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INTRODUCTION

So you want to start a t-shirt business. Congratulations on choosing a challenging and rewarding business venture in which to unleash your creativity. In this world, there are few things more satisfying than seeing your t-shirts worn by people all over the world. People who are willing to give up their hard-earned cash for something you made. Becoming the next big thing is every aspiring brand owner’s dream.

Unfortunately, just dreaming about starting a successful t-shirt brand is not enough. You have to take action to make your fantasies come true. Whether you’ve been an artist and designer for years or have no artistic talent whatsoever, starting a t-shirt business is an ongoing process that requires a lot of hard work and devotion.

Years In The Making

Our journey to launching a kick-ass t-shirt brand has been several years in the making and will probably be somewhat similar to yours. It should give you a scope on the creation of a successful brand from its earliest stages.

The Beginning

Several years ago, before launching T-Shirt Magazine, we created a comic book we planned on selling in major comic shops. Along with the comic, we created t-shirts based on the characters from the comic and sold them online. At the time, we created and sold our products through an all-in-one fulfillment company called Cafe Press, which required little to no money to launch and maintain. This was the first time we created an entire collection of t-shirts, and we actually sold a few too.

Okay, honestly, when I say we sold a few, I really mean few. Granted, t-shirts weren’t our main focus at the time, but since we were still developing the comic, we weren’t satisfied with the results of our business—especially since we only profited about $3 for each t-shirt we sold through Cafe Press. We also had to put the comic book on hold because we had to raise more funds to publish it. We planned on doing this through selling more t-shirts.

The Launch of T-Shirt Magazine

Soon after our first t-shirt endeavor, we developed the idea of T-Shirt Magazine. Through this publication, we started sharing our experiences selling through Cafe Press, in addition to anything else we knew so far, while expressing our enjoyment of t-shirt design and culture via articles and blog posts. We simultaneously launched a limited-edition t-shirt brand available exclusively on the website.

The plan was to release a new t-shirt each week, but unfortunately, we didn’t sell a single one. We created and attempted to sell these t-shirts through a Cafe Press competitor site called Spreadshirt. With no upfront production costs and relatively low maintenance, we figured we’d go with the cheapest route.

Since the beginning of T-Shirt Magazine, we started interviewing up-and-coming t-shirt brands on a weekly basis to give other emergent designers inspiration. At the same time, these interviews inspired and educated us as well. We further educated ourselves on the development of these brands and the aspects that played into their success. We became t-shirt brand experts of a sort, knowledgeable on nearly every aspect of creating an awesome t-shirt brand. Or so we thought.

Our First Official T-Shirt Brand

Our next venture was creating a whole new t-shirt brand unrelated to T-Shirt Magazine or anything else we were running at the time. At this point, the comic book we were working on was long forgotten. However, we did get one copy created, which is sort of like an artifact now. With our first official t-shirt brand we decided we wouldn’t use Cafe Press, Spreadshirt or any other fulfillment company this time.

After studying many of the brands we had interviewed through T-Shirt Magazine, we realized they were doing things we were incapable of doing by selling through a fulfillment company. Custom labeling, jumbo screen-printed designs, hang tagging—you name it. Almost anything that makes a t-shirt cool we realized we just couldn’t do with a fulfillment company. So, we had no choice but to do it on our own this time if we planned on making it big. And doing it on our own meant start-up costs, product development, and fulfilling orders ourselves.

We were barely out of high school at the time and had no jobs, so we were pretty much too broke to fund everything we planned for. We created seven t-shirt designs to be printed on American Apparel t-shirts and planned on custom-packaging them with a few other extra goodies in each order (a strategy we learned from some of the brands we’d interviewed). We convinced our dad that we had an excellent business idea and needed help funding it, and so the first season of our first official brand was released.

The first season was the last season. We were perplexed. We had everything planned out, we had set goals and planned daily tasks to get where we wanted to get, but all we could sell was 20-something shirts to our friends and a handful of fans on Myspace. After a few months of slow sales, we began developing the second collection, and during the development the idea of a new brand came to mind: Cashletes.

Our Second Official T-Shirt Brand

My gut feeling was to stop the first brand completely and start developing Cashletes. Hundreds of ideas came to me in an instant, and I knew we had to go with this new concept. This time, I did even more research on not only what goes into developing a t-shirt line, but what goes into developing a solid brand. We tried to make sure not to repeat any of our mistakes from the past, and we built this new brand with care and precision, using some tools and resources we had discovered over time.

Signs of Success

Fast forward to the present, and we definitely consider the Cashletes brand a success so far, even though we haven’t reached all of the pinnacles we plan to reach. We know our t-shirt brand is kick-ass because we now make thousands of dollars every month selling through more than one channel, and we have a fan base all over the world, with customers in countries we’ve never even heard of.

We have celebrity stylists contacting us, frequently requesting products for their clients to wear, and retail shops begging to get a hold of our stuff to sell in their stores. We’ve kept the brand alive through several collection releases and have even expanded to getting clothing custom-made overseas. We’re also glad to say we even have our own office. Something we could only dream of a few years ago.

An Essential Guide

Our story might sound like what you’d hope to achieve soon, and chances are you will if you take smart steps. We created this guide because we get questions from our readers all the time about specific concerns that we realized hadn’t been sufficiently answered anywhere else—concerns that we, too, had throughout our journey. We hope to address these questions and more throughout this guide.

To make this guide even more helpful, we enlisted the help of a few other founders of kick-ass brands who really know their stuff, some of whom have achieved way more success than we have so far and were nice enough to share their wisdom and their own stories. Pay close attention to these exclusive brand owner contributions highlighted throughout the book, as they are probably the most important passages you’ll read. After reading this book in its entirety, we truly believe you’ll be on your way to launching a kick-ass t-shirt brand of your own.