Starting up your own t-shirt customization store might just be the ticket to writing your own paycheck or building a successful side hustle. In fact, this new business might also be the best (and quickest) way to break into the fashion industry, especially if you’re offering one-of-a-kind or personalized designs. People love buying t-shirts, especially ones that complete an outfit perfectly or really make a statement. You can start making money selling custom t-shirts online without a big upfront investment, as you’ll learn today.

If you’ve been thinking about starting your own business—launching an online t-shirt customization store—there’s no better time than right now. Does it feel daunting? Don’t worry! It doesn’t have to be. In this primer, we’ll walk you through some of the key steps you need to take if you’re considering starting your own t-shirt business or brand.

Setting up an ecommerce business makes a lot of dollars and sense, as ecommerce sales are projected to surpass $735 billion in 2023, up from $504.6 billion in 2018, Statista reports. Apparel (like t-shirts!) and accessories generate more than $138.7 billion annually in today’s market. To drill down even further, the global t-shirt market in 2020 hit $4 billion. With online store technology and affordable decorating supplies and blank t-shirts, you can join the hundreds of thousands of successful ecommerce entrepreneurs who are making bank selling custom t-shirts out there to their fans.

Selling customized t-shirts online is a viable way to make a profit, even though there’s a lot of competition. However, you can build a successful t-shirt shop if you research your market, and then strategically carve out a niche by creating t-shirts with unique designs or powerful messages that resonate with your target audience and attract loyal buyers. Individual consumers aren’t the only ones who want custom t-shirts, either. Businesses use t-shirts as part of their branding strategy, and organizations use them to raise awareness about causes and societal issues.

As the work-from-home trend has accelerated in the past few years, the demand for casual clothing has also grown. T-shirts are an affordable, easy-to-decorate item that people are willing to pay for, if the shirt’s comfortable, fits well and comes with a design they want to sport. In general, a good-quality t-shirt might cost you around $7 to buy and decorate. You can sell them for as high as $30 to $50, if you’re using a high-quality t-shirt, high-quality decorating methods, and specialty or limited-release designs. The average price for a graphic t-shirt is $16 to $29. Generally, a t-shirt shop owner should aim to make 50% profit on each shirt they decorate and sell. The basic formula is Cost of Product x 2 = Retail Price of Your Graphic T-Shirt.

If you’re serious about starting a successful t-shirt business, your first step should be to conduct light research to identify a profitable target audience and design niche. When you choose a niche, you’re creating t-shirts especially for a certain group of people who’ll love to buy from you. It’s a big mistake to go into business saying, “Everyone will buy my t-shirts,” so here are some tips for brainstorming some great niches for your t-shirt shop to serve. 

Most often, the easiest way to find a niche you’re passionate about is to take inspiration from your own interests. Are you a sports fan? Do you love horses or turtles? Do you love ice skating, cooking, playing throw-back video games, traveling or reading? Do you support a particular cause or movement? What Facebook Groups are you part of? Can you help a group of people express their beliefs or feel that they’re part of a community? You can also use Google Trends, Alexa or Ahrefs to see what’s currently trending in your country or world to get more ideas or to validate a niche idea or two.

Once you’ve narrowed down your niche ideas list, it’s time to learn more about your target market to see if you’re on the right track. There are lots of ways to research, but here are a few to jump-start your brainstorming efforts. Dive back into Facebook Groups where your target audience hangs out, and ask them for feedback about your t-shirt design ideas. Check out Reddit feeds and posts about your target market, to learn what they’re most passionate about. 

If there are t-shirt shops already serving your target market, see what designs they’re selling and why they appeal to their buyers. If you’re lucky, you might even discover a smaller, untapped market within one of your larger target markets. When you decide on a niche, you can then build out a buyer persona, where you drill down into what really interests your ideal customers, including their goals, dreams and biggest pain points.

Your next step will be to decide how you’ll produce your t-shirt art. Remember, your designs don’t need to be complicated. In fact, many of today’s trending t-shirt designs are simple text or illustrations, yet still attract a lot of customers who want to express themselves wearing these tees. Your goal is to make your designs stand out from your competitors.

How will you produce your t-shirt designs? You can start the process by sketching out your design ideas on paper. If you have design skills, you can use professional design software, like Adobe Photoshop or CorelDRAW. You can also use a program like Canva to mock up your designs to play with colors, fonts and stock images. 

If you’re not an artist or a graphic designer, it’s easy to find a professional to help you out. You can use platforms like Fiverr or Upwork to find a freelance graphic designer to create one or multiple designs for you. You can often review their portfolios to see if their design style matches your vision. Behance and Dribbble are another two platforms where graphic designers hang out, and you can easily search for art and styles to find designs you like.

Your next step will be to choose the right imprinting method that fits your capabilities, budget and target audience’s needs. (This step is as important as choosing the right t-shirt and design to appeal to your audience.) You can either decorate the shirts yourself, or outsource them to a decorator or a print-on-demand vendor. Many startup shops choose to outsource the imprinting at first. Others, who’ve been decorating at home for a while, keep the t-shirt decoration in-house. Here are a few decoration methods to consider, whether you’re the decorator or outsource the work.

Heat transfers are one of the most affordable ways to place a long-lasting, full-color design on a t-shirt. You can either print the transfers yourself using your printer and high-quality release paper, or you can outsource them to a vendor. Screen-printed plastisol transfers and direct-to-film (DTF) transfers are two of the most popular types. You’ll use a heat press to adhere the design to your garments. Transfers are a great way to produce both higher-price one-of-a-kind designs as well as designs in bulk.

DTG printing is another hugely popular method of printing designs onto t-shirts. You use a special inkjet printer to apply your design to a garment. This method is great for complex, full-color and photorealistic designs. You can easily print one t-shirt or many. DTG printing applies the ink directly to your shirt, leaving almost no hand. One issue with DTG printers is that your design placement can be limited.

This method is ideal for printing large quantities of t-shirts that all have the same design. Screen printing involves pushing ink through a woven mesh stencil or screen onto fabric. With a screen-printed design, you can only apply one color at a time, so the more colors your design has, the longer it takes to print and the more expensive it is. There are manual and automatic screen-printing presses that can print many shirts quickly for large orders.

If you want to print a unique t-shirt with an all-over design or one that goes over the seams, sublimation printing might be your top pick. Sublimation ink also becomes part of the t-shirt fabric, so you can print full-color, photorealistic designs that never crack, peel or fade. Like DTG, you can print one custom tee or many.

Embroidery is a great choice for multimedia t-shirts. You can easily DTG print a large design and add an embroidered element to make a statement, whether you use metallic thread or 3-D puff embroidery.

Besides your cool designs, the quality of your t-shirts will be what keeps your customers coming back and referring your t-shirt shop to others. Threadsy offers a huge selection of affordable blank garments that you can purchase and customize. When you’re starting out, you’ll want to do a little legwork to decide which wholesale garments you want to put your designs (and logo) on.