Years ago when I wanted to start selling t-shirts, I asked myself, how can I start a t-shirt business without having any money. That was well before the internet even existed, so it was much harder. With the ability to have an online presence today, it is much easier than ever before. This is due to having many companies out there that will print and ship your designs for you. The best part is that it requires no money upfront to get started.
Merch By Amazon (merch.amazon.com)
Merch By Amazon is one of the easiest ways to get started selling t-shirts online with zero upfront cost. The hardest part of MBA is actually getting approved for an account. If you go to merch.amazon.com and apply, you may get accepted in a few days or a few months. Amazon is fickle and sometimes takes their sweet time approving accounts. Once you’re in, they will let you upload ten designs. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but as you sell more, you can get tiered up to the next level and upload more designs. Once your designs are live Amazon will print and ship the products for you, and they are eligible for Prime shipping, which is a big bonus.
Much like the merchant fulfilled or fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) programs Amazon will charge you a fee for selling a product, and you will receive a royalty for every sale. You set the sales price and determine your profit. So you are in control of your income.
The current tiers are 10, 25, 50, 100, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, 6000, 8000, 10000, 12000, 14000 and up. There are also upload limits at each tier; I am currently at the 12000 tier. I am allowed to upload 500 shirts per day. That rarely happens, it is so difficult to upload that many shirts in one day due to the fact Amazon has no way to bulk upload your designs.
You do have to be careful with your designs and make sure to check to see if your phrase, description or design is already trademarked. If it is and you submit it to Amazon, it will get rejected, and that will be a ding on your account. Amazon likes to swing the “ban hammer” and suspend your account for too many violations.
Currently, you can put your designs on standard t-shirts, premium t-shirts, long sleeve tees, crewneck sweatshirts, and hoodies. There is talk of coffee mugs and phone cases in the future, but Amazon is slow to roll out new products.
Shirt Hub (shirthub.com)
Shirt Hub has become my favorite print on demand service because it is local to me and because its owner is very easy to work with. It also helps that he is a t-shirt geek like me and we talk at length about new methods of printing and online sales techniques.
The owner keeps Gildan products, mostly t-shirts, and hoodies in stock at all times so he can fulfill orders quickly. If you are an Amazon seller, this quick turnaround on transactions is crucial. What is excellent about Shirt Hub is that he doesn’t mark up the blank apparel at all, he makes his money on the printing, not charging a premium for blanks like many other POD services do.
If you require apparel other than Gildan tees and hoodies, the owner has accounts will all the major blank apparel wholesalers and can get the product you need. If he can’t get it, you can send your blanks to him, and he will take care of the printing.
Shirt Hub is integrated with Ship Station so if your website or sales portal has an API for Ship Station you are in business. You just upload your designs in .png format to a shared Dropbox with a unique identifier for the name. On your end, you will need to create SKU’s for each of the products you want. For example, 10001-2000-BLACK-S-FF, where 10001 is the unique identifier, 2000 is the style number of the t-shirt, black is the shirt color, S is the size, and FF is full-front. In the Gildan 2000 style, he carries up to 5XL in stock. Not many other POD services sell up to 5XL.
As far as print locations go, he can do:
Full-front – FF
Full-back – FB
Left/Right Chest – LC or RC
Left/Right Sleeve – LS or RS
Pretty much any print location is available, but you will want to talk with the owner and decide on what out of the ordinary codes mean.
His current pricing for white shirts, print only:
Quantity up to 5x5in 5×5 – 12x12in 12×12-16x20in
1-23 $2.50 $5.00 $7.00
24-47 $2.25 $4.00 $4.75
48-143 $2.00 $3.50 $4.25
144-499 $1.75 $3.00 $3.75
500 & up $1.25 $2.00 $3.00
His current pricing for dark shirts, print only:
Quantity up to 5x5in 5×5 – 12x12in 12×12-16x20in
1-23 $3.50 $7.00 $9.00
24-47 $3.00 $6.00 $7.00
48-143 $2.75 $5.00 $5.50
144-499 $2.50 $4.50 $5.00
500 & up $2.25 $3.25 $4.00
As with any service, there will be some problems. On occasion, the wrong shirt has been shipped, but he always takes care of the problem right away. The most issues I have seen are during the Christmas rush, and if you have any experience with retail during the holiday season, you know how crazy and rushed it can be.
Shirt Hub also provides sublimation services for t-shirts and mugs and has recently added print and cut services. This means canvas prints, posters, and stickers.
Red Bubble (redbubble.com)
I have been selling on Red Bubble for about three years now. I don’t get a ton of sales from it, but I also haven’t uploaded many shirts. I have found that I have to price my shirts high to make any money in the end.
The most significant benefit of Red Bubble is the range of products that you can put your design on. Everything from canvas prints to phone cases and much more.
To start, it may be a bit overwhelming because after you upload your design, you have to choose what NOT to put your design on. It will be added to everything, and you will have to click through a lot of products to remove them. Certain designs are just not going to sell well on a skirt or a pillow. You can set it up to default to only specific products as well as set your default commission to a fixed rate for each product.
If they would have a way to bulk upload I would use Red Bubble more but much like Merch By Amazon, the process of uploading each design individually becomes time-consuming and mind-numbing. With its vast array of products, you may question whether or not it is worth the hassle of uploading for the amount of profit generated.
Printful (printful.com)
https://youtu.be/zdpRnkaQxIg
Printful is one of the more popular print-on-demand services being used today. They are popular with online sellers using Shopify because of smooth integration between the two. I don’t personally use Printful because the cost of fulfillment is higher than my current POD service (Shirt Hub).
Much like Red Bubble, Printful has a wide array of products that can be sold and they provide a mock-up generator as well. It is pretty much a one-stop shop for all your fulfillment needs.
From what I hear they are excellent at shipping on time, but their lead times to produce the products seem to be a bit longer than most. You would want to make sure your customers know to order in early around the holidays because of the long lead times. The Printful website states 2-7 days production time for apparel and 2-5 days for non-apparel items. Add in the shipping time, and it could be up to 14 days before a customer receives their order.
One area where Printful stands out is in embroidery. Embroidered hats are trendy, but you usually have to do large orders to make it cost effective. They do charge an $8.95 digitization fee for each file created, but that is cheap compared to most services who charge $10 per 1000 stitches. The popular trucker caps will cost you $14 plus shipping, so there is some room for profit.
They also offer branding services and white label shipping if you are starting a brand and need your identity front and center with the public.
Since I can’t speak from experience using Printful, I would have to say that it would be a fine print on demand service. I haven’t heard anything bad about their quality or customer service. Check them out at printful.com.
Spreadshirt (spreadshirt.com)
Spreadshirt is similar to Red Bubble and boasts that you can put your design on over 200 different products. It is also a one-stop shop for all your printing needs with products ranging from t-shirts to mouse pads. They will print, ship, take care of the transaction and customer service.
They also provide you the option to sell in their marketplace or set up your own store that you will require you to drive traffic its way. I’m a big believer in using someone else’s marketplace to find customers. However, if you are good at getting people to visit your site, it is always better to build a brand.
A basic t-shirt will have a base cost of around $11.99, so you will get a commission based on that estimated cost. So, in theory, you can do quite well on the profit side. It is just a matter of how many people shop on Spreadshirt.
I have found that Spreadshirt is overly cautious on trademark and copyright infringement. Before your design goes live, it is reviewed by someone or something, and in my experience, many of the designs get rejected, even if they’re not really infringing. It’s their site and their butt on the line, so you have to play by their rules.
I uploaded a few designs about two years ago and have yet to make a sale.
CafePress and Zazzle (cafepress.com & zazzle.com)
All I can say is low quality and expensive in my opinion. I have not been impressed with anything I have ordered from either one of them. Plus, they are saturated with sellers because they have been around so long.
Teespring (teespring.com)
Teespring was the favorite t-shirt print on demand service a couple of years ago, but it seems they may have fallen on hard times. This is in significant part due to the Merch By Amazon program. The Teespring program used to require you to sell a minimum number of shirts before they would print and ship to your customers. If you didn’t sell the minimum, the campaign would end without shipping product, and that meant no money for you.
The big difference with Teespring and Merch By Amazon is that with Teespring you have to drive traffic to your shirts, generally by using Facebook ads. So, in reality, it will cost you some money to sell your shirts, but Facebook ads can be charged to a credit card until you have a successful campaign and you get a payout.
These days you have a minimum of one sale to get your shirt printed granted it falls into the right parameters they have set up.
I never had much success with Teespring because I was not very good with the Facebook ads. However, I do know people who have made millions of dollars on the platform.
Pre-sell using Facebook Groups and Pages
I have always struggled with Facebook ads, so the little experience I have in this area is selling to Facebook Pages/Groups without using ads. I am a member of a tiny niche group, under 5000 followers, on Facebook and I post a shirt about once a quarter on the page. From that post, I usually sell around 25 shirts. Those orders generally come in in the first six hours.
By getting all the orders up front, I can either print the shirts myself or out-source it to one of the print-on-demand services and make a few bucks in the process.
You need to be careful with this method and make sure you have permission from the page owner to post or better yet if you own the page yourself.
One problem with t-shirts and Facebook is that Teespring saturated everyone’s news feed a couple of years ago and it seems like everyone is immune to t-shirt ads or even posts.
I am the owner of one Facebook page with 54,000 followers and have yet to sell one t-shirt on that page. They are not interested one bit in buying something for the group. However, if your group is very active and they eat up everything you post, you may have a shot.
Selling to Groups/Teams
If you are active in your community and have any contacts in youth sports leagues, you can get large orders of t-shirts and have the group pay a portion of the cost upfront. This way you can go to a local screen printer and have them print the job with not out of pocket cost to you. I know you are thinking why wouldn’t the group go directly to the screen printer. Well, people are lazy, and if someone is there to take care of that hassle for them, they are willing to pay a premium for that service.
In Minneapolis, Silva Screenprinting specializes in large wholesale orders of apparel. They have a minimum order of 36 shirts but the quality is fantastic, and their prices are reasonable, especially for multiple color prints. For a small fee, they will drop ship your order directly to the customer, and no one will be the wiser.
There is also a guy on Facebook, by the name of Mike Gaul who specializes in using his Merch By Amazon account to sell t-shirts to local businesses. The nice thing about this method is that you can have a private link to the shirts on Amazon so your customer can go back and order anytime they need more shirts. It is a great business model, and he supposedly does millions of dollars per year in sales.
Conclusion
This post scrapes the surface of print on demand services and ways to start a t-shirt business with little to no money. I’m sure there are screen printers in every community that are willing to work with you on your fulfillment and printing needs. It is just a matter of reaching out to local businesses to see what they have to offer.
I also highly recommend attending a decorated apparel trade show to see what services are available. I have found a significant number of contacts that way. That is how I met the guys from Shirt Hub who changed my business entirely.