Start your own apparel company?

Our machine was delivered yesterday (Friday). Give us a week to learn how to use it and we should still hit our of "end of the month" target.

What service would be better you guys?

We dropship the shirts to your customer for $10 each (plus S&H)............or

We make a really low minimum order requirement of 10 shirts for $8 each and send them to you and you handle order fulfillment.

The number and prices aren't set yet, just wondering which type of service you would prefer.

Thanks

BlackBeret: actually both serve a purpose for me. i dunno about the others. Does it have to be one of the two?

BlackBeret said:

Our machine was delivered yesterday (Friday). Give us a week to learn how to use it and we should still hit our of "end of the month" target.

What service would be better you guys?

We dropship the shirts to your customer for $10 each (plus S&H)............or

We make a really low minimum order requirement of 10 shirts for $8 each and send them to you and you handle order fulfillment.

The number and prices aren't set yet, just wondering which type of service you would prefer.

Thanks

Click to expand...

I could def use both, though I think the drop-ship option would be awesome. If you decide to do this, please let me know!

Here is a little more information:

We are not going to be hosting galleries/stores of your images.

We are not going to offer 100 different styles of shirts to print on. We are probably going to stick with the Hanes Tagless, Hanes Beefy T's, and Ringer Shirts. Ringers are the shirts with the colored neck and end of sleeve hems, and they will cost more. That is what we will stock for quick turnarounds (1 day). If you want some special kind of shirt we can probably work something out if we can get them from our supplier but it will add a few days to the order. The printing works the best on white shirts.

We are going to offer front, back and sleeve prints.

We are not going to charge your customers or provide any type of shopping cart for them. All orders must come from you.

We are kind of leaning away from the dropship one-at-a-time service because of the potential for the "I never got it". Then we would come in between you and your customers and we would rather not. We also use the PayPal shipping area to print our shipping labels and I think we can only ship to the address that the payment came from. We are still looking into it.

We are thinking of lowering our minimum to 5 or 6. It takes us about 6 minutes to set up for a shirt, and 2 minutes to make it counting the printing and heat press. So it would take us 8 minutes to make 1 and 16 minutes to make 5. So we can make 5 of one print in the time it takes to make 2 one-at-a-times. That doesn't include the time to package and print shipping labels for all the individual orders. With that low of a minimum and the quick turnaround we are hoping our customers will wait until they get an order for a shirt and order our minimum order and then fill their order to the customer and have a couple extra for a design they know sells, plus they will have some for themselves to wear.

Feel free to ask us any questions so we can work everything out.

I would prefer to use American Apparel if i were to use your service.
how do you feel about me purchasing the shirts and send them reg mail ?

how would htis effect your rate for printing as im just paying for silk screen materials at that point ?

if you just bought a machine and hope to get started in screen printing, you're going to fail. it's more than just owning a machine - it's about techniques, the inks, the different procedures, etc. i help run a screen printing operation in south florida - we ship all over the US and can even do international orders. if any of you are interested in getting shirts (as well as hoodies, jerseys, shorts, posters... anything) printed for a good price, PM me and we can work something out.

IamNomad said:

I would prefer to use American Apparel if i were to use your service.
how do you feel about me purchasing the shirts and send them reg mail ?

how would htis effect your rate for printing as im just paying for silk screen materials at that point ?

Click to expand...

we have a wholesale account with american apparel -the shirts are a bit more expensive then regular old fruit of the loom, but the quality is worth the small increase in price. PM me and we can talk.

to the person using american apparel shirts: their shirts are great, but very very pricey compared to wholesale t-shirts to be found elsewhere. it is actually much cheaper to have someone custom sew your shirts for you (if you are doing a large amount).
American Apparel is one of the priciest wholesale blank shirts out there -- i used to do merch for bands and one band insisted on using american apparel always and those cost at least triple what the average tee costs.

as far as starting your own brand, i'd suggest setting up your own webstore at first. don't think you can just start off and go approaching retailers. start making a name for yourself, and then start searching out trade shows to show off your line and network. make contacts, get some retail customers, and go from there.

it won't happen overnight - i know someone who went from selling a few tshirts out of a briefcase on tour with his band to owning a multi-million dollar clothing line with stores in boston and LA, but it took him the better part of a decade to get to where he's at today.

We had to push it back a couple of days, we are waiting on one more small piece of equipment. The one shipped was damaged and we are waiting on a replacement.

Gee Slick, thanks for the vote of confidence.

if you just bought a machine and hope to get started in screen printing, you're going to fail

Click to expand...

Trust me, we know what we are doing. If you read my posts a little more closely you would probably know we're not doing what your quote refers to. We really have no interest in getting into retail stores any time soon. Unfortunately we aren't very good graphic artists and would rather print shirts for other people.

We are in South Florida also, PM me your city and we will see how close we are. Maybe we can meet for lunch sometime and do some business together.

I'm going to guess your suitcase story is Johnny Cupcakes.

We'll have to look into the AA requests. The bad thing is we don't stock them and if we mess one up we'll have to re-order blanks to replace them which adds time and other things. Maybe we'll keep a dozen of each size in stock and see what happens. We just got our order of 600 (50 doz) Gildans in various sizes and a couple dozen of the ringers.

My partner just launched a WSO for our shirt company. We have also added an affiliate program.

We are just trying this offer to get our feet wet.

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior...ess-offline-make-money-affiliate-program.html