A few questions for my muse

[Brick_House]

Greeting everyone!

First time post for me and I must say this forum has a great wealth of information already for being so new.

Anyway, I'm a wage slave at a major software company in the silicon valley. Job is easy, get paid well, options aren't bad, but I don't like busting my a$$ everyday and reading how our execs are cashing in options at $10m every couple of months. So I have been on the search to become independent of 'The Man' upstairs for a year or so...

I have been dabbling in RE for a year or so after reading 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad', however it's a lot of headaches/work with minimal return in the short.

After that and before reading Tim's book I began the search for something else and came up with another idea from listening to some co-workers playful banter at the water cooler. I've found a catchy saying and going to start with t-shirts and eventually build a brand. I've been putting in about 5 hours per week to date working on my muse and almost ready to launch...

Timing is everything I must say, I'm currently one month into my three month paternity leave and my brother gave me Tim's book. WOW!

Even before reading his book and since my leave has started it's getting harder and harder each day to think I will be going back to my desk and chair in 2 months. Spending time with my new son, my older son 7yrs and my wife has really driven home Tim's Ideals/methodology and lifestyle. I'm almost done with the book, but after reading what I have, my motivation to get back to not having to go to the office everyday has gone through the roof!! I WILL BE REACHING THIS LIFESTYLE!

Like they say on the MasterCard commercials... having time like this is PRICELESS! THANK YOU TIM FOR FURTHER MOTIVATING ME AND GIVING ME A GREAT FRAMEWORK!:D



1. Created 10 designs from freelancer on Craig list. He wanted $200 per design, but I got him down to $1200/plus some software with the addition of a logo design and a shell website.

2. Found a silk screener on Craig list to do shirts at around $7 per unit.

3. Had 100 printed, gave about half away, sold the others on eBay and a school fair within a week...

4. Going to have another 100 printed (5 designs) and kick off my website in about two weeks..

5. I'm hosing my site with www.1and1.com and bought a shopping cart for $300 from Digishop. I didn't want the monthly fee from Yahoo, and I have complete control of the source code.

So.. I have a few questions and your help is much appreciated!

a. How important is it to get my site modified for SEO? ( I was thinking of getting a bid from elance.com)?

b. Should I go with Adwords, etc.. I don't fully understand the concepts of Pay per Click and Affiliates, would that be worth my time?

c. Thinking about having a VA do some research on magazines with readers in my target market and get names of editiors so I could get some articles on my release?

d. Has anyone used prweb.com? I was recommend by a guest on 'The Big Idea'.?

Thanks for your help!:D

[neuromancer]

everything you want to know about SEO you can find here: http://www.seobook.com/

PPC campaigns are where you want to go for selling on the interwebs, as long as you get a good conversion on the campaign.

As a designer, I would have charged you between $50 and $150 for designs so don't go back to that designer. A good target price to go for when hiring a designer is between $25 and $50 an hour. A design should take about a half an hour so for your 10 shirts it should have been around $250 to $500. That would have been screen ready art. Logos run about $300 for 3 options.

The big cost for screen printing is setup and screens. 4 screens make a full color on a white shirt and 5 on a color shirt. If you want less than about 50 5 color shirts I recomend finding a screener that has a digital garment printer. It's an ink jet printer for clothing. There is no screen cost so the prices should be around $4 to $5 per shirt. I can't say for sure because I haven't used one before.

As far as starting out goes, I recommend a heat press, I have a a Hicks swingman 15. It kind of works like an iron on but is higher quality. it costs around $500. Once you have that, order from a screener a type of transfer called Plastisol. It is a transfer that is made with silk screens. It is cheap to do a huge run and then you can heat press as orders come in and it doesn't hurt as much if you have to throw them away.

Next start buying shirts from a wholesale vender like Staton Corporate and casual. Their site is http://www.statononline.com . Shirts run between $1.50 and $2.50 wholesale until you start buying huge quantities.

How you want to do production is buy the heat press and plastisol transfers and store them. They will cost between 15 and 50 cents a piece. Order your shirts on friday to fulfill the weeks orders on tuesday. Spend the afternoon at the heat press making shirts and shipping them. If you get more than 30 of one design ordered in a week, have staton dropship the shirts for that design to your screener. They will either fulfill the order for you or ship to you to fulfill the order after they have been screened.

This way you can start with low production and automate it as the orders grow.

The Heatpress and plastisol can make testing designs real cheap in the long run.

If Tee shirts are your muse, join this forum: http://www.t-shirtforums.com/

I am thinking of using a win loose guarantee. If you have a problem with the shirt within 6 months, ship it back and I will send you 2 shirts of your choice free of charge. here's how that works. If you sell a shirt for $20 plus shipping and the shirts cost you $5 to make and $5 to ship, shipping 2 shirts back costs you $5x2+$5 for shipping for a total of $15. You still haven't lost money on the sale. Even if you get 10% return on 100 units, you make $1500-$150 for $1350. Hopefully you can move 100 units a month. I bet you can move 100 a week. Which, by the way isn't hard to do in house.

By the way, an online tee shirt shop is one of my businesses.

[Brick_House]

Hey Neuromancer!

Thanks for all the information, I appreciate it. I wanted to clarify something in your post.

You said "If you get more than 30 of one design ordered in a week, have staton dropship the shirts for that design to your screener. They will either fulfill the order for you or ship to you to fulfill the order after they have been screened."

So it's your recommendation to use a silkscreener do the shirts if the qty get's above 30 per shirt, otherwise do them in house?

Also, how does the quality compare from a heat transfer vs. silkscreen?

Have you ever considered getting your shirts done in Chine or India?

Also, if you have a site do you mind passing it along via email, I wouldn't mind taking a look and ordering a shirt!

Thanks again!

[markus]

I second recommending SEO Book. I would never ever buy "SEO services" on elance. If you want to drop me the URL (here or private message), I can give you some quick tips/advice.

Generally I wouldn't recommend 1&1 for hosting, but people have mixed experiences so hopefully yours will be good. Good luck with the tees.

[neuromancer]

Plastisol as basically silk screen so you won't notice the difference. I was already into inkjet transfer when I found out about plastisol so i use a different technique. I have a vinyl cutter/optical plotter that I use with vinyl transfer and color inkjet transfer to do my in house work. The quality on ink jet transfer isn't as high as with silk screen or plastisol but it does the job. I also use vinyl for one color stuff. that's the stuff that goes on football jerseys. I can cut custom designs with them that look like silk screen but last longer and are higher quality.

Always try to go to silk screen for 2 reasons, one it is the standard that people expect and the quality is usually high.

Never go to china or India for shirts. You can work out better deals with local screeners such as fulfillment and storage services and prices. You get consistent quality with the local guy and can complain if there is a problem. You can get much smaller runs done locally so your cost can be spread out and you don't have to store product. I look at space as a cost. if I pay $10 per printing extra for a smaller run, I saved the $per foot cost of storage. Also the longer something sits the more it degrades and has a chance of being destroyed.

here's the deal with over 30 shirts is actually about quality and ease. 30 shirts is the cost crossover for shirts. after 30 shirts it's cheaper to have them silk screened than do them in house. Your target cost per shirt is about $5. after 30 screening starts getting cheaper. You take your profits and instead of buying just 30, you buy 90. The per unit price goes down even further and you can project similar sales in the near future. Huge decrease in the pain in the ass factor. As you run low on a specific size you compensate with stored plastisol.

It has another factor. It gives your screener regular business and builds the relationship with them, which, helps with net 90 and fulfillment deals.

Oh another thing, screens can be stored. If you bring regular work to your screener, you can amortize the cost across several runs. That also means that once you have done a run, don't have to pay for the screens again. A 100 shirt run may cost $300 the first time and $75 from then on.

I gotta go so I will be back to answer questions.

[Brick_House]

Hi Makus, sent you a pm.

Thanks

[Brick_House]

Neuromancer -Again, thanks a ton for the information!

[seamonster]

Neuromancer has given some golden advice. I do niche t-shirts and it sounds like I have a very similar setup to what Neuromancer has. Recently I just made the mistake of doing 50 plastisol shirts in house. If I would have sourced it I would have saved many hours and it would have cost me less $ to do so.

[neuromancer]

I have been doing niche tee shirts for 3 years. I sell to night clubs and such. when it comes to one color designs on limited runs, nothing beats a vinyl from a cutter. The weeding is a pain in the ass though. When I do a run, I charge myself different hourly rates based on the work I'm doing. 25 per hour for design and prepress, 8 per hour for weeding, packing and shipping, and 15 for printing and pressing. I do that so I can track the cost per shirt. When I exceed my cost per unit that I can get it screened for, I get it screened. That is usually 30 shirts.

Seamonster, what is your opinion of plastisol? I have never used it because I ink jet heat transfers. Have you looked into DTG printing?

[Brick_House]

Ive been looking through t-shirts.com and Plastisol and heat transfer looks pretty straight forward and good quality almost as good as a screener.

I like your approach to have small orders at home and bigger ones to the screener..

My per unit cost for 100 units/5 designs with the screener is $8.5 and that includes screened labels on inside of the neckline. This will decrease next run because it includes a $20 screen fee that won't be charged next run..

Thanks again for all your input!

[seamonster]

I really like plastisol. It's low cost, especially if you're able to chain your design. So far I've had better results with it than ink jet transfers. I've been using a epson printer and the ink costs and transfer paper make it not as profitable as I'd like.

The best thing about plastisol is if a design doesn't sell, you don't lose nearly as much money as you would if you had 50+ shirts that didn't sell. I'm at the point where I buy blanks and when I get an order I just bang them out. I'd love to get to the point where I'd have someone else do the manufacturing for me but I'm not quite there yet.

I'm going to agree with you with the vinyl cutter. My only problem is I bought a smaller one. (a stika 12"). I should have held out for at least a GX-24. Weeding is a bitch, but I love the results you can get from vinyl. It's perfect for one-offs or custom name/number shirts for teams.

DTG printing is the future. Right now the cost of a printer is more than I want to invest in.

[laniers]

Congrats on moving towards independence. For me one of the amazing things about this book is how it shatters our preconceived ideas of how we move through life, for example why work weeks are 40 hrs and how the amount of work seems to fit. I currently have two businesses that produce physical products, and while profitable they have an inherent flaw, I have to make them. I'm developing a new business that once in place will virtually run itself and will be quite profitable, it's my muse. So a question you might want to examine is, can you turn this t-shirt business into a muse? My thought is that it would be very difficult. Just something to think about.

[neuromancer]

I have a craft robo pro 2. It does up to 15" and has optics. It does a great job. The GX24 is awesome but at 15 with optics my cutter does everything I could do with a Roland only 600 bux cheaper. Using it and magic mask with my ink jet transfers I can get pretty slick with my shirts. The big evil is still polymer window.

[jimmythebarrel]

So a question you might want to examine is, can you turn this t-shirt business into a muse? My thought is that it would be very difficult. Just something to think about.


Well, my thought is, if you think it is going to be difficult, it will be.

I could set up a t-shirt business in less than a week and have it run automatically. Less my marketing time of course.

One easy way to do that is cafepress. I don't have to touch a damn thing as far as product goes. They take, make and ship the product.

Not saying you should go with cafepress, you lose your copyright when you post to them. But its an example that theres nothing more difficult about t-shirts than any other material business. And of course there are other print on demand t-shirts services out there.

Once you have your designs and either a fulfillment house and printer or a print on demand dropshipper, its as easy as any other muse that involves material goods.

[neuromancer]

the big downside of tee shirts is that they aren't a high dollar item. $20 is about the top price you can go with and get good sales. If you target $5 cost per shirt and sell for $20 it's only 3x profit. That means you must sell quantity to make serious money. 100 shirts a month is $1500 profit. Sure it's a good profit but it's a lot of legwork at $15 profit per sale. That's without advertising too. If you want to do advertising (which I recommend) it thins the margin further. In order to make this shirt biz happen you HAVE to automate. It's becomes too much of a pain in the ass otherwise. 25 shirts a week in house is do-able but much more than that and it really starts taking up your time. You can easily kill a day doing 25 shirts. so if you are doing 100 a week, you are working 4 days a week and making $6000 a month.

gotta go will continue later.

[laniers]

the big downside of tee shirts is that they aren't a high dollar item. $20 is about the top price you can go with and get good sales. If you target $5 cost per shirt and sell for $20 it's only 3x profit. That means you must sell quantity to make serious money. 100 shirts a month is $1500 profit. Sure it's a good profit but it's a lot of legwork at $15 profit per sale. That's without advertising too. If you want to do advertising (which I recommend) it thins the margin further. In order to make this shirt biz happen you HAVE to automate. It's becomes too much of a pain in the ass otherwise. 25 shirts a week in house is do-able but much more than that and it really starts taking up your time. You can easily kill a day doing 25 shirts. so if you are doing 100 a week, you are working 4 days a week and making $6000 a month.

gotta go will continue later.

This was exactly my point. The other down side is fashion is fashion, the t-shirt design that sells well now will be Goodwill material in six months which means you must always be looking for the next big thing. I'd much rather be in a higher ticket per item area (remember Tim suggested $50 - $200) and I'd also want something that you build once and then fine tune for the long haul to capture maximum return on the initial investment. And if you're going to do something like t-shirts then you have to think big and out of the box like threadless.com (see http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/other/06/25/25crowdsource.html?cxtype=rss&cxsvc=7&cxcat=3) that does $15 Million a year in sales based on designs other people create for them.

[neuromancer]

OK so how about I lay it out like this. Build your business up to 100 units a month, outsource your advertising, web design and shirt design on elance. While you do that, set up a deal with a screener and a fulfillment house. Set up a VA to manage the sales, production and distribution. Then you sit back and let other people do it. All you do is OK new designs and pick up your monthly checks.

see, automated and room for expansion.

You will probably plateau at 15 grand profits a month but that will get you a mansion and a Porsche.

[laniers]

OK so how about I lay it out like this. Build your business up to 100 units a month, outsource your advertising, web design and shirt design on elance.

You will probably plateau at 15 grand profits a month but that will get you a mansion and a Porsche.

I still disagree, I don't think you can outsource great design at $5 an hour. I seriously don't $15k a month with the plan you present is a likely outcome. I see so many other potentials she has in her profile and mentions in the post, project manager software company, golf, new mom, travel. These are all HUGE markets that have potential for all sorts of products and services. Dream big, do what you love, do what you know. DREAM!

[neuromancer]

so what's with the trolling dude?