How to Start a T Shirt Printing Business in The UK With a Tight Budget

Starting a business is a dream held by many, but the financial investment can sometimes act as a barrier for some budding entrepreneurs. Don’t let limited finances be the dampener to your business dream, there are many markets you can enter on a budget and still come out on top.

Take T Shirt Printing for example. Although this may initially sound like a complex business, the process has become much simpler in recent years with advances in technology and the growth of high-street printing companies.

With the right amount of research, the aspiration to create unique and inspiring designs, and a willingness to step into unfamiliar roles to secure the future of your business, you could be on to the winning formula straight out of the gate.

Understanding Your Target Market

One of the first, and most important steps to starting your business is carrying out market research in order to identifying your target market and understand the companies you will be competing against for custom. Basing your research around the following questions will help you to know about the people you are selling to, and what they will expect;

• Key demographics (age or income based)
• What are their interests? (this will be useful for highlighting a niche)
• Where do they live? (people in rural areas are more likely to shop online) 

If you want to take your research to the next level, when you have defined an audience you could carry out a market research survey to gather more granular detail. This is not essential at this stage, but a great idea when you have repeat customers. 

Create Your Brand

Once  you have carried out your market research, you should have an understanding of the audience you will be targeting your products towards, their interests, and their buying motivations. This will help not only when creating your designs, but also when creating your brand identity, as it will give you a criterion to work around. Approaching your branding this way and basing your decisions on data will reduce the margin for error, helping to keep you on the track to success whilst keeping costs down. 

Get Creative

In your quest to get creative on a budget you may have realised design software can demand a small fortune, and frankly at this stage will offer very little return on investment. So, what are the alternatives? Well, you could check companies like Banana Moon who are not only experts in the field of printed and embroidered clothing, but also feature an on-site design platform, meaning you can explore your ideas and see them on the garments before you have even signed off the design. 

Social Media 

Once you have created your brand identity you have everything you need to create Social Media profiles for your business, which will allow you to communicate and promote your garments to your target audience. As we are doing things on a budget, we will focus on organic social traffic to start with to avoid unnecessarily spending your budget.

So, to summarise, you don’t need stacks of cash to start your venture into t shirt printing, just remember to do your research and fact check everything you do. You may come across software or technology that promises the world for your business but always remember to ask if it benefits your customers and your business.