When I started fashion Bandits around spring 2006, I didnt’t had any clue how much T-Shirt Projects are already out there. Ok - I knew it’s pretty crowded already… But to be honest, I didnt expect that in fact the number of cool fashion labels is almost endless plus all the new fresh Ideas and concepts which are launching day by day.

But hey, no reason to get nervous. A) competition is good for business and B) if you believe in your own idea and keep on working hard and passionated there is no reason why your project should not succeed. But watch out! A few cute looking T-Shirts are not enough. There are some important points to consider:

Before we start, please note: This series is called “Your own T-Shirt Project” and will be structured in 4 parts 2 parts. In every part I will refer to the awsome article “die Zufallsfischer” (Issue 6/ June 2006), published by the german magazin “brand eins“. Because the original article is german I’ll gonna translate some paragraphs for you. If you are interested in reading the whole article you might use a translation tool, such as the google translator.

Let’s start - Part 1: Know your market!

brand eins is writing (translated version - the original text is in german):

• “The people holding their products in the hand and suddenly they notice: Actual, the only thing which is missing is the right market.” says Urs Fueglistaller, Professor for Business Administration at the University of St. Gallen and an expert for entrepreneurship. Actual. Only. It sounds like not imortant. But in reality exactly this market is the actual barrier. How to reach the target group? How to build up sales and marketing? How to organize the production process? What about the financing?”

Bingo! - they mentioned some valueble points. Especially many of the small T-Shirt Projects out there have great Ideas, but no substantive experiences about how to market their products. How to find customers? How to increase traffic on the website? How to deal with wholesalers and even more important how to get them interested in the product? Also the production process: an important aspect. Is it better to use decentraliced concepts like Spreadshirt or Cafepress (which means they take care about manufacturing the t-shirts, printing, shipping etc.) or will it be more appropriate to keep control over such primary processes?

A lot of important questions. Everyone who’s really serious about launching such a project should spend some time to finding the right answers.

In Part 2 I will discuss the fact that it’s important to be present: go out there, the whole world should see your t-shirts! (the continuation will be published during the next 2 days)

This entry was posted on Mittwoch, Januar 17th, 2007 at 10:21 pm and is filed under General, T-Shirt Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.