Amit Chaudhary ⋅ San Jose, CA Doordash, Silicon Valley Software Company ⋅ 20 years experience

Start by selling a t shirt of your favorite cause via teespring.com. Take it from there.
Let's your passion fuel the path

Kimberly West ⋅ Long Beach, CA Personality-Ville, Treasure Map to Life ⋅ 20 years experience

Hi India--

As far as assessing the feasibility of a T-shirt company, I'm not sure there is a quick answer on that one. SBDC, Score, and other agencies can help.

What I can tell you is, you can start one relativity easy, part-time. I use a company called Shopify. They have a special price for under 25 products, I think it's only $14 a month. You can get a website that matches your gym business name and use their do-it-yourself templates.

You would need the ability to make a graphic image that goes on the T-Shirt. Then, you can use "Printful" for print-on-demand printing and fulfillment for the shirts. (They also have other items.) Here is a link: https://www.theprintful.com/. They can print one T-shirt and pack it up and send it out for a percent of the price.

The thing that's so neat about this, is Shopify can be easily hooked up to Printful. If you have the patience and are willing to read the instructions, it can be done.

There is a whole other side to marketing your shirts online.

If you are going to be creating situations where you are physically with people (where you are wearing the shirt) you can give them a card and refer them to your site. You don't need a lot of inventory. You also can have Printful make up several shirts to have on hand to get started and test out different versions.

Good luck. As a business owner, I can tell you it's ALOT of work, but doing what you love gives you energy!

P.S. Thanks so much for your service to our wonderful country.

David Akre ⋅ New York, NY A NYSE listed financial company ⋅ 25 years experience

Stick to the HR idea. There are a million people selling T-shirts. Don't get sucked into the easy money schemes.

Brian Richardson ⋅ Columbus, IN U.S. Army, Sergeant ⋅ 8 years served

Hi India,
Is your idea to provide a type of t-shirt that is not available on the market? Or are you designing a logo/graphic to go on an existing t-shirt?

There are a million sellers of t-shirts out there. have you thought about how you could stand out from the crowd? What makes you different?

Once you think thru some of those concepts, do you have the ability to sell some small quantities to see if they are wanted in the marketplace.

Here are some articles about the Life is Good company. http://fortune.com/2014/05/01/life-is-good-in-the-t-shirt-business/ http://www.lifeisgood.com/our-story.html

I would be happy to discuss this further. Feel free to contact me here or via my email address.

Brian Richardson
brian@VetLaunched.com
www.VetLaunched.com

Saeed Abdul-Karim ⋅ Dallas, TX U.S. Army, Sergeant First Class ⋅ 20 years served

The best and easiest is to visit www.proworldinc.com. The site will provide everything you need, material, equipment and tutorial on how to make the shirts. They even have a website for your customers to view all available transfer.