So You Want to Make a Whole Bunch of T-Shirts
Two years ago, we warned you that making t-shirts isn’t all fun and games. But did you listen? No. You went out and made yourself a little side business selling shirts. Maybe you created a Kick starter to launch your new store, or you run a popular design website with an equipment shop, or maybe you’re not hitting that kind of volume yet, but you see it around the corner and don’t know what to do. Relax, we’re here for you. Get ready to take a crash course in selling and shipping 1,000 tees a month. Tshirt Printing Burbank. We’re not Thread less, but having grown two orders of magnitude since starting this little union, we know the pain of scaling in every part of our operation. What’s the difference you ask?
Printing
Let’s start at the beginning. Before you can sell a shirt, you need to have a printer. We’ve been through three printers in less than three years, so trust us when we say, you need the right printer. When we started, we did our research. We wanted someone local, someone good, and someone cheap, so we looked around Pittsburgh and found someone who met all three criteria—or so we thought. We definitely found local and cheap, but good eluded us. Don’t get us wrong; at the time we thought our shirts were great. Today, we look back and cringe a little at the quality. Sometimes its subtle things like color fidelity and registration clarity. Sometimes its big things like plastisol caked on so heavy you could swear you’re wearing a hockey sweater. Unless you’ve been in the garment industry your whole life, you’re going to want to find a printer who knows more about ink, fabric, and production than you. Don’t settle. Look around until you find the right team. They’ll make you better, and your customers will thank you.
You know how I mentioned “production” as something your printer needs to know about? Yeah, that’s a big one. In addition to some less than sharp printing we had in the early days, we were also plagued by issues with quality control. In fact, our entire first guest design batch had to be re-printed because of a problem with the curing process. Those kinds of issues eventually forced us to switch to a company in Kansas City that has a tremendous reputation for professional, high-quality work. And they deserved it.
We used them for one big print run before realizing that Kansas City is a long way from Pittsburgh. Tshirt Printing Studio City. What if we wanted to drop by for a press check? What if we wanted to talk strategy, fulfillment, and long-term plans? You can see our dilemma. Thankfully we bumped into a guy who ran a print shop that met all three of our needs. He was local, he did great work, and his prices were even better than we had been getting before. A hat trick! For the last year-and-a-half we’ve been humming along with Clockwise Tees as the printer of record for United Pixel workers. As many a Pixel worker can attest, they make a mean shirt. Like any relationship, we’ve had our share of problems, but because our printer is nearby, we can work them out with the least amount of disruption for us and our customers. You want to make and sell a quarter-ton of t-shirts a month? Find a good printer.
Selling
It’s not enough to design a sweet shirt, you’re going to need to let people know and have a rock-solid website to receive and process orders. Letting people know is what you might have heard referred to before as “marketing”. It sounds scary, but it’s actually really simple. That’s why we like to call it “letting people know”. When we got started, we sent friendly emails to the people in the industry we admired. In addition to mentioning how much we liked the work they did, we sent each of them a shirt. That got us started, but it takes a lot more than a bit of early reciprocity to see a healthy six figures in annual revenue and nearly 7,000 followers on Twitter. Selling anything, whether it’s a physical product, a website, or an idea requires trust. One customer sale is noteworthy, two is a relationship. When your best customers come back for more every month and voluntarily spread the word to friends, you know you’re doing something right.
We take an insane amount of pride in every aspect of Pixel workers (and Pixel very) from the business model to the shirt design to the production to the fulfillment to the customer service. Just take a look at these handsome folks. That means a lot to us. We unabashedly believe that if you want to have a successful business of any kind, you need to treat your customers well.