7 Steps to successful selling on TeespringThis article was originally published by Teespring Creator Alison Scott on medium.com under the title “I stared an online t-shirt business…and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”. We caught up with Alison recently on her Facebook ad best practices, thoughts on the new T2 updates, and more—read the full interview here. I sell t-shirts on the Internet. I also hang out in a couple of groups for people who sell t-shirts on the Internet. For both these reasons, I’ve started to get quite a lot of friends requests from people who want to make money selling t-shirts on the Internet, and I don’t have time to help all those people with queries. However, for free and gratis, here’s how to make money online by selling t-shirts. 1. Design a shirt that people want to buy Look at news stories about shirts that sell, shirts you see people wearing, shirts you see in shops. Do not copy any of these shirts, but think about what works in terms of design, ideas, structure. Find a hobby, ideally one of your hobbies, that has few available shirts. Hint: look for hobbies where all the shirts say “I’d rather be pigeon-fancying” or “Keep calm and carry on pigeon-fancying” or “I’m a girl who loves pigeons” or anything else where you could put any hobby at all on the shirt. Now design a shirt with a slogan that’s relevant to that hobby. “I love pigeons — coz there’s no place like home”. That sort of thing. Check that your idea’s not been used already, and check it doesn’t violate anyone’s intellectual property. If you’re new to design, use online tutorials t work out how to make your shirt look good. Use the GIMP and Inkscape if you can’t afford paid design programs. Make your design as good as you can, but don’t make it too complex, and don’t spend days on it unless you’re learning how to use the software. Consider paying for designs; I personally don’t but lots of people do. 2. Make your shirt available Set your shirt up on Teespring or another t-shirt fulfilment site; use their tools to make sure that the preview/mock-up image is as good as possible. I use Teespring because I like the quality of the shirts, the company is responsive to sellers, and the customer service is generally good. They also pay quickly which matters, especially once you’re scaling. 3. Market your shirt for nothing Find out where the pigeon-fanciers hang out. Forums, Facebook groups, mailing lists. Check the terms of those groups very carefully; if they allow you to post pigeon-fancying commercial messages then post, just once, politely, with a link to your shirt. If they don’t, then message the moderators, or post saying “is it ok to do this” — because most groups that don’t have many good shirts already are quite happy for you to post about your shirt. 4. Sell a shirt or two With luck, a couple of pigeon-fanciers will buy your shirt. If they don’t, see if they give you feedback about your shirt; act on it. If there are lots of likes but no sales, ask why they’re not buying. “It’s funny but I wouldn’t wear it” is a problem; ask what they’re after. If it’s “the shirt costs too much” then start again from the top with a hobby that costs more to take part in. Design issues, or it being a t-shirt when they’re after a hoodie, or slight changes to wording, fix, relaunch, follow up. Pay special attention to people who say things like “I really need a shirt saying…” — if you make that shirt then that person will probably buy it unless it’s crap, and other people might like it too. 5. Paid ads and scaling Once you’ve got a couple of sales, set an ad up on Facebook for $5 a day, aimed at approximately the readers of Pigeon Fancier magazine. Search for videos on YouTube about using audience insights to find the really keen pigeon-fanciers who will spend money on their hobby. Look at Teespring’s Training Center, and Teespring’s videos on YouTube to learn about using paid ads effectively. (The videos from Teecon Barcelona are particularly excellent). Run your ads off a Pigeon Fancying Facebook Page. Pick a good name for it, like “We All Fancy Pigeons.” Make it look real; post real pigeon-fancying photos and content as well as shirt ads. (This is another good reason to start with a hobby you’re in). Once you have a profitable ad, scale up (spend more money on that ad) and scale out (design similar ads, and shirts for very similar niches, canary-fanciers say). Watch your return on investment very carefully; you’re aiming for at least 100%, so every $10 spent earns you $20 in sales. This is by far the hardest part, and there’s lots of free advice out there on how to do it. You now need to spend time, probably a week full time, learning this part of the trade. But if you’re a newbie, here’s the thing: Do not spend a single penny on ads until you have already sold one shirt to a person who you aren’t related to. I keep seeing people saying ‘you have to spend money to make money’ and spending hundreds of dollars ‘testing’ very poor designs. If you can’t sell one shirt to a mad keen person using free methods, it’s unlikely to ever be a profitable shirt. I have a rule that I (almost) never spend more on ads than 50% of my previous day’s shirt sales. As I don’t pay for designs, this means that my business bootstrapped with zero overheads. (I do subscribe to Adobe CC and a couple of other relevant bits of software, and I buy software and fonts out of profits when I need to). 6. Make more shirts Lots more shirts. I try to launch at least one a day, many people launch more than that. I watched an interview with Derek Pankaew, who said that nine out of ten shirts lose money (though not for me, see ‘no overheads’), nine out of ten of the rest make a little money, and one in a hundred makes thousands of dollars. When I got to 1000 shirts, Teespring said ‘you’ve launched 460 campaigns’. I think that must include relaunches, but still, I have many, many active campaigns, and most of them just sell a shirt or two, or none. But plenty sell twenty shirts, and a few sell a hundred shirts or more. 7. Three bonus free pieces of advice “Do not spend more than an hour designing a shirt” — I got this from Keegan Rush, who’s a Teespring millionaire. I break it all the time, because I design the shirts I want to design regardless of how long they take. But two of my top five shirts took less than an hour to design, and the next 20 are split 50/50 between shirts I’ve laboured for hours over and shirts I’ve knocked up in a few minutes. There’s a lesson here. “It’s about as hard to go from 1 sale to 10 as it is from 10 to 100, 100 to 1000, and 1,000 to 10,000.” I got this from someone on Teespring News, sorry, can’t remember who, can’t find the post again; but it appears to be broadly true for me, and if I hadn’t thought it was possible I would probably have stopped, because 10,000 shirts a year is about where it delivers the income for a full-time job and that feels utterly impossible at the point where you’ve sold 50 shirts. his is a graph of my 2016 sales numbers (blue) and gross profits pre-ad-spend (green); net profits are about half as much. The y axis is logarithmic; as these graphs are reasonably linear, it supports the theory that you can scale exponentially until you hit the limits of the platform you’re selling on. Finally, Ira Glass’s famous quote on creativity. “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” Creator Insights: Alison Scott talks successful sellingAlison Scott is a UK based Creator who first signed up with Teespring in 2015. She currently focuses on selling within European niches and recently made the switch to full-time seller in June 2016. In the interview below Alison shares more insight on how she was able to go full-time, her thoughts on some of the recent T2 updates, and her plans for the future. Make sure to check out Alison’s insightful article titled “7 Steps to Successful Selling on Teespring” as well.
What inspired you to write the article listed above? I was in a Facebook group for Teespring newbies, and people kept asking the same questions over and over. I don’t really have time to help individuals, but I’d learnt a lot from sellers like Ty Huls and Keegan Rush, and I wanted to do something for people who are just starting out. You signed up with Teespring in 2015, but didn’t really start selling until later on, what changed? I started in a very slow and part-time way, just doing the odd shirt as I felt like it. And then in June I had a running shirt and thought “maybe I could make a go of this”. And I quickly had two or three more designs that sold, you know, 20 or 30 shirts, and at that point I ran some numbers and thought it would definitely work. Christmas 2016 was better than I was expecting though. When was the moment you decided to focus on selling full-time? I think the tipping point was my first profitable Facebook ad that scaled. That was when I saw the power of the platform, that if you can just find your audience your sales are essentially unlimited. And that rang a bell, because I’d been looking to build a new career in an area where I could lever my work, so that I did something once and sold it many times. Teespring recently announced some significant T2 updates which include flat-pricing, access to buyer emails, new storefronts, and much more. What is your favorite T2 update that Teespring has announced thus far and why? For me the biggest thing is being able to predict profits on a shirt. Before T2, I had to price a shirt so that it was profitable even if I only sold one. And then if I happened to sell 100, well, I got massive windfall profits as the cost came down. And massive windfall profits are very nice, but not as nice as getting a steady, higher, profit shirt by shirt. How will this T2 update (or updates) impact your business strategy? Having a lot of designs that sell in small numbers forever was always part of my strategy, but T2 has vindicated that; I’m making a lot more on the random sales that come through. I’m pleased to get the emails but of course only a small portion of buyers tick the email box; I’d like Teespring to find a way to increase the proportion who do that. In your article you said you aim to launch one design every day; can you give us a glimpse at what your typical work day looks like? The great thing about working for yourself, and about Teespring, is that you can work when it suits you, so in one sense I don’t have a typical day, it’s very variable. But I normally start by clearing comments and queries that have come in overnight, checking my ads and tweaking any that are going well or badly, and checking relaunches in Teespring and doing any price adjustments (price adjustments are a fact of life in Teespring EU because my shirts are priced in round pounds but profit is in Euros). I try to set aside time every day for design, and I split that between quick designs and variants of existing designs that customers have asked for, and more elaborate ideas. Sometimes design takes the whole day, but normally I do an hour or two. Then I launch shirts, write posts about the shirts for my niche pages, and launch an ad for the shirt. And finally I research trends in my niches and possible new niches. In your article you also mention starting off using an ad budget of $5 a day for paid ads; what ad types do you use when testing a new design? I usually start by boosting a post about a shirt; you can normally get a very good idea of how it’s going to go from the shares and comments. And sometimes your readers will tell you right then what’s wrong with your item! After a couple of days I’ll either kill it or add a new ad with a conversion goal for the same design; I normally convert on ‘add to basket’. Normally I’ll stop the boosted post after a few days and just leave the conversion ad, but if it’s obviously driving sales I’ll keep it going. But I no longer kill designs completely, I just stop running ads to them. Only yesterday I had a random sale on a design I did last summer that had never sold a single shirt; but I left it running and it’s free money now. Finally – the great pixel debate! At this moment – what’s your pixel approach? Do you use one for all niches or one per niche? Do you expect this strategy to change as your business continues to grow? I’m all on one pixel, because I’m using my personal FB account. I get a lot of page likes by inviting people who’ve liked a post (over a thousand new likes this week for example); I go through and invite them all while watching TV in the evening. I think with a business account I can still invite people after running a PPE ad but I’m not quite sure and don’t want to lose that opportunity. I’m sure I’ll switch during 2017 but it feels like a big step. Is there anything else you’d like to share with the community? It’s mostly in the article; but like any other business, making money is about controlling costs, meeting demand, and being persistent. So don’t spend money on ads until you’ve sold a few shirts by free methods, pay attention to your customers, and don’t give up.
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