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T-shirt Selling 101: The K-12 School Market

T-shirt Selling 101

Topic #1 of our new “T-shirt Selling 101″ is the best tips on how to effectively utilize the schools in your areas as your best customers.

School sales are definitely the top clients for the most successful t-shirt printing shops. You can easily build your sales and overall income if you are willing to spend a little more time with researching the needs and special situations of these great clients. Read more to learn on the best ways of selling screen printed shirts directly to the K-12 School Market.

Increasing Sales

Schools can easily be used as a medium to increase sales. Screen printed and embroidered goods are a hot commodity throughout the entire school year for a majority of schools in America. Depending on the size of your local schools and their involvement in extracurricular and athletic activities, local schools will provide the biggest share of your sales for at least 9 months during the year.

Knowing what is desired by these customers is key to getting the sale. Some really “in” items right now seem to be 3/4 length sleeves for t-shirts and color-block hoodies for sweatshirts. As customary with school orders, the students love to have their shirts personalized. This can be as simple as a “signature back” design where the students sign a template which is then transferred to be screen printed in bulk on the back of their shirt, or can include individual personalization with the student’s last name used on the back.

Year Round Sales

Like I said earlier, you should easily be able to expect year-round sales from any school who is very active in extracurricular or athletic activities.

Let’s start at the beginning of a school’s fiscal year, usually July, and show some ideas for how you could sell these ideas to your local school and gain extra sales and extra income….

July & August

• Teacher and Staff shirts
• School shirts for every enrolled student (good for elementary field trips & incentive prizes)
• Athletic Department’s Coaching Staff Gear (usually embroidered polos)
• Fall sports apparel (football shirts, cross country shirts, girl’s golf shirts, volleyball shirts)

September & October

• PTA Organizations (and other parent organizations)
• Athletic Department fundraisers (selling to the community)
• Extracurricular groups (music groups, ffa shirts, fbla shirts, student council shirts, key club shirts, foreign language club shirts, etc.)

November & December

• Senior Shirt and Senior Hoodies
• Winter sports apparel (swimming t-shirts, basketball team shirts, wrestling t-shirt and hoodies)
• Student Section shirts (students buy t-shirts to sit in spirit sections and for some schools pay $1 less to get into the game)

January & February

• Offer to use t-shirts as a base for fundraisers for various school groups.
• Much like the rest of our industry, this is a slow period for school activities too.
• If you have a good suggestion for specific sales during this period, suggest them by leaving a comment.
• Continue trying to sell shirts to various extracurricular groups who still haven’t ordered.

March & April

• After-Prom Shirts
• Spring sports apparel (baseball t-shirt, softball shirts, boy’s golf apparel, track & field team shirts)

May & June

• Graduation Shirt
• School Incentive Shirts
• End of Year celebration t-shirts

School Contacts

Finding out who to go to may be the biggest problem in making the sale. Usually a good contact for school wide, non-athletic based shirts would be the school principal. For any athletic related shirt contact the school’s athletic director. If you’d like to sell directly to an individual extracurricular group, find out who the group’s sponsor is and get into contact with them. To sell directly to a specific sports team you can go to that team’s coach. Another great contact for your company would be a few influential seniors. These students will get things done and could get the sales for your company. You could also resort to paying certain students a commission if they secure your company a big sale, though obviously controversial, this can lead to great sales for your company.

Hopefully this will be a good start to helping you get your feet wet with selling to the schools in your area. If you have any additional questions, or would like to suggest future “T-shirt Selling 101″ topics, please do so in the comments section below.

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Phillip Westrick, owner of PW Apparel, is the author and sponsor of the T-shirt Printing Blog. If you would like to suggest any future articles or would like to become a guest contributor, please leave a comment on this or any article. Thanks for reading!

Tags: athletic teams, marketing, schools, t-shirt selling 101