If you’re dreaming of starting a T-shirt business but don’t know where to begin, here's a step-by-step guide on how to do it.

Step One: Select a Niche

Choosing a good niche is crucial when setting up your T-shirt enterprise. In 2023, lucrative niches like hobbies, pets, politics, family, motivational quotes, and sports are heavily saturated, but with a little bit of niching down, you can tap into untouched, yet profitable sub-niches.

Research these sub-niches before selecting the one you’re going to stick with. Look at careers (teachers, engineers, nurses), hobbies/passions (fishing, travel, geek culture), family (parents, spouses, kids), and animals (especially pets). Then, find out what their sub-niches are.

Niching down helps you target people who have not seen a product made for them so specifically. For example, if you’re targeting nurses, under the career niche, there are pediatric nurses, emergency nurses, and ICU nurses. 

Step Two: Conceptualize Your T-shirt Design

If you want to start a shirt line, you need to conceptualize unique custom t-shirt designs to set yourself apart from your competitors. Keep going back to your target niches, and brainstorm ideas that will match their interests and preferences.

Look up best-selling t-shirt design ideas, then try to apply them to a sub-niche you picked in step one. For example, there’s a popular shirt design with a slogan that says, “Dangerous Creature”. Adapting this idea to your chosen sub-niche, like for example, web developer (a sub-niche of IT Professional), you’ll get a T-shirt design with the caption, “Dangerous Web Dev Guy” or “Dangerous Web Dev Gal”

If you need further help coming up with a design that will look good on screen-printed custom tees, partner with a graphic designer who specializes in apparel design.

Step Three: Get a Permit

If you’re looking to set up, and maintain a thriving T-shirt business, clashing with relevant authorities is the last thing you want. So, make sure to acquire all permits, and register your business.

Different states have different business registration requirements. Refer to this page to register your business with the state of Georgia.

You should also know the different business entities to choose from before starting your T-shirt line. There's LLC, sole proprietorship, S-corporation, partnership, C-corporation, or limited partnership.

Step Four: Outsource Screen Printing

Once you’ve passed all the legal hurdles, the next thing you should consider is outsourcing your screen printing services to a contract screen-printer like 20 Days Screen Printing. Doing so can help your business succeed at the first trial. 

You won't be wasting time and money and risking having unhappy customers because you're just learning screen printing as you go. When you outsource your screen printing, you can confidently stand behind your brand knowing that you are providing the highest quality product on the market made by professionals.

Outsourcing your printing services to a Suwanee screen printing company also means quicker turnarounds and guaranteed production. You also remove yourself as the bottleneck in your business. While you’re fulfilling one order after another, you get to focus more on marketing your products. Best of all, you get to grow and scale your business without sacrificing your quality of life.

Step Five: Start Marketing

Now, you have a great product. The next logical thing to do is develop a marketing strategy to get in front of the people who want to buy your custom shirts. Start marketing your T-shirt business through flyers, pamphlets, and business cards with QR codes that point to your website, or social media pages.

Word-of-mouth promotion is also still a powerful way for getting your message spread amongst the locals. An effective way to take advantage of word-of-mouth promotion is by wearing your merchandise in public, and also by posting pictures of yourself wearing them on social media, especially Instagram which is a go-to platform for fashion marketing.

You can also enlist the help of some Instagram influencers. Reach out to them and see if they will agree to post some images of your shirts in exchange for freebies. Try working with smaller influencers, because they tend to have a very targeted audience, which means you have a better chance of having your shirts seen by people who actually may be interested in buying them.

Finally, don’t shy away from attending or even sponsoring events in your niche. Local events like craft shows are a great avenue for getting more eyes on your merchandise while having face-to-face interaction with your potential customers.

Step Six: Decide Between a Physical and an Online Store

Finally, your T-shirts have to reach your target customers one way or the other. You now have a choice of whether to open a brick-and-mortar store or set up an online store. Make sure you understand the pros and cons of each one before making a decision.

Physical stores allow customers to have an in-person buying experience, but they involve high startup, and operating costs, which will need a significant amount of investment upfront. If you want to reach a broader customer base, you also need to open up multiple physical stores in different locations.

Online stores, on the other hand, don’t allow customers to have a feel for the product they’re purchasing, but the upside is, they are less costly to set up and run, easier to manage and have a greater market reach.