When Misti Money, founder of 6Money’s Creations, launched 6Money’s T-shirt Club, the goal was to create something for women of all ages, including members as young as 11, who want to feel great about themselves wherever they may find themselves in life.
Misti Money, founder of 6Money’s Creations, has her hands full in the best way possible when it comes to taking care of the customers involved in her T-shirt club. Photo courtesy of 6 Money’s Creations
“My vision is to spread smiles,” says Money, who every month sends her subscribers exclusive, original T-shirt designs unavailable to the general public. “The messages are positive, to make the wearer and everyone she meets feel good,” Money says, noting subscribers often share stories of receiving compliments and feeling uplifted by the shirts.
T-shirt-of-the-month clubs are popular for their fun and convenient approach to receiving unique, high-quality shirts regularly. Subscribers enjoy anticipating new designs in their mailboxes each month reflecting the latest trends or seasonal themes. The clubs also foster a sense of community, offering members access to limited-edition apparel. With regular deliveries from your shop, they keep wardrobes fresh and exciting, appealing to fashion enthusiasts and casual wearers alike.
Choose a Custom T-shirt Niche or Audience
The key to starting a successful club is choosing a theme and audience your T-shirts will resonate with enough that your customers will want to wear a new one each month. A great example of this can be found in the themes selected by Justin Lawrence, owner of the Oklahoma Shirt Co., and creator of the Oklahoma Shirt of the Month and Oklahoma State University Shirt of the Month clubs.
“Our clubs are aimed at anyone who wants to celebrate Oklahoma and Oklahomans and build a sense of community with others in our great state,” Lawrence says. “We create designs centered around the history and state pride of Oklahoma. It was a no-brainer when we realized we could design, manufacture and distribute the product under our roof.”
One of the keys to a successful T-shirt club is finding a theme that resonates with you and your customers. Can you guess what the focus is at Cheerdocious? Photo courtesy of Cheerdocious
Similarly, Teajai Kimsey collected cheer shirts for over a decade as a former cheer mom. “Every competition has shirts, so I started a very niche T-shirt-of-the-month club called Cheer Delights for all-star cheerleaders and their fans,” says Kimsey, creator of Cheerdocious.
Along these same lines, 6Money’s Creations’ Money, had thought about creating a monthly club for about a year before deciding to try it. Her goal? To reach a larger audience of women and bring a bright spot to their lives each month.
“As women, we tend to be critical of ourselves and often have poor body image,” she says. “We give so much of ourselves to our families, jobs, churches and organizations that we can lose ourselves in day-to-day life. One day, after opening my mailbox and receiving nothing exciting except a jury duty notice, I knew I needed to pursue my club idea.” Despite the challenges of launching in March 2020 in the middle of the pandemic, she successfully debuted 6Money’s Monthly T-shirt Club for women of all ages and walks of life.
As for Sarah Williams (aka “The Subscription Box Queen”), founder and owner of Framed! By Sarah and The T-Shirt Club, she’d already been offering a Monogram Box subscription for a couple of years when her customers started asking for more women’s T-shirts with fun and inspirational designs.
“I always tell people how important it is to listen to your subscribers, so I listened to mine, and so my T-shirt club was born!” she says. “We offer trendy, comfy super-cute tees every month that subscribers can dress up or down to help answer the question ‘What am I going to wear today?’ confidently.”
Set Your Custom T-shirt Club Apart
Once you’ve chosen your focus and market, enticing consumers to join your T-shirt-of-the-month club comes down to setting yours apart from others in the marketplace to attract and retain subscribers. What follows are some ways successful club owners have done so:
- Offer exclusive designs only available to club members. Money, who creates all of her designs in-house, not only puts a lot of thought but her own personal stories into each of her designs, helping her connect with her customers. “Each shirt has a story that we include with their monthly tee,” she says. This personal touch has significantly impacted her subscribers, with many sharing how the messages resonate with them at just the right time
- Offer a variety of sizes. Money offers women’s tees in sizes small to 4XL in order to be as inclusive as possible. Williams also emphasizes the importance of consistent T-shirt fit. “The most important thing to your subscribers is the fit of your tees,” she says. Williams advises trying multiple brands and ensuring they have similar fits to prevent confusion and potential cancellations.
- Offer high-quality items at an attractive price. Williams focuses on marketing “special T-shirts” with unique designs, super-soft fabrics, fun colors and comfortable fit at a price point 30 percent less than retail. The results of this approach speak for themselves in the loyalty of her customers.
- Offer complementary clubs. In addition to Williams’ basic T-Shirt Club, she offers clubs where subscribers can upgrade further, matching accessories and other monogrammed products.
- Offer customization options. Kimsey helps set her niche cheer shirts apart by customizing them to a team’s color, name and even the athlete’s birth month.
- Offer a sense of belonging. Lawrence’s company’s core passion is building community through shirts. “In a sea of subscription options, we wanted ours to bring people together,” he says. “It’s so inspiring to be walking around Oklahoma and see people wearing the shirts and connecting at grocery stores, parks and other events and hear them say to one another, ‘Love your shirt!’”
The Apparel-Decorating Process
Part of the allure of a T-shirt-of-the-month club is receiving exclusive designs on high-quality shirts each month, thereby making the subscriber part of a group of other wearers. Lawrence’s designs, for example, always reference Oklahoma, whether it’s an image, phrasing or overall style. “We [also] take into account current trends or feedback from our subscribers on what they love or didn’t love,” he says. “Recently, we’ve started with local up-and-coming designers to get some fresh ideas while supporting our artist community.”
Along these same lines, Kimsey looks at where the teams she works with are in the cheer season to create relevant designs. “Right now, there are tryouts when the teams are set, so I’ll create a design with a choreography camp theme or a tryout theme,” she says. “When it’s competition season, the shirts feature key themes related to those events.”
Inspirational messages are central to Sarah Williams’ T-Shirt club at Framed! By Sarah. Photo courtesy of Framed! By Sarah
Similarly, Williams curates on-trend tees in seasonal colors and designs, focusing on comfort and fit. “My designs are typically inspirational, like ‘Fearless, Fierce & Fabulous.’ One of my goals is to help my subscribers feel confident, knowing they look as good as they feel,” she says. Whether she designs them herself or collaborates with other artists, she aims to create unique, comfortable tees that subscribers will love. As part of this effort, she makes a point of getting to know her subscribers and their preferences, allowing her to create and select items they’d also likely choose for themselves.
Finally, as mentioned earlier, for 6Money’s Monthly T-shirt Club, Money often finds inspiration in her own personal experiences. “Many of my T-shirt designs come from where I am in life,” she says. For example, she recently felt unmotivated to go to the gym while on her own personal health journey. The shirt she wore at the time had the message: “You only fail when you stop trying.”
Money also strives to stay on top of design trends, incorporating popular elements into her creations. This past January, for example, the monthly tee featured a fun retro-checkered pattern with hot pink and purple colors, giving off a disco vibe. The shirt says “LOVE” in a retro font with “and be loved” underneath, offering a fun tee with a great message to anyone who wears it.
Encouraging People to Join a T-shirt Club
People subscribe to a T-shirt-of-the-month club for many reasons, including the novelty and convenience. Understanding what motivates your buyers will help you continue to attract additional members, allowing your club to grow. Included among the many reasons for doing so are the following:
- Great self-care and gifting idea: “People join my club to do something special for themselves,” Money says. “It’s a light bulb moment when they realize how much they do for others and how little for themselves. Membership is less than $1 a day, and I remind them they’re worth so much more than that!” Money’s messaging also encourages people to give T-shirt subscriptions as a gift.
- The element of surprise: Everyone loves getting a surprise in the mail. “It’s always fun to see a package when it arrives,” Kimsey says. “A subscription box is like Christmas once a month.”
- Convenient style: Williams helps her subscribers make the most of shirts they receive each month via her own online style guide, a blog that shows members several different ways they can wear that month’s shirt. “I include casual, dressed-up and trendy looks to show how versatile each tee is,” she says. “I also love to post when I’m using products from the subscription box and talk about how I’m using them…If I’m heading to a soccer game and have the bag that came in last November’s box in my trunk, I’ll take a quick picture of it with everything I have loaded into it and turn it into a social media post.”
- Unique and Local: For those of Lawrence’s customers who don’t have immediate access to boutique or city shopping, his club offers a means of having a unique T-shirt delivered to their door. Same thing for Oklahomans who may be far from home. “We’ve seen many people choose this as a gift for a family member or an Oklahoma expat,” he says. “It quickly becomes everyone’s favorite mail day.”
Running your T-shirt Club, Logistics
Besides getting creative with designs, you’ve got to have the logistical and technical aspects of running a T-shirt-of-the-month club down pat. “After having a T-shirt club for four years, we have a smooth system in place, but we needed to try different things initially,” Money says. “It’s also an evolving process, since what worked when we had 40 subscribers looks different from when we have 200.”
Decide on a subscription model
Williams prefers to run an open subscription model for her club. “Subscribers can join at any time, as opposed to [having a] closed subscription model, where customers can only subscribe during certain times, such as a launch point,” she says. This model is particularly effective for new subscription boxes and items that are easy to source, like T-shirts. With quick access to T-shirts, Williams can print the monthly design and have them ready without worrying about planning far ahead.
Payment processing program
Have a payment processing program that can run your automatic payments each month,” Money says. “Understanding the cutoff dates for payment acceptance is crucial. If an order comes in after a specific day of the month, we’ll process it for the upcoming month. This ensures smooth and timely transactions for subscription services.”
Constant contact
Make it a point to keep subscribers informed. “Let your subscribers know when their payment will be coming out and if they need to change their upcoming subscription,” Money says. “Send an email when their shirt ships, too.” While this process is automated in her case, Money says proper setup was required to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Efficient decorating method
If you’re decorating a set of T-shirts in bulk once a month, you’ll need to choose the decorating method that works best for the type of design and number of shirts you’ll be decorating. Some shops will rely on screen printing for bulk orders. Others will order direct-to-film (DTF) printed transfers for custom, full-color designs they will then heat press onto their tees.
Order fulfillment
“For our club, we draft all payments on the first day of the month,” says Money, who orders blank stock by the fifth day and then receives and decorates them a week later. “That way, we can pack and ship them by the 15th day to maintain a consistent and efficient schedule.”
Packing and shipping
You need to handle packing and shipping meticulously, Money says. In her case, the team folds each shirt, places it in size order and then prints all the packaging slips before packing each shirt one at a time. “We never seal the shippers until all the orders have been placed in the bag just in case someone pulled the wrong size,” she says. “Once confirmed, we seal the poly mailers, print a scan sheet for the post office and schedule a pickup.”
Money notes you can save a ton of money using shipping bags or poly mailers as opposed to boxes. By opting for poly mailers, she says, the weight of each package remains under a pound, significantly reducing shipping costs. Best of all, she says, her subscribers still receive an on-brand, instantly recognizable package each month.
Prep in advance
To ensure things run smoothly, Lawrence’s team prepares blanks, designs and marketing tools over a month in advance of each shirt launch. “There have been several times where we’ve shifted our execution, whether in the blank purchasing process, the shipping tools or actual fulfillment to improve our margins or workflow,” he says. By regularly evaluating and refining their processes, the team has enhanced efficiency and driven the program’s success, he adds.
White-glove service
Williams emphasizes the importance of immediate response when issues arise. “If I send out 3,000 T-shirts to my T-shirt club members, there might be a small hole in four of them,” she says. “My team does its best to catch issues like this while folding and packing the shirts. However, if the hole is in a spot that makes it hard to detect, a few could make it out the door. When something like this happens, it’s important to have an immediate response. Apologizing and sending out a replacement immediately will go a long way in terms of satisfaction and retention.”
Promoting your T-shirt Club
Besides turning out shirts people can’t wait to receive and wear, you must continuously market your club to increase its subscriber base. “Making sure that I’m constantly talking about my club in some way is imperative to growth,” Money says. “You can never talk enough about your club!” The following are some ideas to help spread the word:
- Create a strong landing page. “Explain all the details about your club and focus on talking to your ideal subscriber to explain why they need a shirt from you each month,” Money says. “Showcase different members’ stories and photos to bring them to life.”
- Share, share and share some more on social media. Money always tries to reach and engage with both existing and potential customers on social media by creating reels and other inspirational content. Similarly, Kimsey and Lawrence use social media to build their followings and attract new potential members. “We’ve [also] experimented with targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram and always learn from our efforts,” Lawrence says of his company’s efforts in this area.
- Build an email list. Kimsey says she has gone to great lengths to cultivate her niche audience over the past 10 years. “The foundation is a good email list and making an effort to stay in touch with them,” she says. She emphasizes the importance of consistently adding new subscribers and prospects to your list. In a similar vein, for Lawrence, a regular e-newsletter serves as the primary driver for retaining and keeping current subscribers interested in his many product offerings.
- Build different touch points. To maximize her outreach efforts, Williams uses live video on Facebook, YouTube and other platforms, along with promotional texting. She also does events with live box reveals.
- Ask for testimonials. Money asks all her club members to submit reviews on their experiences and encourages them to refer new members. There’s nothing having happy customers vouch for your products to bring in yet more sales! she says.
- Market yourself and your “why.” Williams knows that even though her subscribers like her T-shirts, they also want to know how she chooses the designs she decides to go with each month. They’re also interested in the backstory on how and why she decided on starting her club in the first place. “Never underestimate this kind of connection marketing, especially during a launch week,” she says. “Talk about your offerings, but don’t forget to also talk about you. You’re the influencer of your business, so let them get to know you.”
Profitability and Growth
By its nature, a T-shirt-of-the-month club is a recurring revenue stream—that’s a win right there. However, you still need to keep a sharp eye on costs. “Yes, having subscriptions does provide guaranteed cash flow,” Kimsey says. “But like any business, you need to watch the bottom line, use the best resources for garments and supplies, and find the best way to ship economically.”
When you’re starting out, Williams recommends looking at other T-shirt subscription models to get an idea what to charge. “Set your pricing in the middle since you don’t want to be the cheapest or the most expensive,” she says.
As you’re doing so, keep your profit margin in mind as you’re sourcing products, discovering new vendors and considering your options.
“Make sure your profit margin is at least 30 percent and ideally closer to 50 percent, [though] at the beginning, you’ll go through some trial and error,” Williams says. “You’ll have time to increase your profits as you perfect this process. All your costs for one box—the price of all the items, packaging and shipping—shouldn’t be more than 70 percent of the price a subscriber pays.”
Williams notes when she first started her monthly club business, she struggled to be profitable because she kept adding “one more thing” to each box. “Wanting to delight your subscribers is a great thing, but those one-more-things ate into my profits,” she says. “At a certain point, I had to draw a line, and you’ll need to do so too.”
Money says she also focuses on keeping costs low where she can. For example, using design techniques that give the appearance of a multicolored graphic while using the shirt as one of the colors has helped tremendously with printing costs. “To balance that, make sure your members know exactly what they’re getting,” she says. “They know what type of shirt they’ll receive, with always encouraging and on-trend graphics, and they know exactly when it will arrive each month.”
That said, Lawrence warns those looking to start a club to not put all their eggs in one basket. “While our shirt of the month is truly a unique vertical for us, it’s not sustainable on its own,” he says. “Custom screen printing, embroidery and promo products will continue to reign as our most profitable verticals.”
Nicole Rollender is an award-winning writer and heads up the copywriting and content-creation firm strandwritingservices.com.
