1-23-2020
After taking a night off and playing a few video games I realized that I could be using that time to look further into my business ideas. There is far too much information, posts and other sites on the internet for it to be a complete waste of time.
I dove back into my learning with a vengence. I then discovered teespring.com Let me tell you I was excited when I saw them. They are a dropshipper but they have their own built in storefront so you don't have to use Shopify, Etsy or some other store. Though I did learn that you can to widen your market. They also bill the customer directly; handle all of the manufacturing, shipping, and issues that arise. They then send you the profits of each sale. Essentially, you log in, choose what type of items to create set your prices and then list it in your store. Each of their items has a clearly set price, which is modified slightly depending on your design. For instance, a front or back only on a shirt is one price, adding both front and back increases the price a bit. The main advantage I saw here is that I could get started with no risk at all.
I realized that I would need a store name and that the initial store I had attempted to start on Shopify did not really fit. After some consideration I settled on the name of Unusual Choices. This stemmed from the fact that all of this was way out of my normal method of operation as I had always done physical labor type work and did not use social media. I felt that I could begin to brand that and that others would feel it suited them as well.
I quickly got to work and created a few designs. One thing to be careful of is to make sure that you don't copy anyone else's item. During this, I checked out various sites such as Etsy, Pinterest, Teespring, Amazon and even some news channels to get ideas. By the time, I had done this I was 5 or 6 days into it. One important think to point out and that I feel I was and possibly am failing to do is finding a Niche. Nearly every video I watched indicated that I needed to pick a specific niche and focus all my efforts on that. I found myself getting side tracked and creating designs all over the board that rarely associated with each other.
Initially I felt that this would give me a better chance at someone buying something who stumbled on them. However, as I continued this fantastic journey I realized that my sporadic choices were likely causing me to lose customers as they had come to the site for a specific type of shirt only to find a lot of items that they were not interested in. At this point, I had sent out links for my page to several friends and family but they had not been too interested and I had not gotten any hits on my limited social media accounts. I figured it was time I took a step back and evaluated what I was doing and how to improve.
By this point, I had only been on my journey for about a week, I had yet to spend anything except time, though I had invested probably close to 40 hours between working on the designs I had as well as the two websites and I had yet to make any money. However, I knew that in order to make money one of two things needs to be put in. That is either starting capital or sweat equity. I was fully prepared to continue putting in the work.
I then realized that I needed to expand my market base. Teespring will advertise for you but only in comparison with the sales, you drive on your own. You need a minimum of between 5 and 10 sales to even get your items to start showing up. More sales will cause your items to show up in the searches more often. This is where having the other sites also linked would help out as a sale from etsy would still trigger the counter on Teespring almost like compounding interest.
I decided that I would need to figure out Social Media. For some of you this will be easy as your already involved. For me however, it seemed like a mountain as I have a very limited Facebook and none of the other accounts. The next blog will cover the steps that I took to begin my foray into Social Media.
(I plan to add a YouTube video showing how I came up with my designs and got them listed. A discussion into the various software I used is also pending, possibly a video on it.)
As always, I would like to check in with you and get your thoughts, opinions, and questions on this portion. Feel free to comment below.