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.
I am an artist who has other businesses to operate. I am not interested in manufacturing shirts as a full time business.
Ideally, I would make the art work, have a website to sell the work (as an on demand product), and have all of the work made by others and drop shipped to the customer. (I will sell heat transfer shirts that I make at a local store.)
Cafe Press will do this, but the costs are pretty high. Does anyone know of other vendors that will do this kind of service? Has anyone done this kind of business before?
You're looking for a "fulfillment" company. If you do a search for that term on the forum, there are alot of threads about the different fulfillment companies out there.
I'll give it a try thanks. Do anyone out there recommend a vendor like this for shirts. I really don't like dealing with companies without good references.
Outsourcing everything is the only way to go in my book. I've been selling t-shirts online for 8 years now, since before sites like cafepress.com became popular. At first I did all the inventory management and fulfillment myself, and it was enough to make me want to quit!
It seemed like I had to do a whole inventory recount every other week because all of a sudden someone would order a shirt online that I didn't have in stock, even when my inventory management efforts were supposed to eliminate that possibility.
Nowadays, I found a screen printer that was willing to screen print my shirts on demand and ship them out to my customer. It took me several years to get my business running the way it is now, but it was well worth it. I highly recommend seeking this sort of business model.
I'd recommend SpreadShirt who are a fulfilment service who I've been with for around 2 years now. The prices on the shirts may be a little high but I think the overall service is worthwhile and it allows me to concentrate on other stuff rather than printing shirts and dealing with payments etc.
Virtual T shirt store made easy 
