When you start any business, it’s important to know what makes a successful t shirt business. Anything can be a business but the core of any kind of success is understanding the concept and working towards it with the ethical values in place.
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It is a well known fact that t shirts have been in use since time immemorial. However, the advent of modern printed clothing has led us to think that this type of clothing has just become popular. The reality is, t shirts have always been immensely popular and continue to be so to this day. Here, we will understand the strategies that are important for building a profitable and successful t shirt business.
Success of T shirt Business in India
The T shirt printing market is increasing day-by-day in India. Currently it is a 5500 crore market, but 90% of the startups in the printing business are still in loss. Only 10% of startups are making profit. Some of them are turning ultra-profitable.
For example; Bewakoof .com started with an investment of only INR 30000 investment and today generating a revenue of more than INR 10 lakhs per month. Souled store is a startup started with 6 lakh rupees which today earn more than 3.5 crore rupees in a month. Moreover, startups like Byoung, which only started with 1 lakh rupees today earning more than 3 crore revenue in a month. Also there are many new brands in the market such as Wear Your Opinion which is generating more than 1 crore revenue monthly in their initial stages only. So, let’s try to understand their business model which is making these t shirt companies profitable.
Business Model of T Shirt Business
Here, we will understand the ideal business model of t shirt business which is making it profitable:
1. Product
A t shirt business needs to go through 3 steps in order to accomplish the first step which is product. Sourcing, designing, and printing are the 3 important steps for preparing the product i.e. t shirts.
Getting raw materials, which is t shirt in this case in stock from other sources is known as sourcing. In India, the best places from where t shirts can be sourced are Kolkata, Mumbai, and Tirpur.
For the designing part, some companies have their own designers and some startups also get and copy paste design from outside. For the printing part, startups might have their own printing setups or also they might outsource. With these 3 steps, they create their basic product which is t shirts.
2. e-Commerce Website
The next step of a successful t shirt business is creating their own website and listing their products on the website. Initially as a startup, you can create a social-commerce website, but if you have good investment then you can create a website on Shopify as it is more impactful. Startups also make their custom websites these days.
3. Digital Marketing
Third step of a t shirt business is digital marketing. They do marketing of their websites on online portals. The best ways for the online promotion of websites are content marketing, influencer marketing, paid ads, etc. Maximum digital marketing you do of your business, more and more people will get aware of your website and product. After getting orders with the step of digital marketing, the next step is shipping.
4. Shipping
Today, startups mostly use third-party aggregators for shipping. Some of the good third-party aggregators are Shiprocket, ithink logistic, picker.com, etc. There are many third-party aggregators available in the market with which shipping integration can be done. The shipping integration enables the creation of automatic shipping as the businesses get orders through their website. The product successfully get delivered to the end customer.
5. Feedbacks And Reviews
The 5th process of a successful t shirt business is to take feedback and reviews. When the product reaches their customers, they should take feedback and reviews from them. The feedback and reviews help the businesses to change the product continuously. This is the standard process used by every ecommerce store. After taking feedback, if the feedback is not good, they analyse the part of the product or services which is not good. Whereas, if they get good feedback, they use that positive feedback for remarketing, which is the next step of t shirt business.
6. Retargeting And Remarketing
As you get customers, you need to do marketing again and again. Retargeting or remarketing simply means sending products or services again and again to the customers. Send them notifications again and again on a continuous basis. There are many channels using which you can send notifications to your customers. Some of the channels are WhatsApp, email, sms, and inapps. Basically, there are many channels to do remarketing to customers, from where the businesses generate sales again and again.
7. Partnership or Collaboration
This is the important step of a successful t shirt printing business. Most of the t shirt printing business collaborating with various partners for official merchandise. For example, Bewakoof.com collaborates with many media houses. Souled store collaborates with various comic companies. All the printing companies collaborate with the media houses of their own domain and other partners and become official merchandise partners.
Overall all the t shirt businesses work on this model only. Then what makes any company different is not the business model, but it is the business idea. Their business idea creates the difference and makes them different from normal t shirt companies.
What Is Their Business Idea?
Creating Content
The end-customers buy content actually, instead of the product. They wanted to see the content which is connected to their life and which they admire and idealise. People want to buy such content only. Therefore the best technique to step forward towards a successful t shirt business is creating evergreen content which is idealised by everyone and socially acceptable.
You will notice that the young generation idealise comics, movies, cartoons, humorous content in social media. Therefore most of the companies like bewakoof.com print movies quotations, souled store print comics characters, Byoung.com print cartoons, and Wear Your Opinion print humorous content of social media on their t shirts. This is the reason their content become famous in social media and people buy this content. And hence these startups grow very fast.
So, overall the core competency of these startups is to create content. Making content is easy, but creating the right content is difficult. And here is where their hit and try method works, which actually happens with social media marketing. The core of the whole t shirt business is hit and try method which happens from social media. Basically, they create 100 contents and do social media marketing of those 100 contents without developing a product. From there they come to know which content is bringing more engagement or which content is liked by most of the people. Then, they print t shirts with the same content.
For example, Souled stores have many t shirts on their website, but they use only some t shirts on their social media campaigns. They promote some t shirts in social media because they get the maximum clicks from these t shirts. Rest of their t shirts work as stock and are not used for promotion. These are the only t shirts which gain maximum sales. This is how the whole hit and try method works.
Marketing Strategy
The next step is marketing. So, how do these startups do their marketing? How is their marketing done as they get to know which content is working in the market? They take these contents and run social media campaigns with them. This is where half of their marketing is finished.
1. Content Marketing
After that content marketing plays a big role for these startups, because people relate with content. If you see bewakoof.com, they have a very good Instagram page in which they create memes and create content too. They also came to youtube recently and started creating videos. The success of a t shirt business depends a lot on content marketing just as these companies.
2. Influencer Marketing
Second most important technique for the marketing of a t shirt business is influencer marketing. All these startups have something in common, that some celebrities or big influencers have worn and promoted their t shirts on social media. From there only people came to know about these startups
3. Facebook And Google Ads
After that, their marketing is completely premised on Facebook and Google Ads. This is also one of the important content marketing techniques these days.
Investment
So, how much investment these businesses did and how much you will need to start a t shirt printing business? T shirt printing is a cost intensive type of startup and it requires heavy investment initially. What are the factors in this business where you need investment? Let’s learn:
Raw Material Cost
You will need initial investment in the form of raw material. The owner will need to buy stock of t shirts of different colours and sizes. Basically you need to invest 1.5 to 2 lakh rupees initially for a t shirt printing business.
Printing Machine Cost
You might also need to invest in a printing machine, if you want your own setup of the machine. Here you need to invest a big amount. Most of the businesses outsource this.
Other Expenses Cost
Other expenses of a t shirt printing business include employee cost, etc.
Overall a t shirt business needs heavy investment but after that they work on an asset light model. Whenever they get orders after this, they print on order basis, they don’t keep the manufactured stock. Big companies might keep the stock but the initial level companies print the t shirts on an order basis only.
Other business success stories.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. How do you make a successful t shirt design?
Do research and understand your target audience, their age group, likes, desires, and create content on it.
Q. How do I make my t shirt business stand out?
Invest in digital marketing including Facebook, Google Ads, Instagram marketing, Influencer marketing, etc.