How to Start a T-Shirt Business on a Shoestring Budget

In this post, we will show you how to start a T-Shirt Business on a shoestring budget. 

How a profitable T-shirt business works
1. Create your own brand2. Be creative
  2.1 WP T-shirt Solution features
 3. Promoting your site
  3.1 Build an in-house digital marketing team
  3.2 Hire a professional marketing agency & taking care of digital promoting

1. Create your own brand

First and foremost, you have to pick a niche, a name and a logo for your upcoming brand. A niche is basically a group of people in which a product is focused. Depending on their ages, hobbies, and other objective factors, the niches can be changed.

However, there are some traditional and safe T-shirt themes that you can consider such as comic, animals, environment, etc. Just make sure that your niche is not too detailed yet possible to marketing. After picking your niche, set a name and a logo for your brand that can speak the topic and make your brand unique.

You can make some researches on your competitors and other giant brands to get ideas for your own T-shirt line. However, remember to keep those designs as inspiration, not a copy.

To possess a nice logo, you can custom it or hire a third party to take care of that job. Either ways, make sure your logo is simple yet attractive enough to create a good impression because over 80% of visitors will pay attention to your logo more than to your content. 

2. Be Creative 

 To most online store, their site outlook is super crucial. As there are plenty of T-shirt online businesses, a plain, ordinary visual cannot compete with others. That’s why you should pay proper attention to building a flexible and responsive website at the very beginning.

By far, the easiest and most inexpensive way to make a beautiful and useful frontend for your site is to get a WP T-shirt Solution from CMSmart. WP Tshirt Solution is a powerful yet lightweight plugin to increase your T-shirt e-commerce traffic and sales thanks to its awesome features.

2.1 WP T-shirt Solution features

• Price matrix: Lead customers to the final price in the fastest way instead of showing them in drop-down boxes. 
• Order upload: Customers can take advantage of this feature to distribute their T-shirt design to you in the most fast and convenient way. They can also modify type of the file to deliver it at its highest quality. 
• Online design: This feature allows your visitors create their own T-shirt using default design options available on your site. Most importantly, it is super easy to use so customers are not required any photoshop experience. This feature not only works on T-shirt but also on mugs, pillow, photo, canvas, business card, phone case and so on. 
• Responsive design: Thanks to this feature, both you and your customers can access the online store on different devices – from smartphones, tablets to desktops.
• Customizable layouts: With over 200 typography, 100 pre-defined templates, unlimited colors and fonts, this plugin offers you a wide range of choice to create a unique page front on your own. It also includes a free hand drawing feature that you can use to create a signature for your site. 
• Frontend translate with multiple languages: Being fully acknowledged of the involving of businesses from multiple of nations all over the world, we have developed translation feature to get rid of language barrier and strengthen the connection between you and your customers. 
• Order management: You can view the design in detail so it’s quite easy to modify when spotting any errors. You are also in total control to accept or reject customers’ order and send email feedback to them. In another hand, your customers can receive your modified file, redesign it and send it back to you via the Order Upload feature. 

Once you have successfully installed WP Tshirt Solution, take advantage of it to create the most unique Tshirt business of your own.  

3. Promoting your site

The easiest way to promote your site is through social media. You can use Facebook, Instagram or any social network. However, since these are giant social network used by millions of people all over the world, you are obviously not the only one business who uses Facebook/Instagram advertising tool.

That’s why these social network platforms have a very strict advertising policy that could cost you a lot of time and money before you even gain any profit from it. So, here’s what you should do: 

3.1 Build an in-house digital marketing team

3.2 Hire a professional marketing agency and have them taking care of digital promoting

Either way will cost you a certain amount of money. However, consider the pros and cons. In the first choice, you will have to pay for not only the advertising fee but also for people who work for you, not to mention the expense on training. While with the second choice, you only have to pay the marketing agency so they can do their job. We think you have already made up your mind.

Overall, starting a business is not cheap. You will have to scarify both time and money. However, if by using proper plugin and spending time doing some research, you can start a Tshirt business that’s basically generating recurring revenue for you with minimal effort. We hope our suggestion might be helpful to you and your business.  

If you are having problems in building, navigating, customizing your website or simply want to find out more information about our product, please contact us for support. We are also available for modifying and developing website/project on demand. And do not forget using coupon code MAR_DL to get 18% Discount for purchasing items at Cmsmart.   

Best regards.

Further reading

• PRINTING United Alliance
• Statista printing industry research