White Shirts: Your Own Pro-White T-shirt Company
The first thing I notice about this poster art is it's almost perfect for printing a black t-shirt. If successful, the slogan can be re-used. It can become a printed advertisement, an online ad (on 4chan, for example) and a thumbnail image. The graphics can be licensed out to people who have other ideas.
Our high-res graphics can be printed on a t-shirt. A bulk order costs less for everyone involved when you can split it 3 ways. The design costs are less when split 3 ways. Each design is like it's own logo. Once you've got the graphics, you can re-use them everywhere.
Click on the image and check it out. But can a shirt look this good? See for yourself:
What a sponsored silkscreen shirt can look like:
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| On this sponsored shirt design, the t-shirt printer's logo rides along for free, while several sponsors cross-promote each other (All have an incentive to help distribute the shirt.) |
I want you to succeed.
To think of success differently, and believe it or not, this 6-color poster you see above, printed on a t-shirt, captures someone at the ground floor of something much greater. Because he's thinking like part of a team.He's building an ecosystem. Not a company.
To replace your dependence on the system, you don't need to transfer out of a stable job and into a rickety business. You need to be building a rock solid set of income streams so that WHEN they attack you, you'll thrive, because getting attacked is part of your business plan.
To pay your bills, you need stable income. To get a stable income, you need to be paid every month of the year. Eleven months doesn't cut it. You need the lights on THIS month, too. Your landlord needs to be paid. Your kids need to be fed. Yes. EVERY month.
Imagine a gun was to your head, (which it kinda is) and you needed to plug in 30 streams of income quickly. Could you do it?
Imagine if, in just one of those streams of income, 100 people per hour lined up around the block to pay you $10 for something you got for free, and took you no time to get, make, and give them, how happy would you be to keep that $1,000 an hour for doing basically nothing?
Even better, what if ten of of those people was prepared to give you an extra thousand right now?
I've just described OWNING (not running) a very successful t-shirt business. This business has a very big up-sell involved, or else ten people wouldn't want to give you a thousand bucks. That up-sell makes all the difference between profit and loss. Between a small audience and a big one.
It's just numbers.
And imagine the shirts help you grow it to to a much larger scale, with a much larger audience than you ever thought possible. The other 30 streams of income come from all the other companies you build, acquire, or plug in.
But here are 5 income streams to take money from the sale of one shirt. Some of them without actually making or selling shirts.
1 - The manufacturer pays you to advertise their shirt. That might happen. It's worth a shot. But it's not the only way. It's harder to sell advertising unless they come to you.
2 - Offer to advertise t-shirts for a percentage of each sale. Your cut could be $10 per sale. Whatever you can negotiate. This is an easier deal to make. A lot of companies would prefer to advertise this way. Because they think of it as a referral fee. Think of what a company will pay to get those precious Glengarry leads you can generate for them.
3 - Get paid on consignment. If someone's agreed to put their logo on their shirt, it's a good bet they'd be willing to put your t-shirt on display in their shop in exchange for a portion of the sale. We've taken "wanna order a bunch of retail inventory?" and flipped it around so it's much easier to get a "yes."
4 - Once it's a proven seller, you can migrate from a consignment deal to keeping them stocked up on your product line. And it should be a proven seller if you're telling your audience where to go and try on the t-shirt to see for themselves how young, strong and sexy it makes them feel.
5 - Capture the contact info (or cookie) of each buyer (or visitor) and profitably offer them up to 30 other related products or services, spread out over time, taking a generous commission for each of these sales. The internet has made this kind of follow-up easier than ever.
6 - Get paid a licensing fee for the sale of each shirt. Let someone else take on the project. You license out the brand. This is a very easy way to scale up to 30 streams of income once you're a known property. Each licensee, in paying to promotes their product, promotes your brand.
I'm still saying T-shirt, but it applies to whatever item you want to use. It's easier to picture than a widget. Because I'm trying to get you results. And shirts are proven sellers. Especially when you know how to liquidate inventory at full price.
Whether you take a commission, own the company, license your brand, or just send customers to your buddy to print up shirts in your garage, you're generating jobs for yourself and others.
In itself, the t-shirt is an ad, but you get to decide whether it's 90% rad or 90% ad.
I've seen bands sell both. Early on, when you're paying to keep your lights on, you're probably better off if it's 90% ad. But in the long run, or if you have huge financial backing, or when you're installing your second Olympic-sized swimming pool in the back yard, it's probably better if it's 90% rad.
Creating a job for someone to do and building brand awareness, a buyer list, and little beacons, freebies, and give-aways that point people back to your broadcast medium is a reliable formula for someone to grow their brand, even if they're not pretty like Katy Perry.
In the end, both Katy Perry and the copy-writer pictured on the right are in the same sort of business. The self-aggrandizement business. What one does by force of personality, the other accomplishes through very deliberately, consciously constructing the mechanics.
In the final analysis, if you looked at their business, you'd recognize a lot of similarities. Events, frequent communication, follow-up. That's not an accident. The same principles and forces apply to both people.
Eventually, e-celebrities and YouTube stars will be pulled in the direction of more and varied streams of income as their audience share continues to shrink. I thought I'd prepare you in advance.
If you're a kid growing up in America, you might be washing the dishes AND taking out the trash. Why? Because your paying audience is very small. Mom and dad. Eventually, that becomes mom, dad, and a job.
Then, if you work hard or get lucky, your band gets its first paying gig, and now you're dealing with a larger audience and more streams of income until you're living the dream:
Doing one great thing for a million people instead of doing a million little things for one person.
You'll be working with a team to build an ecosystem. Not around a t-shirt, but around single idea. A common purpose. It should be self-evident. We're under attack. We have the right to sound the alarm and defend ourselves. Because
Because as much as anyone else does, we deserve to exist.
You can do anything you set your mind to. If every man fought for his race for one year, would he be free? Unfortunately, no. Not against the men who are fighting to destroy us every year.
Everyone who isn't with us is our enemy. So we have to build everything for ourselves. There are no jobs in preserving our people. We have to create one hundred thousand of those jobs. And then a hundred thousand more.
This is the beginning: Getting you, dear reader, a real-world job that pays you to fight for your people. But if I only set you free, I've failed.
You need the kind of job that allows you to hire ten more people to fight for our people. The kind of job that attracts 100 more people into full-time jobs fighting for our people.
That means we need media driving paying customers away from our enemy's system and into ours. Into a mass media empire that hasn't been built because we haven't built it. Because it costs money.
If someone supports this cause, I want a piece of everything he buys going toward his liberation. And that means giving him ways to do it.
T-shirts can be one of the ads in a 30 page-newsletter, with a different ad on every page. Because everybody needs clothes. And because we need to look presentable and to advertise what we're about.
T-shirts can be one of the 30 shout-outs or commercials in a 2-hour podcast.
What else do people spend money on? Food, shelter, lights, heat, transportation, and so on. Each ad potentially fills a need in his life, more than supports the show, broadcast, or media and its rapid growth.
It doesn't have to be hard work. A pre-recorded ad can be push-button simple. You just drop it into the show or copy and paste it onto the page.
The ads themselves can be and should be entertaining, enraging, or informative, so they're a thing of value in their own right.
But be sure to hit the psychological buttons that make people buy. If the t-shirts are going fast, remind them. If brand new new designs are in stock, let people know. If you've had to bring on someone to keep up with the demand, let people know. These all trigger social proof. Our ears perk up. "Other people are doing this? I've got to do this."
For example, I'll remind you over a hundred people listened to the latest Terms of Fair Use on my YouTube channel alone. The one about how it's our duty to be rich and generous by lending. I just got a catalog that offers one price if you buy, or to pay for it with something down and a series of payments.
That's what I mean by lending. And you guys in the t-shirt business ought to be thinking about that kind of offer for your distributors.
If I can give you boxes of t-shirts to re-sell, but the payments are spread out over a period of time, then it's a lot easier for you to take me up on the offer. Whatever's left that the distributors can't sell, they can give away to their clubs and friends and churches and organizations. They can keep whatever profit they make, and do pretty well for themselves in their spare time, and it's for a good cause.
You might not think $50 dollars down can get you 20 to 50 shirts to sell and give away. But that's probably because you haven't read the rest of this article.
The Terms has quickly shifted the conversation in our community, as it was intended and designed to do. As I thought it would. And you can bet I'll be the first to remind you of it.
That several ideas from Terms of Fair Use have been repeated across a sample of several Alt-Right shows. The mind virus is spreading far and wide. I know that because I want to track which ideas have the most traction and hammer home those same points again and again.
Getting more out of a small audience.
I get the most from my audience by asking for help. I give them lots of ways to help. I show them how to help. I guide them through the process, train them up.
If you're reading this, you're probably an early adopter. You're probably pretty sharp. You'll never need all the help I'm offering you. But most people aren't as sharp as you are, and I want their help, too. So I'm helping them build an ecosystem to the best of their ability. As much as they can. If it never gets out of the garage, that's okay.
If they never design a shirt, but crank out our team's great shirt designs in their community, that's great. Here's one of the great designs from an alt-right team.
Even one great shirt or site can lead people to ten organizations that direct people to hundreds of resources. Fueling The Resistance is one of those possible resources. Terms of Fair Use is one. Exodus Americanus on The Right Stuff is another. The direct response marketing community is this way. Everyone promotes their mentors by giving credit to a person who gave them an idea.
In the same way, you can string together a few up-sells based on each purchase, and/or trigger a follow-up sequence. These sequences can be done manually or automatically.Particularly if you set up a family member in the t-shirt business, you're keeping that money in the family, focusing on selling things that build your family of companies.
At first, a friend or family member is handling the sweat shop, processing the transactions, and handling customer care on each product line. They're making sure Amazon has a supply available, eBay has a listing up, that the surplus inventory is offered on a marketplace like ITEX or offered for a swap on Craigslist.
If you're operating at any kind of a covert or subtle level, your celebration of astronauts, founding fathers, and pictures of "perfect babies" (all white) shouldn't attract too much blowback, and should appeal to a very broad audience. Why? Because everyone but the devil likes our babies.
You can be so covert, you don't even tell me that you're putting out pro-white or pro-Christian (which is pro-white and JQ-aware) or anti-communist propaganda, and I might never really know you're doing it.
Whatever you thought of his divinely inspired, mass-produced prints, artist Thomas Kinkade (probably) unwittingly produced fantastic propaganda for our people. Even if he was doing it to make a buck, it achieved more inspiration than a lot of preachers ever manage to achieve.
Hopefully, seeing the cross constantly reminds you where your blessings come from and inspire you to crack open the scriptures. Because an image has no wisdom without the word. And heading down the path of idolatry brings about deadly dangers.
I mention Kinkade deliberately. Because whether you print on canvas, cotton, or polyester, you're in the business of commercial art when you're putting pigments on mass-produced textiles.
You don't need $1400 worth of equipment. You can even start with $10. If you don't have a flash dryer or heat gun or a hot hair dryer, you might use an iron.
The t-shirt business becomes one of your 30 streams of income. Now you just need 30 family members or friends, each handling a different stream of income. Or teaming up to handle all 30 by meeting the immediate wants and needs of your audience while documenting and broadcasting about current events and recent developments.
The more you focus on what you do well, and the more you offload the appropriate training to the appropriate person, and the more treat this blog and email list as a reference library to be collected, studied by the members of the ecosystem, and used as a piece of training and a historical document to be passed on to the next generation, the more it benefits our people, and therefore the more it benefits you.
You have to pay the bills to build a team of any size. To be 30 times bigger, to broadcast 30 times more often or more pages or more minutes, to to go daily instead of monthly, or hourly instead of weekly, to reach a larger audience, someone has to think about the money.
That includes breaking the bonds of the artificially-imposed limits on the size of our economy, starting with cash-conserving strategies. Not just cost cutting, but deals which involve trade, or making a generous gift of your time, money, and services with no expectation of repayment.
Someone has to be fueling the resistance. And that person, being a source of means, is a supply line. And a supply line is always considered a military target. So protect yourself.
One way I protect myself is by making myself a smaller target. Do I get rich in finance and spend billions on hiring shill agitators? No. That would make me a big target.
Instead, a break up a large risk and a big job and distribute it among a hundred or a thousand people, instead of trying in vain to concentrate all my forbidden knowledge and skill in any one powerful person. I may be mistaken on that strategy, and will fail to create a culture of continuous learning and application and massive action for the common man.
Just about any man can learn to liberate himself from the global banking elite's artificially scarce money supply designed to destroy us. But what good is his independence if he's the last man standing?
But maybe I'll change my mind. Only time will tell.
It would be easier and quicker to lift myself up than to stop here and lift up others, getting them started with t-shirts.
apprentices as I go along, and you'll see that I'm less outwardly successful as a result. But if I make myself the central target, instead of passing on what I know, then everything I've struggled to achieve will very easily die with me. As it has died with others.
Where, in all of the German movement, is the library of books I can study to lift up my nation the way Hitler lifted up his? In a world flooded with information and data, he hasn't left anyone a pathway to to leadership. His excuse? Different races are different.
To follow his formula or to innovate has proven nearly impossible for everyone who's coming up behind him. We may have his philosophy, the photos, the symbols and salutes and newsletters and speeches. But not much else. That's why his success hasn't been replicated.
I've approached things the wrong way around. From a fascination with the solutions. Not the problems. I never knew I was living in a racist, sexist world that hates white men more and more each day.
My education was backwards. Children should start off life knowing they're in a struggle for tribal dominance against the cleverest, shrewdest, wickedest race of monsters in the world. Human devils who look like us, talk like us, and seem almost perfectly ordinary, except for their complete absence of anything we'd call morality.
I had something else in mind when I embarked on my education. I still have no interest in politics. No education in it, except through osmosis. I'm not a philosopher. Not as in tune with the events of the day. I didn't study ancient Rome or get a college degree.
An hour with a history book tells you much more than a month with a newspaper.
The German movement left behind a lot of things, but not a clear path for me to follow, or even a list of the common mistakes their competitors made. If there is such a library or resource beyond the few books everyone knows about, I haven't seen it.
So that means we're making those mistakes now. We do have our elders and historians, but they ain't got no money. Why? Because they studied history. Not money-making. Apparently they didn't study the part of history where nothing happened unless you had some. Lots of it. Billions.
I expect we'll encounter a lot more fire and steel for daring to tell the truth. And there may be a time when it's too late. When it's impossible to think of others and vital to think only about yourself.
I've been told what happens after that, but
The most successful marketers are in direct response. They had at least a year of sales experience. And they all learned from this man, a successful anti-Communist who learned a lot from his mentors and he recommends you learn from this guy. New stuff AND the old stuff.
That's just keeping things a little bit vague just to warm up your mind. Because winning a campaign is about focus and specializing on the one thing nobody else will do, but it's also about building up a whole ecosystem. Apple Computer built an ecosystem. 4 core products, yes. But each one with its own line of accessories.
Now, if you like a clothing lines as one of your 30 streams of income, that's good. Clothes aren't my first choice, but they have lots of cool advantages:
- The cool thing about t-shirts is they promote your mass media for you.
- The cool thing about broadcast is it promotes your t-shirt.
- Another cool thing about t-shirts is they're mass media. They're walking billboards. Everyone knows this, fact, but almost nobody maximizes this fact.
- The cool thing about sponsors and advertisers is they can more than pay for your "hard costs" before you've sold either one.
- The cool thing about leveraging your sponsors and advertisers is they can become a distribution channel. They can sell your stuff for you. All because you added them to the shirt design. (This also makes them a paying customer.)
- The cool thing about distribution channels is that even people who don't buy the thing will still see it. So each distribution channel becomes your advertiser.
- Whatever you design, keep the nature of the t-shirt in mind. The product is a great advertisement for the product. That's why Toyota trucks said TOYOTA across the back.
- The cool thing about t-shirts, posters, billboards, Toyotas & stickers. They're made to be seen.
- The main reason why people will want your shirt? Because it's cool.
The t-shirt design at the top of this article has now been seen 91,000 times on YouTube. It's also showing up here for educational purposes. It looks more like a movie poster than most t-shirts you've seen. Why? Because people don't mind a string of logos across their body.
The world we live in is becoming a little like Idiocracy. The stuff we buy is cheaper and filled with ads.If you could get shirts for 58 cents or less from China, (and I'll gladly show you how to do that), I might start thinking about selling customers a disposable shirt dispenser with a combination of ads and content that build my ecosystem.
A series of memes and messages and reminders to create a culture that guides people through their unthinking, forgetful, distracted lives.
The reason why I'm stretching you in this direction is so that you can snap back to something sustainable, something that pays you to run it, or own it. Not so we can ship all our jobs overseas, obviously. But I'm not going to tie one hand behind your back in fighting evil whatever way you can.
I say run OR own because you don't have to do both. You can try to run 30 business. You'll fail. Or you can try to own 30 business that run themselves, and you'll probably succeed. Aim to own. To control through a set of policies and procedures, or through deals like licensing. Then you don't have to run them.
Sponsors don't have to run your podcast to control you. They do it through a sponsorship agreement which tells you what you can and can't say. If you want freedom from that, learn this lesson from your enemies.
Set up licensing agreements with 30 companies that not only pay you generously, but operate YOUR WAY. Why? So you can focus on building the one thing that matters; That brand.
Trump the real estate guy is one such brand. Garfield the cat is another. Apple is another. Google has built a thriving, interconnected ecosystem of products and services around search. You could build an ecosystem centered on a successful T-shirt that people want.With ecosystems of products and services, through licensing and ownership, income steams flowing from one to another, company policies and agreements, mass behavior is orchestrated and managed and supervised and audited to create order from chaos, to give the end-customer the best possible experience in life, to use the proceeds of their labor to gradually shepherd them away from the greatest dangers and temptations in life.
Jim Davis started with the end in mind, then made a lazy cartoon cat around 4 running gags. He did it for profit. For products. But even though Garfield isn't really funny, we don't hate Garfield.
"That year, [1983] Davis placed seven Garfield books simultaneously on the Times trade-paperback best-seller list, a feat that's never been repeated."
He built a propaganda empire.
At scale, great design is free. Mass production allows you to make a great design that people want, then scale it up for the masses until the design cost virtually disappears.
I looked at large-scale music video budgets, and the average cost per viewer was about a dime. They wouldn't keep spending that kind of money unless the value of that view exceeded ten cents per music video.
Over 100 million people watch the Superbowl. A 30-second ad costs about a 4.5 million dollars. That's 4.5 cents per viewer for 30 seconds of their time.
People will pay from 30 cents to 50 dollars per click on internet ads that take them to a website. If you can catch someone at the right moment, their time becomes very valuable to the insurance man, broker, professional, or company.
What you do, say, and broadcast has a knowable and quantifiable cost, risk, and value.
In other words, it's something you can measure and figure out.
If you've got your costs paid for before printing a damn thing, you can afford to put some really nice, high quality design work so people want to have one. Even if they don't know what it's for. And by using targeted online ads which appear in front of the super fans online, you can profitably (or, if you'd like to reach a LOT more people, at a break-even) sell a whole lot of t-shirts.
Since the sale of the shirt pays for the ad impressions, it's like you're not paying for the ad at all!
Remember: Your logo shows up on the shirt design anytime someone considers buying your shirt online. If the logo catches their curiosity, or leaves a favorable impression, you've improved your brand awareness. Normally, I wouldn't advise doing brand awareness advertising, but as long as the ad's free to you, it doesn't matter. Big, dumb companies love spending thousands building brand awareness. Even if the ads don't work.
If you know anything about (((who))) owns Google and Facebook, you might be worried that they'll shut down your ads. Probably will. Luckily, there are more online ad networks than just Google and Facebook. We won't get into that today.
Let's find out what it takes to get started and see if this is for you or not.
If you set up your system right, and follow these simple steps, and you don't mess up too bad, then I don't see why you can't use distribution and sponsors and co-promotion and broadcast and a few other key ingredients (the secret sauce) to turn a little turn-key t-shirt business into a real powerhouse. Revolutions have been built on less.
But I can't promise you the moon and stars. It's just a t-shirt business. The good news is these things have a way of scaling up when you know a lil' about marketing, licensing, trade (like we talked about on the Fueling The Resistance email list), and simple, basic arithmetic. I didn't say math. I know they squeeze and torture your brain until you hate numbers.
That's the purpose of government math classes. If you don't love numbers, you'll never have time OR money, which means you're not a threat and can't do nothin'.
The Secret to Massive Influence: Time AND Money
Ah. That magical combination. Rare. Almost never seen. Like a unicorn. The land of trust fund babies. People who mysteriously have both time and money can change the world.
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| We get to decide how your life is going to be. |
The movement needs billions. But you don't need billions. Even if you did a tenth as well as some of these Mexican bootleggers flooding over the border, you'd still be independent.
Before we start, I want to show you how real that $1,000 an hour is, and exactly what it takes to get you there, even if the recession comes and wipes out all your competitors in a cut-throat field.
What to do with excess inventory.
How much to bid on a job. At scale, it's only a three or four bucks to make these shirts. As long as someone else is paying that money, it's free to you.
One of these sponsored shirts that promotes a lot of local businesses. It's okay to promote your t-shirt business, your brother's podcast, your mom's restaurant, and your dad's auto detailing business.
So you go on eBay or search around, finding you can order bundles of plain white shirts for as little as a dollar seventy each.
And actually, you can find custom printed t-shirts from China for less than 58 cents each [not an endorsement] at high volume.
Yeah. I said 58 cents. At hot, summer events, you could actually give away the t-shirt for free with purchase of a $1 bottled water (which you can buy in bulk for 10 or 20 cents) and you'd be making money while distributing human billboards.
See? There's a reason why people are glad I'm on their side. One of the likely reasons why Trump wants to introduce protectionist policies is to slightly curtail our dirty-cheap access to the machinery of uncontrolled propaganda. Such access might theoretically represent some kind of a threat to their two-party duopoly.
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| Flags like these are listed for about 20 cents each from China right now. |
Due diligence is always important. Even more important when dealing overseas.
They know you're going to be a million miles away.
At that price, if you're printing in high volume, or doing complicated, labor-intensive pieces, it's probably worth checking out to see if it meets your needs. That's why I mentioned it. Like I said. This business scales up.
[Or, if you're trying to impress people, you might say the exact same thing, but with fancier wording and a suit and tie.]
China's a Communist country that now requires state approval before publishing anything of "an informational or thoughtful nature." That's aimed at paper, but might also affect T-shirt printing.
It's true that Asia isn't hit with the same propaganda we're bombarded with, and aren't necessarily native English speakers, so the companies themselves may not care what logo or words you want to use in your design. But you can expect U.S. Customs to open up and examine whatever they send.
Which, if you're saying anything less politically popular, makes it even more important to control the means of production.
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| White Privilege: When your race invented the wheel and his didn't. |
So you can start thinking in terms of custom flags, patches, embroidered jackets, silk-screened sleeves and wrap-around prints you otherwise would have thought were too expensive. All at very small minimum orders because labor's really cheap. It's China.
It's the shipping cost and time that's often the biggest issue. I hear it eats up all the savings on small orders.
Obviously, we Americans get a lot of products from Chinese manufacturers. They fill the shelves of American stores. That means there are lots of importers have been very happy. They've kept doing business with the same company for years.
And at these low prices, all you have to do is find one fairly reliable company to make it worth a lot of trial and error. But maybe some Americans are starting to get spoiled.
With that discussed, whether you order out or do it in-house, there's probably a little room for profit.
If you're making as little as $5 profit per shirt, and you're a perfectionist who takes your time to get the best quality possible, and you make as few as 10 shirts per hour, that's $50 an hour.
Listen: If you're healthy and hard-working person, you're probably going to decide you want to do more like 20, 50, or 100 shirts per hour and make at least $10 per shirt. And if you want, we're going to learn one little celebrity trick that I learned from one of the world's most famous bullshit artists that you can turn into an honest profit by making each shirt a limited-edition or unique piece of collectible art. This adds to the perceived value tremendously. And perceptual illusion is easily turned into real world cash. Just look at the government.
Yours free. No extra charge. An example is hidden somewhere in this article, and explained somewhere else, seemingly at random.
And don't worry about any that don't sell. We're going to erase that problem.
But depending on your equipment, you could easily crank them out a lot faster than that. (For one person, printing 2 shirts per minute is not so unusual.)
Once you're done cutting out the cucked middle man who doesn't believe in freedom, you get to keep ALL the loot except shirt & shipping. In the biz, we call those "hard costs." But I'll show you how to get nearly full retail value out of every last one of them. I promise.
If you're not slow at basic arithmetic as I am, then you probably already figured out this is more than enough to pay your bills. Easily. Question: Can you and your family live off of $30 an hour if you're working full time? Oh, ok. Then they can probably live off of $50 an hour even easier, right?
So let's see if we can make that happen. We'll start you off part time, and ease you right out into your own thang. Sitting back drinking lemonade in the sun while others do all the work for you.
No, seriously. If you've got the right designs and quality people want, this scales up all the way, baby. This. All by itself. Nothing else to learn ever. (Unless you wanna.)
Hard costs: The ink costs pennies. The shirts are a couple of bucks. It's not as cheap as paper and ink, but the perceived value's much higher.
Even people who aren't printing their own shirts like to make at least $10 profit per shirt. Why? To pay for the ads. That's right. The ads. If you have a kick-ass design, total strangers will want to buy it, even if they don't know what it is. How many t-shirts are in your closet just because they looked cool?
20 shirts an hour times $10 is $200 an hour. Have you got the picture? And if you can get other people to pay for YOUR stock of t-shirts for you, then not only are you being paid, but you could give away your shirts for free (or free with purchase) and it functions as free advertising.
Your costs? Dirt cheap, if you do it like Mexican [I assume] bootleggers. They've got it down to a science, and it's so dirt cheap to set up it's insane. We're not Mexicans, so obviously we're not going to liberate anyone's intellectual property. When you're practically printing your own money, you don't have to.
Don't be scared. Prepare to collect a minimum of $1,000 per design in cash and spending power. In other words. (Cash, grass, or ass. Nobody gets a T for free.) And get ready to fire up your money-printing machine. Because...
We're building a better lemonade stand.
Once you know how to silkscreen, you can put logos on coffee cups, surfboards, posters, stickers, bags, pretty much any kind of clothing, plastic, metal, etc. Especially if it's protected by some kind of top-coat so it doesn't scratch off.
Why should you listen to me? After all, I knew basically nothing about the t-shirt business until today. But like you're doing now, I looked into it, and learned plenty.
But all your business and life experience carries over. Hell, if you've ever successfully completed a long hike or something similar, that experience is going to carry over, too. If you've lifted that one last rep in the gym, you've pushed past the pain.
So let's push past the pain and find those gains. Except this time, instead of looking in the mirror and seeing bulging biceps, we're going to be checking out our stack of Commie-fighting cash. Damn right.
As your guide through the Matrix, I'll infect you with my rare, potent mojo of positive vibes and opportunistic mindset. You'll go from cursing the world like a chump and kicking your can down a dirty, dusty road to printing sweet designs like a champ.
Online stores won't carry your "Happy B-day Adolf" shirts? No problem. That's what web developers are for. To pull something off the shelf, install it for you, and you're in business. In fact, my web host has all that stuff. You just have to plug it in to a payment processor.
Payment processors don't like your "Gassing Another 6" hoodies? Not to worry. Bitcoin has you covered. Coinbase takes any old credit car (just like PayPal) and turns it into Bitcoins that turn right back into cash, using Bitcoins as a medium of exchange.
And if Coinbase cuts you off, you can still accept Bitcoins and swap them for cash conveniently and locally with LocalBitcoins.com remotely or in person. An accountability system is built in. If your customers prefer more privacy, Darkcoin is another currency which smoothly transfers in and out of Bitcoin.
I don't mention it because I think you'll ever need to use it, but because I know you'll always think of another excuse not to take action, no matter how prepared you are.
You'll learn it even faster than I did, and how it applies to being advertiser-independent in producing propaganda/mass media/publicity for your cause.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZIW-Xh6cOU
The Bible has a lot to say about the value of honest toil. You're definitely creating paying jobs for people, putting idle hands to work, and these are jobs your family and friends can help you with, and they'll might be better compensated than they would if they worked as a wage slave at a "job."
Remember... you're reading about leverage. When people see what I've got for them, people say, "I'm glad you're on our side." So you're in good hands here, even though I'm not an expert in this particular industry. As you'll see, it won't matter.
Instead of training you myself, I'm going to leverage the work of others. We'll use these t-shirt-making videos to show you how to get started super cheap. How cheap? How about ten bucks?
What to do with excess inventory, and why you should never mind producing some extra inventory, unlike the plebs who overly fret about it.
This article is incomplete.
Buy pre-made emulsions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuXxCEFOZ1g
Which is a bit easier, but still harder work than printing out your stencils with a Risograph duplicator of any kind. Here's one that's purpose-built for the job, but any Riso will do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQyoaaec_jE
Spreadsheets help you in bidding and planning.
https://youtu.be/LWMBGs77jvM
Free Business Plan tool:
LeanStack (Haven't even looked at it. A rock solid marketing plan is much more important, IMO.)
Simulating full color with a multi-stage process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubXIMC_ghMY
Okay. I don't know what this is:
https://youtu.be/RgApFS83pT8
Taking it to the autistic level: This apparently OCD white guy shows you how to get nearly perfect manual registration on relatively cheap equipment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx2IQkRzVkI
Getting sorta artsy with it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOQcfp36LDo
Scaling up: Mass production:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mku8Nt10Yr8
You've stayed with me this long? Great. Here's the bonus stuff.
So the secret to making something collectible is to have a celebrity hand-sign it. If you've made yourself into a celebrity with your own mass media by associating yourself with good feelings and by demonstrating your superpowers, then that sorta kinda counts.
The hand-signed print doesn't just add $40 worth of value. If you're a celebrity artist selling one-off shirts, prints, and or unique artwork, it's worth more.
Got an airbrush to add some quick mood lighting or a bit of a glow in the corner? Bam. It's not a print. It's an original piece of art.
More things you can do with silk-screening. Also, take note of the sales pitch.
They look very nice. The colors are incredible. Like the colors you can do with a silk screen on a t-shirt. But it's still mass-produced.
Thomas Kinkade was already mass-producing prints of his works as limited editions which fetched a pretty penny, then realized he could add unique little touches to each finished prints and call it an original piece of art. I believe some of these sold for 20 to 50 thousand dollars.
If I understand correctly, he could dab a spot of paint in a different spot on each print and sell it for a hell of a lot more. His prints then sold for thousands of dollars.
Yeah. You're welcome.
So the unique smearing of multiple colors on a single silkscreen counts. It's slightly unique. Like Cabbage patch dolls, you can put the same print on the teal, black, white, grey, blue, and yellow t-shirt, a-shirt, and long-sleeve shirt, cut-off, and sliced (or not) shirt in small, medium, large, extra large, 2xl, 3xl, cotton, polyester or blend, and each one becomes a unique and collectible piece of original art.
From what I just mentioned in the last sentence, you have 324 combinations per print. To multiply that by a lot, if you have 6 colors, you can wash out the screen and load it with a different pigment. Or thin it and have a lighter, vintage look. Blues can be swapped for greens, skin tones can be darkened or lightened or pushed into colder or warmer pallet. Now you've got thousands of combinations. Post-printing operations include embroidery, patches, sequins, and tailoring.
The full color gamut: The colors your home printer and monitor achieve by mixing three colors doesn't come anywhere near the full spectrum of violets and florescents, shiny metallics and true reds available only to people using Riso, silkscreen, or post-processing techniques.
Remember... you can print on canvas, shirts, bags, any object made of smooth plastic, wood, rubber, or metal, so mass produced custom artwork is definitely an option.
Depending on your comfort level with the fine art of cranking out quick custom work, and depending on what kind celebrity appeal you can cultivate to your niche, you can conceivably compete with any size or quality of operation just by using your imagination. But mainly by studying Thomas Kinkade's schtick.
And since it needn't take you a tremendous amount of time to produce original pieces of wearable art, it
It could take as much as a minute per shirt or as little as the two or three seconds to add your autograph or finishing touches. Putting the customer's name or logo on something it is a value-add called personalization.
So one series of shirts may have an [insert logo here] space to designate it's specifically produced for a certain company, occasion, day, or event.
The Riso method of screen making makes this incredibly quick & easy, since new screens pop out ready-to-use in about 2 minutes. Ready to stretch on your frame & make thousands of prints.
I don't consider this article to be finished yet, and once I get the time, there will be updates. Like a downloadable audio version.
Getting Nearly Full Retail out of ever
Personally, I don't care if 10% or 90% of your business is offloading shirts to trade exchanges. That's up to you. Exchange means you can probably get nice and/or useful for your surplus inventory. Maybe even things you can sell for cash easier than these t-shirts.
People might wonder how you got a vacation package for the Bahamas, a vinyl wrap for your car to advertise your business. You don't have to tell them you got it on a trade exchange. Because that's none of their business. But you might tell them about the nice wardrobe and accessories you picked up for pennies on the dollar by swapping tshirts you listed at full retail.
And you're not limited to the stuff you make. Anything you can get your hands on.
You can list a demo design, see if anyone wants it, and crank up the production to meet demand. Your best-seller on the exchange might be your best candidate for eBay. Whatever becomes your best-seller on eBay is a great candidate for targeted online ads. So you're going from lowest risk to higher risk, and only keeping your winners for the next round where the costs of selling are higher and so the stakes are higher.
My opinions don't count. Your opinions don't count. The only thing that counts is the opinions of people who are voting with their dollars.
In fact, that's not such a bad way to keep you busy working and earning money. It's steady, reliable income as long as anyone's buying. And on the trade exchange, it's a seller's market.
And I'm about to release a fairly epic email, going into what to do with the excess inventory so you don't need to worry about it. The short answer is to list it on a trade exchange like ITEX (which I believe is the largest) and see if anyone bites. If it sells, you'll have trade dollars you can spend on the exchange for things like professional services, gifts, travel, advertising, and all kinds of stuff.
So if you end up with an extra $5,000 worth of unique, customized, one-of-a-kind shirts that only cost you $500 to produce, then you could conceivably turn that into up to $2,000 to $5,000 worth of real-world spending power. Why would anyone want to do that? Well, for example, because they've got even bigger margins than you do, and they can snap up what you've got for next to nothing. So it's a seller's market.
Such exchanges of course charges a small transaction fee. And those come due every few weeks. This gives you time to buy something you need with your trade dollars before the fees come due. It costs you something to sell excess inventory this way, but it's still a sale that gives you real-world spending power. Depending on how creative you are, you turn trade dollars into actual dollars. And there's lots of unexpected leverage which comes from doing that.
Naturally, it's not something they want you to know about.
If you have a pile of $200,000 in shirts which cost you $30,000 in material and labor, you can still offer to personalize them, and try to make another sale on a trade exchange or otherwise.
Also, like a tattoo, if you ended up with something bad, you can cover it up and put something over the top to try to salvage the inventory. This might make sense since the inks are cheap, the labor's cheap, and the shirts are what cost money.
Since communicating with your buyers is relatively cheap, especially because they're the most likely to buy you might consider cashing out with a time-tested style of limited promotion or sale.
But there are different levels of ethics.
There are deep discounts because "the boss is out of town." (Or the accountant/wife/attorney.) Boy, "the boss" would never let me sell these precious, but we've got a small amount of overstocked merchandise and we need the room for a big, new, expensive set of designs. Well, that's a real reason. But I'm not sure how unhappy your boss/wife/accountant/attorney would be about you caving to the pressure to sell before a new truckload of stuff arrives.
Then again, it's "costing you" thousands of dollars to drop the price on these exact same item others paid full retail for. So, you need to give a reason why you're doing it, or people won't want to buy.
Tell them why. Then they'll buy.
Scratch and dent sale. Let's say you had a very minor screw-up on about ten of your shirts. And it wasn't even a printing error. The print came out perfect. But you "lost" the poly bags because a spatter of ink splashed on outside and you have them safely stashed inside brand new poly bags.
But you can't bring yourself to sell them at full price because you had to replace the bag. Or the cat walked on it and there might be cat hairs. Can't sell it as new because some people are allergic.
Little things. Barely noticeable things, but they were still rejected for quality reasons, since you can't sell them as new, pristine retail stock. So you have to sell them at 50% off retail. Maybe more. (That's still a pretty good profit.)
You could admit the screw up happened and offer them a second chance to get one of the last of the time-limited runs of a shirt that had previously sold out. If it's true, that's what you could say.
What if you get 15 or 20 orders or more? Well, you could turn away those extra orders, or you could be nice and generous and send them a new, pristine, mint-condition shirt to once you've run out of the slightly flawed shirts. Nobody's going to complain.
If some random person calls you upset that they didn't get the discount, you can always refund him the difference or offer to send him a free item.
Not only do the benefits almost universally outweigh the costs, some unscrupulous guys go out of their way to stomp on or scuff-up just a little of their inventory just to have a good excuse to run the promotion and sell tons and tons of their surplus stock for half off.
Some businesses like commodities and electronics have slim margins, or must be sold in perfect and pristine condition, like aircraft engines. You probably don't want to offer a big discount on an overstock of scratched up jet engines sitting around collecting rust. Instead, you'd look for another reason to put them on sale.
And that reason makes it an event. And events are news. So there's always a good reason why you're communicating with someone. "Hey. Here's what's happening. I thought you'd like to know."
Besides. We always want to help our customers save money when we can so they'll have more money to spend on our stuff. Make sense? Good.
And from your perspective, sales and promotions are a way of converting excess inventory to cash to keep the lights on, to pay your bills, to finance the resistance propaganda, to get uniforms on the troops, and to keep the tanks fueled up.
There are about ten other common kinds of promotions to help you do that, depending on your situation. And for some folks, it makes the all the difference between profit and loss at the end of the month.
Each kind of promotion is essentially a different excuse to sell product at a marked down price. Going out of business is such an effective and popular one, regulators have had to step in to prevent stores from going out of business year-round. Some retailers started sneaking inventory in at night so they could continue "going out of business" the next day.
Bonus instead of discount.
Too many people are ashamed of asking for money. And they refuse to ask for the price they need. If you have a list of existing buyers, it's probably easier for you to offer a bonus than a discount. But it's not any harder to sell at a higher price point, and you get a better buyer. And that's what you want. A higher price point allows you to reach more people with paid ads, if you're doing that.
But this article isn't about advertising. And it's not really about the t-shirt business. It's about opening up your mind to lots of different kinds of options and opportunities you should be looking for.
In fact, all we've done is build a better lemonade stand. It's easy to get into with very low costs. And you need a lot of customers who don't pay very much. There are much better business models than this.
So I the t-shirt business isn't my favorite, even though it's the ideal combination of a person paying you for the privilege of advertising your brand, and it can grow really big, it's also very competitive unless you know exactly what niche you're going for. If someone else isn't doing it, there's probably a reason why.
It also gives you the wrong idea about who your customer is. They're not really a t-shirt buyer. They're not just someone to throw merch at. They're not just a fan or collector, either.
They're a human being with a variety of wants and needs, impulses, goals, values, and purpose. If you're not at a values-level alignment with someone, you're not gonna be much help to them. It's the tip of the iceberg.
You're not going to be able to solve their problems. And that means they're not going to want to buy very much more than a t-shirt from you.
If your values do align, then things become more automatic. More natural. You'll have a shared passion and purpose. A powerful connection with your audience. Your enthusiasm will be real, and it will come through in what you do. Which means...
You can make all kinds of mistakes, and they'll be forgiven. Your audience will be there to catch you when you fall.
This is sometimes crassly called the "money at will" position. And it's a sacred responsibility and one heck of a good time.
T-shirts aren't a business. They're a product line. Whether or not it's for you, it's one of the profit-getters you can set up to feed your cashflow pipeline. It's something else to advertise on your broadcasting platform that the establishment can't shut down.
The equipment starts at a very affordable price point, and you can even start your very first setup for about $10 in parts. Or with a handy $140 machine. Or you can use a t-shirt printing service (not mentioned here due to content control issues) without any startup costs.
This makes it something you can delegate. Your job: Run the ad. Drive business to your shirt-maker. Take a generous cut of the proceeds for handling the marketing and keeping the shirt-maker busy. In doing so, you've created a paying job (or jobs) for the shirt-maker, who would have been a white man living under a bridge somewhere while a minority takes his job.
And you've created a no-holds-barred, name the enemy source of t-shirts with total control of the designs and distribution.
In creating your local conglomerate, you'll want to be looking for the pizza shops. The t-shirt business. The printing business. Things you can offer for sale that pays for your broadcasting costs. Whether it's paper and ink or keeping the TV or radio station beaming out signal, having stuff to sell in-house makes you harder to kill.
And it helps you fuel the resistance.
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