RAHchills said:
that doesn't make much sense to me. why would a retailor want to pick up your designs without any previous sales information that would generate a decent sales forcast for their demographic?
Because they have no need for that information?
More often than not a real-world retailer will have more experience selling a product than their online counterparts. Even when that's not the case, it's still their job to know what will sell and what won't - their livelihood depends on it.
Online sales forecasts etc. are not particularly relevant. The demographics online store X and real store Y are aiming at are different. Their marketing is different (most likely in scale as well as style). Even if they're the online and offline version of the same store this applies, let alone if they're different companies. The retailer will have their own projections, based on how similar material sold in the past - much more reliable data for them under the circumstances.
Obviously what sells in one format has a good chance of selling in another, but a good buyer should know whether or not your shirt is going to sell just by looking at it - they don't need a sales record.
RAHchills said:
My next question for this thread is how do you try to control your shirts' price when seeking international sales? Currency conversions are a killer, eh?
I don't think it's a great idea to try.
If you did a straight currency conversion to GBP for example, a USD $18 shirt would cost GBP 9.75. How many shirts have you seen for that in the UK? Sure there's the occasional one for 9.99, but generally speaking the conversion to the UK is "whatever it costs in US dollars, it'll cost in British pounds". So USD 18 is simply GBP 18.
The more distance you put between the wholesale source and the retail end product, the less competition there is between them anyway. The majority of people are still not all that adventurous about going beyond geographical boundaries.