We’re well known for our great quality printing (don’t believe us? — just check the reviews on Google!), the good news is that we’ve just launched our new fulfillment service, where you can rely on good quality picking, packing, and tracked shipping to customers all over the world.

We’ll even help you collect sizes from your fans if you need to!

The process of getting high quality merchandise printed, and into the hands of your fans, customers, or team-members, is broken into three main parts:

• Printing
• Information collection (addresses, preferred sizes)
• Distribution (sending individual packets all over the world)

We can do any mix of the above, so just pick what works for you.

Package 1 — This is the usual high-quality merchandise printing service that thousands of customers have benefitted from. Just upload your design here, choose your sizes, and checkout in under 3 mins. You’ll soon have great quality merch on your doorstep to sell, giveaway, or kit out your team.

Package 2 — Maybe you have a large team that you need to collect all the preferred sizings from. Or maybe you’ve just done a big crowdfunding campaign and you have promised all your supporters a t-shirt or tote bag for their backing. Well, just let us take care of that for you. We’ll create a bespoke form for you ( click here for an example), then deliver you great quality merch AND a detailed list of information collected from your team-mates, supporters or customers, so that you can distribute them accordingly.

Package 3 — Don’t have the time or space to distribute to hundreds of supporters or fans? Don’t want to spend hours at your local post office after spending the whole of the previous day putting hoodies and caps into waterproof envelopes? Then let us do it for you! Not only will we print great quality merch for you, and collect any info required from everyone who’s lucky enough to receive it, but we’ll securely send it directly to them. Leaving you free to concentrate on your core business.

Note — while we can send to customers anywhere in the world, individual shipping is currently only available from our UK print facilities. We’ll happily send globally from there, but be aware that outside of Europe it may take a week or so for your customer’s merchandise to arrive. Our US print facilities will hopefully bring this service online later this year.

For more info about how we can help you get great quality merch directly into the hands of those that need it, and to get a price list, send an email to neil@ramptshirts.com

Originally published at https://ramptshirts.com on October 4, 2019.

Ramp is a deeply European company, headquartered in Wales, UK.

We have employed EU nationals in the UK. We have employed EU & UK nationals in our EU office. One of the co-founders is from Bulgaria, an EU country.

Does anyone know what’s happening?

On the 29th March the UK is scheduled to leave the EU.

Or is it? We’re not entirely sure. Nobody is. But if the UK does leave the EU as scheduled, we’re not sure what impact it will have on us, or our EU customers. We don’t really know how it will affect supply chains, billing, tax, employment, money transfers etc etc. All these things are vital to us as a business, and how we best serve those who are kind enough to trust us with their brand.

Planning for Brexit. Or not.

It’s three weeks away, and we can’t plan how we could serve up to 20 million EU businesses that might want to use us. And that’s not to mention the untold millions of clubs, events, conferences, as-yet-unregistered startups etc etc.

But we do know that after 29th March, and until there is more clarity from the UK government, that it’s going to be impossible for us to make any guarantees to our existing EU customers. Customers who make up approximately 10% of our business, because we currently print most of our UK & EU orders here in the UK (all our USA orders will, as always, continue to be printed in the US).

So, it’s very likely that our business is going to start losing revenue, and therefore be worth less, on 1st April. And as a growing British business, this truly sucks.

Who are the winners in Brexit?

In short, a handful of very wealthy people. And proportionally very few other people.

But, as a thank you to the EU customers who make up 10% of our business, we’re offering 10% off orders made before 14th March*. We’ll ship your orders to you in plenty of time for them to reach you before the Brexit deadline. Simply because we can’t be sure if there will be delays, confusion and import fees after the 29th March.

To take advantage of this offer that marks the changing of the social, legal, and economic structure of the UK solely for some wealthy people’s political and financial gain, use the code THANKSBREXIT by the 14th March.

• For those with a valid EU VAT number, you can still benefit from getting VAT-free prices PLUS the 10% off. Just email Neil for more info.

Originally published at ramptshirts.com on March 6, 2019.

We’ll shortly be running a series of webinars aimed at helping you understand how to use t-shirts to win more business, at the same time as making you look good!

In this short webinar, you’ll find out:

• Why t-shirts *rock* at winning you more business.
• How to make it a nearly risk-free marketing channel.
• How to calculate the return on investment.
• How they will pay for themselves many times over.
• How to do it like the companies who have made millions using t-shirts as marketing tools.
• How to use insider tricks for maximising value when ordering.

Finally, we’ll give away the secrets behind our cold email campaign that broke the internet.

From analysing case studies of businesses that have done it brilliantly (and generated millions of dollars of revenue from it!), to understanding the return on investment of t-shirts (or any other type of merch or swag), Neil will run you through everything you need to consider in order to make sure you win new business, and make people love what you do!

The first webinar will take place on the 1st February, with more to follow.

Just go on the original blog post on our website before 1st Feb 2018, enter your email in the box and we’ll be sure to send you details.

Originally published at ramptshirts.com on January 24, 2018.

This is the story of how we emailed 50,000 companies, with the “best cold email ever”, offering the services of Ramp, the smartest, simplest, custom t-shirt ordering site in the world. Each sales email featured a photo of me, Ramp’s CEO, wearing their company t-shirt so that they could see what they would be buying.

(UPDATE — We’re currently raising investment. Drop us a line if you’re a professional investor and interested in helping a smart, innovative, data-driven company reach its potential. My email address is in most of the screengrabs.)

THE EMAIL

So, here’s the TL;DR version.

50,000 people have received an email in their inbox with the subject line: “I’m wearing a [YOUR COMPANY] t-shirt!”.

How could they not open that…?

When they opened it, this is what they saw.

We built a system that sent this engaging sales email out to tens of thousands of people, each featuring a personalised image, letting them know that we made it really easy for them to great quality merchandise for their team or event. Read on to find out how we did it….

How we created the “best cold email ever”

A few months back we were reading the ReallyGoodEmails site, and got to wondering how to personalise an image in a sales email, and not just the text. As with all good ideas, it took a few of us chatting to take inspiration from that, and come up with the idea of sending an outreach email for Ramp, but which included a photo of someone wearing a t-shirt with the recipient’s company logo on it.

Like all good startups, we decided to test the theory in the quickest, cheapest way we could. We found some stock photography of a model wearing a plain white t-shirt, and manually photoshopped in the logo of 50 different companies, and sent them each a sales email. It took about 4 hours to create all the previews, get all the emails, and then do the mail merge. We didn’t think too hard about the copy at this point. We just wanted to test how people responded to the image.

It was an instant hit. We got several replies, and a solid 50% open rate. OK, we had something. But it was labour intensive, and not hugely scalable. The response rate at this stage just didn’t justify the time we’d need to spend on it. We needed to dig around for an automated solution. Technically tricky, but by no means impossible.

We started patching together various web services — we found PlaceIt.net, which allowed us to upload logos and automatically create previews of random models wearing t-shirts. The photos were good quality, and the images looked professional. We even discovered that they allowed us to create video previews. So we created a bunch of videos, turned them into animated gifs, and embedded those into the emails.

However, in split tests the animated images performed even more poorly, which was a surprise to us. We reverted to static images. It was at this point that we thought that the ultimate preview would feature me, the company CEO, wearing a preview of their t-shirt.

But it still took time and money to use other people’s services.

Here comes the science bit

The next step was to build something to do this at scale, so we sat down with our CTO, Milen, and came up with a system that could:

1. Get company emails.
2. Get company logos.
3. Create a unique preview for each company.

After some research we found a bunch of micro-services like Clearbit, Hunter, and Zapier to achieve the first two. The third one took some image processing wizardry from the tech team, but it was doable. The main issue was now tying it all together.

We’re writing up a full technical rundown of how we did this, but the short version is that all we do now is feed the system a list of domain names. It finds all the emails (it weeds out anything like support@ and info@), and the company logos. The resulting preview images are uploaded to our server with a unique image URL, which can be embedded in the relevant email so that person at company X receives a picture of me wearing the logo of company X.

Now that we had built our own bespoke system, we would need our own photo of a person wearing a blank t-shirt. And it made sense for it to be a photo of me, the company CEO. Like many people, I’m not a huge fan of having my photo taken, but it’s the ultimate mark of trust and reliability, right?!

So, I stood up against a white wall, and Romina took 50 shots of me. We picked the least awful one, and have used it ever since.

The whole process took about six weeks from idea, through testing, to roll out of the fully automated system.

The responses

We had three main types of replies:

1. Amazing! 90% of the people who responded had a positive comment on our marketing, or just bought straight away.
2. Funny! The majority of the rest were amusing.
3. Angry! A tiny handful were upset, and just didn’t get it. We had legal threats, insults about my appearance, and some other unsavoury comments.

Positive responses

I have a folder of literally hundreds of these emails. Here’s a small handful.

Funny responses

Some recipients were inspired to fire up Photoshop or MS Paint, and send us their own versions!

Nice quick work from Reach Robotics, below, who seemed to email this nice bit of Photoshop back to me literally seconds after they received our email!

But our all time favourite response came from Rusty at Impact Canopy who loved our email so much, that he decided he wanted a t-shirt featuring me, wearing his company logo. And we couldn’t let him down, so we printed one and sent it.

And here he is!

He tells us that it hangs proudly in his booth, much to the amusement of his colleagues.

Angry responses

Some people just didn’t get it. Or they got out of the wrong side of the bed that day. Whatever caused it, if you get an email that starts “Look my friend”, you know it’s not good.

But thankfully very few people were angry. Some people liked it so much they decided to tweet about it!

Miriam Ballesteros on Twitter

That was an effective attention-grabbing mail! 👏🏻 Well done @RampTshirts @neilcocker #EmailMarketing

Adam Breckler on Twitter

Best cold email, ever?

So, where are we now?

After going through a few versions of the campaign, we’ve reduced the campaign to a single email, where once it was three emails. We felt that the impact of the first email was enough.

Some Stats

• Open rate — consistently above 50%
• Click Through Rate — Some campaigns/sectors have received a whopping 25%+ CTR
• Total revenue — We might reveal full details at a later date. But for now, let’s just say — Tens of thousands of pounds, dollars and euros! 😉

Want to know what it looks like in your inbox?

Want to get an automated email like the one above, but featuring your company logo? Just put your email address in this box. You won’t be added to a list, and you’ll just receive a single, example email. (Note — ideally a proper company email. If you use a Gmail or Hotmail address, for example, you’ll get a photo of me wearing a Gmail or Hotmail tshirt…)

What we learned

1. Beyond avoiding the spam filter, it’s worth thinking about sales emails as a sales funnel. What do you need to do to get them to the next stage. The first stage is just opening the email in the first place. The second stage is grabbing their attention. The third stage is making them read your pitch etc etc etc.
2. On that note, at every stage think to yourself “What would make me open an email? What would grab my attention? What would make me read the next sentence?”. There’s a famous tech journalist that says he receives over 1,000 emails a day, and that the best way to get him to even open your email is to put a massive, all-caps, filthy swearword in the Subject line! 😉
3. There are a ton of micro-services out there that allow you to bootstrap/growth-hack/whatever your way to proving that your idea works. Zapier, Hunter, Gmail plugins, DuxSoup etc etc. We spent less than £50 on subscriptions and licenses to prove this approach worked. From there, we knew it was worth committing the technical resource.
4. You don’t need to be a tech genius. We pretty much proved the concept between the few of us with our hand in marketing before we moved it “up the foodchain” to Milen and the tech team.
5. Cold sales emails aren’t just something for tech companies. I mean, we’re a tech company, but we’re selling something fairly “traditional”. You could sell your consultancy service with this very same email — “See how I made you open and read this email? I could do this for all your prospective clients, too!“

Finally

Don’t forget, if you need high quality merch or swag for your team or events, head to our homepage and upload your company logo to see just how simple and smart we’ve made it to get great quality screenprinted custom t-shirts. And just in case you’re still not convinced about our sales email, here’s a random selection of the hundreds of responses we’ve received….

(The gallery is on Ramp’s website)

Originally published at ramptshirts.com on January 12, 2018.

All businesses want to create a sense of uniformity and brand recognition. They also want their message and brand to be widely spread by their team and their customers. What better way to do it than through the use of custom business slogan t-shirts?

Now, we get it. “Business slogans” don’t sound like the most exciting artwork for custom t-shirts, but it’s ultimately all about the appeal and message of your slogan. Get it right and it can be hugely memorable.

Questions to ask yourself.

• Is it short?
• Does it stand out?
• Is it broad in meaning and applicable to more than just your business in particular?
• Importantly, will people want to wear it!?

All of these things need to be taken into account if you’re thinking about team t-shirts or logo t-shirts for your business.

For example, if you run a florist you probably shouldn’t get the phrase “Bringing lovely flowers to the people of Birmingham and the surrounding counties” printed on custom t-shirts. Unless perhaps you want your staff to wear them as official team t-shirts. This makes more sense, though the slogan is stiff, cumbersome, and uninteresting to read. As a slogan it inspires no energy, engagement, or interest. It’s just a statement of fact, and bare facts are rarely inspiring!

Nike’s slogan t-shirts for customers and employees

On the other hand, however, you only have to look at a company like Nike to see the sheer power of the slogan. Every time I go to the gym I am overcome with quasi-inspiration from the sea of spandex that is shouting “JUST DO IT” at me from all across the room. This is an example of business slogan t-shirts that appeal to both their staff and their customers. “JUST DO IT” is synonymous with Nike, yet it is a vague inspirational quote with a multitude of possible meanings.

Other popular slogans on a t-shirt

Other notable examples of clever custom t-shirts include the “Choose Life” slogan t-shirt (made popular by the film “Trainspotting”), and the infamous “Frankie Say Relax” slogan t-shirts that litter the streets.

MC Donald’s slogan t-shirts for employees

When it comes to staff uniforms, clever slogans and logo t-shirts it’s easy to add that sprinkle of professionalism and image that many businesses unfortunately lack. Wouldn’t it be weird if you turned up at McDonald’s and saw their staff members wearing plain shirts instead of team t-shirts emblazoned with the famous golden arches and cries of “I’m lovin’ it” emanating from their bodies?

Team t-shirts and slogan t-shirts are the kinds of things that become subconsciously linked in our brains over time, whether the custom t-shirts are intended for staff, customers, or both. This is the sort of thing that white-collar types would call “brand awareness” and “brand visibility”, and although it sounds boring, business slogan t-shirts can have a great effect on your business over time.

What slogan represents your business, and that you and your customers would be proud to wear?

Originally published at ramptshirts.com on December 1, 2017.

1 General

There’s plenty of guides about how to succeed in general at crowdfunding — we’re not going to go into detail in this blog but here’s a few important insights:

Budget — make sure your budget is tight. Get it checked out by some people who’ve started companies before, and don’t forget Kickstarter or Indiegogo may charge you taxes at the end of the campaign, factor those in!

Update often — keep your backers informed and they may even invest more or tell others to.

Most important of all — do the work before you launch. You should have a list of confirmed backers ready to pledge on Day 1, as well as a mailing list, social media presence, and a press release list.

So you’ve set up your campaign and you’ve decided to offer t-shirts as a backer reward. What should you look out for?

2 Design & Material

Make sure this is a desirable shirt. Think hard about who your backers are. Do they want a really high end premium shirt like an AA 50/50 or do they want a basic shirt? Do they want a really bright garment or a pastel shirt?Why not ask them! Use it as an excuse for generating awareness before you launch. When it comes to design, you could go for the basic option of your logo, but you might get more interest by making a special limited edition design. You could mock up some design options and get people to vote on their favourite (generating some nice buzz about your campaign too).

Whatever you do, don’t get your design made without thinking about the next point though…. cost.

3. Budgeting

Here comes the hard bit — money. Here’s what you need to think about:

Cost of the merch. Get multiple quotes for what you want and request the printer holds the price until after your campaign has finished. Your design is important too — in general the more complex your design the more it costs.

You can use our tools at Ramp to get an instant price which we’ll hold for you until your campaign is over.

Cost of packing materials. Head to ebay and check the cost of mailbags — buy spares too!

Cost of postage — you can check out how much some popular t-shirts weigh here. Plug that info into your country’s postal service and get yourself an accurate postage cost. Choose if you’re sending by tracked mail or not. It will cost more but you’ll have fewer headaches if items go missing. If you’re packing a shirt and another physical reward together, think about the combined postage and packing costs too.

Cost of your time: It can take a full day to fold, pack and individually ship a couple of hundred shirts. Even if you don’t explicitly charge for this, it will impact the time you would be spending on your project.

Cost of extra items — things sometimes do go missing in the post. Even if you can claim compensation for them that doesn’t help your backer get their shirt. So order a few extras in every size.

When you’ve got all those down, add it all up and make sure you’re making enough money from your backers. For example, if you give away a one t-shirt for every £20 donation to your campaign, you need to know exactly what’s left after you’ve bought & shipped the shirts.

4 Marketing your t-shirt

Why not take advantage of on-demand DTG technology to order a one-off shirt while the campaign is running? You should be sending update videos and photos wearing the shirt, letting people know how they can get their shirt. Make a handful for your team. Here’s one that our sister site CottonCart printed for a friend’s campaign:

5 Stay organised

Make a list of sizes and backer destinations as the backers come in. Don’t let it slip! It’s so much easier to keep on top in small chunks.

Good luck — let us know how you get on with your campaign and let us know if there’s any other tips we should include in future updates to this post.

Any questions?

If there’s anything we can do to help, just ask in the LiveChat box, give us a call, or email us. And don’t forget the free checklist below so that you have all the things you need to know before ordering custom t-shirts and more in one quick and easy document.

Download it from here!

Originally published at ramptshirts.com on November 15, 2017.

So, you’re thinking of ordering custom t-shirts?

Good idea! But whether you are getting them for your company, for a weekend away with friends, or as promo giveaways, it definitely pays to spend a few minutes reviewing these questions before ordering custom t-shirts and spending your cash.

Here’s a few things to consider. Hopefully they will save you both time AND money.

What are the t-shirts for?

• It sounds like a stupid question, but asking this of yourself is really important. Thinking about the people who’ll be wearing them, why, where, and what they’ll be doing while wearing them will help you with the other elements. For example…
• Buying t-shirts for people to wear while handing out flyers — think *visibility*. Bright colours, big design, calls-to-action on the back. Probably not likely to be worn more than a few times, so can be cheaper.
• Need t-shirts for the staff of your new coffee shop? — Nice logo design, dark shirt colour (it hides coffee stains better!), and something soft and comfortable as they’l be wearing it all day.
• Are you getting t-shirts to gift to favourite customers or, even better, potential customers? Then go for something that they’ll be happy to wear on a regular basis. They’ll become free brand ambassadors for you!

How many do you need?

• Unless you know exactly how many people you’re buying for, this is a tough one. And it’s frustrating if you buy too few or too many. It’s always worth bearing in mind that you benefit from economies of scale with screenprinting — in other words, the more you buy, the cheaper each one becomes. You can get an instant price from our homepage.
• If you know everyone who will receive one, then you can ask them in advance of ordering custom t-shirts. If it’s for delegates at an event, you can make life easier by asking their t-shirt size as part of the sign-up form. Alternatively, you can ask us to collect the sizes from everyone for you, free of charge. We’ll give you a free online size form to share with your team, friends, or attendees.
• Also, the best unit-prices for t-shirts start after about 25. Depending on the number of colours in your design, it can be sometimes cheaper to order 25 in total than our minimum of 15!

Free checklist!

Want a free checklist so that you have all this info (and more!) in one handy document?

Download it from here.

How are you going to get them to your team/fans/customers?

• Handing them out at an event? Make sure you have them organised into sizes etc, so that you can easily get the shirts you need. Even better, if you know the size of each person attending, you can label them and organise them alphabetically.
• Sending them in the mail? Good quality mailing weather-proof envelopes can be bought from eBay or similar for just a few pence each. Just make sure you have collected all the relevant information in an easily accessed spreadsheet. You’ll need to know:
• Name
• Size
• Gender (if you’re doing both unisex and ladies shirts)
• Address
• Here’s a quick guide how to fold a t-shirt so it fits neatly into a mailing envelope.

Design

Having a great design is key to a popular t-shirt that people will want to wear. Employ a professional designer, and you’ll earn that money back ten-fold (or at least improve your brand perception tenfold!). Also be aware that for each colour in your design a screen needs to be created, which is an added costs.

• Fewer colours = cheaper printing. The good news is that most of the best designs that stand out well are one or two colours!
• Make it bold, make it clear, make it easy to be seen from the other side of the room.
• Make sure the designer provides you with a vector of the artwork, along with Pantone references for any colours included.

Any questions?

If there’s anything we can do to help, just ask in the LiveChat box, give us a call, or email us. And don’t forget the free checklist below so that you have all the things you need to know before ordering custom t-shirts and more in one quick and easy document.

Download it from here!

Originally published at ramptshirts.com on November 14, 2017.

Christmas business gifts, such as sweaters and t-shirts, are great way to say thank you to your employees, your clients, and earn you some good holiday PR. It only takes a little effort to come up with corporate Christmas gift ideas that really stand out from the crowd. Plus, you’ll have created something that people will want (and hopefully wear more than just over the festive season!). And the potential rewards are huge!

There’s generally two approaches to Christmas when you work in a team or business.

1 — Get Mariah Carey blasting out of the office stereo from the 1st November onwards.

2 — Begrudgingly stick up some tinsel and a second hand Christmas tree on the 22nd December, just before everyone leaves for the holidays.

Whichever camp you fall into, the holiday season brings an amazing opportunity to be great at Christmas business gifts. You can build team spirit, reach out to favourite customers, and grow your brand. Sometimes all at once.

Christmas business gifts

UBER

Uber worked with Dutch design agency Oy to bring this Christmas sweater to life:

“We wanted to design something that would reflect Uber’s young and hip culture, while still maintaining a sense of the traditional Christmas spirit. Using conventional sweater designs as a basis and applying relevant brand elements, the outcome is an ownable design with the right amount of freshness and humour.”

We think they did a great job, and there’s no doubt that any staff members who got one will still be wearing it with pride for many Christmases to come!

This isn’t the first time the tech giant got in on the Christmas sweater act. In fact, they gave a bunch of these (below) away in their app to people who were quick enough! Uber even donated a sweater to The Salvation Army for every one given away.

APPSFLYER

When mobile marketing platform Appsflyer needed holiday-themed sweaters they gave us a call. We helped out with print and distribution of hundreds of these beauties to their friends, customers and partners all over the world. It even got them plenty of Twitter love!

David Cremades on Twitter

I like my new Xmas pullover very much!!! Thanks to @AppsFlyer for this amazing xmas gift!

Paul West on Twitter

Christmas jumper day and our Wizard of Ops is representing @appsflyer in style. #savethechildren

PickASO on Twitter

Thanks for the gifts 🎁🎄❄️✌🏼️ #merrychristmas @AppsFlyer @TheASOTool @DanielPeris @MiriamPelaez

JGA

Florida marketing agency JGA made a splash with their pizza box full of Christmas goodies. It included a gorgeous Christmas t-shirt design with one of several animals dressed as a reindeer. Festive! It was to promote their “fast delivery idea kitchen”. And they decided that being based in Florida they should choose t-shirts over sweaters!

STARBUCKS

When it comes to Christmas, very few brands “own” the time of year like Starbucks. Whether it’s simply the ubiquity of Pumpkin Spice Lattes once halloween is upon us, they have a real flair for being seasonal. They put us all in the mood for spending a bit of extra cash on coffee, with great Christmas t-shirt ideas by making sure their staff look Christmassy yet casual…

The key thing to be aware is that Christmas business gifts don’t have to be a costly exercise. And it can result in higher staff engagement, delighted clients, and positive PR. Great quality printed Christmas t-shirts start from just £2.50/$4.50/€3 each, while fantastic sweatshirts can be provided for as little as £7/$10/€8 each.

If you’d like to know more, just drop us a line on info@ramptshirts.com. Or just say hello in the livechat box. We’d be delighted to help out!

Originally published at ramptshirts.com on November 6, 2017.

There’s a lot of choice when it comes to t-shirt brands. We’ve simplified the process for you by choosing three great options on our main ordering page, but we know sometimes it’s good to get the lowdown on all the options on how to choose which t-shirt to print on. We’ve rounded up the contenders from American Apparel, Gildan, Fruit of The Loom and Continental below — these are ordered from lowest price to highest.

Fruit of the Loom

We use the Valueweight SS28M shirt. It’s a great basic choice if you’re on a budget. These shirts will fit people almost everyone (sizes run a little larger, and the shirts are not fitted — there’s no tapering at the waist). There are versions of this shirt available in kids and womens sizes too. It weighs 165 grams.

Gildan

Our standard shirt is the Gildan Softstyle (aka GD01 or 64000). We recommend this shirt for a few reasons — it has a soft feel to the cotton, and a bit more of a slimmer fit, which means although it’s a basic shirt it looks much more expensive. There are women’s versions too. The sizes run pretty small because it’s fitted, so you may want to order one size up if using this shirt. Most colours are 100% cotton. It’s also lightweight at only 150 grams.

Gildan Ultra Cotton (2000): This is one of the thickest Gildan shirts at 200 grams, so if you prefer a warm t-shirt this is for you. It’s available in plenty of colours and some of the more basic colours also go up to 5XL, so choose the Ultra if you need large sizes.

Gildan Heavy Cotton (5000): The weight of the Heavy Cotton is about halfway between the Ultra and the Softstyle, so it’s a perfect balance between those who like a thick shirt and those who prefer the more fashionable lighter garments. It’s available in lots of colours, and there’s a women’s and a youth version.

Continental

The Earth Positive (EP01) by Continental is great if you’re looking to step up from the standard brands. Continental shirts are 155 grams, 100% Combed Organic Cotton, approved by the Soil Association. The fit is somewhere between the Gildan Softstyle and the GIldan Heavy Cotton, and the cost is a little more than the Gildans. There’s a women’s version (EP02) but it’s not available in a lot of colours.

The Continental FS01 is a 145 gram shirt made out of officially certified 100% organic fairtrade cotton. It’s not available in a lot of colours, but the shirts feel great and it’s all about the fairtrade status.

American Apparel

Our premium option is the American Apparel 50/50 (BB401). Choose this if you love the soft feel of the blend of cotton and polyester and the fashionable fit, mixed with a super 125 gram lightweight garment. This is a unisex shirt so there’s no female option.

American Apparel Fine Jersey: 100% cotton, 146grams and available in mens and womens sizes. It’s really similar to the 50/50, but just not quite as soft.

SO — that’s just a basic roundup — if you’d like long sleeve shirts, v-neck shirts, vests, or any other type of garment, talk to us on chat. We’re here to help.

Originally published at ramptshirts.com on November 2, 2017.

Before you decide, you should think about a few things:

1. How big do you want this to be? Is it a side project, a little hobby? Or are you looking to make it a business?

2. How much time have you got? Are you available to deal with lost packages and customer emails?

3. What’s your budget? And have you got access to that cash up front?

In general, if it looks like you’re short on time and cash then you should go for print on demand, and if you’ve got time and money then bulk usually works out better. Let’s look at them both below.

Print on Demand

What is print on demand? Generally, it works like this. You create your design (or get one made for you), upload your design to a t-shirt mockup online, and it’s instantly made available for sale, before any of them are ever printed. This is done via a marketplace such as CottonCart or Spreadshirt. You share the link, and when someone orders one, the shirt is printed and shipped to the customer directly.

You don’t ever see the shirts, and you’ll end up with a payment for every sale. In order to be able to print one-off shirts, a method called Direct-To-Garment is typically used. You can read more about that in our blog here, but it’s a really flexible way of printing all kinds of technical and multicolour designs as one-offs. The print quality is good, but not as good as screenprinting, which we’ll come to next.

Print On Demand Pros
Zero risk
Hassle-free
Earn money from every sale — no waiting to break even

Print On Demand Cons
Print quality not as good as screenprinting
Lack of control over your customer’s experience
Lower profits than bulk ordering

Printing in bulk

Ordering in bulk is pretty straightforward. You send your design to a screen printer, pay upfront and a couple of weeks later, you get your shirts in the mail. You’re in charge of absolutely everything — photographing, setting up an online or physical shop, taking payments, and customer emails. You’ll be the one walking to the post office with a sack full or mailbags or arranging a courier.

So why would you do all that work? Well, typically, you can buy custom shirts in bulk at a great price (from around £3/$4 each) due to the economies of scale, meaning you can add on a nice margin to cover all your costs. Not only that, screen printing is incredibly high quality and durable meaning your customers get the best products and your designs will look great.

Bulk Pros
Big profits
High quality prints
High level of control over the creative process, from the website to the packaging

Bulk Cons
Cash needed upfront
Can be time consuming to ship orders
Your responsibility to keep your customers happy if items go missing
Your risk — if none sell you’ll be stuck with unsold items.

So which you choose is up to you, but there is one more option — combining both. So you can use print on demand to test which design/colour sells best, and where your sales come from. Then use that info to order in bulk, at better prices, and make more money. If you do this, bear in mind that you should check your design is suitable for printing both using DTG and screenprinting.

For help with on print on demand, use CottonCart.com

For a great deal on high quality screenprinting, use RampTshirts.com

Originally published at ramptshirts.com on October 25, 2017.