This section of the forum is for discussing the business and finance issues of the t-shirt industry. Which business structure to use (sole proprietor, LLC, S Corp, etc), how to handle billing, where to register your business and get the proper licensing, etc.
Ok I just thought of this. and I feel like im not going to relay my thought out.
Ok, well I have started a new brand of shirts, and as usually money is always a factor.
So the idea is to wholesale the design. Only thing is I will not be selling the printed shirts, I will only sell rights to the actual design.
Im probably not making sense.
Instead of me wholeselling printed shirts, I want to only sell my designs. Leave the printing to the buyers of my designs or printing companies. designs cannot be altered, Only thing that can change will be shirt colors. Must be printed on certain brand of shirt to keep consistent.
This allows the printer to have options of either buying an entire series of shirts or a single shirt, and also they have th eoption to print as many or as little as they would like.
I dont know if this is a good idea.
Plus if it is succesfull they would continue to buy whatever designs i bring out for the different seasons.
Post your thoughts or ideas on this and see if maybe we can comeout with some sense.
Others will be able to answer this better than I, but in the mean time: I'm sure we would all love to just sell our designs, or ideas, but it is the person that takes the risk that gets the reward. I recommend figuring out a way to produce your designs. At the very least, produce samples (actual shirts) and hustle to write orders for wholesale. That way you can have the promise of revenue before printing. But that is a tough way to go.
It sounds like in your head this proposition is probably different to something like GoMedia's vector packs. To the customer, it's practically the same. You came at it from a different direction, but ultimately arrived in a very similar place. One major difference to the customer would be that you would be coming to them periodically with seasons, rather than them seeking you out. Not really a big difference. The kind of person who wants designs like this probably doesn't think like that (or last many seasons), and the kind of person who thinks in seasons doesn't want stock designs.
Can you set up a site selling pre-made t-shirt designs to people who want to use them? Yes. But are you going to get retail buyers, printers, etc. interested in taking them on? Not if they weren't already doing that sort of thing anyway.
Retailers have way too much to worry about without getting involved in the printing game. Printers are busy printing. Labels want their own designs, and are busy producing them. There is a market for people who want ready made designs: but that's exactly the (narrow, cheap) market that your business would need to target. You're not likely to break out of that box by having a differing presentation. It's not about selling t-shirt designs to those who sell t-shirts, so much as about selling clipart to those who already want designs.
Plus if you're going to set post-sale conditions you'll lose interest from some buyers, and you'll need a good watertight licensing agreement if you want to have any chance of actually enforcing it.
I just get the sense that you have the idea that people will buy these designs, print them, sell them, and a recognisable brand will be created. End customers will recognise the one brand, that's being sold by all these different companies that want a piece of your brand's success. A t-shirt franchise. It's not going to happen.
thanks for the comments, it was an idea, and I just really wasnt sure of it so im glad I asked.
I think eventually i will spend the moeny to create the samples and work on getting orders.
i thought about doing cafe press but I have never purchased anything from them, so im like in doubt as far as quality goes. but they do DTG so im almost sure that it would be good as long as i supplied a good quality image...
Also what about heat transfer ready art.
Are there any printers that would like to buy ready to heat press designs..
I thinkt hat would be a good idea, and i have the abillity to supply it.
Are there any printers that would like to buy ready to heat press designs..
I thinkt hat would be a good idea, and i have the abillity to supply it.
Trouble is a printer could buy say three of each design, then as they wanted more, just scan your designs and print them out themselves. You would find it virtually impossible to monitor anything like that.
Most printers would already have access to things like vector art packs and raster image collections, so unless your designs are something radically different, I think you would struggle to sell enough heat transfers to make it viable.
If finance hadn't been a problem for you, I would have suggested designing onto plastisol transfers, as these are much more difficult to copy.
Suggestions And Ideas Needed 
