It Pays to Take Shirt Design Online

SALES & MARKETING

It Pays to Take Shirt Design Online

Here are some tips on how to make the most of adding an online design software program to your website. October 13, 2011
By Kevin Kelly, Contributing Writer

In terms of garment choices, you want to keep them manageable. Stick with the most popular garments, otherwise you overwhelm the customer.

One of the biggest trends in the decorated apparel industry is online apparel design. When set up correctly, it can function as a 24-hour salesperson for your business. It’s a great way to capture the small-order market and satisfy customers who otherwise would not be profitable. I have 30 online shirt design websites in operation and I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to make this business model successful.

From the time an order is downloaded into the system, we can have it processed and machine-ready, if needed, within five minutes. Online design is a huge timesaver for any decorator. It frees up that bottleneck of waiting on the customer to make a decision and having to do edits. We actually speak to only about 1% of those customers, so there is very little interaction.

When I started my operation, I bought online design software from a supplier. It is a solid product for most applications; however, it had limitations that resulted in me getting custom software developed.

If you’re just getting started, you should research the various available online design programs, many of which are subscription-based with modest fees. This allows people to get into the business without a huge capital investment. Typical costs range from $1,500-$2,000 for setup. If you choose to do the setup yourself, some of the leading companies have monthly subscriptions as low as $49 per month with a fairly reasonable royalty per transaction.

I have reviewed numerous demos that companies have sent me. For the most part, you will be up and running in a week. There is some legwork, which you can pay people to do for you if you prefer. Most online programs are intuitively laid out, and it is easy to track what you are doing.

One limitation I have found with online software design packages is that they only will accept certain file types, such as .jpg, .gif and .png. For example, you can’t upload Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, or CorelDraw files.

An important long-term consideration for your business is where the actual design software resides. The ideal situation is to have it located on the server with your main URL. This type of arrangement will allow you to link the catalog and the designer directly to your homepage for maximum search engine optimization (SEO) possibilities. By having the catalog on your server, you will grow your site as you add pages and products. If these pages are properly optimized for Google, Yahoo and other major search engines, it will increase the chances that you will eventually be found in organic search results. Organic search is non-paid advertising. Thus, SEO is the key to success.

Our soon-to-be-released, custom-built system will take virtually any file type and display it on-screen for the customer to manipulate. It will handle embroidery, direct-to-garment printing and screen printing in the traditional manner.

Getting Good Artwork
One of the biggest challenges for any decorated apparel business is getting good artwork. Sadly, that problem will not go away with online design software. When graphic design programs initially became available for free, everyone on the planet became a graphic designer. We started getting artwork in programs like Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Word, and artwork quality — in general — started to go downhill.

This has led to an ongoing customer service issue. When a customer uploads poor artwork, they initially are given an opportunity to upload better artwork. However, there are times when we have to contact customers by phone. Our art staff is knowledgeable enough to know that when artwork is bad, we will not print it. We’d rather not print an order and then get complaints from customers that they should have been contacted.

For the customer who doesn’t have any artwork, most of the online design programs come with a nice library of stock designs. Customers can pick and choose anything from sports to novelty designs, then add text, choose colors and spend as much time as they want getting a design they love.

Decorating Methods & Shirt Styles
All my online decorated apparel websites that use stock online design programs offer only digital direct-to-garment printing or embroidery. This is because these two methods lend themselves best to smaller orders. For our websites with the new custom software, we’re also offering screen printing, but with a 36-piece minimum.

In terms of dealing with the poor artwork issues, digital direct-to-garment printing is the most logical and simplest decorating process to offer if you have online ordering capabilities. With industrial-quality digital equipment, you can transform otherwise unacceptable .jpgs, questionable .gifs and a whole range of formats that would never be considered for screen printing and make them usable. In my opinion, digital printing is the preferred medium for online ordering and all the biggest players in the online business are direct-to-garment printing operations.

You want to be selective about the brands you offer with an online ordering system. For direct-to-garment printing, all shirts do not print equally well. We know what doesn’t work, and we want to avoid those.

Also, you should limit your product choices to something that is manageable; otherwise, you will overwhelm the customer. We offer about 35 T-shirt styles on our main website (goblueheron.com), and that covers hundreds of colors. It’s a mix of unisex, ladies and kids styles.

We stock styles of which we print a lot in black and white. Otherwise, our shop is in close proximity to all major distributors, so we just order each day what we need to cover the incoming orders.

Customer Contact
Communication is important to the success of your online design business. No matter how sophisticated the Internet has become, you have to communicate through the website well enough to create a comfort level high enough that the customer will give you a credit card number.

We are proactive when we see anything that is suspect in an order; we get on the phone with the customer immediately. It’s also helpful to have a good frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) section. We try to answer as many questions as possible through the website.

A good terms-and-conditions page also is invaluable, and I’m not talking about the one that is written by a lawyer, but also can be found online for free. It has to be one that people can understand. Customers need to know your policies. If they are posted, then you are covered. However, they have to be posted and linked from your homepage, not buried deep within the site. If we make an error, we are very clear that we replace the product. We don’t squabble about it.

At our shop, any questions that come in from the “question” button go to multiple people simultaneously. That way, we monitor our e-mail 14 hours a day. You must have redundancy because good customer service in the online realm all about speed and responsiveness. When a question is answered, everyone is automatically notified via Microsoft Outlook.

On weekends, we also have people who watch incoming questions, but you don’t have to do that. Most customers understand that businesses are closed on weekends.

Online Order Characteristics
We have found our average order for dark shirts runs between 24 and 72 pieces. On white shirts, it is less than 12 pieces. We offer a volume discount, which is incorporated into the order process. We get very few single orders.

One of the most important lessons I have learned since getting involved in online ordering is single orders should not be discounted. Sometimes a customer is running a test of your service and quality, and it could turn into an order of thousands.

In the last calendar year, we’ve had single-piece orders that turned into more than $50,000 worth of business. So you never know who that customer is, which is why you have to be nice to everyone. You never know who that big hitter will be.

Getting Customers
Unlike in the popular movie “Field of Dreams,” the saying, “If you build it, they will come,” does not apply to websites. You must educate yourself on how to drive traffic to your website and create a plan of regular activity to ensure your investment in online design software pays off. Search engines generate about 90% of the activity on our websites, and this is a result of many hours doing SEO, monitoring, and analyzing activity and the source of it.

There is nothing more valuable than looking at your statistics, and seeing where your company appears on a Google page listing. If it’s on Page 1, you know your strategy is working. But nothing works forever, and you have to be flexible and constantly adjusting your strategy.

Online shirt design programs can be beneficial and add to your bottom line if you are willing to take the time and effort to get them set up properly with systems and procedures that work. Just pushing a button won’t make them effective; rather, they require daily monitoring, ongoing updates and adjustments. These tips will get you started and make you aware of some of the issues you will experience.

Kevin Kelly has been involved in decorated apparel for more than 34 years. He opened his current business, Blue Heron Industries Inc., in Little Falls, N.J., in 2002. Blue Heron offers volume screen printing, embroidery and direct-to-garment services. For more information or to comment on this article, e-mail Kevin at kkelly@goblueheron.com or visit goblueheron.com.

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