Hi all Tee Afficionados

Hey

Welcome to the tshirt forums and I've seen the site by the way, very freaking cool

Id have to agree with Rodney though, while the search engines will help the static pages don't over look simplicity.

Customers are likely to spend on average 2-8 seconds on a website before deciding to ditch it and move on or stay on the site and keep looking.

Thats where marketing to that niche is so damn important.
Take me for instance, Im in the process of setting up a tshirt store in a few months time that caters for the dungeon and dragon geek type niche, very specific, but ive done my research and because its a passion of my own I know where potential customers congregate online.

But despite all this, I know that it will take time.
It would be way cool if I got a sudden surger of customers right away, but I think like wine the site needs to mature and ripen and providing you dont lax at builing that traffic month by month I think in the long run it'll really turn out.

Best of luck! Those shirts are awesome!

Rodney said:

I think if you continue marketing to the right niche, you'll find the buyers for your products.

I think the static pages will help you more with search engines, but they should be made so it's still easy to buy a product.

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Finding the right niche for us is tough. As I mentioned before, we have a higher price point than most other places. The cost IS justified as we pay the artists what they are worth, and the products are printed on premium technical fabric materials. Not to mention the garments are really custom made, in the sense that the front, back and arms of the shirts have to be constructed so the art falls in the right way.

So our problem is that we are still trying to work out what our product is. Is it fashion or athletic clothing (the garments are made with lightweight moisture-wicking fabrics)? In reality, they are both, but it's very difficult to market to both areas at the same time.

Our products have been picked up by select Saks Fifth Ave, Nieman Marcus, and Bloomingdale stores - which represent more high-end fashion stores. But now Macy's will be doing a test order for us on our lower price-point items.

Anyway, the wholesale market is accelerating for us, and now I'm just trying to spark the online market for us, but I think the price is the biggest challenge to work with there as online shoppers tend to look for bargains.

Annushka said:

Hi YellowMan, welcome. The desings are very attractive. Could you tell us a little more about the overall process of creating these shirts - printing techniques, garment assemply steps etc? How much time does it take you to complete each pieace? And how much of this do you outsource to contractors? Very interested in hearing about it.

Thank you

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Sure. The most complicated designs are the long sleeve shirts. For each shirt, a front, back, right sleeve, and left sleeve is printed. Artwork is done on a pattern template, so each piece of artwork is cut out of the fabric once it has been printed. There is a lot of yardage waste in this process, which contributes to the overall cost - not to mention the custom attention to each piece. Most of the garments are printed on rolls of pre-treated fabric using a reactive dye heat transfer process. The blend of technical fabrics used for the garments recieves the color brilliantly and permanently. After the heat transfer, fabrics are post-treated to bring out the color and preserve the quality. After this, the pieces are cut out and sewn together.
Making one-off samples is VERY expensive, but once we commit to bulk orders the cost comes down considerably.

We have a big advantage in that the owner of the company has a family business in textile manufacturing. Nevertheless, the expenses can still be quite high.