Dumb T-Shirts: There's money in'em.

T-Shirts quite simply will never go out of style. All over the net there are countless websites popping up taking advantage of this net niche market that has expanded from generic smiley faces and "I'm With Stupid" shirts to even more sophisticated make your own spam mail shirts. The fact is, almost anywhere you go on the planet, there's a person wearing a t-shirt with either a witless quote or an interesting graphic.

So you wanna make shirts huh, but you don't have the resources? Or you just can't figure out what would sell if you did have them. Honestly, t-shirt production is not that expensive and the profit return on your investment can be sweet provided you manage to sell your product. You have 2 main ways to get images on shirts. You can go the silkscreen route or the heat transfer route. Silk screen is real simple and less costly then heat transfer depending on the amount of colors involved in your project. The more colors the more it will cost you. If you find a good company like N Designs in the heart of Tennessee you'll do fairly well on production cost and they even do small orders, although they mostly service large companies and record labels with printed garments.

But what if you don't want silkscreened shirts? What if you're more interested in full color images like those portraits of Tupace & Biggie that never seem to run outtah steam. Now you're talking heat transfer and you're also talking more money. There's one way I've personally used to get my full color images on shirts and thousands of independent t-shirt creators have followed this trend. Cafepress.com has made it possible for folks to create not only t-shirts but various items to customize and even sell online in their very own net store. Only drawback is the amount of profit you end up with after your merchandise is sold. The base prices are rather high and you'd have to raise your sell price a bit much to get a few dollars off of your items. If you think in volume though, selling more at lower prices you'll make some money. Considering the fact that Cafe Press produces the product for you, completes the transaction and delivers it to your customer while you sit back and do nothing but promote your store, kinda makes what they're asking for as a base for each item not so terrible. Nevermind, the basic account with Cafe Press is free. (With a free account you can only create one of each customizable item.)

Okay now you have some what of an idea of where you can get shirts produced. (Get to searching the net for more info on companies that produce garments. Pay attention to the types of shirts they use to print on. You want to sell a quality product.) Now what do you put on them ? Depends on what you want to represent. Or if you're trynah toss a gimmick out there to make a quick buck. Either way you'll need to do what anyone that's trying to sell anything does. Research your market. Find out what's popular and what sells. Just think about what you would want a shirt to say. What haven't you seen on a shirt that you know people would be amazed to see. Come up a with a concept or 2 and run with'em. You won't know if it will be a big sell unless you actually try.