AP 0492: How Can I Build a Profitable T-Shirt Business?

Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 492 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question today from Alain.

Alrighty, here's today's question from Alain.

Alain: Hey, Pat. It's Alain from Toronto with another question, this time about t-shirts. Yeah, I can't believe nobody's asked you this yet. Anyways, so you often talk about having niche audiences or niche audiences, you like to call them, and I was wondering … I am getting a few ideas on t-shirts I could sell to this audience. I know how to come up with an idea and get it designed and put on a visual mock-up that I can put on the website.

How do you … Where do you start or what places can you recommend in terms of actually going from that visual on your website to actually having it produced and shipped? What's the process? What are some resources or places you would recommend in terms of t-shirt suppliers? How much profit can we actually make off that? Do we need to have a lot of volume? How would you price it? If you could give us a mini tutorial maybe in your next AskPat show or the one that you're obviously doing today because you're reading this question publicly. That would be fantastic. Thanks so much for everything you do. Bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey Alain, good to hear from you. I hope all is well. I'm really excited because this is something that I was interested in a while back. I just didn't want to put the resources into it because of all the other stuff I had going on. How profitable can you get with t-shirts? Well, I know a lot of people who are doing this and they are doing extremely well. There's one person I would like for you to follow and read about. He's publicly shared his information on how he has been able to do so well with t-shirts specifically. This is Benny Hsu, B-E-N-N-Y H-S-U, Benny Hsu. If you look up Benny Hsu Teespring, T-E-E-S-P-R-I-N-G. You'll find some information there. If you look it up in Google, the first thing that comes up is “How I profited 100K online in just five months this year”.

Benny is one of my good friends. He is definitely somebody who I trust and he's been a supporter of SPI too. He and I actually talked about this t-shirt thing. I was really interested in it. I was like, wow, this is really insane, how well a lot of people are doing. There is a Teespring Facebook group, that I know of. I will talk about what Teespring is in just a second. It's very active. A lot of people are putting their designs on the web and selling them, essentially driving traffic to those t-shirts using Facebook ads or other means of getting cold traffic, targeting a particular niche. Timing is important, of course, the design and if you have the design down, then it's a potential money maker for a lot of people.

Now the cool thing about Teespring is it's sort of like crowdfunding, like Kickstarter, but with t-shirts. What I mean by that is essentially you create a design. You put it on Teespring … this is what's cool about this platform. You say that you want to sell X number of shirts at a certain price. If you get that many people … that X that you described earlier … if you get that many people actually wanting to buy that shirt, then it means that it's obviously successful. But Teespring will print and ship and fulfill that t-shirt for you.

It's kind of cool because you could validate your designs and you don't have to necessarily get them printed out until you know that it's gonna be successful. I think that's the cool thing about this. If you can find a good design for a niche and it just strikes a cord with them, you could do very well. I know a lot of people who pay attention to the news simply because they want to create t-shirts of stuff that happens in real time, and be the first on the market on these kind of things. Target people on Facebook who are related to that particular topic. Try to get those shirts in front of those people as soon as possible.

Again, I recommend checking out this article by Benny Hsu. It's called, “How I profited a 100K in just five months this year with t-shirts.” Up here it says up 'til September 1st, I have been paid $152,996.34 by Teespring. Teespring is T-E-E-S-P-R-I-N-G and check it out. It could be pretty exciting for a lot of people.

Now there's a lot of other t-shirt fulfillment services, I'm very familiar with Printfection. That's not anything that's like Teespring in the fact that it's kind of crowdfunded or crowdsourced, I guess you could say. Printfection is what we use to fulfill the AskPat shirts and they are on demand, which is nice. So whenever somebody gets a t-shirt … Alain, you're gonna get one … we'll send you a link to Printfection where you fill out your information, the shipping information, the size and all that stuff. Then because I've ordered a bunch of t-shirts ahead of time, which Printfection keeps in their warehouse, if you order a medium or whatever, Printfection goes and gets that one. Again, it's cool because I don't have to do any of the fulfillment. Plus, that link that I give you, that collects all your information, so I don't have to deal with that too. Which I know is a very pain … that's part of the painful process of actually, fulfilling t-shirts on your own. If you have these t-shirts in your own house, for example, that you're shipping … it's a pain. Well, Printfection takes care of that for us, in terms of delivering the AskPat shirts.

Teespring is a great one too, that does the same thing but it has the sort of contest validation process on the front in, which is really cool. So go ahead and check it out. Teespring.com and again Benny Hsu is the guy who you should check out. Alain, I wish you the best of luck. Keep me posted and let me know what shirts you make. I'm really excited and interested to see what you have … these designs that you have in mind. Check it out. Of course, as I said, we're gonna send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show.

I also want to thank everybody else out there who's asking questions because obviously this show wouldn't exist without your questions. It's AskPat, so please ask your question. Go to AskPat.com. You can ask your question right there on that page.

Can't wait to serve you in the next episode of AskPat, until then here is a quote to finish off the day, by Chris Brogan, a good friend of mine. He said, “Don't settle. Don't finish crappy books. If you don't like the menu, leave the restaurant. If you're not on the right path, get off it.” Love that quote. Cheers, take care and I'll see you next episode of AskPat. Bye.