Big Little Cities progress

Over the last couple of months we have made good progress on our second t-shirt company, Big Little Cities. Big Little Cities is a t-shirt company that produces shirts with big city names printed in small print in the upper left breast of the t-shirt. That's what we are doing for now, over time we plan to make other t-shirt designs and some more products. But for now we are sticking with t-shirts with city names printed small in the upper left of the shirt.

Printify Samples

We are running all of our printing through Printify. When we ran a t-shirt company the first time we ordered the shirts ourselves and drove them to a local print shop in St. Paul. That takes a lot of time and effort. Since both of us are keeping our day jobs, we don't have time for that. That's why we are going the print on demand route. POD is where another company handles the printing and fullfilment of the orders so you don't have to. Another positive to POD is that there is little up front capital so the barrier to entry is pretty low. You really only pay for what you are printing and in theory - you are only printing what your customers are paying you for.

The first round of samples we got back had the print too far down and too far over to the side. I need to adjust the print location inside the Printify website in order to get the location set where we want it. These are the Printify samples that we used in our latest photo shoot. They're unisex heavyweight cotton Comfort Colors 1717 style. This seems to be a popular choice for t-shirt companies right now. Comfort Colors has a good reputation and from what I've been able to tell so far, they have a good company as well.

Display All Varients In Shopify

We wanted a way to display all the available variants for each of the products when a customer is shopping on the website. For instance if you are viewing the Minneapolis t-shirt section of the website, you might not like blue shirts but you love ivory shirts. Shopify doesn't have an out of the box method to display all the variant options on a single page (unless you scroll through each variant on the product page).

Enter Variator. Variator allows you to display all of the different variants for each of your products in Shopify Collection pages. For $5 a month we can now display all the different t-shirt variant colors on the collection pages. This is a big advantage because it lets customers see and share a specific color of the shirt right away without the need to scroll through product images.

What Cities To Print

To start things off we are creating designs for the following cities in the Round One cell below. When we figure out how to execute efficiently we plan to roll out the other cities in the Round 2 cell. Don't see your city below - send us an email and we will add it to round 3.

That's the latest update for building this new company from the ground up. Eventually I will probably start writing posts on the website to gain some SEO traction in addition to Instagram and other social media. But for now we're focusing on building the website and getting the products set up with Printify. It's been exciting and I can't wait to start marketing and advertising for the store.