MarketingFilter: So. . . I made a tacky (yet delightfully unrefined) t-shirt. How do I best sell it online? [Long jump]
A couple months back, I was looking to start up my own t-shirt company, along the lines of established companies
UNDRCRWN and
Pennant Race -- that is to say, a company with heavy sports influence with a sprinkling of pop culture and a dose of societal commentary. Maybe even a
No Mas, but less for hipsters and yuppies and more for hip hop heads and anti-establishment people.
So I came up with a name -- ftw. clothing, with ftw being adapted from gaming-talk as for the win, but with the added connotation of f-ck the world. Our poster boy was going to be Rod "He Hate Me" Smart, a one-time kick returner for the Panthers (and other lesser stints).
My flagship shirt? In the spirit of
old NBA playoff shirts featuring starting fives, I would have a simple black-on-white colorway and a starting five. But my starting five wasn't going to be a basketball team -- it was going to be related to crack. (Here's where the collective "eep!" comes in.)
Now, you might ask, but why? That's horribly tacky, maybe even not delightfully unrefined, and probably very offensive. And yes, I acknowledge that. It's kind of the point. I wanted a "statement" shirt, one that would make people think -- because really, for middle and upper America, and especially in my home of Hawai'i, crack is something that people think of in abstractions, and ghetto is a term applied to anything sketchy, when really, some of the worst ghettos are terrible things. I wanted a shirt that would put this reality in peoples' faces. In a way, it was like the infamous "Snowman" shirts popular earlier in the decade.
The shirts read:
Pyrex &
The Arm &
The Hammer &
The Spot &
The Raw
I printed them hoping that I'd be able to sell them (via consignment or whatever) in one of the newer less-established boutiques in Honolulu. I approached the one that I thought would give me the best chance, and the manager was totally cool with me -- but because of limited space, he couldn't run the shirt on the store's shelves. But if I showed him a season's lineup of designs, he'd be willing to put me in touch with his industry contacts and maybe I'd get something serious rolling.
After tinkering around and coming up with some designs (some were even pretty good) I realized that I didn't have enough to make a season's worth, probably because it was never my intention to make this my entire career. The manager understood, and encouraged me to give it some more thought and maybe talk to him in the future if I wanted to give it another run.
But now, I have 13 shirts left (I printed 15, thinking that I would get them on shelves, no problem) and I don't really know how to market them online.
They're not made with enough love for etsy, I can't get into supermarket, and I think that on other lesser sites, they'd sell... but probably over an extended period. eBay is a possible strategy, but I'm unsure about how to market them/title them and if they'll sell (and auction fees are preferably avoidable).
So... how do I move these shirts, preferably quickly, preferably digitally? (But any kind of movement is fine!)
(PS. For those of you who sometimes like to dig in OP's past records for dirt/help/what have you, yes, I acknowledged I set off a real sh!tstorm [that I'm just now reading, hey!] with my very first AskMeFi. The lesson, as always: sometimes I'm a real idiot. Sorry if you remember it, and doubly so for the ignorance.)
Thanks.
posted by the NATURAL at 4:00 AM on July 27, 2009