Henryunderborn you’re going to lose your ass on this.
There is about a 1% chance you succeed, and that 1% entails you getting your money back at best.
I appreciate the depth you are all providing me, on market strategies and all that. That however is what I meant, is what I can determine for myself, for viable operations. There are two critical points, for me to base my perrogative by.
- If in all my search on the internet, not one shirt says, what my GOLDEN ticket shirt will be. Can i lock that phrase down, for sole production rights. SO, when it comes out the gates, as a master piece product; a fan boy sensation, if you will. I will have a concentrated rights for profit, off that shirt.
Does trade marking work like that? How does it work like that?
and 2. Ok. so just deal with the business, as an independent seller, and track my records for tax purposes. Expansion by further development pending.
Copyrighted artwork protects you from a medium to large business in the trade from just grabbing it for free and assuming you will just walk away. Trademarks are more complicated, and I am not going to even try to begin to advise you on that. There is a good chance you are not going to have something “trademarkable”
Problem is, even if they are stopped, some of these places can print thousands of shirts a day. You may find yourself fighting an expensive legal battle while they flood the market with those shirts…
If your GOLDEN ticket t-shirt slogans are as incoherent as some of your posts, I fear that you may be overestimating how GOLDEN they really are 
Huh?
What?
Que?
Dafuq?
???
No matter how you slice it, 1 shirt will fizzle in no time.
develop dozens of shirts, set up a site then once you have a pipeline in place, toss in your “super product”. The super product may be great clickbait, and may even be a great seller, by having other options you will capture additional revenues from those who find one of your other shirts more appealing and help establish you as a “brand” as opposed to some guy with a stack of “git’er done” shirts.
Here’s the short answer: you can’t adequately protect a catch phrase, logo or design from piracy unless you are an international corporation. So let’s say you’re right and that unlike the last five marketing geniuses I’ve worked with on similar projects you have an item that will really catch fire.
What’s likely to happen is that it goes wildly viral and the one-off shirt places fill most of the purchases before you can assert your rights and trademark. It might even get ripped off at the Chinese manufacturer level and sold all over the world before you even know it’s out there.
Your ability to stop this copying and piracy will be nil. Your ability to recover damages will exist in theory, but it’s unlikely you have enough capital for a one-hour consultation with a lawyer good enough to do something about it, much less press a national/international case for it. And that assumes someone else, someone you’ve never heard of, a company with enough assets to squash you, hasn’t already got a similar slogan/design/idea on the boards and can prove it predates yours.
Go ahead, print 500 shirts and put them on sale. Get back to us with the results in a few months. But don’t think you’re the first to have such an idea, or the idea that it’s just a matter of putting the item on sale and fame/fortune/fabulousness will find you. You aren’t even the first to cross my path with this approach, and I literally live out in the woods in the middle of nowhere.
You have a chance at some modest success if you play things carefully, but you’re not going to bulldoze Amazon, Cafe Press, VistaPrint and an army of pop junk producers across the world.
Here’s how I did it:
Move to a tourist hot spot.
Print your own shirts.
With local interest themes.
I was fairly successful at this. I decided to up the ante by going online. Failed miserably.
Go to your nearest supermarket. Look to your left and to your right. See all those people? Each of them has a clever idea for a tee shirt, or can come up with one with a couple minutes notice.
What they don’t have is access to distribution channels. That is the difference between people who make money selling tee shirts and people who do not make money in selling tee shirts. The idea is the common part. It’s the access to distribution that is rare.
It’s kind of like the Monopoly game at McDonalds. You need three yellow pieces to win, but having a single yellow piece doesn’t mean you are one third of the way to winning. What matters is getting the rare, hard to find piece. If you get that piece, putting the rest together is trivially easy.
Ok. Thank you, for what I came for, it has been answered.
- “incorporating” would be for if I reached a successfull climate to my objective.
- Copyrighting is what I was looking for, which won’t hold up for squat, against…
- the depths of intricating myself into the market, for any successfull return.
great story yall. great story.
Did the failure cost much? Unlike the OP, you were already making shirts, so at least your production capability was already there.
I wasn’t going to say anything … but this^^
Henry you are generating silly sounding babblespeak to try and make it sound like you have some notion of what you are doing. It creates exactly the opposite impression you want to make. You need to strive for simplicity and clarity in your writing. Your creative attempts to mimic business syntax are going to be working against you with anyone who is minimally literate.
Trademarking a t-shirt phase would be an epic waste of time for reasons Amateur Barbarian and others have laid out.
If you think you’re going to make big money with a fairly specialized, relatively low volume clothing item that costs you 10.00 just to manufacture and sells for 20.00 at retail you do not have a complete picture of the costs involved in the process.
Good luck with the epic “phrase”.
Something else to consider. Some big company may decide your shirt may be a little too close to what they’re doing and sue you. You might be able to defend your idea, but can you afford it? Or, you might lose.
You may have heard the story of Gary Dahl, who created thePet Rock and became a millionaire from it. What’s usually not mentioned is that Dahl managed to convince Neiman-Marcus to order 500 of them, and used that fact as his marketing hook.
Do you have a Neiman-Marcus?
I’m wondering what country Henryunderborn is in and what country he’s from. His word choice & sentence structure sound sort of like Caribbean English. Or maybe (??) he’s a French Canadian who rarely uses English.
We’ve all been assuming he intends to operate this business in the US. That may also be a bad assumption.
One of the very few clearly-written sentences in the OP is:
Yeh, but maybe he means New Hampshire, Haiti or even Massachusetts, Quebec?
D’oh!! :smack:
Type enough stuff and you’re (I’m) bound to write something stupid now and again.
Fly to Colon Panama and check out the Free zone. It is the second largest in the world. For a few dozen shirts or jeans or whatever you can have your own brand name printed on them.
No it didn’t set me back that much, basically the cost of setting up the web site. I ended up using it for something else so it wasn’t a total loss. But yeah, I was already set up and selling so it didn’t cost me much. I just underestimated how supersaturated the web is with tshirt sellers.
T-shirts can make a decent small business but it takes a lot of hustle. If you make $5.00 per shirt you need to sell at least 40 shirts a day to make $200.00. The market is pretty well saturated with sellers but at the same time there are still some openings that are under utilized if you are a hustler.
The internet has provided us with a huge number of special interest groups who are easy to contact and ask for business. At the same time each one of these groups would quickly be burned out and may only provide a small trickle of repeat business once the intitial offer was gone through. I like T shirts as a small side business but too much hustle needed to really grow.
Yall came around here stating business plans to me. I didn’t ask for business plans. I didn’t ask for market details. I didn’t ask for opinions on the positive or negative basis of what and entire I might be able to strive for.
I simply wanted to know.
WALKING OUT THE DOOR:
- What I should be structured as.
- The details surrounding Trade Marking / Copy Righting.
Through 50 posts, a skim of 3 posts, answered it.