Hey guys Claire with Bella Canvas. If you're thinking of starting a t-shirt company,
the single most important thing you need to do is find your niche audience. With
all the online noise out there, your brand can't be something for everyone so
the real success comes in connecting the right product with the right audience.
We're sitting down today with Printful, a print-on-demand company that has helped
launch tens of thousands of t-shirt startups. We'll share examples of how
finding that niche audience can be the determining factor between companies
that make it and the ones that fail. Hey I'm Wes from Printful. We are a
printer on demand and drop shipping company. We're at our Los Angeles
location today and we're gonna be talking about finding your niche
audience. People usually find much more success when they are able to target a
niche audience instead of just a broad audience that comes from just being able
to understand a specific people group and what they need and what they're
looking for. At Printful we see lots of different successful companies and those
really are the ones that tap into a specific niche and there's some really
fun ones out there that we've noticed, one of them is the Bad Dad's Club and
they really kind of just discovered as they were going through Parenthood that
lots of the apparel for dads was a very cookie cutter like in the box specific
group of people and the guys that have tattoos and are creative and drive
motorcycles they didn't really feel a part of that group so they started an
entire company called The Bad Dads Club where men that are like that can be
celebrated and fill that same love. Another really great example of someone
who was able to find a niche audience was the Pal Campaign, they create really
cool street wear for Christians and Catholics and now he also has like a
really cool community they get to be a part of the larger society and feel cool
while still expressing who they are and themselves.
if you're looking to find in each market the best one is to really look at
yourself first because we all fit into a niche category that's kind of the truth
of it we might feel like we're super unique and individual but there are
others that are out there like us and that's great
and that also helps you create a very genuine approach to business and your
community that you'll end up creating.
All niches are involved somewhere online that might be specific BuzzFeed
groups or reddit's or Instagram accounts so if you're a part of that community
it's not gonna be very hard for you to figure out what people are talking about
the trends that are going on so just stay engaged with your audience and that
way you can see where things are going and you might even be able to become a
trendsetter in that group as well. Maintaining brand consistency is really
important when it comes to working with your niche but as you continue to grow
with your audience that you're creating you can find kind of a little bit of an
extension within your niche audience so the Bad Dad's Club for example, after
they found their a success and they have like a group in a community they've
expanded it to where now they have the Bad Mamas Club so that's just like
another branch where their audience is a little bit bigger than maybe what they
originally thought but it's still very consistent with their brand their brand
voice what they're trying to accomplish. One really big thing to avoid so that
you don't fail at this process if you tried to expand too big or too quickly
or too broad that's where you're not really going to make a difference or be
seen or connect with your audience but especially if you're just starting out
stick with your niche audience and stay there with them and just listen to their
feedback what's going on I mean you can grow from there.
Choosing your blank is really important when it comes to just selling in general.
I'm using like BELLA+CANVAS for example is a great quality product that you can
trust and you know it's always gonna be good and it's also a great selling point
at this point as well so you're end customer most likely knows about BELLA+CANVAS
and they know that that's gonna be a great product as well they know
what its gonna feel like, they know about the durability of it, it's gonna help you
sell that product even more sometimes if you can say like this is printed on
BELLA+CANVAS it just builds in this nice safety net as well. My biggest piece of
advice to anyone going out starting especially or maybe they're trying to
redefine their niche is just remember that everything a business is always an
experiment. You can also really take advantage of print-on-demand companies
when you are testing things out so like for a printful for example you can
upload a product to your site just to see if people are interested in
buying the design if they're interested in the fact that it's a tank top now
will people actually buy it um it's a very low risk financial situation for
you so using print-on-demand is a great way to really scale and grow your
business and also help you define your target audience for yourself because
maybe you can put some things up go these things didn't work this really did
so my audience likes this let's keep going in this direction so it's a great
way to help grow yourself. So what niche category do you fall under? Are you in
the Bad Dad's Club or maybe your passion is food and you have endless
illustration ideas for avocados and latte? Let us know what your niche is in
the comments below. We love looking at what our customers are making with our
apparel. Subscribe to our channel for printing tips and design inspo to build
your successful niche brand. Be Different