# Question about my t-shirt market and about Threadless.com



## Xeon (Aug 11, 2007)

Hi all!

I've two issues which I hope people can enlighten me.
This post is gonna be fairly long, but I think it may be an interesting case study where we can all learn something from it. 

*First issue - Wrong marketing approach?*
I've recently started a Cafepress store selling apparel with kanji designs on them. According to my web statistics, people got into my site through Google.com, and below is an excerpt of the keywords they use to discover my site:

red monkey long sleeve shirt
year of the rat t sh
mermaid rings
royal navy everest, t shirt
mount everest shirt
monkey teddy bear
year of the rat t-shirt
phoenix messenger bag
year of the rat t shirt
sakura mouse pad
pig totes

Interestingly, the *Entry* and *Exit* pages are the same.
That means that when they enter the site through a certain page, they also leave after viewing that same, certain page.

In addition, the *Visitors' Visit length* shows that:

75% stay on the site for less than 5 seconds
5% stay on the site for 5 - 30 seconds
5% stay on the site for 30 s - 5 mins
blah blah blah...

From all these stats, I can pretty much conclude that these visitors have no interest in my designs.
I don't feel bad either, because there's a very high chance that these guys are not even the kind of customers I had in mind! 

I mean, look at the keyword "mermaid rings" above.
I sell a mermaid ringer t-shirt with kanji words on it, and this visitor who searched for "mermaid rings" is probably looking for mermaid rings (jewellery kinda thing).

Another example, I sell a long-sleeve t-shirt with a little monkey design on it with 12 kanji characters surrounding the monkey.
And there's this visitor who searched for "red monkey long sleeve shirt"....probably what he has in mind is a cute red funny monkey all in red, which is different from what I'm offering.

Same goes for many of the keywords listed above and the corresponding products I sell.

My question is:

*Do people actually go onto the web and delibrately search for t-shirts with kanji designs on them, and then buy them?*
Umm.....looks a bit unlikely to me.

So, I was thinking if I should change my marketing approach?
I've full confidence in the quality of my designs and they're not like those from clipart "paste-ons" or other crappy, pixellated, distorted, kindergarten kinda art.

I've also thought about advertising on websites which teaches kanji and their use etc., but it seems that people who want to learn kanji may not necessarily want to wear apparel with kanji designs.
And besides, their minds may not be in the "buying state" when they're browsing the websites learning kanji (tried it once and wasted all my bucks).


*Second issue - Threadless.com*
Second question....usually, when we sell t-shirts, we usually sell them based on a "theme", isn't it? Like a web store selling dogs t-shirt as its niche, or maybe "Support Obama" etc. kind of t-shirts....with a theme.

But I see popular t-shirt stores like Threadless.com...this company doesn't have any theme to its shirts and they're just random designs (random floral imprints, abstract art, miscellaneous figures etc.).

How can they still make it so big? Are they using a marketing approach like Nike? Whereby they sell their products based solely on a logo?
In the case of Threadless, they sell it based on their brand "Threadless"?

Their designs are random and I wonder how they can even come up with search engine keywords for their designs, unless they focus mainly on banner ads / offline advertising and then put "Threadless" as their keywords in their pages for the search engines to pick up on.

In fact, their "keywords" meta-tag consists of very general keywords like "t-shirt, tee shirts" and in terms of SEO, they defy all laws and conventions....their images' ALT tags are all empty.

Perhaps some old guys can give me some advice on this.
Really need it! 

Thanks a lot,
Xeon.


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## MiNGLED (Aug 22, 2007)

Not sure about answering the first point, I'm still working out the joy of Adwords myself. But as the the second point, Threadless got where they are today thanks to a number of things. They were one of the first sites (I think) to do the user submit/vote model. At the time this was thought to be quite innovative. Also through advertising, branding and getting the people on the site to 'sell' the site: "To all my mates, please vote for my design on Threadless". And because the 'popular' t-shirts won, they were more likely to sell. As such it has become one of the largest t-shirt sites on the net. However I guess people don't buy a t-shirt because it's a Threadless t-shirt, they don't usually have any branding, they buy it because Threadless have a large number of good designs to choose from.

Well that's my take on it.


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## jh41 (Dec 2, 2007)

+1 on what mingled said....

As for your first issue, I think maybe you should focus more on going after your target market, rather than waiting for them to discover you with keywords.....

just a thought.

-jh


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## hideyourarms (Apr 15, 2006)

You can't really look at Threadless like a traditional brand because their greatest asset is their community, which is something that most stores cannot leverage. The community creates the designs (often professional graphic designers), the community discusses and critiques the designs, and eventually the community buys the designs. When you consider that the community includes 100s of thousands of registered users you can see how they're so successful, although of course it has taken them years of hard work to get to this point.

Also, the lack of branding on Threadless tees is something that a lot of people like, because they don't want to be treated like a walking billboard. That said, they do sell one design with their logo, which is for hardcore Threadless fans only!

From my experience people do often find their way to my blog using specific terms like 'robot tshirt' 'cute characters' and that kind of thing, but obviously there's no way for me to tell what percentage of the overall t-shirt buying public find tees to buy in that way.


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## Xeon (Aug 11, 2007)

Wow, those were some great insight which I never thought of!
Thanks, I get the idea now. 

Would be great if you guys can give some advice on the 1st issue if you have similar experiences like it.

Thanks again!
Xeon


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## monkeylantern (Oct 16, 2005)

Threadless doesn't have a theme, but they certainly have a style continuity.


Personally, I think the idea of a "themed" tshirt site abhorrent. You are penning yourself in. When an online business services a micro-niche, it is only successful when it has *many* micro niche sites. You are not going to become rich selling only dog shirts. You may do if your dog shirt site is one of dozens, all done well.



There used to be a program in the UK called Changing Rooms, where neighbours decorated each other's houses. If the word "theme" was used, you could guarantee it was going to be hideous..."African theme", "nautical theme"......it essentially meant they would be doing something grotesque with mud walls and buckets of sand. "African style" however meant in the style of a certain region of Africa. Influenced by rather than caricature.

Threadless is a style, not a theme. You can spot a tshirt and you can tell a Threadless "feel" design. Coherence in your product range is not about caricaturing a niche, it's about stylistic harmony.


On your first issue.....a very high bounce rate means, usually, your customer has instantly lost interest in your site. This could be because: your traffic is badly targeted, your site is hideous, your site is unprofessional, the CafePress disincentive, etc etc.

There are whole books on reducing bounce rate and making your site sticky.



EDIT for 3am incoherence.


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## Xeon (Aug 11, 2007)

*From MonkeyLantern:*


> Personally, I think the idea of a "themed" tshirt site abhorrent. You are penning yourself in. When an online business services a micro-niche, it is only successful when it has *many* micro niche sites. You are not going to become rich selling only dog shirts. You may do if you dog shirt site is one of dozens, all done well.


Well, first of all, your post is really interesting cos' I've never had anyone say this kind of thing to me. Your entire post goes against convention and logic! If everyone was like you, I think I could have learnt tons of very useful things.

Back to topic. Isn't it logical to focus on a specific area when a new business starts up?
I mean, if a t-shirt store is a new kid on the block and yet it sells random, non-themed designs, then how is it going to attract people to buy it?
We see t-shirts everywhere and the new kid on the block will have a hard time standing out from the crowd and differentiating himself from the more established players.

As a good example, consider a new software company which is selling a new, unheard-of office productivity suite. The big boys in this market are obviously Microsoft Office, Sun's StarOffice, OpenOffice etc...
If it competes with these big boys, either it's gonna need an entire universe of marketing funds or it's doomed right from the start.

As such, I do think it's better for the new kid on the block to choose a specific niche and target that. So, in the example above, the new software company might want to sell a product that performs a specific function better than the more "general" big boys.

Surely this is the same with t-shirt companies and their niches, or is it not?
I always thought t-shirt companies need to choose at least something they can target.



> There used to be a program in the UK call Changing Rooms, where neighbours decorated each other's houses. If the word "theme" was used, you could guarantee it was going to be hideous..."African theme", "nautical theme"......it essentially meant they would be doing something grotesque with mud walls and buckets of sand. "African style" however meant in the style of a certain region of Africa. Influenced by rather than caricature. Threadless is a style, not a theme. You can spot a tshirt and you can tell a Threadless "feel" design. Coherence in your product range is not about caricaturing a niche, it's about stylistic harmony.


That's a very abstract example and I have difficulty understanding it 100%, but I can grasp the basic idea behind it! 

So, what you mean is that we should be focusing on style instead of themes and then market that style?

I think that might work for the brick-and-mortar, physical t-shirts stores, but I seriously doubt any CafePress shops can pull that off.

And I'm not too sure about the "Cafepress disincentive" either....people are making real money with these print-on-demand publishers based on their theme stores, you know. 

Good day! Your deep insight has really given me big chunks of food for thought throughout the entire day!
Xeon


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## hideyourarms (Apr 15, 2006)

Xeon said:


> And I'm not too sure about the "Cafepress disincentive" either....people are making real money with these print-on-demand publishers based on their theme stores, you know.


I'm sure that's true, but I don't think that's what ML was getting at. 

There are a lot of people who will not buy a product simply because it is made by CafePress. They might not believe that it is possible for a company with the volume that they produce and the processes they use to make a tee that is of good enough quality to buy when they know they can probably buy something similar that has been produced using a more durable process for a similar amount of money. A purchaser might also believe that someone using CafePress put less effort into making their product so they might as well go and buy a t-shirt from a website that makes the tees themselves or a larger mainstream label.

I think staying on a theme is a fairly normal thing for a CafePress producer to do, but in a wider sense, there aren't that many t-shirt companies that I deal with that only make one type of tee design. Sure, they have their own style, but that's entirely different.


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## RegularJOE (Oct 26, 2007)

*wow, this is good*

You guys are really giving some great feedback here. I am new, but I have been reading for a while, and I love this site.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> *Do people actually go onto the web and delibrately search for t-shirts with kanji designs on them, and then buy them?*
> Umm.....looks a bit unlikely to me.


I think they may be looking for kanji designs, just not using the keywords that you're showing up for.

They are probably searching for kanji t-shirts or kanji t-shirt designs, which is probably a much more competitive phrase to rank well for (but would probably give you better conversions if you showed up higher for those phrases).


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