Experiment / Results: T-Shirts

If you’re familiar with my work, you know that I co-created Legalize Trans (if you’re new, hi!). In July 2010, my friend Asher came to me with an idea for a t-shirt line and asked me to launch it with him. We did. Today, we’re still selling shirts.

As I look back on a over a year of Legalize Trans, I want to share the results of this experiment-in-progress with you.

Selling t-shirts is easy.

I don’t know why this surprised me, but it did. Make a compelling design, build a simple website, offer shirts for sale, print the shirts, ship, repeat. Voila! We launched legalizetrans.com on July 27, 2010 and sold our very first shirt that same day. I don’t remember how long it took before our first non-friend sale went through. It was definitely withing a week. It was possibly within 24 hours. A good design + folks who will want it + a way to give it to them = easy success.

Selling t-shirts is harder than it seems.

This surprised me too. Selling shirts is sorta difficult. It is a never ending process of pulling shirts and shipping them off. Managing inventory and ordering more. Updating the website to reflect your current offering. It takes an investment of time and Asher and I are always “on.” You don’t get two weeks of paid vacation when you’re working for yourself.

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Revenue vs. Expenses

Currently, Legalize Trans pays to have our shirts and buttons printed, then the inventory is shipped to my apartment or Asher’s. We do our own fulfillment.

Expenses are t-shirt stock, printing fees, shipping (from printer to us), and packing supplies.Intangible expenses are time it takes to pick up and drop off packages at the Post Office, prepare shipments, update the website, and the brainspace taken up managing everything.

Thus, per-item profits are relatively low. It’s impossible to get rich off of Legalize Trans (which is fine). In order to make buckets of money, we’d have to sell more t-shirts than we’re equipped to handle. For now, it provides a steady stream of additional income.

Intangible benefits

In addition to the tangible, monetary benefits, selling t-shirts is fun. Fans and customers post pictures of themselves in our shirts to our Facebook wall (my favorite part of this whole endeavour). I see Google Alerts of blogs and news sources talking about our projet, I meet strangers at conferences sporting the shirt, my friends report to me when they see someone wearing a shirt in their town or on their campus.

Is it for you?

Is this selling t-shirts something for you? Only you can decide that. Over a year later, I’m still enjoying the project. You can always start small, pre-sell the shirts first, do a limited run, or use a print-to-order service such as Skreened to dabble with it.

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