operationteeshirt

OK so there’s been some lessons learned of late. First of all we’ve discovered that running a tee-shirt business is exactly that. It’s running A BUSINESS! So whilst you may have great designs it’s not much good if you aren’t selling and marketing them.

As mentioned in our last post we designed some stickers and flyers and have pasted them up around town. We also letterbox dropped and have formed relationships with some rehearsal studios around Melbourne so hopefully the work pays off with more orders.

OUR STICKERS!

I’ve set myself a minimum of 15 cold calls a day which is kind of tough. But if that happens then eventually I’m sure it’ll pay off. We also have a Facebook caption competition planned and a few other initiatives. Maybe having a stall at a major fashion show early next year but we’ll see. We don’t really have that sort of money but our good friends at Mastercard could come to the party so who knows?

The difficult thing is deciding how much money to spend on our campaigns. There are lots of different things that can be done but as a start-up company the decisions you make as far as spending the marketing money goes are crucial. If we spend in the wrong area we’re toast.

All we know is we’ve got a great product that can be quite profitable if marketed and executed correctly. I also updated our melbourneteeshirts.com.au site and added an ‘about us’ page which I really think reflects our whole philosophy about this business so I’m really happy with that.

In other news we’re moving very soon so that’ll be a big relief. Our space is too small!!!!! Will post pics of the move when it happens!

Well we’ve finally decided to pack up and get out of the apartment. It’s just too small a space to effectively run a business from. And it really feels like we’re living in a warehouse too, with boxes and tee-shirt samples all over the place. And worst of all is the pre-treatment spray’s been going everywhere. It’s made the floor sticky and is kind of coating our computers and cables and is not very pleasant. Oh there’s also the matter of the cat leaving bits of his luxurious fur over some of the tee-shirts which would be fine if we were furriers but we’re not.

So it’s back to Windsor we go. For how long who knows but we definitely are thinking of opening up a retail operation at some point next year. I think for us to grow we need to show some balls and be prepared to fork over a bit of rent and gain some visibility and a greater client base in the process.

Speaking of which, we’ve been casting our net pretty wide lately and have been doing some work with local bands, cricket clubs and some corporates so things are going OK for us. But the thing is growth and it’s something that I find particularly challenging. To stay on top of everything and consistently try and find new business is the key for us to succeed. So I’m paying more attention to marketing and looking for ways for us to be innovative when it comes to getting ourselves out there.

Next week will be interesting as we’re going on a flyer drop and if we can generate a few leads from that we’ll be happy. I’ve found that you can contact a hundred people and maybe if you get two or three jobs you’re doing pretty well. The good news is that once we have a customer we seem to be keeping them and our customer service focus is really showing through. If there’s one thing you can have 100% control over it’s how you treat your customers and we’re aiming to be the best. Sometimes that means you take a bit of a financial hit but in the end I think it’s definitely worth it. If people are happy they’ll keep coming back and recommend you to others. Pretty simple stuff but it’s definitely a key.

Anyhow, marriage is upon us this weekend and we’re both naturally really excited to be tying the knot. But we’ll be straight back into things come Tuesday and we have lots of new things to report. Like the development of our lamp-shade printing and polo tee-shirt testing. Until then, have a good one, we sure will!

Twas a very good day for theteehouse today because we now get to make tee shirts for the soccer club we support! I guess when you’re in business for yourselves you need to be a bit creative when it comes to finding jobs. So when we saw that South Melbourne Football Club (AKA – Sth Melb Hellas) were having a special game to mark the return to their home ground after two years we thought straight away how good a commemorative tee shirt would be.

After contacting one of our friends who’s quite connected with the club about the possibility of doing this we got in touch with the club’s merchandising manager. He was all for it and we mocked up several designs, had a meeting and just got given the go ahead to sell the shirts on behalf of the club.

Otherwise we’ve decided that we need to split our site into two. One for theteehouse and one that specialises in custom printed shirts. It was just getting too complicated and we thought we were trying to do too much on the one site. Now we also have www.melbourneteeshirts.com.au for all of our custom work.

This way we will be able to direct people to the site that best suits their needs. If they want some of our badass designs then they go to theteehouse. If they want custom printing then they go to Melbourneteeshirts or MTS as we like to call it!

You know after just a few months of solid work on our business we feel like we’re really starting to find our feet. Things are slowly growing and we’re getting repeat business. Most importantly is the confidence factor. We’re now fully confident in our ability to get jobs done professionally and for all of you who’ve been following us from the beginning you’ll know what a big deal that is for us.

Went out to West Footscray today for the Bangs photo shoot. We’re running his tee-shirt business for him and yesterday I printed five shirts for him to model. He’s kind of a big lad and guessing the size wasn’t easy but somewhere between a large and a 2XL seemed to work just fine.

If anybody doesn’t know Bangs he’s become very well known through his track, “take you to da movies” and hopefully we can sell quite a few shirts together.

In exciting news for us he’s going to wear his tee house tees in his next video so we’re pretty rapped about that.

We went out around the streets of Footscray and to the Tottenham rail yards where there’s a bunch of old graffed up trains. The sun was shining and we managed to get a bunch of great shots. His site will be up really soon so we’ll let you know when that’s available for a bit of a look.

Otherwise I’ve been busy plugging away at trying to generate some business. We keep getting jobs but they’re on the smaller scale and it would be nice to be amazingly busy. Hopefully that day comes soon but we’re lucky things keep coming in for us.

Anyhow, I’ll keep today’s entry short and sweet and more will come tomorrow!

Day 34 – Everything was going so well for a while there until outta nowhere the prints are misaligning a little bit with the white ink. Do we know why? NO! And we’ve tried everything to fix it but to no avail.

Hopefully the technician can come out tomorrow to have a look at it but it’s probably the worst of the worst things to happen since we’ve started. I mean just as we thought we’d finally put the problems behind us too. Anyway, hopefully it’s nothing major.

Aside from that the site is pretty much live at www.theteehouse.com but it’s kind of on the down-low because we still need to tweak a few things.

In other news we’ve agreed to set up and make tee-shirts for Boy Bangs, Melbourne’s most successful Sudanese hip-hop artist! Stay tuned for that.

AND now for day 35!!! OK our techie came out today and diagnosed the problem as a snapped strap on the conveyor belt. This is good news for us because it’s got nothing to do with the print head or anything like that. We heard him speak to the manufacturer and they said it probably was a bit misconfigured from the factory. Anyway, to cut a long story short the machine will be fine when the new part arrives tomorrow.

So today we printed at Designwyse for a bit and completed some sample shirts for a client. We ran around like idiots trying to find an express post box too! Lucky for us we managed to get one in the nick of time!

The only crap thing was a misaligned a tee-shirt by a fraction. We’ve decided to let the customer know that it’s a mistake and not charge him. Hopefully our honesty counts but it was a mistake that just happens sometimes. You see the tee-shirts are aligned by hand and it’s just natural that a mistake will be made every now and again. Nature of the beast eh?

When you’re trying to set up a tee-shirt business there’s so many options available that it kind of gets overwhelming.  Choosing a brand and style of shirt is one thing but then you’ve got male, female and all the kids options that complicate things even more.

And before you’ve got a client base, trying to work out what you’re going to do is a complicated matter. I mean unless you’ve got heaps of cash to splash around you need to narrow your focus and commit to as little stock as possible. Otherwise before you know it you’ve dropped thousands of dollars on blank tee-shirts you don’t even know will sell.

So to cut to the chase we identified that most of our shirts would appeal to guys. Then we narrowed that down to guys who probably like a thin cut neck and sleeve and not too thick a garment either. We also invested in a small amount of stock for the ladies but the kids!!! What about the kids? Why shouldn’t the kids have killer tee-shirts available to them? It was something we needed to address and largely due to one of our friends (cough, cough… Ben) we’ve decided to allocate some time to a kids range.

In any case today we printed our very first children’s tee-shirts. And what a delight it was! Why’s that? Well, if you guessed a smaller print surface then you’d be right! It was a breeze and they came out great. The question I was wondering though was why are kid’s shirts as expensive as adult’s shirts when there’s so much less material used? It seems a bit silly but it’s kind of out of our hands. All we can do is offer a nice printing price and affordable, badass shirts as we don’t mark up on blanks and there’s no middle man involved. So, I think we’ll be able to offer a great range of stuff for kids down the track. We’ve even registered a name which is ‘The Notorious K.I.D’ for kids with attitudes!

Hahaha, you know if for nothing else this whole venture has given us a lot of memories and stories that are kind of priceless to us. Never for a moment do either of us regret giving this a go and we’re still only in the infancy of the whole project. Sometimes I wonder what’s in store down the track for us. The only certainty is that I’ll still be documenting everything for all you guys who like to hear all the goss! Cheers!