No zazzle or cafepress. I'm building up orders for a bulk wholesale order of good quality screenprinted tees. Haven't started printing or shipping just yet, as is explained on the site. I don't have a "contact" per se, but I have dabbled in the indie t-shirt world quite a bit so I have printers that I've worked with and I've gotten packaging/shipping down to a science. I can ship shirts in really nice, secure packaging for $2/ea. I already have the packaging supplies from previous endeavors.
I'm a former professional T-Shirt designer. Here's a few pieces of advice for people thinking about doing something similar:
1. Reduce the size of the design - while it looks great on a flat t-shirt (and perfect for the promo picture) you need to add room for a human body at the sides (surprisingly more than you think). My rule of thumb is to measure from your left nipple to your right nipple. Try sticking printouts to your chest and you'll see what I mean. A logo could probably fit on a large post-it note (roughly the size of the of an iPhone).
2. You need to position the design so it floats in a woman's cleavage. The most popular t-shirt I did had a small duck that looked like it was sitting on a woman's chest.
3. Screen printed t-shirts are printed light-colour to dark colour (like an oil painting). If you put a full print of white under the other colours they will look more vibrant - even black. But remember that t-shirts have bleeds measured in mm! getting accurate registration on cloth is tricky.
4. Large designs with many layers of solid ink can get very sweaty to wear. Try to keep things small and have gaps in the design. The recent trend for grungy, worn & badly printed designs were naturally less sweaty.
Have you looked at the $2.95 shirt guys? http://www.295guys.com/ I have talked to them at some trade shows and they have very aggressive pricing if you are in the 500 unit range.
I have a printer in mind that I've worked with before, but ill definitely give those guys a look. Not in 500 range yet, but I think I just hit viral a few minute ago so it could be a possibility. Thanks for the tip.
What was your plan had this flopped and you only had a few sales by the time you had to start shipping items? could you have brought down to a per-unit basis? did you have an exit strategy if it didn't seem worth your time?
Paypal has a wonderful thing called a refund button. Had things not worked out, all I would have to do is hit that a few times and I'm right back where I started, with no loss except $8 and some time.
Can you talk more or share some tips about packaging? I've had an idea for a shirt I've kicked around for a few weeks now but I don't know anything about the process.
That's a tutorial I wrote a couple years ago. It has made it's rounds in the indie t-shirt world (with hundreds of steady hits long after I stopped blogging).
