Pre-Orders on New Designs: Great Business Strategy, or BEST Business Strategy?
Hey all, just wanted to share some advice that I learned first hand with my own t-shirt company (link in sig)! And that advice is: offer new designs on your online t-shirt shop for pre-order!
Of course, you have to do more than just stick them up on your site... you also have to promote them. Which I've done so far via online t-shirt blogs, and a few other blogs. We're also going to be having a side deal on Shirt.Woot and a giveaway on Facebook. The long and short of it is, though, that in the past three days we've sold more shirts than in the last six days we've sold more shirts than in the previous month!
It took some advanced planning, like getting quotes from printers and artwork prepared significantly ahead of time, but it's been worth it. Waking up each morning is such a pleasant surprise, because the majority of the orders are placed before I get up.
And these are the pros of having pre-sales, as I see it:
gauge popularity of items before investing in stock
provide customers with the (accurate) impression that they'll be the first to get your tees
accumulation of capital to fund the printing of the shirts
customer perception of a sale that will expire more concretely than any other sale, because there can be no other pre-order sale on this design ever
If you can swing it, I highly recommend that you offer your new designs on pre-sale!
Re: Pre-Orders on New Designs: Great Business Strategy, or BEST Business Strategy?
Joe, that was a great post.i wanted to thank you for being so articulate and concise with your data. thanks for taking the time to post. .... God luck... JB
Re: Pre-Orders on New Designs: Great Business Strategy, or BEST Business Strategy?
Wow I was just thinking about this method actually. I searched it to see if anyone else was going to post. I did have a question though.
Would you do it on a larger scale? Our companies main customers are smaller retail shops. How do you think they would react to a process like this? Where we would offer them all our designs first for pre-order in bulk and then release them on our site after they've made their orders?
I thought it would give them a sense of "wow we're number one on their list" and also give us the advantage of all the things mentioned above.
And yes thank you so much for posting. It's so nice to hear that success is being produced from something we've been on the fence about.
Re: Pre-Orders on New Designs: Great Business Strategy, or BEST Business Strategy?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yazakisan
Wow I was just thinking about this method actually. I searched it to see if anyone else was going to post. I did have a question though.
Would you do it on a larger scale? Our companies main customers are smaller retail shops. How do you think they would react to a process like this? Where we would offer them all our designs first for pre-order in bulk and then release them on our site after they've made their orders?
I thought it would give them a sense of "wow we're number one on their list" and also give us the advantage of all the things mentioned above.
And yes thank you so much for posting. It's so nice to hear that success is being produced from something we've been on the fence about.
It definitely makes sense to do something similar when selling to retailers. In fact, it's pretty standard to collect wholesale orders and then ship them all on a specified ship date (or before!), once per season. Many buyers like to see samples of your product, though, so you could get a small run printed to show to buyers and then print a large one once you have orders.
This is a discussion about Pre-Orders on New Designs: Great Business Strategy, or BEST Business Strategy? that was posted in the General T-Shirt Selling Discussion section of the forums.
Pre-Orders on New Designs: Great Business Strategy, or BEST Business Strategy? 
Daniel Slatkin 
