How big is the tshirt business industry? Becoming an affiliate rather than founding a company?

The tee business is HUGE. There is a huge potential to make money from it as it is simple and evergreen. Everybody needs clothes right?

The choice is truly up to you. If you want to create your own brand, then founding a tee company would be suitable so getting a domain name would be a great start.

If you just want to want to promote different trending topics happening around in the world, then teespring would be ideal. For example, the Superbowl was out yesterday so people would have created tees designed promoting the teams and then advertising it to fans via Facebook ads. This is a good way to increase money as you don't have any upfront investment such as the tees, screen printing equipment etc.

If I owned tshirt.com, I would sell it.

However...to answer your hypothetical question....

tshirt.com would be generic, and in that instance, I'd "found" a company like Teespring or whatever.

If I was to make a tshirt company that sold shirts, I'd niche down - like TightShirtsForBeardedMen.com - and just tear that niche up.

Aloha jiwonman,

The t-shirt industry is a big industry to get into. And the cost of breaking into this industry as a company can be just as big but so can be the profits. If you're just starting out you will want to be able to keep your costs down as much as possible in order to maxymise your profits. One way to to this would be to consider heat transfers. With heat transfers, you will be able to design great looking t-shirts without having to bear the brunt of the cost of the equipment needed in any normal t-shirt business.

There are several screen printing companies out there that will allow you to send them your design, and they will screen print that design onto a heat transfer. You could then take that design and put it onto any t-shirt you want using a professional heating press. Yes, you would also need to pick one of these heating presses up. These heat presses can be a little pricey, but they area a lot cheaper than having to drop 10-12k on a 4 color screen printing press. And we haven"t even touched all the other costs involved with the ink, screens, emulsion, light box, wash basin, dryers, etc. All of which are necessary items for any t-shirt printing business.

No as far as your domain goes, according to Google's keyword planner, the keyword "tshirt" receives 14800 exact searches per month within the US. But the competition for that keyword is listed as being very high. Meaning that if you wanted to rank on the first page of Google for that keyword, you would have to work pretty hard on your website using SEO, traffic driving and backlinking strategies in order to raise the ranking of your site up to the first position in order to receive those 14800 visitors per month.

Another thing to consider is how broad that keyword is. It doesn't allow you to specifically target a specific audience like churches, bands, events, crazy shirts (that one's taken by the way). It's my opinion that in order to sell t-shirts effectively, you need to design your shirts towards a specific audience.

Also I'm assuming that you're a designer, which is why you're even considering getting into this industry in the first place. With that being said, I think that you would be much happier designing awesome looking t-shirts rather than spending all your time on website construction, SEO and all the other traffic driving techniques necessary to get your website ranked.


Bottom line? If you are into designing and have a little money, stick with designing and go with the heat press. That way you can design to your hearts content and not have to worry about everything else. As far as your domain name goes, I would dump it. It's too broad and not specific enough to do be of any benefit to you without a lot of hard work doing something that you're not very interest in anyway.

Aloha and I hope this helps,


Richard Simafranca