Designing the Right Shirt

As with any business, the only way to be successful is to fill your customer's needs. Like in any business, you need to know your target market to a point, so you can really find what those needs are and figure out which is the best way to satisfy them. Here in this hub I want to talk about target markets in the T-Shirt industry and how you can design the right shirts for your business.

YoYo's T-Shirt Creations is a childhood business that I started many years ago. From its inception, I had begun trying to narrow down on my target market and let me tell you it wasn't the easiest. Now, I would define my target market as male and female teenagers/college students. Simple enough, it's a broad market with many capabilities.

The first thing I considered when looking at my market was, "Are they actual buyers?" It was difficult to determine, but looking at myself, my friends and my results, I've determined that they are a buying market. Interestingly enough, as with any target market, they will only buy under certain circumstances and figuring out when those perfect times are is a bit more difficult. For example, in terms of finances, my target market aren't necessarily millionaires, so I need to fit my prices around their budgets. I could easily raise my markup and sell my shirts for $20 at least, but since my target market would probably think that's either shady, too expensive, or their parents aren't willing to fork over the money, a $20 ticket isn't worth it.

Now that we've looked at my market from a financial point-of-view, let's try to look at their needs. What can I provide to my market that they would be willing to trade for money? It is very common for my market to be driven by the fashion trends at their schools and on TV. For a while now it's been a trend to wear t-shirts with funny captions. You see it all the time in stores at the mall and you see those kids wearing them. Now the real question is, what do you design?

I initially didn't ask this question when I designed my first t-shirt. I had a cool idea that I decided to put on a shirt. I never thought about market needs or anything, I thought it looked cool so I figured others would think it would look cool too. For the most part that has been true, but when you are trying to come up with fresh new designs, it doesn't work the same way twice. What has helped me continue to come up with new designs is to look at what has worked in the past and try to somehow replicate that glory. I have many different genre t-shirts, but the ones that have done the best in terms of sales have been my nerdy/video gamer shirts. Naturally because of this, I try to design more gamer shirts than other genres.

So recap, my golden formula is to make affordable, funny, gamer t-shirts.

Inspiration for individual shirts may seem a bit intimidating, but there are ways to come up with them. One thing that I do is I talk to my younger brothers and have them give me an update on the world of gaming. They'll tell me what new games are out, which ones blowed and what people are saying. It's a bit difficult to get it right since you are basically trying to replicate a whole culture onto clothing, so if you get it wrong, people will surely let you now. Just try and imagine yourself in their shoes and work from there. You can even have your 'testers' give you their opinion on what kind of direction you should be taking with your designs.

For example, my one brother likes to play multiplayer shooter games online. Every now and then I'll sit there and watch him play. Above, you can see a shirt that was inspired by those online games. I looked at different elements of gameplay and decided to replicate an image of it and then come up with a funny slogan. What makes this image most relatable to online games is the exclamation point over his head. The slogan brings in an extra umph to the image and set a sarcastic tone to the shirt.

I have another gamer shirt design that is similar, but was inspired by other real world situations. There are many popular military games out today and I decided that I wanted to design a shirt that would cater to individuals who liked those games. One day I saw an advertisement for the army and I decided to take their slogan and run with it. I decided a simple old school-looking graphic and modified the slogan to make it sound more "gamer." As you can see above, this was the result.

If you can do your research, envelop yourself into the culture of your target market and do a lot of brainstorming, design ideas will come to you. Don't ever forget to get as much feedback as you can, whether that be asking for opinions or even feedback from your sales. Anything helps!

Don't forget to hang in there and never get discouraged. With enough diligence and perserverance, you'll make it.

Take it easy

-YoYo