Many of us must have been thinking about starting a clothing line or having a t-shirt business at one time in our life. Starting your own clothing or t-shirt business is easier than ever before with the advent of the internet. Here are some cardinal rules of starting your own clothing line.

Have a Specific Goal

You need to have a specific goal of owning your own clothing line or t-shirt business. Without a goal, you will not go far. Set a specific goal of what you want to achieve from your business. For most people it is going to be monetary goals. You want to set how much you want to achieve in say 1-year time. A few of your may not aim for profit but this t-shirt business is about sending a message, such as environmental or political message. If this is your aim, you could set your goal to be number of people you reached or number of t-shirt sold. For whatever reasons you want to start this business, you need to have the specific goal written down on paper. Have a clear end in mind.

Find Your Niche

You will do much better if you can cater to specific target audience. For example, you may want to target the funny t-shirt market and be the first or the best to provide such designs. Those who likes to play video games would probably want to start a line about a character or a game theme. Start with your passion and kick off your research from there.

If you thought of a theme or subject that may have a good audience, feel free to research further. You do not need to be an expert now to start on a certain niche. You can become and expert by learning. The internet has made it possible for anyone to learn almost anything.

Sell Apparel or Clothing Online

Selling online would be the cheapest way to go. There are 4 ways to get your clothing line store up and running.

1. Get a hosted e-Commerce solution and create your own store – you can get a store from an all-in-one ecommerce solutions such as BigCommerce, CoreCommerce, Volusion, Shopify, and Yahoo Merchant Solutions and then configure your store as you wish. The payment system, shopping cart, hosting account, security features and more would be provided for you from one provider. Cost: from $24.95/month.

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2. Get your designs hosted on third-party online store – you create designs, upload them and then publish them to their platform such as Spreadshirt and Cafepress. You can set a commission for every design, which is credited to your account each time that design is sold. This method will not allow you to have your own brand because you will be creating a store at Spreadshirt or Cafepress. Cost: free.

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3. Build a webstore from scratch – you probably have the ability (or know somebody) to design your own website or configure your own shopping cart. You will need a web hosting account and a domain name. You can start with installing the free shopping cart software such as Magento, CubeCart, OpenCart, or OSCommerce, and build your website or brand and go from there. You can also expand your online business with a blog, forum and much more if you have your own web hosting account. Cost: about $10/month.

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4. Refer other people’s product – This method will probably be the easiest to set up but may not be the most profitable. You can join and affiliate program and resell the product of others. There are quite a few affiliate networks around that list many affiliate programs. Most of these have search functions to allow you to type in keywords and find promotions relevant to your niche. Check out few sample programs such as Amazon, ShareaSale, Commission Junction, MarketLeverage, Clickbank, PepperJam Network, Linkshare, etc. Cost: free.

Marketing

Once all the previous steps have been done, you will spend most of your time at this step. Marketing, promoting, advertising are the keywords here. There are many ways to market your products or to advertise your shop. One of the fastest way is by using pay-per-click marketing. To find guidelines for marketing, check out Must-Do Marketing Strategy.