My Sabbatical

Source: Fosforix at flickr

OK, in Part One, I outlined a business idea I had to sell t-shirts online. This is part of my plan to create an income that will sustain me while I am spending 6 months a year in a warm locale.

In the part, I will decide which of several ways to create a web site for it, and how to sell it.

Step Three: Decide How to Sell Them

I have several options for running my t-shirt business

a) Have someone do all the work, and only get a few dollars of per-unit profit from each sale

b) Take on the retail sales job and let someone else produce the shirts, getting a bit more of the per-unit profits

c) Getting a company to produce the shirts for me in bulk, taking on the up front risk, for the most amount of per-unit profit

There are pros and cons for each approach. My approach right at the moment is to take the least amount of risk, prove that this is an idea worth doing, and then move progressively down the scale as the business gets popular.

To briefly outline the options for each of the above:

a) Utilize a site like CafePress to do all of the work, including hosting, order management and fullfilment

b) Create a web site front end for ordering, and use a back end company for print-on-demand order fulfillment

c) Contract a company to produce a few dozen shirts at only a few dollars per item, and sell and ship the items myself from home

The easiest and most appealing option right now is to use a t-shirt (and other product) company that will allow you to create custom designs and sell them in their marketplace. This serves as a proof of concept. I am not trying to make a lot of money right now, I am trying to prove to myself that this is an idea worth persuing. The most popular of these is CafePress. I will start by opening a CafePress account and selling some custom products there.

Step Four: Register for CafePress

Registering for an account was easy. In fact, dead easy. There are not a lot of customization options on their free account however. For $5 a month or so, I can get a premium account. I am not even ready to do that yet. Let’s start with the free acount and see how it goes.

Step Five: Upload the Design

This part is simple. In step 2 I created a simple design in PhotoShop. I export it to a transparent GIF format, and upload it to CafePress.  I then choose which products I would like my graphic to appear. For now I am sticking to t-shirts. Mousepads and coffee mugs are great too, but I don’t think my Your Mom idea translates as well to those things.

One downside to a free account is that you can only sell one of any individual type of product. This will be my first major problem. I want to create 20 or 30 different sayings and see which one is popular. I do not want to only be able to sell one type of white t-shirt.

The other ideas will have to wait I guess. Let’s give this a month to see if I can sell any of my first idea before committing to the money to upgrade to premium. Once you have upgraded to premium apparently you can’t downgrade to a basic account any more. So it’s a pretty hefty decision.

In the next post, I will talk about how I plan to market this new store far and wide. This is not a “build it and they will come” scenario. I need to get the idea out there.

And for the curious, here is the store.

Like

Unlike

Related posts:

1. Create a Business Web Site in One Night: Part One
2. Annual Review: 2009 Was the Start of Something
3. Frugality as an Essential Ingredient to Doing What You Want With Life
4. How to Be Independent in the 2010′s