The Impossible shirts have been online for a few months and we’ve sold a few hundred of them. We’ve got a bunch of pictures of people doing some impossible things, and even had a university class order them for their final presentations. When I made them, I figured I’d sell a few, but it’s gone over much, much better than anticipated.

In fact, they’ve gone over so well, that lately I’ve been getting a ton of email about how I did it. Instead of writing the same email over and over, I thought I’d lay it all out here one time. At first, I was a little apprehensive to do this, mostly because t-shirts are the first thing people think of when they think of easy ways to make money. When organization wants to raise funds, some genius stands up and yells, “I know, let’s sell t-shirts!”

It’s true, a lot of people make t-shirts and a lot of people make t-shirts that suck. They’ll either make them and don’t sell a single one or sell a bunch that end up at the bottom of people’s drawers or thrown in a trash bag laying around for the next trip to GoodWill. So, this is designed to help you make shirts that suck less and ones that people want to wear and share with their friends. So, while I’m still not sure that everyone should make t-shirts, hopefully I can help those that choose to do so, make their t-shirt lines a little better.

Understanding The T-Shirt Concept

How hard can it be? There’s three basic steps, right?

1. Sell T-shirts
2. ???
3. Profit!

• To people who know the brand, it’s clear about what the shirt represents and makes them want to wear it.
• To those who aren’t, be interesting enough to peak their curiosity and make them want to learn more.

That’s it. Don’t try to make it a million different things or you’ll have problems. As long as it does those two things, you’re good. People get all wrapped up in what t-shirts are and aren’t that they miss the two above points. Don’t get this confused.

T-shirts aren’t

• A quick way to monetize your blog.
• A cash cow.
• Very fun to fulfill.

• A community builder
• An extension of your brand
• Pretty Fun

Don’t Create A T-shirt!

A lot of people ask me about creating a t-shirt when they haven’t created anything else first. If that’s you, don’t focus on creating t-shirts! Create something else. A blog. A business. A brand. Something. T-shirts are cool, but unless you’re an apparel company, t-shirts should not be your main focus or your main source of revenue.

They’re an asset to something else you’re building. Not the whole thing.

Ideally, you’ve already created something that people like talking about, that people are interested in and that people want to tell their friends about. If you’ve done that, most likely, people will be asking you for t-shirts, and you can simply go out and create one for them. The main reason I finally came out with t-shirts was because I got message after message from people asking for something to wear and they were starting to become unruly. The need was driven by the community, not the other way around. So I went ahead and decided to go ahead and make a shirt.

This is how I did it.

Creating Your Shirt

First up. You gotta have a shirt. Crazy, I know, but true. This is a pretty simple first step, so don’t screw it up.

PICK AN AMAZING BASE SHIRT

This is what is people are going to be feeling against their skin every time they put it on. Make sure it doesn’t suck. If they’re more expensive, so be it. If you cheap out this early in the process, you probably need to focus on something else. If you get a cheap shirt that feels like sandpaper, you might get people to buy it, but you won’t be able to get them to wear it, and that’s the whole point after all.

So pick a good base shirt – one that you’d wear over and over even if it didn’t have any logo on it  - and use that (For what it’s worth, for the Impossible Tees, we use the American Apparel Tri-Blend Track Tee). I’ve had lots of people tell me it’s the most comfortable shirt in their wardrobe – comfortable enough to wear out anywhere, but light enough to work out in. It’s a great shirt before I do anything to it.

Designing Your Shirt

Have an idea of what you want. I knew that the IMPOSSIBLE logo was going to be the front of mine. Then had a very good Then find a good designer to do their thing and make it happen (Steven did mine).

This was my original sketch (before we eventually made it into the official logo everywhere).

This is how it turned out eventually.

In between we had a bunch of other types of designs, but we settled on one.

• ONE
• UNO
• 1

That’s it. Just make one shirt.

I know you think you’re creative. You probably are, but this is not a practice in exercising your incredible creative skills (you’ll have a chance to do that later). There’s a really bad line of thought that is easy to fall into:

If I have one shirt, and I sell 50, I’ll sell 50 shirts, so if I have 50 shirts, and I sell 50 shirts each, I’ll sell 2500! I’ll have more money than God and start a t-shirt empire! I’ll start heating my house with $100 bills.

WRONG

If you have one shirt, you might sell 50, but if you try and sell 50 shirts, you’ll probably sell 0.

I’ve seen so many people come out with 10 or 20 different versions of t-shirts and not sell a single one. You’re not Colin Wright. If you want to design a shirt a day for year, do it, just don’t expect to sell and fulfill them all in a way that doesn’t end up with you to gouge out your eyes.

The point is to end up with one design that your audience can wear with pride and identify themselves as part of your tribe – not 50 designs that people think are cool but will never actually buy.

Create one shirt. Commit to one design. This your is your branded t-shirt design. You can’t have 50 of these. Pick one.

Keep it simple

Once again, your first time out, t-shirts are not an exercise in your creative skills.

Remember, your shirt should be able to do two things

• To people who know the brand, it’s clear about what the shirt represents and makes them want to wear it.
• To those who aren’t, be interesting enough to peak their curiosity and make them want to learn more.

Mine’s pretty simple

IMPOSSSIBLE

If you want more info on the shirt and site behind it, the url ImpossibleHQ.com is visible on the back of the shirt.

That’s it.

No over the top designs. No crass promotion all over the place. Just the logo. You wouldn’t believe how many people who’ve bought the shirt and emailed me to say that they’ve had to explain to their friends what IMPOSSIBLE means and how it’s been a conversation started even with strangers.

This of course, relies on the fact that hopefully you’ve created a simple & concise message for your brand (if you don’t have this, you shouldn’t be working on t-shirts already – see the top of this post).

But if you get all the way through this, congrats. With the base shirt  picked out and the design, your shirt is created – well virtually, at least. Now to make it come to life.

Finding a Printer

Find somewhere to print your shirts. This is pretty simple. All you need to do is find a t-shirt printer. These guys are everywhere. Chances are you’ve got one or two or twenty in your town or near you and another couple hundred online. There are a lot of people that do it, the challenge is finding people who do it well. I’ve used a few different people.

For Hashtag Boom, we set up shirts via Skreend, which does do a nice job, and has quality shirts and fulfills them for you on a one-off basis with no up-front costs for you. Unfortunately, the individual tee price is pretty expensive which means you’ll probably make less overall sales if you go this route. Since Hashtag Boom is more for-fun than anything, it was a good arrangement to just get something up. However, if I was expecting to sell more than a handful of shirts, I would find another option.

For the Impossible Shirts, we set up an arrangement with Decatur Screenprint through their site MerchVendor. This was an interesting process. They have an initial order of 24 shirts to get things started. I bypassed this by paying an initial set up fee and ate the costs myself while waiting for the shirts to get set up. Because a bunch of people had expressed interest already, I’d knew I’d be able to sell at least that many + a few to give away to friends and family, so I paid the initial set-up fee out-of-pocket, essentially pre-ordering 24 shirts myself. If you’re short on cash or don’t know if the shirts will go over well, you’ll definitely want to hold a pre-order from your audience.

What about the money? I make $6/shirt on a $20 shirt (I told you it’s not about the money), but I’m very happy with it considering the quality of the shirts we make, and the fact that we ship anywhere in the world for FREE. In fact, the regular base shirt costs about $2 more if you buy it in one of American Apparel’s retail stores than it does to get the Impossible Shirt shipped to y our doorstep (I don’t care who you are, that’s pretty cool).

In my experience, I’ve been pretty happy with Decatur overall. At times, we’ve had some shirts slow to ship out, but most of the issues have been on American Apparel’s end (they run out of stock a lot) . On a scale of 1-10, I’d give Decatur an 8. If you’d like to work with them, go over to MerchVendor, tell them Joel sent you and they’ll take care of you.

Setting Up Fulfillment

You are not an apparel merchant. You don’t want to handle this. Trust me. It’s more work than it’s worth. You run a site, a website or a small business. You do not want to be handling orders, inventory, shipping, etc. If you sell a million t-shirts, you can start worrying about dealing with this yourself if you really want to. My printer (Decatur) takes care of my fulfillment for me. Also, I’ve never had anyone ask about returns, so I can’t help you there at all.

Marketing Your T-Shirt

Get your shirt. Wear it. Go out in public.

Then, get photos taken. Put them on your product page and please don’t try to sell your shirt by only using mock ups on torsos of unidentified stock models.

Do you really expect other people to buy and wear your shirt, if you’re not willing to do the same thing?

Exactly, so get photos taken - real photos. Find a friend that’s good with a camera or hire a pro. (hint: the difference professional photography can make is absolutely amazing. People are always impressed by how Impossible HQ looks, but it would look so much different if it wasn’t for the photography work or Jeff & Marla Sarris at Six4Eleven).

For the launch, I went downtown Chicago with Jeff & Marla for 12 hours and we took photos all over the place. It took a while and was freezing cold, but we ended up with some pretty great photos despite the fact I was that Jeff and Marla were shooting photos of this ugly mug the entire time. Just take a look at what they were able to do with the subject they had.

Seriously, how they did that is beyond me, but that’s why they’re pros. Get photos taken. They make a world of difference. (And if you’re in Chicago, Jeff & Marla do really great work).

Be Original. Do Something Different.

One of my big pet peeves is that people take creative ideas, boil it down to a few bullet points (like this list) and through the process, lose a lot of the originality that comes from having an idea. Then everyone always does the same thing and things that were creative and fun become boring.

Remember when I told you to save your creative energy? Now’s the time to use it. Do something different. Be original, not boring.

I can’t tell you what to do here  (if I did, it wouldn’t be original). For our launch, we decided to have a little fun with things. While hanging out downtown with Jeff and Marla, we were laughing about how some commercials are overhyped and promise things they can’t actually deliver on. We thought it was pretty fun so we decided to ad-lib our own parody of them on the spot touting the unreal benefits of the impossible shirt.

Impossible HQ: Impossible T-Shirt Promo Video (1 of 3) from Jeff Sarris on Vimeo.

Somehow that led to talking about the Old Spice guy commercials and me trying to do my best impersonation of him (I couldn’t quite keep it together though).

Impossible HQ: Impossible T-Shirt Promo Video (2 of 3) from Jeff Sarris on Vimeo.

And what would anything I do be complete without calling out the-arch-nemesis Steve Kamb and making fun of him?

Impossible HQ: Impossible T-Shirt Promo Video (3 of 3) from Jeff Sarris on Vimeo.

[click here to watch video in email]

BOOM.
We realized that having fun, was…wait for it…fun. Which brings us to the last point.

Have Fun

T-shirts can make a decent amount of money, but I’m not in the apparel business…yet. More than anything the process was fun. It created a shirt for an already existing community that could embrace it. It allowed us to be creative in a new way, helped promote the blog outside of the normal online community and do something different. If you’re going to make t-shirts for your blog, you’ll have a much better chance if you make it fun. Make it something that people want to be a part of instead of shoving it down their throats complete along with branded miniature action figures, keychains and koozies. By making it fun, we were able to make it into a community project rather than a Joel project. By making it fun, we were able to solicit reader photos doing impossible things, and turn them into different galleries to use around the league, facebook and HQ. Have fun!

TLDR: That’s okay, I still love you. Here’s the quick and dirty.

• Make ONE Shirt
• Keep It Simple
• Find A Printer (MerchVendor will save you a headache)
• Get Good Photos (Jeff & Marla rock)
• Do Something Different (Be Original)
• Have Fun
• BOOM

In case you’re wondering, you can grab your own Impossible Shirt and be a part of the Impossible League community. We’d love to have ya. And, if you’ve got one already, go do something impossible, take a photo in your shirt and send it in! We’ll be putting a full gallery of everyone together soon. In the meantime, here’s a mini-collage of the people who’ve sent photos in.