I have always been fascinated by a business like a market stall on a weekend. Since shifting to Germany, the chance of that happening is small.
So I started to look around the internet to see what is happening. I came across the concept of drop shipping. Drop shipping is a concept where you are selling the physical product, but the inventory is held by your supplier. The supplier also ships the product directly to the customer. Do a check via Google on what drop shipping. Plenty of information will pop up. T-Shirt is a possible avenue.
The T-Shirt bug started when I came across Tee Spring after hearing it on Mixergy. The thing about Tee Spring is that it uses the crowd funding model. You design a T-Shirt by putting some text and some graphic on a T-Shirt. Next you specify how many T-Shirt is your minimum quantity, and set your selling price. You will also need to specify the number of days it is on sale for. Once all these are set, it is time to launch it onto the market. The idea is to get the minimum of number of folks to sign up. When the time has expired and if the minimum number of folks have signed up, a production run of the T-Shirt is executed and delivered out. Some folks have had great success with this platform, unfortunately, I didn't
The next platform I tried was a spreadshirt. It is a more traditional model. You basically create a shop, upload or create some T-shirts, and start the marketing campaign. You can see what my efforts are at http://smartarsecomments.spreadshirt.co.uk/.
The one thing that I did which I should have taken sometime is the name of the shop. I called it "smart arse comments". In some ways, it portrays a red neck attitude for the shop, not something that I feel happy about. It also limits to what I can sell in the shop. The name of the shop should represent the type of T-Shirt it is selling. In the long term, I definitely don't want to see T-Shirts with smart arse comments on it.
Well, I have created 8 T-Shirts on it, any haven't managed to sell any yet. Today is the 8th since I started the shop. The next thing I need to do is to create more T-Shirts, and the start the marketing campaign. I hope that the type of T-Shirts that I have for sale is of interest to the general public.
