# economics of running a free t-shirt promotion for a startup w/ all the fixins



## kan (Jun 16, 2008)

Hey all, 1st post here, so be nice  

I just launched an innovative new startup social network online with a few friends and we were thinking of offering a free t-shirt promotion for new members who attract and refer at least 50 friends to the service. Here is generally what we're thinking of doing and I'm wondering what is the best avenue to get this done at the cheapest cost possible: 

-User refers 50 of his buddies to the site and they qualify for a tshirt. We want to make it a worldwide promotion with no specific end date. 
-We'll offer maybe a half dozen different tshirt styles (textual, or logo, or both. 1-2 colours max) users can pick from once they've referred 50 friends. User submits their preferred design, size, shipping details to us. 
-Here's where it gets fuzzy math wise....we can do it one of 3 ways:

1. We get the tshirts printed either made to order once someone has referred 50 friends
2. We guesstimate requirements and print off large quantities of each style/size prior to the promotion and mail out as need be when a user has referred 50 friends. 
3. We could offer a firm end date to the promotion and batch process all the orders at that time based off exact quantities of size/style requirements after the promotion has ended.

Obviously there is a cost (doing one or two large prints in bulk vs. printing as required) and time to fulfil (right after someone has reached 50 refered friends vs. waiting till the entire promo is over) tradeoff so it's hard to estimate what avenue would be best. I think though we'd need at minimum 5,000 tshirts and upwards of 100,000 shirts over the life of the promotion, which could be anywhere from 3 months to 1 year long. 

Lastly, we're based in Canada but shipping costs and packaging material are so much cheaper in the US so we think working with a shipping fulfillment company would be best to ship out orders globally for as cheaply as possible. Are there any companies that can handle this for costs that are only $1-2 above the cheapest shipping costs of shipping via USPS?

My question is...what's the best way to setup the promotion given the constraints so that we could process tshirts at an effective cost to us of less than $10 printed, packaged and shipped? Is it doable? Any help would be greatly appreciated!


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## splathead (Dec 4, 2005)

Less than $10 is probably not doable using a fulfillment house. It's very doable if you print and ship your items yourself.

If you don't want to be involved in the hassle, there are print shops that act as a fulfillment house. They will print, and ship for you and only charge your their normal printing charge plus actual shipping.

If in fact you are talking thousands of shirts, you may want to consider having less designs. Maybe one, just your logo? Otherwise you'll have to print X designs times 6 different sizes = a lot of printing to get done.


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## Binary01 (Jun 2, 2007)

i dont think people would think the hassle of getting 50 people to "sign up" is worth a t-shirt....

just have weekly or monthly givaways....

.02


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## kan (Jun 16, 2008)

237am said:


> i dont think people would think the hassle of getting 50 people to "sign up" is worth a t-shirt....
> 
> just have weekly or monthly givaways....
> 
> .02



This is actually not much of a problem. People are absolutely addicted to the site (we were the fastest growing site on the web the first week of June!) and I'm quite confident we'll hit the metrics....the question is, how do we do it for as cheap as possible.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

splathead said:


> Less than $10 is probably not doable using a fulfillment house. It's very doable if you print and ship your items yourself.
> 
> If you don't want to be involved in the hassle, there are print shops that act as a fulfillment house. They will print, and ship for you and only charge your their normal printing charge plus actual shipping.
> 
> If in fact you are talking thousands of shirts, you may want to consider having less designs. Maybe one, just your logo? Otherwise you'll have to print X designs times 6 different sizes = a lot of printing to get done.


I agree that with the costs of the garment, the printing, the fulfillment fees AND shipping, it may be near impossible to hit that $10 per t-shirt price point.


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