T-Shirt Design Shop
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- phlojonaut
ANyone here succesfully started a t-shirt design studio ?
I'm seriously thinking about starting one, as a hobby, and to make some money on the side...
any suggestions ?
- mrdobolina0
When I was in school, I started off doing some t-shirts and selling them to friends, then we started selling them to skateboard shops and bmx shops locally and then in a few different states in the midwest. It was fun, but we didnt mae any money until we started doing screenprinting for other businesses. I ran a screenprinting business out of my apartment for like 3 years. Some months I wouldnt make anything, others I would profit 6 grand. After a while I started sending all of the work to other screenprinters and I just did the artwork and billing. The money was decent but then I got interested in html and shit.
Man, all this talk of my old printing days is making me nostalgic.
- Troyy0
I've just got a load of screenprinting gear and have started printing t-shirts...not selling, yet.
If you want to start printing just look for some second hand printing gear and get everything you need in go for it...
- phlojonaut0
so it could be possible to
- create designs
- send the designs to a printer to print the shirts
- seel the shirts from my own site...
?in average... how much would cost to buy a shirt and have it rpinted...
and how much would you make on it ( how much would you seel it for ? )
- mrdobolina0
Depending on what you do, you could go with Fruit of the Loom 100% pre-shrunk shirts. These are quality shirts and can be had for pretty cheap. Screen printing your own shirts is cool, but you will soon notice that you are paying for waste, you ARE going to fuck up quite a few shirts, your best bet is to have them printed locally. Open up your phone book and look up 't-shirts' and 'screenprinting' make a list of all the shops in your area do t-shirts. start calling these peeps and getting quotes. you are going to want to go with at least 4 dozen per design as the price gets quite a bit cheaper the higher you go.
- mrdobolina0
Im not really sure how many shirts you were planning on doing. One color print jobs are simple enough to do yourself, but multi color jobs can give you ulcers on shitty equipment. Why not try the one colors on your own and get multi color shirts done by a printer. You dont pay for fuckups in that case.
- CAJTBr0
yes, you could.
it's easy to research all of these questions on the web. there are thousands of screen printers with websites.
the price of a shirt depends on:
the printers prices
the quality of the shirt
the number of colours in the print
the number of shirts you orderso it's difficult to give an average.
how much you can sell them for depends on your designs, marketing and audience.
again, have a look around.
- mrdobolina0
Most action sports retailers (skate shops etc.) work on a one hundred percent markup structure, and that is how I always did it too. say you pay 5 bucks per unit, you sell it for 10 per unit to the shop and they in turn double it to 20 for retail. you can walk into almost any skate shop in the U.S. and this works almost on everything in the store. a pair of shoes that cost 80 bucks by DC or Etnies probably cost that dealer 40 and so on. I have friends that used to be reps for skate and snowboard companies and this is basically standard practice.
- mrdobolina0
Now if your selling them direct off of your site, charge whatever the hell you want for them.
- phlojonaut0
mrdoblina...
from my research it looks like a decent quality color shirt with a 4 color print would cost me around 10$ a pop to make ( buy shirt, print ) .. that is for under 100 shirts...
does this sound about right ?
also sence you sound like you have allot of experience in the field... and assuming my designs will be "dope" how long would it take to sell 100 tshirts, using online shopping, local shops, and maybe events and stuff....
?
- MrPlOW0
you shoud check out dopepope's site. They do what I think you are talking about . They design their own stuff and sell it in stores and off the site.
- mrdobolina0
phloj, if I were you I wouldnt go for a 4 color design right off the bat. Thats damn pricey, 10 bucks a shirt.
try a one or two color shirt first
crawl before you walk.
Also, how fast you get rid of them depends on price, design and how tight your network of friends are.
- esko0
mrdobolina:
How much do you think it would cost to get enough screenprinting equipment to get going?
I've been thinking about making some shirts for myself, and really want to be able to do quite a bit of messing around, like smearing the designs as they are being printed and all sorts of other stuff that I may think of.
Is this something that's possible? Im looking to make some pretty grungy type shirts / learn to screenprint at the same time.
- phlojonaut0
yeah... i think that's a really good point.. start with 1 or 2 colors first....
well, we have a really strong concept for our tshirt line, and also we have a good netwrok of people around here in Detroit.... including the art college we graduated from
between that and a strong online site... i'm confident we could sell a good amount..
also did I mention there area few detroit music festivals wehere i think we could sell too..