Note: This article first appeared on the front page of the May 4th, 2005 issue of The Wall Street Journal as well as the online edition. It represents well the growing successes of the online tshirt retail industry. As a person named in the article I’d also like to point out that the references to “TheTShirtZone” are that of the predecessor to the Torndao Republic. The company and name may have changed but the success and enjoyment of the online tshirt business goes on.
~Dan Mowry
Owner/operator of the former TheTShirtZone now the Tornado Republic and the blipfish himself.
By accident or design, selling T-shirts is big business on Web
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
By Pui-Wing Tam, The Wall Street Journal
Dan Mowry thought he knew just how to turn his family entertainment newsletter into a successful online business.
Two years ago, he designed an attractive site and loaded it up with features to entice readers and advertisers: electronic crossword puzzles, a history quiz and cartoons. Almost as an afterthought, he designed a T-shirt with his company’s logo, a circus ringmaster holding a megaphone.
Today the online and print newsletters have flopped. But the shirts are pulling in up to $3,000 per month, as Mr. Mowry joins the growing ranks of entrepreneurs profiting from an improbable but lucrative Web business model: selling T-shirts.
All over the Web, bloggers, artists and entrepreneurs are unexpectedly finding that T-shirts are more reliable moneymakers than the original ideas that brought them to the Internet.
CollegeHumor.com, a site offering jokes and pictures from college campuses nationwide, sells T-shirts that say “My other shirt has its collar up,” “What Would Ashton Do,” and dozens of others. Its parent company, Connected Ventures LLC, says it takes in roughly $200,000 in monthly revenue from the shirts, about half of its total income. “A year from now things could be very different, but for now, T-shirts are a great way to monetize the Internet,” says Josh Abramson, one of the site’s founders.
It turns out the T-shirt is a perfect fit for online commerce. It captures the Web’s renegade allure and allows surfers to show off their virtual journeys. Easy to make and deliver, T-shirts often cost $15 or less online.
More than 1,500 Web sites now sell T-shirts, says Rodney Blackwell, a Sacramento, Calif., entrepreneur who runs several Web sites. Mr. Blackwell, who began cataloguing the number of sites offering T-shirts in early 2004 for one of his Web properties, tracked just 500 such sites last year before the market exploded.
“So many people wanted their T-shirt sites listed on my page that I had to turn people away and institute a listing fee of $19.95,” says Mr. Blackwell. He says he now adds 60 sites every month to his list, which is displayed on T-shirtcountdown.com, where visitors can vote for the most popular shirt.
Recently, one of Mr. Blackwell’s own creations — a T-shirt declaring “Can’t sleep, clowns will eat me … ” — ranked No. 5 on that list. The shirt is available on Mr. Blackwell’s ihateclowns.com, an elaborate site whose name accurately describes its philosophy. The nine-year-old site covers its expenses by selling up to 90 T-shirts per month for $15 per shirt, Mr. Blackwell says.
John Wooden of Brooklyn, N.Y., runs a parody of the official White House site on whitehouse.org, and pays for it by selling anti-Bush T-shirts with messages like “Proud Blue Stater.” He says he covers all the costs of running the site by selling tees and lives off the rest of the earnings, which total several thousand dollars per month. “It’s not a bad living,” says Mr. Wooden, who declined to provide specific revenue figures.
It’s not hard to make money on T-shirts. Mr. Mowry, the accidental T-shirt merchant, often gets his shirts from CafePress.com, a San Leandro, Calif., company that prints designs on shirts and other products and even ships them directly to a Web site’s customers.
CafePress charges a vendor like Mr. Mowry a base price of $8.99 for a T-shirt with a customized logo printed on it. Mr. Mowry then charges $19 or more for the finished product. That leaves him $10 per shirt in pretax income. Using a local apparel printer, which charges him only $5 for a basic T-shirt with printing, Mr. Mowry’s profit margins can be as high as $14 a shirt.
Mr. Mowry’s best-selling T-shirts today include one with the message “Shiny Objects Distract Me,” written in colorful fonts on the front. Another is rubber-stamped with the words “Does Not Play Well With Others.” Mr. Mowry has since sold off his newsletter and last year he launched a site that sells T-shirts, dubbed thetshirtzone.com.
Mary Ogle, an Ojai, Calif., oil painter, created a site in 2001 to sell her art prints at $150 each. But she sold no more than two prints a month. Two years later, she added a line of T-shirts and various tchotchkes featuring blue bears, pink cranes, mother hens and other images from her artworks. Sales took off and today she says she sells several hundred tees per month, taking in up to $800 in revenue.
Nick Bayne, 25 years old, an entertainment producer in New York, began buying T-shirts on the Internet last year, after coming across the CollegeHumor site that sold tees with clever puns and cartoons. In the past six months, Mr. Bayne says, he has bought six shirts online, for $18 apiece, and plans to buy more to add to his collection of 100.
Among his favorites: A shirt featuring a lead character of the movie “Napoleon Dynamite” that he says he could only find on the Web. Another shirt shows a picture of Che Guevara and says: “I have no idea who this is.”
“It’s a guilty pleasure,” Mr. Bayne says. “There’s a point where my girlfriend will tell me I’ll have to grow up, but until then, one definitely can’t have too many funny T-shirts.”
CollegeHumor.com asks visitors of its site for T-shirt ideas and receives an average of two suggestions a day. “The majority of them are awful,” says Mr. Abramson, adding that many of the submissions are far too crass.
To generate T-shirts with smarter messages, Mr. Abramson and three business partners look for puns and draw inspiration from television shows. Recent results include one that declares “Your Retarded” and another with a picture of a man with bear’s arms and the message “Right to Bear Arms.”
Reprinted with permission.
Original Wall Street Journal article available online here.