Discuss the fun task of marketing a t-shirt shop. Where to advertise, local marketing tips, word of mouth, press releases, search engine marketing, keyword advertising, magazines, etc.
thanks everyone to your reply to my last thread. i'm still curious as to whether or not there are a minimum # of designs a retailer expects from a label. at the moment, we have 6 designs (all of which have a connected theme) and, in theory, could come up with several more. quite frankly, i'm concerned that additional designs will simply added significant costs and may not impact our efforts in trying to make a sale to retailers, but im not sure. i could theorize that retailers want a label that, if the initial trial is successful, can offer a wide variety of options, but this is pure speculation. thoughts?
Definitely depends on the retailer. Some small retailers are happy to carry only one or two designs from you. A very large chainstore will probably want a dozen or more (but only once you've been established as a brand). In general six seems like a perfectly reasonable number to me (a smaller business won't necessarily want all six, if a larger business likes all six you can get more done at that point), but you'd need to find out the needs of the actual retailers you plan on dealing with.
That also assumes that all six work well, and fit together into a range. A retailer may prefer to pick the six best out of a range of twelve or more for example. When you get big enough some retailers may want exclusive designs. So it really depends... six might be enough, it might not.
It sounds like you have a product you are happy with though (and therefore happy to stand behind), and don't want to risk complicating that for no real gain. It might be worth running with what you have and seeing what happens - there's a lot to be said for just starting. If you find the first few retailers you contact aren't responding well, try and find out why. You can always add more designs before moving on to the next ones if that's the problem. If they love the line but just want more, they may even be willing to tell you that (i.e. "If you can come up with more of this stuff we'd be interested").
I'm going to have 6 designs for one brand and another will start with two. But my question is that would anyone here use their t-shirt designs on other products? Say a notebook or something, i've been experimenting with putting my designs on stickers as well just to get a look. But then i'm not sure if that would be too few designs on too many products.....
if you're using the same design on many products you're probably going to want to be branding yourself through those products with a specific design, character, text, etc. not that you must stick with one design, but it should probably be a vehicle for contributing to your overall quality market exposure and not just a mere attempt to get as many products out in front of your customers' faces as possible. if that is the case you'll ultimately just desensitize your customers to your products.
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Say around, 8 different designs and a few extra products besides clothing such as a notebook and stickers. Could also help for promotional purposes. It's just offering something else rather then a single t-shirt with a design on. Although I'm looking at making my designs on men/womens vests as well. I kinda got the idea from the gift shops in museums (which I love) and how they sell little notebooks and stickers with the museum name on it. It's not really selling as many products as possible. I agree that you need to have brand and product quality and it's simply not worth saturating your own market for the sake of a few more bucks/pounds/pesos/yen.
I'm going to have 6 designs for one brand and another will start with two. But my question is that would anyone here use their t-shirt designs on other products? Say a notebook or something, i've been experimenting with putting my designs on stickers as well just to get a look. But then i'm not sure if that would be too few designs on too many products.....
HongKongDMZ
yes ive thought about this also, it is done by est brands, affliction for example. they use the same designs for some of thier basball cap ranges, they use the design of 1 of their tees and have part of it embroidered onto the frnt of the cap! which looks cool.
# of designs 
