Why traditionally selling tshirts sucks I’ve been running Facebook pages in many different niches since 2011. Since that time i’ve experimented with various ways to make money from my pages, and have been quite successful in simply promoting affiliate products all by themselves. I started promoting Amazon products like bumper stickers, niche specific books, and the one item which has sold more than any other for me.. tshirts. Out of all of the products I was selling through Amazon, tshirts always sold the best. The problem however was that instead of getting a decent commission on these sales, the measly 68% from Amazon wasn’t making it a very profitable option overall.
This was the point in which I got the bright idea to cut Amazon out of the process completely and just sell them myself.
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I was quite successful selling tshirts on my own. I set up a shopify store and linked it to my paypal and then eventually to a stamps.com account where I could print out my own labels etc. so that I could run it all on my own. Having all the orders go through my own store was pretty exciting at first. I sold nearly 200 shirts in the span of a weekend, and then I was left to actually pack and ship all of these shirts.. on my own. After printing what seemed like a billion labels and weighing and packing them up I STILL had to take them to the post office to be shipped away. While the profits were much better than what Amazon could provide, it was still a ton of work and required a full time dedication if I was going to be doing all the work by myself. At this point I was stuck. If I left it in the hands of Amazon to do all the selling and shipping, i’d get cents on the dollar for my promotional efforts.. not worth it. On the other hand, if I did all the work myself i’d make substantially more cash, but i’d be a slave to the work required to make it successful. meh... I simply didn’t have the time to dedicate hours each day picking, packing, printing, and shipping tshirts all day.. afterall.. I’m in this business to not be a slave to a job.. and shipping tshirts all day quickly started feeling just like that... a job.
Enter teespring.com I needed a solution that would allow me to sell tshirts, while having someone else handle all the payments, shipping, and customer service. This is when I found a site that i’ve never heard of before, one that does ALL this for you... they even allow you to design your own tshirt with their interactive design system as well as set your own pricing and goal for your tshirt campaign. This seemed nearly too good to be true, so I went ahead and threw together a quick design.. and put it up for sale and started posting to my pages. I was extremely satisfied with the results...
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Not only did I reach my goal on both of the campaigns that I launched, but I exceeded the sales goals I set really telling me this was going to be big. I immediately requested a payout after the campaigns ended and received a check 5 days later.. which told me it was truly the real deal.
How to pick the right design for your niche The most important part of getting this to work for your niche (or any niche for that matter) is to match the design with your niche’s demographic or interest. Take a look at this design...
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It’s nothing special, but I happen to know that 75% of the fans on my page are middle aged women who are crazy about their Chihuahuas. I knew that if I could create something targeting them specifically, it would explode.. and I was right!
I went on to sell 80 of these tshirts and have had multiple requests to bring it back.. which I plan to. Infact, i’ve gone on to “bring back” the highest selling, most popular designs that have sold well as a special limited time offer. Kind of a “if you missed this shirt sale the first time, you have one more chance to pick it up!” kind of offer. It’s been working very very well.
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Setting your campaign goal (why this is important) One of the most important parts of setting up your first successful tshirt campaign is ensuring that you set a campaign goal that’s high enough that you’ll reach it but not too low so that you give up your profit.
The way teespring works is after you design your shirt, they have you set up a campaign goal which is displayed on the sales page for the shirt you are selling. Each design you sell will have a “campaign goal” that you must reach in order for the shirts to be printed. The minimum you can select is 10 and you can raise it into the hundreds if you have the audience to sell that many. Simply put, the higher you set your campaign goal, and the more you sell, the higher your profit is per shirt. So ideally you want to set your campaign goal low enough that you know you can reach it but high enough to where you won’t be sacrificing your profit when the shirt sells well for you.
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How to price your shirts I’ve tested different price points in the different niches that i’m in and have found that pricing your shirts anywhere between 14.99 and 16.99 has worked quite well for me personally. When you are promoting your “limited edition” tee’s it’s a lot easier to ask for 17 dollars a shirt when only a small number of them will be printed. It’s taking advantage of the scarcity concept making your fans feel special for being one of the few people to own a “limited edition” tee that only a small number of people will own.
How to get your audience to buy your shirts I’ve been fortunate enough to generate over $4,000 in profits since my first campaign a couple weeks ago so I feel as if my strategy for actually selling the shirts has worked quite well. What I like to do is set the campaign for 3 days only.. meaning you have 72 hours to sell as many tshirts as you can before the campaign ends and the shirt is made unavailable for sale at that point forward. During these 3 days, I treat the shirt sale like a product launch. I have been starting the campaigns on a Friday and running them 3 days ensuring I hit them on the weekends as that’s the most active days on Facebook. This strategy has served me well. Day 1 I hit them hard, a post every 23 hours throughout the day telling them about the new shirt design. I always make sure to mention in the posts that the shirt for sale is a LIMITED run tee.. and that only a certain number will be printed and sold.. so if you want to get ahold of this limited tee while it’s still available, you need to act fast. If the design fits, day 1 is normally a flood of sales from a fresh design. I continue this on day 2 and on day 3 I throw in some scarcity in every post making sure to tell them that the sale ends TODAY and that if they want to buy one of these limited edition tees, that they better act fast! At the end of the day, a few hours before the campaign ends, I always make a “Last Call” post telling them this is their last chance to grab the tee before it’s gone FOREVER! The last call post has been working excellent for me as well as the fans that are on the fence tend to go ahead and make the purchase they’ve been thinking about the entire weekend. 6
From here... all that’s left to do is continue creating new designs that your audience will enjoy and be happy wearing. I’ve even brought back designs that sold well the first time around for a limited second run saying.. “I’ve received a flood of messages asking to bring this limited edition tee back for one more small run.. so we’ve listened and done just that.. act quickly as this will be the last time you’ll see this tee available!” These second runs have been successful as well. It’s really been a win win situation and i’ve only had but just a few designs that have only sold a few. I’ve still yet to design a shirt that hasn’t at least sold a few.. but you will definitely know when you have a winning design as the sales will flood through if you have any decent size of audience you are promoting it to.
Final thoughts If you are the owner of some fan pages or have some websites and just haven’t found a viable way to profit, this is something I would highly consider trying. I’ve done this on multiple pages I run and have found success on all of them so far. Most people have no problem buying a tshirt, it’s all up to you to design a simple one they will like and put a buy button (in this case, a teespring campaign) in front of them and watch the sales flood in. There’s never been a better way to design what sells best, and have someone else handle all the hard work of collecting payments, printing, shipping, and customer service. I have no affiliation whatsoever with teespring.com, but will continue to use their service and recommend it to anyone looking to generate some easy sales from something just about everyone loves to buy, good ol’ tshirts! :) Now go get em!
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