I promised to do a quick analysis/feedback session on how to launch a successful cotton bureau campaign, and before I dive straight into it, I want to once again thank everyone who supported Grumpy and bought a t-shirt. You are incredible, and your tees should be sent tomorrow, so you are going to get them very soon! I would love to see you wearing your Grumpy t-shirt, share your pictures with me and the rest of the world using the hashtag #IconUtopia or the contact form – whichever is more comfortable for you! I’m looking forward to your photos!
But…First things first:
What is Cotton Bureau?
Okay, for those of you who are not familiar with it, Cotton Bureau, as they put it themselves, is the best place to buy and sell t-shirts online. Simply said, it’s a little business that lets everyone upload their design, create and then have their t-shirts being sold for two weeks. Afterwards you get your cut from every t-shirt, and your customers get their ridiculously high-quality tees. You can read more about this on Cotton Bureau About Us page.
Why Cotton Bureau?
There is a pretty reasonable question you might ask — why the Cotton Bureau campaign when I could simply print out the t-shirts, ship and handle everything myself? In the end, I would have made a lot more money. But look at it this way:
You’re running your first ever t-shirt campaign. It’s risky as you never know for sure if it is going to be successful or not. And if you want to have the best quality shirts for decent price, the number of items should be huge.And this is a big investment! I bet you don’t want to end up with hundreds of your own t-shirts lying in your closet because apparently nobody wants them. So Rule #1 is: Check the market! Is there even a little demand for your shirts out there?
Stress-free services like Cotton Bureau are the best option to start your research with. Upload your design and watch it being sold… or not. Either way, once the two weeks pass, you’ll figure out if it’s worth it to continue working on these shirts.
The Big Launch
My t-shirt launch started with some problems, to be honest. The thing is that launching on Cotton Bureau is actually done by their stuff, so it isn’t automated which means it’s quite unachievable to start your campaign at certain time of your choice. Nevertheless, I managed to negotiate to launch my t-shirts just a few hours before my weekly newsletter goes out.
Seems like perfect timing, doesn’t it? It was, except for… Cotton Bureau forgot to launch the campaign 🙂 So it was delayed for half of the day. But it didn’t cause any problems really, because 16 t-shirts were sold in the first two days! I guess this is where I have to thank my amazing newsletter subscribers again.
After The Launch
I had expected the sales to slow down, and they did. By the end of the first week, 23 t-shirts had been distributed. During this time, my design was featured on the Cotton Bureau’s Instagram account. It is hard to generate the sales through Instagram as you can’t share the direct link to the product, but it definitely brought some attention to the design.
In the beginning of the second week I was featured in the Cotton Bureau newsletter. This was a massive boost in sales! I also launched a Facebook ads campaign in the same time slot. All in all, I had 35 sales and six days left.
For the rest of the week, I had the Facebook ads running, and four days after it resulted into 44 overall sales. This was also the time I had to leave for Amsterdam and as you already know, I didn’t want to get anywhere near my computer during my trip, so I just left the campaign as it was. It might have been the most important time where I could make the most out of those last days and work on the last minute sales, but oh well, things don’t always go the way we’ve planned.
When I got back from my trip, I was surprised to see 55 sales. I assume that Cotton Bureau featured my t-shirt one more time on the last day of the campaign on Twitter. Hooray!
Numbers
So as promised, I’m sharing some real numbers with y’all!
In total, over the two weeks I sold 55 shirts. Five of them I bought myself as gifts and for people who help me run Iconutopia. So, to the exclusion of those five, we get 50 t-shirts sold. Not bad for the first attempt, I would say.
Now let’s do the math:
From every shirt, I earned five bucks. It’s good keeping in mind that I didn’t have to deal with anything but promoting my design.
Overall income – $250
Expenses:
Facebook advertisement – $73.41
Overall profit – $176.59
Lessons Learned – What I Would Change
Analyses like this one don’t have much value unless you want to reflect on what was done great and what could be improved in the future. Here are a few things that I think should be more thought out before and during my next launch (which I’m definitely doing):
1) Bother to create more buzz beforehand.
This time only a small amount of people knew I had been planning to launch my t-shirt campaign. And basically if they don’t want to get the t-shirts immediately, two weeks might just be too little time to make them do. Next time I’ll need a pre-lauch campaign to get a little bit of buzz going around. Maybe some behind-the-scenes shots, the making-of, other goodies people will receive with the tees, etc..
2) Second guess the Facebook ads.
Even though it really generated some sales, I think conversion rate was bigger than $5 I was getting for a t-shirt. (There is no real way to measure it, when launching campaign on another platform.) What this means is that I was losing money with every click on my ads. And it would be even worse if I had to additionally hire a guy to run the Facebook ads. (This time a friend of mine helped me do the campaign). However, generally it’s a great way to get some extra sales if you’re a few t-shirts away from the payout.
3) Send the last-minute email.
I was crazy busy during this campaign and I had to leave a few days before it ended. So I missed my chance to send one final email to shake things up and push few extra people who were still in doubt.
4) Free up more time for the launch.
My workload during the campaign and then the Amsterdam trip didn’t help me raise the sales, that’s for sure! I barely managed to find time to work on promoting my t-shirts.
5) Spread the word.
Note to self: Talking more about the t-shirts, tweeting daily, creating some more content around the subject won’t hurt the campaign. Also, showing my design directly to friends and family will do justice.
6) Launching the contest.
Another thing I didn’t get to do because I was too busy was launching the contest. The idea is simple: share the t-shirt page, and if the design reaches a certain amount of sales, one of the people who have shared it, wins a free t-shirt. That’s a win-win situation! Buying and sending a t-shirt for the winner will cost you around 35 dollars. Through the contest you’ll have to sell at least 7 t-shirts to break even. If you announce the contest winner after, say, the 15th sale, it will bring you another $40 of profit.
Key Notes
To call it a day, here are the takeaways from this article:
- Cotton Bureau is a great place to test out your idea. (This isn’t sponsored, by the way 🙂 ) Always start small — if you fail, you’ll fail early and painless. There is nothing worse than putting countless hours of hard work and cash into the project just to see it fall flat after the launch.
- It helps a lot when Cotton Bureau features your design on their social media. Create a great t-shirt design and hope the stuff will love it as much as you do to feature it everywhere over these two weeks.
- Promoting like crazy definitely helps.
- It’s difficult to run a successful Facebook ads campaign, but it might help if you need just a few more sales. Think it through.
- Even though launching a t-shirt campaign with Cotton Bureau is quite easy and stress-free, you still have to find enough time to check out how your shirts are doing and promote them.
That’s it, folks! I hope it was helpful. I’m also encouraging you to try your luck launching your own t-shirt design. I’ve already set up a plan to do another campaign. We’ll see how it goes! Stay tuned.
