Ideas on Selling T-Shirts Online

T-Shirt Island has a great, detailed post detailing how different online t-shirt businesses are going about things. They are broken down into:

1. Let customers decide what they want: Allowing the customer to determine all the aspects of a t-shirt; the print, fabric colour, cut etc.
2. Transform loyal customers to business partners: Partnering with your customers to sell their creations.
3. These guys create their own market!: Via focusing on community and having that community as the core of the market. Threadless is the pioneering example here.
4. Products campaign goes social web, for free: Individuals such as artists have the flexibility and reach to produce, promote and sell their designs - aided heavily via social networking websites like MySpace and Stylehive.
5. Selling for good cause: Placing a focus on charity and social responsibility.

I'd like to add two new ideas for new models and ways of going about things:

Open Source Community-Created World: Everything is contributed by the community. Not just artwork for t-shirts, but narrative (incorporating plot points & character development that can individually be reused) or photographs or music. In return the community is allowed to freely use, incorporate and distribute this intellectual property - for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

In effect you have a community created and controlled "world" filled with a cohesive intellectual property that can be utilised freely by one member or a group of them.

Pre-requisite Production Model: With this model you offer several styles but only produce them if a predetermined number of people commit to purchasing one. For a t-shirt style you might require 50 people to commit to it, whereas for a luxury jacket you may only need 5 or 10 people paying a higher price. This means that you can produce exact numbers with no wastage and reduced liability.

To entice people you could require they only put a 50% deposit down to secure their place, with the balance required once the prerequisite number of orders has been reached.

The other great advantage to this model is that you can make a garment as exclusive or as mass market as you want, depending on how many people must commit to an order before production.


We're very interested in using the above mentioned models in the future and think that a lot of emerging t-shirt labels will do well to use them, too.