Creating and selling T-Shirts for profit.
 

Okay, i have found a small market in which some money can be made by producing t-shirts for. I can do the graphic design stuff with no problem.


i know i seen transfer sheets selling for 12 bucks for 6, thats $2 per t-shirt transfer... and t-shirts can't be more than like 5-7 bucks for a decent one... allowing me to sell for between 15-20 for a reasonable profit.

I have no clue of what to do beyond that!


My main concerns are about quality. I've seen numerous shirts that really stunk up a storm before. Most of the shirts i've seen done this way were square photos and stuff like that... I've also seen some shirts where people tried to do lettering onto a colored shirt, and had white squares around the letters from the transfer sheet.... Will using Iron-ons allow people to do free lettering and designs, without applying white and stuff between the lettering?



What i want to do is have a line of text at the top, and a graphic logo on the bottom, the logo will be complex and have spots where the shirt will show through from behind. Will this work well with basic iron on transfer sheets?


I'm clueless on this topic, soo any advice is much much much appreciated!


Thanks!

Quality should be the least of your worries.

You can't just take the design to a T-shirt wholesale factory and tell them to print you up some shirts?

Or were you planning on making custom t-shirts where each one is different?

Laser printed iron ons are crap.

Silk screen them youself or get them done in bulk from a real live printer.

Cafepress.com might be the answer if you can mark them up enough to make it worth your while.

I know nothing about the pricing of screened shirts, but I have seen iron-ons that a fellow had made and they were indeed crap. The fellow did original line work, scanned and emailed it to someone who had the images transferred to iron-on material and snail-mailed back to him. He would hand-trim the iron-ons and apply them to cheap shirts and sell them from his back-pack at weekend events. The shirts would sell, and then the image would start to peel off within a day or 2 (even before washing). No repeat business, and lots of unhappy people all over the region.
Go with screened work, make your art 1 or 2 colours in order to lower the front-end cost, and create a happy customer base. Even without the Adobe Suite I'm sure you can find a cheap (even freeware) graphics program which allows you to import a scanned drawing and break it into a combination of graphics and images. This will allow you to create the files you would want to email to a printer. Resolution requirements in print files for a shirt are probably low enough to email rather easily.

You can make t-shirts for bands and sell them in the streets outside of concerts when bands go on tour to undercut the high stadium merchandise prices. Problems with this is 1. you are not supporting the band via sales, which distribute mostly to people other than the bandmates, and 2. you may deal with turf wars with other people doing the same thing as you outside the stadium. It is a very quick way to make cash, but not very legitimate.

I've used a local printer-someone who has a full operation in his basement-and the price was pretty reasonable; however, I overestimated what I needed and got myself stuck with about 10 unsaleable shirts.
DON'T go iron-ons for selling stuff. An online company, ArtApart, does that and they are horrid.
Cafepress is a good way to start. They don't use iron-ons, they do direct print and the image doesn't wash away at all.
Most, if not all, print companies will charge a per color fee, so try to keep your colors at a minimum without sacrificing graphic quality. The more shirts you order, the cheaper the deal per shirt. Easiest way to figure out how much to then charge would be to triple your total cost and divide it by the number of shirts being sold. Do this estimation to see what printer can give you the best deal. No one wants to pay $30 for a tshirt.

Just putting in my $.02, but American Apparel sells wholesale shirts for about $3.65 each.

The local silk screen shop near me typically charges $40 to make the screen (not sure on the number of colors sorry), then a fee for each individual shirt, so naturally it gets cheaper (per shirt) the more you order. If I remember correctly its between $7-10 per shirt on top of the screen fee. The benefit is that if you need to get shirts reprinted, they save the screen for you, so it's a one time fee. :thumbup: