[t2c]

Hello there, I'm looking to start up a brand with a friend of mine, targeting teens to young adults, mainly of the skateboarding subculture. What marketing strategies might prove successful with these groups? I have a couple ideas thus far.
-Social media, facebook and twitter seem like very good opportunities to sell a brand
-Considering I'm a teenager myself (I'm 17), Myself and my group of friends would wear our brand, especially while boarding.
-Guerrilla marketing, I went through a street art phase, and know a thing or two about slaps (stickers), and they seem like a good idea to get the word out with flash / interesting designs.
-Spread the word around my school, and hand out some shirts to my good friends, get the trend going.

Besides these, does anyone have any thing to add / feedback to comment on it all?

 

[ssdapparel]

Don't know if this might help but: Have you thought of promotional products? Depending on your guys' budget there are all sorts of promotional products that fit a budget. Put your logo/brand name on the item along with a phone number and maybe a tagling or the products that you sell.
I would go through a promotional product distributor in your area than finding the product yourself on line. Sometimes they have the resources to find you a great product that goes well with branding your t-shirt business

 

[EnMartian]

Don't forget sponsoring popular skateboarders or skateboarding events. That would probably be down the road after the brand is making money, but it is a good way to get your name in front of a lot of people. Plus, if the person or event you sponsor is well known and respected, you get the halo effect from that.

 

[ryan barker]

if you give your shirts away, give them to the trendsetters of the group. if there's an alpha wolf of the pack, that's who you want wearing your gear. the sheep will follow in suit (or shirt).

i've yet to be convinced the guerrilla method of marketing works at all, regardless of how fun it sounds. consider that even if you sold a shirt or two to everyone in your direct clique as a direct result of you stickering everything in sight, is that going to meet your sales goals? probably not, even if you pick up a random sales from it from strangers. better would be to put stickers where your market hangs out rather than just anywhere you happen to be standing at the moment.

this is going to interesting considering your age and the age of your market in that most of them probably don't have credit cards and/or a paypal account, not is it legal for you to enter into a contract with any payment service. if your friend is 18, you're good, otherwise you'll need someone old enough to do this stuff for you.

absolutely, facebook, twitter, etc., is stuff you'll need to do. still, you should have a website if you plan on making any significant sales. this place is littered with would-be johnny cupcakes trying to be the next big thing trying to pull off the impossible with literally no money, i.e. social media sites.

i would say not to hand out promotional items without having a place to visit online. a facebook page, imo, isn't that place. to me, FB/twitter is a method to drive people to your main site where your real selling methods come into use. some people will argue, 'all i have is a facebook page and i sell a ton of shirts!' my counterpoint to that is imagine how many more you'd sell if you had a real website.

how do you plan on making the shirts?

 

[t2c]

A website would be ideal, EDIT: I looked around at a few webhosts. I'm located in Canada, could you recommend some cheaper but reliable domain hosts?

As well, along with the guerilla marketing, we'd probably give out a couple stickers with each order. I'm honestly not how sure it would work, but I had in mind that we would do it while boarding around my city, even if we don't get a huge amount of customers from it, its still fun. Maybe the art will even be eye catching enough to attract some people.

We plan to use a fufillment service (Print mojo is seeming to be the best to me), get a couple designs printed up, then go from there. We have a bit of a plan, but I can't find where I wrote it down.

 

[roadcaptainjimmy]

Go to your local skate parks, if its a free park spread the word and hand out stickers, maybe you can generate a few sales there. If its a paid park then talk to the owner and see if he would be willing to let you set up a booth to sell or some sort of consignment although that can be a headache. Contests via your Facebook and Twitter, those almost always work.

Sent from my HTC Glacier using T-Shirt Forums

 

[t2c]

Go to your local skate parks, if its a free park spread the word and hand out stickers, maybe you can generate a few sales there. If its a paid park then talk to the owner and see if he would be willing to let you set up a booth to sell or some sort of consignment although that can be a headache. Contests via your Facebook and Twitter, those almost always work.

Sent from my HTC Glacier using T-Shirt Forums

Good ideas, thank you! I'll def check them out, once we get the brand launched.

 

[roadcaptainjimmy]

Let's us know so we can check it out, good luck.

Sent from my HTC Glacier using T-Shirt Forums

 

[TurkishConnect]

If you know SEO (search engine optimisation) a non techie amateur may in fact be able to make it very close to a number one spot on Google in your chosen area. In this technical age when even the amateurs among us have some passive knowledge getting to the elusive number one spot can be very difficult. Many people are shooting for that top spot and that top spot in the t-shirt industry is hot property. Difficult but not impossible to get there. You have to use all of arsenal of technical weapons. Use twitter it's good for SEO, every day you should be tweeting. Add lots of contacts and become completely wired. Use Facebook and have a Facebook business page.

On your personal selling website make sure all of your links are referring back to each other in a matrix of link juice (Google loves this). Make sure that you have links on your website back to your Facebook and twitter page, set-up a LinkedIn account.

If you have a spare $299 get a professional to do your SEO for you, it is worth the money since many of these companies say they will get you a number one spot for your chosen keyword. Make sure all of your keywords are relevant and pepper them through your site but not so that the text reads badly and no more of 7 occasions on each page of this word. Make comments on lots of different forums relevant and not relevant.If you can buy a .org or .edu link if possible as it gives you some more juice with Google. Forget about all the other search engines and trying to get in them and only aim for Google, whatever gets in Google listings eventually gets in all the other listings.

The Internet is the best way to sell if you can get that number 1 spot or at least close. This is another reason I constantly talk about outsourcing because all of this internet related work will take up a hell of a lot of time and needs to fairly constant because if you take someone's spot at number 1, you can bet they're going to want to get that back. Also if you have the number one spot for your keyword and that keyword is popular then you may need to consider outsourcing to keep up with your sales demand.

Last thing to say is good luck getting promotion through the web is time consuming and difficult. You may be better off putting a business card inside every t-shirt with a statement on the top, "Please put this in your wallet!" maybe this has a better chance of working. Any sales tactic could be useful, you could even make some amazing skateboard stickers with your company name on them and tour skate parks and give them out free since this is your target audience get your name into your heads. Of course the good old word of mouth is key as well. Talk with everyone when working when not working about your t-shirts and how great they are as you never know where your next lead may come from. Keep some samples in your trunk (boot in English) and show them to people on any occasion possible. The proof is in the designs and your creations.

 

[TurkishConnect]

I already wrote too much so just a quick add on here: Make yourself a YOUTUBE account and make a channel and to this channel add your own videos with good keywords. For some reason these videos get quite high up in the ratings.

Good luck once again!

 

[fedz7]

I am selling great quality t shirts which are quite fashionable and great looking at wholesale prices...please my ebay listening,V necks and crew necks with euro style fitting,i maybe design t shirts and whenever i print my design on these t's via vynl heat press they looks stunning people always ask where i got them.....Wholesale/Retail Glidan Blank T-Shirts Great For Printing & Casual Wear | eBay the below pic is one of my many designs printed on the v neck t shirt i am telling u about,real quality.

 

[ryan barker]

i would venture to say that the top google sites have more going on than using fulfillment services, eh? sure, SEO is something to consider in the long-term, though i think it behooves someone to have a more profitable production method if their goals are lofty. too, i think before someone spends that much money and effort they should know whether or not their designs are even sellable. otherwise, it's putting the cart before the horse.

sure, you probably want to throw a sticker in every order, absolutely. but, there are a lot of things to consider when mailing, also, so be prepared for that. for example, how are you going to process a credit card order?

sponsorships would be great... and not free.

as far as having a business, how into it are you?

 

[t2c]

i would venture to say that the top google sites have more going on than using fulfillment services, eh? sure, SEO is something to consider in the long-term, though i think it behooves someone to have a more profitable production method if their goals are lofty. too, i think before someone spends that much money and effort they should know whether or not their designs are even sellable. otherwise, it's putting the cart before the horse.

sure, you probably want to throw a sticker in every order, absolutely. but, there are a lot of things to consider when mailing, also, so be prepared for that. for example, how are you going to process a credit card order?

sponsorships would be great... and not free.

as far as having a business, how into it are you?

Good points. That is true, I'm honestly not sure how we are going to process that. Indeed, not free, but somethign to think about down the line. Into having a buisness? I feel like I should be working on designing / planning and getting things up and running first. What do you mean exactly by having a buisness (Like what would it entail?)

Also to consider, I don't have a large amount of starting money to work with, all of these ideas are good, but I think I need to take things slowly, and grow from there. More or less, my friend and I are still in the planning phase of all of this (we haven't even decided on a brand name lol)

 

[ryan barker]

let me start off by saying no one will think less of you or your goals if all you want to do is make up some shirts for fun, earn a few bucks on the side, and if it goes someplace, great, if not, life goes on. there are tons of ways to put a graphic on a shirt, even if you cut out a stencil out of paper and spray paint it a shirt (i've done that ), it's just how to do it economically that also protects your wallet and interests in the long-term.

awhile back i started a thread that you may find interesting and maybe help answer some questions about 'what it entails' to own a business. don't think i'm an authority, but i think it's a pretty decent overview. here's the thread:

http://www.t-shirtforums.com/general-t-shirt-selling-discussion/t178412.html

it's not as if you have to answer every single question or even that every question pertains to you, but it's food for thought.

as far as marketing your brand, what are other similar brands doing? where are they advertising, if at all? a lot of brands have blogs to follow, and that's like giving the competition a blueprint sometimes, lol. do they have web sites? what's the quality of the site? do they have accessories, too? do they attend a lot of events? what kind of shirts are they selling, and how are they made? (generally, most sites say how the shirt is made. some even mention the brand, e.g. gildan.)

let me know your thoughts on having a business after you take a peek at that thread, eh?

 

[TurkishConnect]

As far the credit card processing Moneybookers (now called Skrill) worked fine for me in the past. They enable you receive credit card payments and also allow your customers to use their bank accounts to transfer to you. If you need something that is not too costly then this s a good option. I used to use paypal and moneybookers but I was surprised that my US customers preferred moneybookers. When the customer goes through the payment service they have to set up a password with moneybookers and then they are signed up to the moneybookers service.ery similar to paypal with lesser fees.

About what you said starting off slow. If you were to do your own SEO you would be able to do this slowly and if you were successful with your SEO for any website you produced you would slowly become more popular and sell more.

Good luck with your ventures.

 

[ryan barker]

there are youtube videos that can show you how to do seo, albeit it's most likely to be applicable to local markets as opposed to the whole world, in which case a pro might be more appropriate. just what i've seen people post. i've found a couple of people in real life who claim to know 'all about seo,' but, you know how that goes....

do you plan on selling online more or person-to-person, or about 50/50? or should i say, what do you *want* to do? i think any way that works is fine, but it may put a different emphasis on certain parts of your budget.

 

[Swisha]

A way me and my friends used to do to promote whatever we were doing is take advantage of school events. Not just your school. Anytime we had football, basketball, soccer, lacrosse and even GOLF games/matches we would talk to kids from the other schools and spread the word to them. I've built great connections that way.
We would have guys promoting inside and some guys putting flyers on cars outside. We got away with the flyers on the cars because they were "home" events. The faculty and cops knew us. I guess that would be another tip ad well, be cool with the staff and they'll tend to be easy going with you.

 

[t2c]

there are youtube videos that can show you how to do seo, albeit it's most likely to be applicable to local markets as opposed to the whole world, in which case a pro might be more appropriate. just what i've seen people post. i've found a couple of people in real life who claim to know 'all about seo,' but, you know how that goes....

do you plan on selling online more or person-to-person, or about 50/50? or should i say, what do you *want* to do? i think any way that works is fine, but it may put a different emphasis on certain parts of your budget.

I would say about 50/50, perhaps leaning more towards selling in person. More or less, you guessed exactly what I sort of wanted to do, print some self designed shirts, make a little bit of coin, and if it takes off? Great! If not, no big, I'm not looking for a get-rich-quick scheme. Although i want to market enough to not be stuck with unsold stock. I will look into using money bookers, thanks for that! As well, the school events idea sounds solid.

Also, I was planning on using printmojo, since they seemed to have a reasonable price and I would prefer screen printing over transfers.

 

[TurkishConnect]

Just one more quick tip about SEO, if you do want to sell to a world audience when you go in to webmaster tools through your Google account after you have added the Google code to your website. You should select the no country option as opposed to a country. This way it seems to do better on all Google international pages and maybe overall. The other option of selecting your local country may just pigeon hole you to a specific locale. I personally think from my trials that not selecting a country seemed to work better overall. Log in to Google from the signin button to see all the available tools open to you and use as many as you can as promotion tactics.

 

[Riderz Ready]

You have posted a question in "T-Shirt Marketing" yet the vast majority of people responding do not even link to their website and/or Facebook account in their signature. That is marketing 101 - start there.