How To Start A T-Shirt Business (2023 Guide) (2024)

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Updated: Dec 5, 2023, 1:10pm

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Before starting to sell T-shirts, you have to make a plan to help guide your actions toward success. Follow these seven steps to sketch out a path forward for your business, but don’t worry if you don’t have all the details yet. You just need to have an idea of where you’re headed so that everything flows smoothly once you get started.

First and foremost, you’ll need to pick a name for your business. Whether it’s just your name or something different, that will guide your process of creating a logo, business cards, a website and other branded assets.

Once you’ve chosen a name, you can register a domain so that when setting up your website you’ll be all set to link it with your brand. Shopify and Etsy are popular options for selling T-shirts online, but if you want to build your own custom website, you should get started quickly so your website is ready to launch with your products.

Whether you intend for your new venture to be a side hustle or full time, you should register your business as a sole proprietorship or an LLC. Registering as an LLC will give your business more tax benefits. You’ll also be able to buy blank T-shirts at cost with your EIN (as opposed to your personal Social Security number).

It can cost anywhere from $50 to $100 to register with your state. You should also familiarize yourself with your state’s legal requirements for small businesses and make sure everything’s in order.

If it’s too large a time commitment to go through the process of setting up your business, you can pay an LLC service to set it up for you. Investing in this service and saving your time will give you space to focus on the creative aspects of your business.

There are a variety of ways to produce printed T-shirts for people of all skill and knowledge levels.

If you’re committed to working with materials yourself, you can purchase screen printing equipment for your home or office. This gives you a great measure of control over the quality of the art and designs printed on the shirts, and if you enjoy creating social media content people love to watch creations take shape on TikTok and Instagram. The upfront cost of these machines will be high, but then you will have higher profit margins since you’ll only have to pay upkeep costs.

It’s also very easy to find local businesses that provide screen printing services for you. This means you’d have to take on the cost of paying these vendors as a part of your initial budget. However, a local service, or a company that’s far away but with whom you have a good relationship, will also be good for keeping an eye on quality control.

There are also print-on-demand services that are very reliable if you want to get started immediately. Services like Printful and Printify have fast turnaround times and allow you to sell as many products as possible without assuming the cost of any unsold products. However, the profit margins for these products are smaller because of the cost of individual printing.

Before printing, you need designs that reflect your brand’s goals. If you’re starting a T-shirt business to highlight your own drawings, paintings or digital designs, you’ll need to ensure they are saved as the correct digital files (usually vector files, such as .eps) that can be used by your printing service of choice. If you make highly intricate designs, you’ll probably want to do some test printing to see if everything prints on the shirts clearly. If you’re just starting out with design, there are a lot of free tutorials for using Adobe Photoshop and Canva to create designs.

There are also thousands of great artists whose work you can commission through websites like Creative Market, Fiverr and Upwork. When you find an artist, you can purchase their work outright, but if you have a good relationship with the artist and want to continue working with them, a profit-sharing relationship might be more sustainable for the future.

If you’re stuck on ideas, you can get insight for new designs by checking sales numbers of T-shirts on Etsy or using the tool Jungle Scout (which shows you how many units a product has sold on Amazon). Additionally, a Google trends search of various slogans you want to design for your shirts can show you which are the most popular and probably the most likely to sell.

Once you have the designs ready, customers will want to see how the T-shirts look on real people. Placeit is an easy service to use that gives you a bunch of photographs with blank T-shirt products onto which you can put your designs. You can also look into stock photo packages that include photos of people wearing blank shirts, and you can use Photoshop to put your designs on yourself.

Finally, if you have the time and connections, you can hire a local photographer and get some models for more dynamic action shots. It depends on your budget and how many shirts you’re producing.

When you’re ready to sell, it’s time to choose a sales channel. You can host sales on your own website, but online marketplaces are also an easy way to sell.

If you choose a third-party seller, you’ll have to start an account and set up your store. Services like Etsy, Zazzle and Redbubble are known to sell a lot of clothing and get a lot of customers. You can also sell through Amazon or on social media.

Before choosing, you should check the prices of these services and see which one will be the most sustainable for the long term.

Even if you’re selling on a third-party marketplace, you need a website to promote your T-shirt business. Here are the best e-commerce platforms for building an online store:

• Shopify: strong sales reporting capabilities, ability to customize storefront with design templates
• Wix: free plans available, easy user interface
• Weebly: e-commerce in the lowest-price plan

All of these services can be integrated with a print-on-demand service, if that’s how you’re producing your T-shirts. These make it easy to sell and promote however you choose, and can even ship the merchandise directly to your customers so that you can focus on the creative side of things.

Marketing a fledgling business can be difficult, but there are low-cost ways to do it. If you’re targeting a specific niche, you can look into communities online like subreddits and Facebook groups where you can post your T-shirts to bolster interest.

You could also try to reach out to micro-influencers and ask for their engagement rates to see if they would have decent conversion rates. Influencers that are just beginning to take off are also likely to support a small business just starting out.

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