Making T-shirts for popular trends.

[comment]

What do you guys think about this? People who make t shirts that follow popular trends in culture or the market. Once angry birds got really popular, companies started making t shirts and everything for angry birds and you see them everywhere. I cant name many off the top of my head, but usually when something gets very popular and widely known, people make t-shirts for it and usually they're all over the place for a while. A good example might be the "KEEP CALM AND x" shirts that came from a british propoganda poster in 1938 that have recently re-emerged. A very popular resort in Washington state called Crescent Bar was being torn down, and a guy made SAVE CRESCENT BAR shirts, and he sold TONS

Have any of you ever done something like this, does it work as well as it seems?

 

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[Swoop]

I have a friend that makes some money on the side selling Tshirts, although he takes orders from company's and organizations ahead of time so he knows exactly how many shirts to make, and hence he always makes a profit.

With your idea you would be relying more on "spontaneous" sales rather than pre-orders, so you would have to accurately gauge the amount of inventory to keep for each design or you could risk losing money. If you can do that, and if you could come up with a good marketing strategy so that people actually know when you release your new designs (since they are topical and would be irrelevant after a time) the idea could work. Small batches of your first designs and using social media to promote them to your friend network might be the way to start. Then, if people like your shirts maybe try advertising on some websites that match your demographic to really drive your sales.

The best advice I could give you comes from my friend who sells Tshirts. Buy the blank shirts yourself wholesale and then pay someone else to print the designs. When he started out he spent hundreds, maybe more on screen printing and heat transfer equipment. He quickly realized that printing shirts by hand "sucks", to use his words...it took him hours upon hours to do on his little single shirt machine what a printing company can do in minutes in bulk. Outsource the printing and concentrate your time on marketing. People knowing that the shirts exist is your biggest challenge here.