You Can Never Have Too Many Tee Shirts...

If you are like me, you probably have a drawer or spot in your closet that holds your dozens upon dozens of tee shirts. Tee shirts are one piece of clothing people feel like they can just never have too many of. They are also a piece of clothing that people hold onto for roughly a lifetime. We get rid of pants, shirts, jackets, etc as they begin go go out of style, but those tee shirts just keep piling up and up and up. What is stranger is even though we have enough tee shirts to outfit an army...we wear the same 10 tee shirts over and over again.

Ok, so what does this little monologue on fashion have to do with visual marketing? One of the most common promotional items we produce are tee shirts. We produce tee shirts for events, tournaments, brand promotions, staff...just about anything really. The purpose of these tee shirts, however, is always pretty much the same, brand awareness. If the tee shirt features an event logo, it's goal is to increase brand awareness for the sponsors of the event, or for the event itself, trying to gain more attendance for subsequent years. If the tee shirt's main focus is a simple logo of a company, then that company is trying to gain brand awareness for themselves.

The tricky part of this, though, is that none of this can be achieved if the recipient does not wear the shirt. Now remember, this shirt is going into a tee shirt pile and fighting for wear time among dozens of other contenders! So how do you make sure your shirt is one of the lucky ones.

That is where a key visual marketing partner comes in. If look at the fashion and tee shirts now-a-days, there are alot of brands that are designing their shirts to be more fashionable, and making it "cool" and "hip" to wear that brand. There are distressed designs on soft, comfortable feeling tee shirts on the shelves of Targer, Walmart, Kohls, etc for brands like Mountain Dew, Coors Light, Corona, John Deere and many more. There are also brands like Rockstar Energy Drink that have perfected this "cool factor" among branded tee shirts, partnering with other clothing companies and selling co-branded tee shirts in surf stores like Pacific Sunwear.

You do not need to be a gigantic brand such as the ones listed above to capitalize on this trend, however. We help brands come up with cool and fashionable ways to display their brand or logo on a shirt, that will make the shirt less likely to go into the "abyss" of the other tee shirts, and more likely to make it into that 10-12 shirt rotation we all have!

The two main keys are creating a unique looking, stylish logo/design, and then putting it on a comfortable, fashion style tee shirt that people want to wear. Here is the tough part though...the shirt might cost a bit more. However here is something to think about. You can spend less money, and give away a shirt that no one is going to wear, thus making your return on investment value go down, or you can spend 10-15% more but increase your return on investment by 50% or more by creating something people want to wear, and will wear proudly.

Keep reading, as I will go into this topic more and more over the course of the next few weeks/months, and as always...

how do customers SEE your brand?