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Back to School Markets Deep Dive

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Please find some links and notes from the 2 Regular Guys Podcast. Aaron and Terry took a deep dive into going after the back to school market with your garment decorating and personalization business. They will bring you in-depth details on ideas to market your products to the back to school niche and tips for successfully gaining increased business from it. Have a pen and paper handy as you will want to take notes on these suggestions for growing your business.

Sponsored by: Equipment Zone and Pic The Gift

Our regular listeners know this, but 2 Regular Guys is all about garment decorating, a bit of fun, and no rants or lectures or selling. We are not doing this for our employers, but rather for our industry. For the past three years, 2 Regular Guys has been the first and the most listened to garment decorating industry podcast on this planet! We are humbled by all of you tuning in each week. We work hard to bring you information that will make your business better, and our industry better. Take a look at our incredible weekly guest list and you’ll understand where this industry goes for news, interviews and the heartbeat of garment decorating. Thanks for listening!!

Back to School Markets

Selling directly to school bookstores and organizations like the PTO for back-to-school

    • Back-to-school orientation (Every school will be set up differently when it comes to decorated merchandise.)
      • This is the day or days all students come in for their schedules, student ideas, etc.
      • If someone isn’t selling apparel and other school logoed products it should be you. If someone is, no reason you can’t help them add to their inventory
        • Phone cases with the team mascot or even student ID printed (Riley’s school)
      • Partner up with another club or organization for a specialty product such as water bottles, etc.
  • Have back to school designs, make it easy – They are not designers or even buyers really. Just an underpaid teach most of the time or a volunteer Mom. (Story of MRE and using Shirt Kong over others.)
  • Getting on the School Supplies program – Amazon story, offer some personalization with the supplies to make it a kit that can be presented to the kid as a gift for their first day.

Selling to booster clubs

  • If the school is paying the bill, get a PO no matter how much the teacher or advisor says you don’t have to wait for it.
  • If the school isn’t paying, how are you getting paid?
  • And don’t let the school year end without getting your check!
    • Generic booster club or specific to a sport like football
      • The school booster club will support all sports
      • Big football schools will generally have their own booster club
        • Internal fundraiser – silent auction (Where can I buy those?)
        • White outs, black outs, gold outs…
        • Think of some unique applications – number on side of baseball caps
      • Same for high school band boosters as a separate group
    • Joining up? Only if you are a real booster… not just for profit.
    • Like nearly everyone in this marketplace, they are not professional buyers.
  • Can we get some examples of specifics that people can do to make this easier for the buyers?
    • Some things you can do to make it easy to buy… “easy to buy” is the key
      • You create samples – and a range of sizes for students/parents to try on
      • You create simple order forms to fill out
      • When you deliver the decorated items, especially when multiples can be ordered, bag and label with a name for ease of distribution
      • Offer a second opportunity to place orders as the 1st wave is being delivered

Selling to student organizations

  • It’s time to sign up new members. What do they get for joining your club?
  • Offering unique products as fund raisers… something that isn’t competing with the school store or PTO.
  • Simply find the advisor (teacher) in charge and ask to come in and make a presentation to the group.
  • The more creative and imaginative here, the better you’ll be received
  • Once you make one or two connections, the rest fall into place.

Selling local school related products via retail

    • If you’re selling retail, how difficult will it be to add a section for one or more local schools?
    • Giving back in some way to the school or school groups is very important here. “$1.00 from every shirts sales goes to…”
    • Hitting up the event sites. Groupon, Zulilly, Jane.com, Eleventh Avenue

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  • Compare & Contrast: Garment Decorating, Screen Printing, Sublimation, Direct-to-Garment & Heat Transfers – SGIA Las Vegas Room Number: N115 – September 14, 3:00 pm Pacific

Terry’s Books

Screen Printing: A Practical Guide to Starting Your Own T-Shirt Business Just $4.95 as an e-book.

Direct to Garment: A Practical Guide to Starting Your Own T-Shirt Business Just $4.95 as an e-book.

Scheduling and Estimating Production Time for Garment Screen Printing Just $2.99 as an e-book

Equipment ZoneThis show is brought to you for a full hour by: Equipment Zone, with 20 years experience selling garment printing equipment nationwide. Equipment Zone offers the new Epson F2000 SureColor direct-to-garment printer, their own VelociJet-XL DTG printer, and the all new SpeedTreater-TX automatic pretreat machine with a full 16”x24” pretreat area. Introductory price is $3,995. Equipment Zone also carries a full line of DTG inks and supplies. Go to EquipmentZone.com

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