Hi Bryan,

Your site looks great and is very user friendly! I don't think it screams anything negative at all, maybe you just aren't getting the traffic you need to turn lookers into buyers, like most sites. Your site is much better than many I've seen. Wish I had an answer for you, are you sure you're hitting your "target market" ?

 

I like it. I think it looks clean and crisp. Just be patient though, when starting a site it takes a long time for people to find it. Maybe you could also start a blog about the grubs which would help with the search engines. There are several free blog sites, blogger is one by google.

 

Maybe you could also start a blog

He has one, but the link isn't very prominent.

 

Your site looks great. What program or cart are you using?

Are you getting the looks and people just aren't buying or is it no one is coming to your site?

Having a great site is the first thing, marketing is another. What are you doing to market your site?

If you are getting the hits, I personally would want to have more info on the item i am buying. Are they 100% cotton, 50/50, etc. How is the design applied? Is it hand silkscreened or transfer? What's the feel of the designs? I think the more info you give your visitor the better chance you have of them making a purchase.

 

The site is decent, but the shirts are basically the kind of thing I'd expect to find at Kmart, where they would be significantly cheaper. I'm not saying they're bad, but they are dated and a dime a dozen. It's like expecting people to wear Finding Nemo without the strength of Pixar behind it. And even with Pixar behind it you don't see (m)any adults sporting Nemo shirts either. I think you've got an uphill battle to convince people why they should buy this product. I also think you'd have significantly better luck with in person sales than you will online.

 

Bryan,

Have you tried writing a press release? That might be a good thing to do.

Are you selling your shirts one by one directly to customers, or have you tried to get any wholesale orders from children's boutiques?

One thing that I think might be a problem with your line is that your characters are cute but the design doesn't immediately tell me something about the character. If you go to the bio page I see that you've put some effort into crafting little personalities for them - this one likes karaoke, this one likes ballet, etc. But you don't know that unless you read the bio page. And even if you read it you are likely to forget.

When the big players in this market do character t-shirts, the character is always part of a show or movie where we have the chance to get to know the character. If you have a Dora shirt, well we all know Dora likes to explore and be adventurous - we don't need to see the design feature her with a map and a backpack to know that, because we've seen it on the tv show a hundred times.

You can't really say that your bio page does the same thing, and if you don't have another kind of media to do that for you (a book, a cartoon video, a live puppet show, etc) you should show the personality in the design somehow. You should consider coming up with designs that reflect their interests - one grub singing like a rock star with a microphone in hand, one in a ballet tutu, dancing around. I think you should also include the names of each of the grubs in the designs so that people can relate to them more as a "character" rather than just a cute critter drawing.

I think you could even go beyond that and make each of your grubs interests reflect some kind of strong, simple message with positive values that your customers (parents) would relate with. For example, one of your grubs could be interested in sports or eating right as a way to promote a healthy lifestyle. One of your grubs could be interested in music or art as a way to promote self-expression. If you do that, you are really giving your customers a much more valuable product.

 

Wow, Thanks so much for everyone sharing their ideas!

Marketing has definitely been a kicker for me. I'm using the free methods such as myspace and facebook. I've also tried paying for facebook ads, but that did nothing. I'm in the process of reading a bunch of different books. I've managed to talk with a few blogs, but have not had any turn over from it.

Questions I received:

Your site looks great. What program or cart are you using? I am using 3dcart.com. I really like them.

Are you getting the looks and people just aren't buying or is it no one is coming to your site? I'd say a bit of both, I've watched my visit numbers drop over the last 2 months.

Having a great site is the first thing, marketing is another. What are you doing to market your site? Facebook and myspace, any other ideas?

Solmu: I totally understand what you are saying regarding Pixar and having a major story behind the characters. I'm hoping with time, I will be able to do more things with my Grubs characters and people will understand them more.

Jasonda: Thanks so much! I really appreciate your input.
My press release consisted of emailing just about everyone I've ever known about my site launch. As far as a press release to any type of media circuit, I did not. Any suggestions?

I am in the process of learning the best way to sell to boutiques. Recently, I learned that they won't start buying for Spring/Summer 09 until Sept-Oct. Their buying schedule has been very confusing.

I completely agree with you about adding something to each character that describes their personality, and promoting positive things. An idea I've had for a while, is having them wear guitars and title the T-shirt "Grubs n' Roses".

I'm going to focus on some new designs in hopes of selling to boutiques this October, I will definitely implement your ideas.

Thanks to everyone for you nice complements regarding my site design!

Bryan

 

Solmu: I totally understand what you are saying regarding Pixar and having a major story behind the characters. I'm hoping with time, I will be able to do more things with my Grubs characters and people will understand them more.

Short of $100 million for an animated feature , your concept screams for a stuffed animal compliment. That would set your site off.

 

Your concept is great but your site feels like your talking to the little kids but their not the ones buying your product. Also, if the figures have names, why not put thier names on the shirt as well.That way the characters are more personal and maybe the kids can better identify with them. Just a thought.......good luck.

 

Beautiful web design and excellent photos! Whatever the problem is, it's not the design.

I seem to be hitting a wall as far as sales with regular people....who don't know me personally.

I would recommend taking a look at web statistics to see how many visitors you're getting. Some webhosts offer statistics. If not, install AwStats (tricky, but worth it). If you see that you are hardly getting any visitors, that explains the low sales. If you see tons of visitors who found you by searching Google for something totally different - like Grubs as in worms - that would explain low sales too. Once you see the problem you can see how to fix it.

The biggest thing you can do is add text to your website. You have beautiful photos but hardly any text at all. To get listed well on search engines, you want to have about 1000 words of text on each page. And you have to make sure that you have fairly different text on every page - not just the same stuff copied and pasted. Suggestions - what inspired this design? Customer quotes on why they love your shirts.

Brainstorm what top keyword your customers should search for to find each individual product, and then use that term as often as you can while still sounding natural.

I would highly recommend taking a free SEO (search engine optimization) class. You will learn a ton about how to get better visitors and also how to convince them to buy your products. I have used SEO Training - SEO Training Class - SEO Class and it has really increased my visitors. (I'm not affiliated with the site, I just found it really helpful.)

 

Great design all around, I think your challenge is getting your characters known. Kids want to wear what they see on TV, when I was a kid my favorite shirts were Star Wars, Spiderman, and a Mustang (car) shirt because my mom and dad both owned mustangs. So somehow you have to make a connection with the kids and parents. I'm not sure of the best method but good luck!

 

I actually liked the look of your site. Its bright, its colourful, its cheerful.

I'm not a parent myself, but from a marketing perspective, I think you may need to expand the range of products you currently offer though.

 

The site does look great. Personally, though, I would prefer if all the products were not on the same page. It makes it all too easy to just give it a quick glance and leave without buying anything.

You definitely need more products though! The selection is very limited.

I personally love the style of the art. I do agree that the designs are a bit too simple though. I'd like to see your characters actually doing some things, maybe riding in vehicles, playing some games, etc. Try to think outside of the box for some wacky things for your characters to do! If your designs were a little more dynamic, I'd buy a few shirts myself.

Again, I love the style and I'd be very interested to see where you can take your designs.

 

I like the designs. I immediately thought of getting some for my friend's kids. However, I could not imagine any adults wearing these shirts.

As what others have said the website looks too much for kids. You aren't getting 5 year olds to read your webpage. Remember that you target market is not the same as your product market. You need a webpage made for adults that sells kids stuff, not a kids webpage cause they aren't the ones buying.

 

Having a great site is the first thing, marketing is another. What are you doing to market your site? Facebook and myspace, any other ideas?

That should be YOUR biggest concern right now. Finding where you should advertise.

As Jasonda mentioned, you definitely need to tell story of your characters better to give people a reason to want to wear them.

But aside from that, you need to be figuring out WHO is your target market, and how to get in front of them. It looks like parents of children 2-7 who have a bit more disposable income than the person that shops at walmart.

That means you may want to try advertising in upscale parents magazines, parenting blogs for urbanites, mom blogs, dad blogs, newsletters, etc.

You also need to work on a story. Maybe an ongoing comic or something.

 

Maybe your tag could be a collector card with info about the character on the shirt.

 

Maybe make a cartoon with the characters out of flash. great site. maybe like Everybody! Everybody!