How to start a Clothing Company

A couple weeks back I found this article on omgtees where my clothing company Mediocore Clothing was the 5th highest ranked t-shirt company according to blog posts. Eric Terry of Linty Fresh was ranked 6^th and I remember he was one of the first people to comment on my original post “How to get your cool t-shirts reviewed by a t-shirt blog.” There isn’t anything that either of us have done that is special except make awesome shirts.

If you haven’t read “How to get your cool t-shirts reviewed by a t-shirt blog” by Joe (formerly of Fantastic Blognanza) please do so now.

There are a few things that I wanted restate in my own words about getting your t-shirts reviewed by blogs.

Get to know the blogger

This seems like simple stuff but I’m sure a lot of people just send emails to all the t-shirt blogs they can find and think their t-shirts will get posted. Go to their site, check it out, and in your email give them a compliment letting them know that you visited their site.

Use their name

Use their name in the email. I respond to emails a lot more often when my name is used.

Introduce yourself and tell them why you’re different

Be nice and introduce yourself like an actual person. Tell them about yourself and give them a story on why they should care about you and your clothing company. Let them know why your clothing company is different than all of the clothing companies out there.

Give them information they can use

A lot of bloggers are doing this in their spare time so help them out by writing about your company so they can just copy and paste it into a blog post. The same goes with pictures. Have a bunch of images already uploaded to your site so they can just copy and paste the url. Do you ever wonder why some posts look more professional than others. It’s because the blogger was given all the necessary images and copy to make a great looking article.

Thank Them, and thank them again.

Thank them in your email, comment on the blog if they post an article about you, and email them a thank you if they write about your blog. These guys are doing this for free and they want to be appreciate. Send them something in the mail, it doesn’t have to be a shirt. You can send a handwritten thank you card, or just a little present to let them know you care.

Monitor whose talking about you

A great tool I use to see whose talking about me is www.technorati.com. See whose talking about you and join the discussion. Thank them if it’s something positive and deal with it if it’s something negative.

Get the bloggers on a mailing list

After you’ve become friends with a blogger get them on your mailing list. All I do now is send out a mailing list every time I have a sale or something for them to talk about.

If you follow all of these rules and have good products the bloggers will post about you, it’s really that simple.

Here is a giant list of t-shirt blogs and t-shirt sites to submit your t-shirts to.

Please take some time to write a comment or share this article with others. I want others to share their experiences, write criticism, and comment about how these articles have helped them. Just taking a few seconds to comment or share this article will help this community grow and allow us to have better information to help you in the future.

Thanks,
Jon Kruse