How To Improve Your T-Shirt Sales

I'm just gonna say it...Price is almost never the reason for poor sales!

In this blog, I'm going to explain why you shouldn't compete on price and what you can do instead to improve your sales and profit margins.

WHY YOU SHOULDN'T COMPETE ON PRICE

Personally I feel that too many t-shirt brands underprice their items and undervalue both their time and effort. I know that most of you work very hard to create high quality products and provide a great customer experience, which is why it saddens me that many of you feel the need to lower your prices to compete. This is a race to the bottom that you will never win, as someone is always willing to sell their t-shirts for less.

I really think that this is a poor strategy and a recipe for failure since low prices almost always translate into low profit margins...and if your margins and your profits are low, it's very difficult to survive in the t-shirt space. Not only that, rock bottom pricing lowers your brand's perceived value and puts you in the same category as low-priced t-shirt businesses like Walmart or Amazon Merch, which I have no doubt your products are better than.

DO THIS INSTEAD TO IMPROVE SALES & PROFIT MARGIN

So, if you shouldn't focus on price then what should you focus on?

Instead of trying to lure people in with lower prices, focus on increasing perceived value of both your products and your brand.

You can do this in a number of ways:

1. Strategic branding,
2. High quality attractive designs that invoke emotion and relatability,
3. High quality imagery,
4. High quality branded products,
5. A user-friendly conversion optimized website,
6. Incredible customer service, and
7. Loads and loads of social proof, such as user generated content, customer testimonials, a thorough FAQ, and trust badges.

With all of that said though...

WHEN PRICE ACTUALLY DOES MATTER & WHAT TO DO

There are a few caveats which I do want to mention. If the perceived value doesn't align with the price, this could be an issue so you need to make sure that those two are in alignment. If you have poor performing products that are not selling, I do actually recommend doing some sort of clearance sale to liquidate them and recover your costs. That way you can then focus on reinvesting that money into your better performing products, maybe by buying more inventory of those.

This sale can also be used as a hook to drive traffic to your website and hopefully have them purchase some more popular and higher cost shirts from you. I've actually seen some stores use this tactic in a very strategic way in which they essentially hook people in with a single low price item or collection in order to drive store traffic with the intention of upselling them or hoping that they'll purchase more items at full price or at less of a discount. Although I haven't tried this myself I can definitely see how, if done correctly, this could drive more traffic to your website and if you have other products that really resonate with your niche I could definitely see this working.

SUMMARY

If your sales are poor...don't assume its Price. Competing on price is a game you'll most likely lose and that will ultimately work to destroy your brand's perceived value. Instead focus on things like optimizing the customer experience, your designs and social proof. Where price really does matter, you will see misalignment between your prices and your customers' perceived value for those specific products. If this is the case then I'd suggest finding ways to get rid of those products through strategic sales and reinvest the proceeds from those in products with higher perceived value. 

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