User:BrandenLasseter

Big Star Branding is absolutely committed to providing the very best. Screen printed custom shirts, custom embroidered shirts, and even heat transfer names, numbers, and designs here in San Antonio and across Texas so we provide embroidered shirts and sportswear in the most up to date styles, brand names and apparel. When you design a t shirt we know that no event is the same so Big Star offers an unbeatable selection of colors, styles and price points. There is a big difference between what a "t-shirt" was twenty years ago and the large number of options available today. There is simply an endless variety of styles to choose from: we offer cheap t shirts for budget or casual events to higher end fitted t shirts for the hip crowd. For the workplace we recommend: polos, knit shirts, button ups, work wear, aprons and uniforms.


For colder conditions we suggest long sleeve tshirts, sweatshirts, windbreakers, jackets and sweaters. AND if you don't see it: ASK FOR IT and we will locate the shirt that? For our brand conscious consumers we also offer many popular brand names such as ADIDAS, American Apparel, Dickies, Eddie Bauer, Gildan, Hanes, New Balance, Ogio, Port Authority and MORE! With the development of new styles we also have access to all the latest innovations in fabrics. There are returning classics like ring spun and combed cotton for extreme comfort. For our active clients we recommend lightweight and performance fabrics, these include: moisture wicking, Lycra, spandex and the latest polyester blends.


For our Eco-conscious customers we offer Eco-friendly options like: bamboo, organic and recycled fabrics. There are other fun fabric treatment options such as distressed shirts, treated t shirts and tagless tees. With such a large imprint area custom t shirts are a great way to create brand awareness and a positive image for your business, organization, team or marketing campaign each time the screen print shirt is worn. Remember: whether you are in San Antonio, Texas or anywhere else in the US: Shipping Is FREE! Send me your latest t-shirts and sportswear digital online catalogue! Big Star Branding's prices on wholesale custom t-shirts can't be beat in fact we will match any competitors listed price! Our graphic artists will even help you design your own t-shirts: one of our team of five in-house graphic artists will create custom t-shirt artwork for you FREE. FREE set-up and FREE shipping with your custom tee shirt order. When it comes to pricing on personalized t-shirts Big Star Branding simply can't be beat!


2. How would I print the t-shirts and ship them in a automated way? For me, number one was easy. Unless number two forced my hand another direction, I would use Shopify. I immediately headed to the Shopify App Store and searched for "t-shirts". The search returned approximately six t-shirt printers/dropshippers. After scanning through all of them, their integrations, their t-shirt options and pricing, I decided on Printful. Printful it seemed had the most seamless integration, best selection of shirts and reasonable pricing. They also had the ability to print other products like canvas prints and bags should I ever decide to expand my product offering.


With my ecommerce platform and printer/dropshipper decided upon, it was time to work on the designs. Now, Toronto has over 60 stations and I completely underestimated how grueling and exhausting it would be to design all 60, luckily, many of the designs had a similar style. Over the next 6 hours I cranked out all 60 designs for almost all of the stations. With all 60 designs complete, I thought I was done. However, I quickly realized that very few people would buy a design without knowing how it looked on a t-shirt. With that in mind, I headed over to my favorite graphic design marketplace, Creative Market.


Now that I had the t-shirt template and all my files, it was once again a manual process of applying all 60 of my designs to the t-shirt template and saving each file. With all my t-shirt designs completed, it was time to build the website. I signed up for Shopify’s 14-day trial and got to work. I already had a theme I had purchased for Finch Goods Co. so I might as well use it for this project as well. When it came naming a business, I know it can sometimes take weeks. I didn’t have that long. I decided to allocate 3 minutes to naming this business. As confusing as this was (mostly for my friends and family) I decided to call this business, Finch’s.


Again, this was named after the street I grew up on, the subway station closes to my childhood home and, it just so happens that Finch Station is the first station on the subway line. I designed the website to be as simple as possible, even keeping the same colors scheme from Finch Goods Co. The most time consuming part was creating each of the 60 products and uploading the right photos for each. The last step before I launch and market my new online store was to integrate my store with Printful. This was an easy enough process. I installed the Printful Shopify App, and from there it automatically pulled in all my products. All I had to do at that point was upload the design file to each product and select the type/style of shirt I was going to use.


At this point, I was pretty tired and really had no idea what I was going to do for my marketing. However, I did remember that just the previous week, the subway celebrated its 60th anniversary. Could I use this to my advantage? I did some searches on Google to see who covered this event. One stuck out immediately. It was a pretty popular local online blog and they just wrote an article about the subway systems 60th anniversary. I figured the author of that post might want to hear about to my newly released shirts. I found the author on Twitter and asked for his email address.


Within the hour he replied asking a few more questions. It was late and I was exhausted. I decided to leave the response until the morning. Besides, I still had a few things left to set up in my Shopify account before launch. After ignoring the first few, I finally rolled over and checked my phone. To my surprise it was a bunch of emails from customers asking about my shirts, shipping and pricing… customers? I haven’t even officially launched yet! I quickly opened my laptop and discovered a big spike in traffic to my site. Although I had not "officially" launched, my site was live, however, I still had not turned on checkout, so no one could actually checkout. First priority was to turn checkout on and complete a test order to make sure everything was no working.


After I did that, I checked to see where the traffic was coming from. Turns out, the writer went ahead without my email responses and published a post about my store. I also received a handful of other emails from people interested in collaborations and promotions with my line of tee’s. Furthermore,that day I also received some favorable social media mentions from BlogTO as well as a local Hip Hop radio station and a handful of other locals. I have broken down my total costs below for this 24 hour business. 13 per shirt to print each. Admittedly, after the spike in sales from the initial media coverage, sales dropped.


In fact, since that first 24 hour sales period, I’ve only made a few hundred more dollars, however, I have done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and everything is 100% automated. I have not, and I have no need to login to anything for sales and orders to be taken care of. Since my initial email that sparked my initial sales I haven’t done anything else for marketing. That one blog post continues to deliver a small trickle of sales each week. Most of my time now is spent on my new project, Finch Goods Co. so I have almost no time left for this project. However, when I do get some time, I am going to focus on SEO around some keywords I uncovered that I believe have potential to deliver a steady stream of high quality traffic for people looking for localized Toronto t-shirts.


Again, I want to keep this project as automated as possible so SEO is going to be the biggest opportunity to achieving that. T-Shirt entrepreneurs get a bad rep (I’m looking at you reddit) however, I believe t-shirt businesses play an important part of the online entrepreneurship ecosystem. They are in many respects, a modern day lemonade stand (no pun intended), they are can be started quickly and with no money. 1. They don’t know what to sell online - They spend months and months looking for a product, before giving up. Starting a t-shirt business helps with both of those factors. First, if you’re struggling to find a product to sell, you will automatically have a product, t-shirts (these printer/dropshippers also usually offer other products as well, like canvas prints, mugs etc.).


Second, an online t-shirt business gives you a way to start understanding online marketing, before you sink some real time and money into a more serious business. Remember, and never forget, you’ll learn 100x more from actually starting a business, than you ever will from just consuming articles, blogs, books and podcasts. There is no substitution for real world experience of building traffic and learning to convert it. Niche: Choosing a niche is absolutely vital for success in the over-saturated t-shirt industry. Design: No one will buy your shirts if the designs don’t look good. This doesn’t mean you need to have complex images though and it doesn’t mean it has to cost a lot.


Quality: This includes the quality of the t-shirts themselves as well as the printing. There are plenty of options available for your actual selling platform. Platforms like Teespring have become popular lately, however, options like this aren’t good if you’re trying to learn more about digital marketing and branding. Going with a platform like Teespring means your product ideas live on the Teespring platform and doesn’t give you the option for your own branding, deep analytics or conversion optimization. If you’re serious about building a brand or learning more about digital marketing & optimization and strategy, you need to go with a more customizable option. I can’t recommend Shopify enough. Not only is Shopify one of the easiest platforms to get started with but it’s app store is the most robust and has a host of integrated t-shirt printers and dropshippers.


There are a few considerations when choosing a printer/dropshipping partner for your new online t-shirt business. These considerations include the t-shirts they have available to print on, t-shirt/print pricing, shipping pricing and quality of t-shirt prints. If using a printer/dropshipping like I did, you t-shirt selection (type/style/quality) will partially depend on what you printing/shipping partner have chosen to stock. Most will provide a range of shirts to cover several levels of quality and price points. USA made American Apparel is largely considered the best quality however if comes with a much steeper price point which will significantly cut into your margins. For my 24 hours business, I went with a medium quality/price t-shirt style/brand.


You can choose to order a few samples before deciding on your t-shirt but I would recommend you check out this review guide on the most popular t-shirts for printing to get started. There are literally hundreds of t-shirt mock-up templates available online, both free and paid. Here’s a list of 50 free templates, or if you want to use the same one I did, just go to Creative Market and search for "Realistic-T-Shirt-Templates". It should be the first one. If you are too lazy to read everything above, I have rounded up all the resources below that you can use to build your own online t-shirt store, fast!


Here is my website - customizable T shirts