exactly like this he handle printing the margin of the shirt is very low now he Target resellers because this
one brings more Huge order in a Daily Basis! he has now 20 employee non stop printing of shirts with designs because he targets resellers better than 1 or 2 buyers. and he uses fb ads non stop everyday Hope this one help on your strategy

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Thank you, yes I do plan on setting up Facebook ads for the first time ever. I'm sure there is a lot to learn about that too. There are so many rabbit holes with this. For this first venture I will target retail customers as opposed to re-sellers though. However I'm glad you said that, it's definitely something to think about in the future.

Jeevs said:

All the best William. I own a POD and can offer a more economical and flexible alternate than Printful. Please check your PM

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Thank you, however for this first time venture I have already decided to use printful due to it's integrations. I very much appreciate the offer and I'll definitely check out your PM.

I kiss you with the amulet of good dog t-shirt luck dear.

Good luck on your journey, mate. There are plenty of other POD services out there, why are you only going with Printful? Is it better than others or offers higher commissions?

Good luck to you mate! Be strong. I was doing smth like that but I can't handle this empty space before the real earnings start. It's frustrating for me and I can't keep up with the work. I see your situation as a goo example how it should be done, I think it is pretty hard to make it all alone. Following this journey maybe I will get some encouragement from your story.

Following. I am planning to do this method next year for local market. Create lot of design, upload in 5 different marketplace in my country. Wish u gud luck.

Neon said:

I kiss you with the amulet of good dog t-shirt luck dear.

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Thank you

V said:

Good luck on your journey, mate. There are plenty of other POD services out there, why are you only going with Printful? Is it better than others or offers higher commissions?

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I'm not only going with Printful. Just going with them this first time to get a better understanding of the space. I have had several offers from other members however I feel Printful is a trusted company that is also integrated into the marketplaces I want to use. It is based in the US, the shipping is more economical and faster compared to some of the other offers I have had. I think I will have an easier time scaling with them too. That said I am new to this so I'm sure I will learn a lot along the way and find other suppliers that can meet my needs just as well as Printful can. Plus as this is a journey I thought I had better use a system and tools that others could potentially follow and use.

letuvis said:

Good luck to you mate! Be strong. I was doing smth like that but I can't handle this empty space before the real earnings start. It's frustrating for me and I can't keep up with the work. I see your situation as a goo example how it should be done, I think it is pretty hard to make it all alone. Following this journey maybe I will get some encouragement from your story.

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Thankfully I think I am getting started at the right time, if not a little late. I have a few plans for the initial push to get the shop off to a good start, then as soon as the holidays roll around I should have a good foundation to work with.

nawza21 said:

Following. I am planning to do this method next year for local market. Create lot of design, upload in 5 different marketplace in my country. Wish u gud luck.

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Thank you, I wish you luck too.

Here is a quick update. I plan to do this all in a bootstrap way. I wont be investing tons of money, just the basics and growing it from there. I will of course reinvest as much as I can in the first few months. I'll also keep a running total of revenue and expenditure on each post. If I can do this with no buudget I will scale it up and invest more. I want to get my feet wet first.

Things I have done:

Decide on name
Purchase domain name
Create Facebook page
Create Twitter profile
Create Pinterest account
Create Instagram profile
Create Gmail account
Create Youtube channel
Create Google+ profile
Create Google Analytics account
Create database on Google Sheets
Create Etsy shop
Create Printful account
Create Shopify site (still a lot of work needed to finish)
Sync Printful with Etsy shop
Sync Printful with Shopify site
Create top 12 designs

Things I need to do:

Find source for model images, templates that are high quality that I can overlay the designs on to have as the product image.
Make a list of 20 relevant subreddits to post in.
Make a list of 20 relevant Youtube channels to comment on.
Create a custom follow/unfollow bot, favoriting bot and forum comment bot for Etsy.
Create 100 designs.
Find 20 niche specific Pinterest group boards.
Find 20 niche specific Facebook groups.
Find 20 nice specific Facebook pages.
Follow 500 relevant users on Twitter.
Build out the Pinterest profile and invite it to generic gift and shopping boards.
Purchase top 12 designs on Printful as samples and to use as props with models on the Vegas strip.
Set up generic community Facebook pages for T-shirts as well as group boards on Pinterest and profiles on Instagram for promotional use.
and some stuff I don't really want to mention as it would give away too many of my key bootstrapping resources.

Running Total:
Expenditure $20.16
Revenue $0.00

Since you're going for the low investment route, have you tried affiliate marketing (having influencers as affilitates to your shop)?

salaheddine said:

Since you're going for the low investment route, have you tried affiliate marketing (having influencers as affilitates to your shop)?

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Yes I have tried them before, but not with T-shirts. I had over 400 affiliates for my cosmetics business so I know how valuable they can be. I'm sure I will find some affiliates for this business too but it's far easier in the beauty niche.

William702 said:

Yes I have tried them before, but not with T-shirts. I had over 400 affiliates for my cosmetics business so I know how valuable they can be. I'm sure I will find some affiliates for this business too but it's far easier in the beauty niche.

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Thank you for your reply, I'm starting a clothing store as well. Did you have to send free samples to your affiliates before or did thet agree to promote your products without samples?

salaheddine said:

Thank you for your reply, I'm starting a clothing store as well. Did you have to send free samples to your affiliates before or did thet agree to promote your products without samples?

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Yes in some cases, in others they just started promoting right away

Much different approach to my methods, I'd like to trade info with you, there are things I can help you with and things you could help me with, mind if I PM you? Iv been on this journey for a year or so.

lostchoas said:

Much different approach to my methods, I'd like to trade info with you, there are things I can help you with and things you could help me with, mind if I PM you? Iv been on this journey for a year or so.

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Sure feel free to PM me, but I will say this. I have had several messages from users already stating the same thing and then when I get the message it's really just them asking me a ton of questions. So if you have any questions please feel free to ask them here as I dont have time to answer people individually in PM's. If however you have something to share and you don't want to post it in the public thread please feel free to get in touch. Looking forward to hearing from you.

After thinking it over I'm going to change things up a little.

I'm going to open two shops, both can sell a lot of the same designs with no problem. I'll just use different image templates for each shop so that they look different. I'm doing this because I have seen so many examples over the last 24 hours of shops that seem to be all over the rankings that do things one way, and other shops that I personally thought would have ranked higher nowhere to be found. The ones all over the rankings seem to have done no work with social media and dont use any of the features on marketplaces like Etsy to promote their products. I'm shocked at how well some of these shops are doing. With that in mind I will be running ads on the second shop and not bothering with any of the other promotional activities.

So this will be a split test of sorts. One way will be growth hacking/bootstrapping and the other way will be straight up investment in ads. I'm in the middle of doing what I said I would do for the first business on this second business such as setting up all the social media and databases to track things. All the research work can be used by both businesses. I'm getting some nice logos made on Fiverr for this second brand too. (before you ask I have several accounts with money in them I need to spend so that's why I'm using Fiverr)

I don't have much time for updates and going over everything I have done in this early stage step by step so I'll continue to get some work done and report back when I have something meaningful to share.

Running Total:
Expenditure $54.48
Revenue $0.00

William702 said:

After thinking it over I'm going to change things up a little.

I'm going to open two shops, both can sell a lot of the same designs with no problem. I'll just use different image templates for each shop so that they look different.
So this will be a split test of sorts. One way will be growth hacking/bootstrapping and the other way will be straight up investment in ads.

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This is getting interesting! It's turning into a case study of sorts. I very much look forward to hearing of your updates and results. Good luck!

Good Luck with your journey, man!

Btw, did you find any good sources? Mind sharing them?

William702 said:

Find source for model images, templates that are high quality that I can overlay the designs on to have as the product image.

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