Building a business from the ground up isn’t easy. It takes time, luck, skill, knowledge, it takes connections, and flexibility and it will take a huge part of you for a while. Once you have climbed the mountain you aimed for it is smooth sailing from there and the hardships get distributed to your employees and managers.
In this day in age, if you got a financially plausible idea it probably can be a million-dollar business. It takes a bit of ingenuity, out-of-the-box thinking and a lot of hard work. Anything can be successful if you give 100% of yourself to it.
Today as you can see, we are talking about the t-shirt business and how to start one from scratch. If you ever believed that this can be a million-dollar business you are right and this article will point you to the way you need to go if you thought that idea like this stands no chance, we will tell you why you are wrong.
Just how good, smart and lucrative a business like this can be, you can check out if you visit here the Wordans website. This is the team of people who set a goal to be the best, yet cheapest wholesaler first in Canada then expanded to US and EU. But let’s not talk much about them, you can check that for yourself, let’s try and tell you what you need to do to be like them or even better.
1. Financials
Financial construction is essential to a new business. You need cash to start something if you want to start big as soon as possible. There are alternatives to this of course thanks to newer technologies and newer capabilities. Did you know that this type of business can succeed with little to no money at all? Is that possible? Of course!
What you need is an idea, a place that does print on demand near or around you. what you will need to do is create a site that will offer products and t-shirts in this case, and you need to find someone to do a print on demand and tie them in your site as a backend that will fulfil orders coming from your site.
Now the little to no cash comes in this form – you either create a free website that will cost you nothing with little limitation at first and then invest in better servers and domain, or you can instantly invest $50-100 and have nearly a pro site with all the benefits it is up to you and your financial construction. If you will have partners make sure you got investments and obligations in line and know how many of the shirts you need to start.
For entrepreneurs looking to start their own t-shirt brand, Gelato provides an easy and convenient solution for printing and delivering high-quality products to customers.
2. Market
To have any numbers that would be viable and that will show your customers, the number of orders, the amount of material, labor and all others you need to do some sort of market research. It does sound complicated but for a business like this, you can simply sit down with your friends and listen to what they talk about and what they want and need.
Many will not see this as market research but it is nothing less than that. You will sit with someone that saw a cool movie which started trending and they said it would be nice to have some shirts, caps, pants with their logo, a cool catchphrase or anything in between.
What you do is listen, remember or write down and get to business. A shirt with print on them can be rather cool as a present and can be a rather lucrative thing if you manage to get hired to do team attire for your high school football team or something like that. So, no matter how small your thing your market is, it can always get bigger if you decide you want to venture that way.
3. Brand and labels
When your business takes a swing, you can start thinking about labels and brands of your own. You can do it in the beginning as well, there is little to no impact on what you are creating. Some businesses like to have their seal on every piece that goes out while others start little and build up from there. the route you will take depends on you and if you see that your site and your brand are going places you might want to capitalize on that further.
4. Shipping
Another important thing in any business, especially online ones that do a lot of these collaborations with other partners is to find a shipping company that will work with you and support you. you can also check with your partners if they have some sort of contacts in this department and tie in everything nicely.
If you decided to go for a free route with no money and all you got is a site and a partner that will label and print logos on your t-shirts it would be a nice thing to sit with them and try and utilize their shipping solutions for a little extra profit for each product. If that is not an option you can always negotiate with UPS, FedEx and similar companies and have them deliver for you.
5. ROI
Any business should be considered with the return on the investment side of things or the ROI. This is what tells you if you have a viable and successful business or not. If your investments are bigger than your returns it can mean two things depending on the gap – you are either not profitable or you need to give it more time.
Now, this business does not need a lot of investing and if your blank shirts as a product come in cheap and if you can print them and label them cheaply you should see a hefty return pretty soon. If you decide to do everything by yourself, from logo and label design to the print design and printing yourself you will need to invest a bit more.
You also need to think about the size of the business and the demand and maybe plan for another employee or a business partner. This is a bit of a technical part of the business but it will give you a clear picture of what you can expect and hope for in the future of this business.
Rhydian Choi 
Nicola Holder