If you are an entrepreneur, it is likely that you are constantly thinking of new business ideas.
An industry that many entrepreneurs want to get into is clothing.
That is because in the clothing industry, you are displaying your creativity by designing clothing for people to wear.
This guide will take you through the entire process of starting an online t-shirt business from home at a low budget. It includes everything from research and branding to building and promoting your store.
If you want to sell something other than T-Shirts, check out this article: Best online printing business ideas
Store Niche
Before thinking of a brand name, or designing a logo, you need to pick out a niche for your clothing brand.
In business terms, a niche is a specific area or segment within a larger industry.
Usually, a niche is a refined version of a large market, which is narrowed down so that you can focus on a specific area in your industry.
To give you an example, let’s take a look at the clothing industry.
The clothing industry is massive, so it’s near impossible to be at the top of the market if you are selling generic clothes.
However, if you narrow down your market, let’s say we focus on travel, and have a simplistic design to our products, our niche is now simplistic travel wear.
Now, we have a much smaller target market, which means we can focus more on who our potential customers are, and dominate this niche market.
Common factors used to define a niche market:
- Style
- Geographical area
- Quality
- Demographic
- Culture
- Occasion
You want to think of things like this that will help make your niche stand out from the crowd.
To think of a good niche, I suggest writing down some of your hobbies and then ideas will start rushing to your brain.
In my experience, it also helps to draw out a spider diagram or mind map to think of more ideas.
Just take your time and don’t rush when selecting your niche.
You don’t want to sell clothing that you would not buy yourself, so picking the right niche is important.
Then, you could narrow down your niche further, for example if you want to make sport related t-shirts, you could narrow it down further and make t-shirts with sporting quotes.
This will allow you to build a loyal audience around your brand, because you are creating and selling something specific.
Being more specific with your niche will also help you to easily think of new designs for your products.
In this case, you would simply need to search for famous quotes from sporting legends, and you could add them to your t-shirt or any other products that you choose to sell.
Of course you don’t have to use quotes or design sports related clothing, this is just an example, your niche is completely up to you.
For my clothing store example, the niche that I will be picking is “City Skyline t-shirts “, so hopefully that gives you some inspiration.
You can see how specific my niche is, because I have gone from t-shirts, to geographical t-shirts, then narrowed it down further to city skyline t-shirts.
Brand Name
Now that we have picked our niche, we need to think of a brand name.
There are many ways that you can do this, but there are two main things that I like to do.
- Have a brainstorming session.
- Use a brand name generator.
Or, of course you could use both of these techniques together.
So, start by writing down words related to your niche, and see if any brand name ideas come into your mind.
If you can’t think of anything, enter some of the words that are related to your niche into a brand name generator and see what ideas it generates.
I like to use namelix to generate brand names for my projects, so that’s what we will be using.
- Enter a couple of keywords into the tool (I’m going to enter “city skyline t-shirts”).
- Pick a desirable brand name length (I’ll select both “short” and “medium”).
- Finally, select a brand name style (I’m going to pick the “Multiple words” option), and then click Generate!
Now namelix will generate loads of possible brand name ideas.
Take a minute to have a look at them, and then note down the one that you want to use.
It’s important to take note of a few things when considering your brand name.
- Your brand name must be available as a username on any social media platforms that you want to use (Use Namechk to see availability).
- You want your brand name to be available as a domain name.
- Think about whether your brand name is something people would want to buy from.
For example, you don’t want to select a brand name that is irrelevant to your niche, because then your target market would not understand what you are trying to sell.
So, make sure to keep these things in mind when deciding on your brand name.
For my t-shirt business, I am going to select the brand name “SkylineShirts”.
You may not like it, but I like the simplicity of it, and how it rolls off the tongue.
Logo Design
Now, we need to design a logo for our brand.
There are many ways for you to do this, but to keep it simple, I like to use either Canva, or the Namecheap Logo Maker.
Give both a try, and see which tool you like the most, and which creates the better logo.
In this example, I’m going to use the Namecheap Logo Maker to design the logo for my t-shirt business.
So, lets go through the process of designing a logo using the Namecheap Logo Maker.First, type in the name of your business, and then, the type of business that the logo will be for, then click continue.
Now, you will have to pick your logo style, by selecting your favourite font from three different options.
You will have to do this six times, so that the logo maker can give you the best logos based on what you like.
Once you have gone through the logo style options, you need to select the colour that you want your logo to be.Below each colour, you can also see the emotions that fit with it, for example, the blues are described as friendly, loyal & peaceful.
Now, you can add a slogan for your brand, however, as it’s optional, I think that you should skip that option as it does not work well with this logo maker.
Finally, add relevant icons.
This is also optional, so if you don’t want icons in your logo you can skip it, but you can remove them later.
Now, click Continue, and you will be shown all of the generated logo designs.
Scroll through the logos, and see if you find a style that you like.
Once you find one that you think will suit your brand, click onto it to customize it, or download it.
When you have selected a logo, you will see customization settings down the left, and logo mockups on the right.
You can customize the colour, text, slogan, icon, and layout.
Then, when you are happy with everything, click Download!
This will download a ZIP which includes colour codes for your logo, fonts, cover image, profile image, and logo vector files.
T-shirt Store Platforms
Once the branding is sorted, we need to pick a platform to build our store on.
You could build your store using WordPress, Shopify, or another eCommerce platform, but I suggest using a platform that is specifically for building a t-shirt store.
There are many platforms like this, but here are my top three:
- Teemill
- Spreadshirt
- Teespring
It’s important to note that with these t-shirt store platforms, you do not have to hold any stock, or print the t-shirts that you sell. You only need to add your design and everything from manufacturing to fulfillment is done from their side.
These t-shirt store platforms are also known as Print on demand (POD), as they print the t-shirts whenever one of your customers places an order on your store.
This makes the whole process of starting a t-shirt business online, much easier and faster.
Promote Your Store
Once you have finished creating your store, and published some products, you need to promote your store so that you can start getting sales.
Promoting your store is crucial, because otherwise you would have spent time building your store, and designing your products, but it will receive no traffic, which means you would not get any sales.
You need to spend just as much time, if not more time promoting your store than you did building it.
Here are four techniques to promote your clothing store:
Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
One of the most beneficial store promotion techniques is to optimize your content to appear in search results.
If you appear in searches that your potential customers are making, they are much more likely to click onto your products and make a purchase.
There are many different types of SEO, and SEO techniques, but there are some basic things that all websites need to do.
Basic SEO tactics:
- Use relevant keywords in your product pages
- Write engaging descriptions for your products
- Add relevant keywords to page titles and meta descriptions
- Optimize image alt tags
I recommend taking your time to properly learn how to optimize your t-shirt store to rank in search engine results pages.
Give Discounts to Customers
When customers message you on social media or leave a review, give them a discount code to turn them into repeat customers.
Sharing discount codes will keep your customers happy, and keep them returning.
You can also create social media posts for promotions, to attract more people to your store.
Running seasonal promotions at Christmas, and at other holidays, is a fantastic time to promote your products.
If someone sees a discount code, they are more likely to make a purchase, because they are getting your product for a lower price.
Use Social Media
One of the best methods to promote your t-shirt store is to use social media.
For promoting t-shirts, I suggest using Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Optimize all of your social media pages, with contact information, branding, and add a link to your store.
You can also use social media to engage with your audience.
Reply to their comments, and direct messages, to turn them into loyal customers.
Finally, join and interact with relevant groups, for example if your t-shirts are cat related, join a Facebook group for cat owners.
Make sure to only post relevant and useful content, don’t just spam links to your products, because you want people to trust you and not block you.
Give Your T-shirts to Influencers
If you send your t-shirts to influencers on Instagram, or YouTube, they will wear your t-shirt in their content.
Then, everyone who follows them, will see your t-shirt.
There is a 4 step process for this strategy:
- Find influencers in your industry / niche
- Message them, and ask them if they would like a free t-shirt, in return for promotion in their content.
- If they say yes, send them a t-shirt.
- When viewers see the t-shirt, if they like it, they will comment asking where they can get one.
- Boom! Now your t-shirts are being shown off by influencers in your niche!
For bigger influencers, you may have to pay a promo fee, depending on what you both agree on.
Influencer marketing can help you to grow your brand very quickly, so I suggest looking into it further.
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