Your end of the deal
Out of context: Reply #9
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- monNom2
If it's going to work, I think you need to cut your costs in half. A general rule of thumb is you want your production costs to be 1/4 of your selling price. That's material and labour.
You need to cut out the print-on-demand guys. They eat up all your profit, and they're basically the same business you are starting. You can't compete if you're just selling for your competitor and trying to make a margin.
Silkscreening is easy. If you invest in a bit of silk-screen equipment and buy shirts in bulk, it might cost you a few grand up front, but you earn ~25% more per shirt so it pays for itself pretty quickly. As you get busier, you can hire low-wage workers as it's not hard to silkscreen a shirt.
Like any new business idea, you've got a lot of holes in your plan, and a lot of unknowns. It's not likely that you're going to find all the information you're after by asking or googling. You might need to research yourself and run some tests to find out.
That's where a business plan comes in. Write down how everything works, plan it all out. Make note of places where you're uncertain of things and either research those things, or figure out how you can run a test to get that information.
IE: you want to know how much it costs to get 1,000 visitors to your website, and how many of them will convert to buyers? - Set up a storefront with some sample shirts for sale. Buy ads (pay a few hundred dollars) the way you anticipate you would if your business is up and running. Track your costs for acquisition, and how many people try to buy your shirt. at the checkout stage, give them a message that the shirt is currently out of stock and offer to email them when back in stock. Do this and you can get a pretty good sense of what it's going to take to bring in the sales.
Now, that cost you some money, but now you have real data you can base your business plan on. Do this sort of thing as much as possible to remove uncertainty and see if you can actually make the business work. Then if you start your business, do it again every quarter, or every year to keep evaluating whether your business still works or something needs changing.