Custom Printed T-Shirts Business Plan

Your T-Shirt!

Execution

Marketing & Sales

Marketing Plan

The marketing campaign will seek to increase visibility for Your T-Shirt!, emphasizing the ability of the customer to completely customize their design. Your T-Shirt! will use several different venues to communicate this message.

• Advertising — Your T-Shirt! will run ads in several teen/young adult magazines whose readership demographics are similar to Your T-Shirt!’s.
• Youth events — Many different events will be sponsored as a means of increasing visibility. These include but are not limited to music festivals and sporting events along with the new genre of extreme sporting events.
• Student groups — Your T-Shirt! will attempt to gain awareness of the different student groups who actively purchase shirts for their members. Awareness will be achieved through a combination of sponsorship of student organization events as well as advertisements in magazines that specifically target this demographic. 

Sales Plan

The sales strategy will emphasize the fact that ordering a shirt from Your T-Shirt! is a very easy and pleasing experience. The sales effort will work on the continual development of the website, the main tool used for ordering. It will be quite important to have a friendly, easy to use web interface for two main reasons. One, there are so many choices available that it could become daunting to the customer. The second reason is that a large portion of sales will be placed on the website. It is imperative to make it so easy that people don’t stop part way through ordering due to cumbersome or difficult instructions. The website embraces the philosophy of making the experience so easy and pleasing that the customer comes back to buy more.

Your T-Shirt! will also rely on three other factors to help boost sales. The first is exemplary customer service. Having excellent service will provide the customer with the feeling that the business is looking out for the customer’s interest. Second, when a customer places an order, they will probably be excited to see the finished product, so Your T-Shirt! will ensure the fastest turnaround time possible. Lastly, sales will be boosted by offering customers a high quality product. We will use high grade cotton shirts and state-of-the-art sublimation printing materials.

Operations

Locations & Facilities

We are going to have a small store front with one computer where our customers can put in their own designs. We will have a counter and cash register for those who would like to have help. It will be set up somewhat like a fedex kiosk, most of the work will be done online and offsite at HP. 

Technology

Your T-Shirt! will offer customers a variety of options for creating their own custom shirts. The majority of orders will be for t-shirts, however other style shirts will be available. Your T-Shirt! has developed a strategic relationship with Hewlett-Packard (HP) printer division. We will use their printer sublimation technology that allows a computer image to be applied to a shirt in a high quality, high resolution, economically feasible manner. This technology creates an image durable enough to withstand thousands of washings. Its photo-like quality, due to significantly higher printer resolution than anything on the market, will show off any image. The technology is cost effective enough to offer customers the ability to order just one unit. Most other competitors’ costs prohibit printing custom shirts in one-off production runs. Finally, the customer may choose from an extensive library of existing images, supply their own image, or have an artist create an image for them

Equipment & Tools

The store will have a computer kiosk for customers to access the graphics catalog. The customer can then place the order online or take the information to an employee to place the order.

Milestones & Metrics

Milestones Table

Key Metrics

Our Key Metrics are: 

1. # of page views and shares on Facebook
2. # of tweets and retweets on Twitter 
3. # of Customers in a month
4. # of higher priced custom t shirts 
5. # of searches for our websites 
6. # of customers calling for more info