Bring something incomprehensible into the world.
Hi, my name is Markus, I’m currently in Norway with my camper van, so I work remotely.
My name is Alex.
I'm from Berlin, Germany, and we recently started working on The Philosopher’s Shirt
full-time.
So our mission is to be bold, to educate, while we entertain our audience.
You can see on our social channels that we mostly post philosophical memes.
People are, of course, curious about that and want to learn more: "What’s the joke
here?
I don’t understand!".
But still, they follow us and I engage with them in the comments and try to explain something.
We try to engage our audiences in a non-commercial way and show our products—mainly the Instagram
stories, not that much in the actual feeds.
We have designs that you can wear without being able to talk much about them.
But if you actually wear a t-shirt with the portrait of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein,
or whomever, people might ask you: "Who’s that on your t-shirt?"
And you have to have an answer, of course.
We try to spark discussions at different touchpoints.
I even got in contact with philosophy professors in South America.
I guess they noticed that you can actually have a huge amount of reach.
If you think of a funnel to get into philosophy, memes might be the first touchpoint to get
people into the topic.
We actually do everything, just the two of us.
So from customer service, answering emails, answering Facebook comments, direct messages,
we are pretty close to our audience.
That also is reflected in our reviews.
We're quite happy that we are a five-star rated business on Trustpilot.
You can see the people behind it.
It’s not an abstract business.
And that’s the fun part of it.
So we started in 2016 when I still worked as a performance ads manager, and I noticed
in my own feed a lot of ads with printed shirts.
So I figured there is some sort of gold rush going on, and I want to be part of it.
I just simply Googled the cheapest print-on-demand provider, and set up a store in no time.
We established a brand, we took the long road, and we switched to Printful before Christmas
in 2018.
That’s because we decided you can only run a real brand with Printful, because of all
the branding possibilities, the quality of the products, and the print as well.
And of course, the outstanding service.
Often you see that Printful is mentioned in the same sentence with: "The quality is good,
but it’s too expensive."
But for us, the quality matters more than the price, because, in the end, you can also
price your products the way you want.
The more expensive product is seen as good quality.
We tested out a couple of products with Printful, and we were really convinced that this is
the partner we want to go with.
In 2019 we also added a second duplicated store for the US market.
We figured that we received quite a lot of enquiries regarding customs duties.
If you order from a store and you have to pay customs duties when you receive your order,
you're probably never gonna order from that store again.
We always focused on making every customer a returning customer.
That’s the main reason.
But on the other hand, another reason would be that we can try different products in different
markets.
With the warehousing items, we can simply send them to Latvia and Spain and see what
happens.
If it’s a success, we can try to send some to any of the US warehouses as well.
That's a long story short.
I think we have around 200 ideas.
We don’t develop everything.
Most ideas come from me, and Alex adds his skills to make a great design.
Most of our products are apparel products.
These are also the ones that are bestsellers.
We stop offering products that are not performing well, the same goes for designs.
So we’re trying to reduce our collection because that’s a bit confusing and overwhelming
for a customer to have hundreds of products to choose from.
Choose one skill you really enjoy, and try to master it.
You can do paid advertising, SEO, maybe even taxes or data protection, but do something
you enjoy.
And all the other stuff, you don’t have to put so much energy into it, unless it’
s something that you really enjoy.
Customer service is key.
A happy customer will always return.
And as we see from the feedback we get from our customers, they very much value how we
respond to customer emails and how we deal with their problems.
I think the quote that explains our journey so far would be from the French philosopher,
Gilles Deleuze, who said: "Bring something incomprehensible into the world."
This’s when you kind of start an ecommerce business and you don’t know jack about Shopify,
HTML, regulations, pricing.
But you still do it, even if you don't understand it yourself.
So you brought something incomprehensible into this world and your goal is then to slowly
try to understand what you brought into this world.
That’s your quest then.
Maybe it takes a lifetime.
Maybe not.
Thanks for listening.
We really enjoyed this talk.
You can find us on Instagram @the_philosophers_shirt.
And of course, on our website—the-philosophers-shirt.com.
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