Need ideas for marketing a T-shirt business

I'm helping a company with maintaining their website. Here's the website www.rigragz.ca - I didn't design the site. It could be improved; the design is problematic and buying from here could definitely be easier. However, the owners are more interested in finding retail stores that can carry their products, instead of selling shirts one at a time through their website.

So, I'm wondering if anyone here has ideas of how and where to go from here. There must be distributors of clothing, who (in case they are interested in the products) could take care of contacting a bunch of retail stores? I don't how to find them though.

Any tips and ideas greatly appreciated.

 

their inventory is not that big, just a few items in each category. In my understanding they have limited budget and don't want to invest until they see that they establish good contacts. I know a guy who is in same business and he expanded it through myspace, targeting college students.

 

Find some specialty shops that would sell those kinds of t-shirts. Send them a complimentary t-shirt and ask them to have someone in their shop wear it for a week. Offer an initial order special to get them started in stocking the shirts. You could also call some stores on the internet that sell the same type of clothing and ask them about some of their specific shirts, etc. and ask them who their distributor or source is. I've done that with great success. It's helpful if you know some distributor names that you can ask them if that's who they get if from. If you sound like you know what you're talking about, they'll be more willing to share info with you. Have you google'd clothing distributors, or the genre clothing distributors (replacing genre with whatever it is for these particular clothes, ie, harley clothing distributors).

 

I know a sweet logo will sell no mater the price or location. Gotta hit the streets and find local clothing shops that will take in your line. Blood sweat and tears. word of mouth and a Sweet domain with a simple layout.

Cheers

 

why not sign up with CJ.com and start an affiliate program?

 

I know www.woot.com does a thing for shirts, maybe contact them and see if they would put any of the shirts up there. Never know, may help a little. Besides that why don't they just do it locally, go to stores around them that sell T shirts and ask if they would be interested. I think the CJ idea is actually pretty good, I don't think that there is a real distributor that can help you distribute the shirts to a lot of places unless you have a pretty good amount of inventory.

 

For clothing, the best promotion you can get is to have people wearing that clothing either on tv, in magazines or other similar places. Try contacting some suitable tv shows or celebrities and see if you can get them to agree to wear your product during the show or somewhere else public.

Getting them search engine rankings for some suitable keywords would be a great help too.

 

Good suggestions! I don't know what it takes to set up an affiliate with CJ. The problem may be the shopping cart part of the web site is less than desirable.

The shirts have a very definite style, and I haven't found any good keywords that fit and people are actually searching for.