Starting a T-shirt business has become a lot easier with almost all of the process becoming fully automated. It is bankable business opportunity provides advantage of high volume production with inflated profit margins.
There is no denying about the fact that the importance of T-shirt in the current fashion world is completely irreplaceable and unmatchable. The T-shirt business is flying high beyond the capacity that one could ever imagined.
The thing which attracts the aspiring entrepreneurs the most in starting a T-shirt business is that the T-shirt business doesn’t require highly specialized skills yet it can be easily operate at large scale manufacturing high volume product with the fattening profit margins that keeps on increasing in the present times where new techniques of manufacturing business are invented to increase productivity, efficiency and increasing profitability.
It is the most preferred article of clothing among the people. The rising demand is immensely attributed to its lightweight, comfortable, breathable, and easy to wear quality along with funky and trendy look that drives the sales of T-shirt business all the more rapidly.
There is wider range of T-shirts available in the market right from simple, mild, rebellious, obscure, funny, retro, social cause, famous dialogue or jokes printed T-shirts, it has created a lot of opportunities for people engaged t-shirt business to choose for variety of option for starting a T-shirt company. You can engage in custom T-shirt business if it may deems fit.
Here, we are going to talk about how to start a T-shirt business and operate T-shirt printing online business. Let’s talk about manufacturing part first.
How to Start T-shirt Business ?
Table of Contents
1. Formulate business plan
Formulation of proper business plan is crucial in starting a T-shirt line. It is of utmost important that you decide well in advance the type of customers you are going to cater to, is it kids section, or male or female section that you are going to deal with. After this, decide upon the scalability of your business operation.
Depending upon the scale, you have to arrange for the finances. For finances, you can go for taking the loan from the bank that you already have an account with. After that you need to decide the source of raw material and machinery and in the end you have to have a market readily available to accept your products. Conduct feasibility studies to get an estimate about how much investment is required and on that investment how much is your returns.
2. Register before starting a T-shirt company
It is mandatory that before starting a T-shirt company, you obtain legal license to operate, get your T-shirt printing business registered with ROC, get trade license from the pollution board authorities and get yourself registered for various state taxes and GST.
3. Setting up the plant and procurement of material and machinery required
Your manufacturing plant should have enough space to accommodate the installation of machinery like cutting machine, sewing machine, printing machine, storage space of raw material such as fabric, ink, thread, etc and it should have dedicated space allotted for packaging of finished goods and storage space near the exit door of the plant so that the orders get easily and quickly dispatched.
While setting up the t-shirt manufacturing plant, make sure that the place has proper electricity and water supply availability. You also have to provide for generators while starting a T-shirt business to ensure that continuous power supply is provided to keeps the business operation running. You are also required to arrange for labour. Your T-shirt business plant should not be at a remote location which causes hindrance in proper labour supply.
4. Manufacturing process
Manufacturing process of T-shirt business is very simple. Most of the work is done by the automated machines. First step involves the printing of the stylized design onto the fabric. After the printing is done, cutting is done according to the predefined pattern through the cutting machine then the cut out the front and back part fabric are assembled and stitched together then the sleeves are stitched.
After that hem, shoulder seam and pocket is stitched. After this, neckband is attached depending on the design. At the end, last step is attaching label to the back of neckline giving details of size, fabric and washing directions. Now the product is ready to be packed.
5. For setting up T-shirt printing online business.
To set up T-shirt printing online business, the foremost requirement is building up website for your T- shirt printing online business. If you have a skills and knowledge of graphic designing then you can make your own website or you can hire web designer to design your website.
Your website should be lively and attractive that catches viewers’ attention. You need to provide for the images of different products in order to facilitate quick purchases. For making purchases, it is important that you set up a user friendly payment mechanism.
6. Promotion
After this, only thing that you need to do is to promote your sales which can happen only when people get to know about your business and they pay visit to your sight. For attracting huge traffic, you can partner up with the non-competetive players that enjoys larger customers base. There is exchange traffic in return for commissions. The price of commissions is decided either on the fixed monthly basis or based on number of transactions that takes place through their link.
Other mode of increasing the sales of T-shirt printing online business is by taking advantage of other social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook. You can create an account and post images of your product to convert viewership into customers. You can also offer discount on initial purchases or you can incentivize your customers with rewards points on every purchase.
The best promotional marketing strategy is word of mouth. This happens only when you provide high quality product to your customer. It is true that cheaper product are attractive and can drag customer at your door step once but the bad quality will push your customers away forever. Customers won’t let you fool twice.
So, it is better that you provide a high quality product, no matter even when you have to price your product at a relatively higher price than your competitors. Providing the best quality product helps ensuring long lasting relationship with the customer. Also, maintain the robust feedback channel to know what your customers like the best and what are the things they dislike about your product.
To seal the deal with your customer and increase the sales, it is important that proper shipping mechanism is in place to make timely delivery.