Here I was, a t-shirt printer in a race to the bottom, like the rest of the local screen shops in my area. I used to make an easy $5 per shirt 5 years ago… now I’m lucky if I get $2. I was so stressed out just trying to keep in the game.
And my failing business was like a painful metaphor for my struggling marriage. With 2 small children to take care of and a 3rd on the way my wife didn’t want to hear about online vendors who were undercutting my prices or the competing print shop down the street. She was on the ‘ignore your problems and they’ll go away’ program and I was laying awake at night trying to figure out how the heck I was going to pay for our growing family.
I had plenty of foot traffic to the store, lots of return customers and a couple of great guys working for me who I trusted and who could turn an order around quickly. I just wasn’t making enough money.
One day I come home to find my wife holding a stack of overdue bills and she’s crying cause the bank’s called to say the mortgage needs to be paid. She couldn’t’ ignore our financial problems anymore and neither could I.
“You’ve got to fix this,” she said to me, while my five-year-son was wiping the tears off her face; “Don’t cry, mommy!”
“I know I do,” I promised her.
“What you’re doing…The money you’re bringing home isn’t enough. You’ve got to do something different.”
The problem was I loved making shirts. I was loyal to my customers. I didn’t want to do something else.
“Then sell them something else,” she pleaded with me, “Offer them something no one is selling.”
A week later I’m in the shop and in walks this spunky soccer coach who’s ordered from me before only, this time she wants something different for her team’s soccer jerseys. She wants the logo and team numbers to be done in bling, not paint.
“I want our team design to be made from rhinestones and the girls numbers on the back to be glittery.”
At first I think she must have come to the wrong place because I’m a silk-screen guy and we don’t sell that kind of stuff. She says she trusts me. She wants me to do the jerseys. “You can do this here, right? I know you can. There’s no way I’m shopping for something like this online.”
I’m thinking about my wife at home with our kids, reaching in the mailbox to find another bill and I’m thinking about how silk-screen production is all I know, that it’s too late to start another new career. My big investment a couple years ago was a No matter how I try to force myself to imagine the future it’s looking pretty bleak.
So, I tell the soccer coach I’ll look around, see what I can do, and maybe I can get back to her the next time she has project but what she’s asking for isn’t the sort of thing I can just start offering to her right away.
When she leaves I do a Google search for outsourcing rhinestones and BlingForce pops up. Boom! Like it’s been waiting for me this whole time. It’s a company that makes transfers out of rhinestones and glitter. I send them my customer’s logo, they make the transfers and ship them within a couple days. All I have to do is use my heat press to put the transfers on the jerseys right there in my store.
So, right away I’m convinced I can start offering bling but my problem isn’t that I don’t have customers it’s that my profit margins are terrible. And I see it! BlingForce has this price comparison on their homepage that shows how selling bling is actually 5-10X more profitable than making print T-shirts.
Bam! There it is. My something different! I’m going to sell bling out of my shop cause it’s going to make me more money and nobody else is doing it!
I don’t want to make things sounds more than amazing than they are but if I’m being honest, life is pretty rocking for family and me now. I still got my silk-screen business and I’ve increased my customer base by 30% over the past 18 months because I’m also offering bling. I’m the go-to local guy for female sports teams, dance studios, church fundraisers, companies owned and operated by women, and bling for social clubs and events. In the past my wife supported my business because it was our family’s livelihood but she wasn’t passionate about it. Now that I’ve got rhinestones and glitter she can’t refer people to my shop fast enough. Turns out my wife really loves this stuff. In fact, almost all my female customers when given the choice want rhinestone and glitter. I hung a sample in my window and the product literally sells itself!
The best part is that when I fall asleep at night, I’m not scared of what tomorrow is going to look like for me financially. My business is getting bigger and my profit margins are strong. And my family’s future is lit up with bling!
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Call Brian at 208-856-0406