I'm starting a t-shirt company again. The company is called Big Little Cities and we are creating city inspired t-shirts for cities across the country. The designs are simple, we're using a drop shipping company to print and ship and have hired a designer to help with everything from website design to t-shirt design. Those are the things that I didn't necessarily do the first time around when I owned and ran a t-shirt company. That's right, this will be my second time working in the retail t-shirt market. The first time we created Minnesota city inspired t-shirts. I eventually sold that company but the itch to create more city inspired t-shirts is in my blood, apparently. In this blog post I'm going to break down the t-shirt company and how I'm going to do things differently this time around.
Simple Designs
The t-shirt designs are going to be very simple this time. When I ran a t-shirt company the first time we'd create overly complicated graphic t-shirts that took a long time to design and create. They never ended up coming out the way that I envisioned in my brain. We worked with a pool of designers to create each t-shirt and each designer had their own style. This created a variety of shirts with different vibes, but it never felt like a cohesive brand since every other shirt had it's own style.
These new shirts will be much more uniformed and minimal while still having a good attractive look. The shirts feature a small print city name in the upper left corner of the shirt either in a single line or stacked. Longer city names will be stacked while shorter names like Austin or Atlanta will single lines. We're going simple small selection of cities to start off, planning to expand to a larger pool of cities in the future. I want to get this process down so that the system can run effectifly before introducing more designs.
Printify
Because my main job is as a C# consultant I don't have the time or capacity to do the printing and fullfilment myself. I'm starting out with using Printify to outsource the production and shipping of the shirts. This will cut into my profit margins but it appears to be completely worth it. The last time I did this we were ordering the shirts directly from American Apparel, sorting them, bringing them to the printer, picking up the printed shirts, bringing them back to our warehouse and then shipping orders from the warehouse. That's a lot of work and time. By utilizing Printify we can cut out that entire process. Obviously there is a cost involved, but this is not meant to a a fulltime gig so I think the trade offs will be worth it.
Dedicated Designer
We've hired a dedicated designer who is awesome. They're going to be able to do the things that I struggle with the most - like being a creative person. I'm very logical and am great a developing software, designing architectures and running a business. But when it comes to creating something that looks good - be it a website design or a t-shirt design - I just do not have that skill. I'll stare at my screen for hours and come up with something very basic. It's good to know your strengths and recognize when you are better off bringing someone else in who is strong in the area you are not.
We're in the end of the design stages for the first round of shirts right now. Hopefully in the next month we will have a live website up, running and populated with all the first run of shirts to buy.
Things that we need to still complete: