5 ms·
Doing tshirts seems like a simple way to raise cash or reward people, until you've done tshirts for the first time. Making sure you have a quality product, hand
by leviathant 15y ago
Doing tshirts seems like a simple way to raise cash or reward people, until you've done tshirts for the first time. Making sure you have a quality product, handling inventory and fulfillment, if you've never managed physical products before, it can be overwhelming, and I've seen that bite people in the ass.
I pre-sold tshirts to fund a music news website about ten years ago. I only sold about 35 shirts, but given that I was in school and working two part time jobs in addition to keeping my site going as a hobby, I found even fulfilling just those 35 shirts to be way more work than I really wanted, and I haven't bothered selling shirts since.
Although after everything was mailed off, I did make enough to cover hosting for pretty decent amount of time.
- jaredsohn 15y agoCould the overwhelming aspects be automated? I can see where you would need to design the initial shirt and verify its quality, but isn't the rest just exporting a portion of your database and giving it to a t-shirt printer that ships? (or maybe they don't do that for you?) Or is the problem that people are manually doing something that cafepress or zazzle provide might provide?
- smackfu 15y agoOf course, selling t-shirts for $30 should make a lot of that pain acceptable.
- TillE 15y agoAfter subtracting the cost of the shirt, shipping, and your time, that leaves you with what, $10 each? It's not terrible, but it's nowhere near as efficient as selling digital goods.