Running your own online shop with clothing and accessories is a good idea – but what kind of t-shirt designs do people look for? Here’s a little guideline with three ways to approach potential buyers in a targeted manner. Discover 3 ways to hit the nerv and find your niche to succeed.
Location
The geographic position of your target customers plays a major role in how to draw your customers interest to your designs. It’s a good idea to focus on a specific local culture and pick up on everyday life, language and localities. Why? You can reflect on ordinary people’s feelings and attributes or personal preferences of your audience with:
• Regional customs and traditions
• Regional cuisine
• Regional sports teams
• Expressions in the dialect or language
The successful Shop owner Nektarinchen concentrates on the Austrian dialect:
“Running a Shop for everyone won’t work. The target audience “everyone” doesn’t exist. You’d be well advised to be or become a part of the target group yourself so you’ll avoid added fuss with research. Knowing your niche, subject and the target audience makes it ever so much easier.
Profession
Professions and jobs offer a range of possibilities for your creative ideas. If you target a specific profession, you should consider the following aspects:
• Problems that can be related to a job (e.g. teachers dealing with brats)
• Tools or other equipment required for the job (a lumberjack’s ax, a surgeon’s scalpel)
• Skills and talents needed to perform the trade (maths for engineers, patience for nurses)
• Professional jargon (radio vocabulary of police officers, computer codes of IT people)
Shop owner Nektarinchen tells us about her experience:
“A niche offers great potential to cater to groups of people in a tailor-made way. In my Shop for hairdressers, I pick up on the German expression “Life’s not only black and white but full of colour” by depicting the colouring system for the hair. My designs ” Life’s not only 2/0 and 12/1 but full of 5/66, 7/32 and 8/34″. It was a right success! “
Hobbies
People’s favourite past time activities also offer a wide range of possibilities. Think of the design “Keep Calm & Play Football” or ” Trust me, I’m an engineer”. The idea is to get the attention of the target audience by creating allusions to the hobby. You should exercise care, though. Instead of angering your target audience with stereotypes, consider the following aspects:
• The place where people pursue their hobby (a boat or dry land for angling)
• Vocabulary used (a pawn in chess, a halfback in football)
• Things related to passion (weeds for gardening, GPS for geocaching)
Think of the box, says Nektarinchen:
“Creating designs is a lot of work. It takes a lot of research and hours of contemplation to find the right artistic expression. When something is well thought through, it works much better than what may already have a high ranking in the Marketplace.”
Now, what can you do with those design ideas buzzing in your brain? There’s an online shop system that offers you a platform for your creative ideas, free of charge while offering a professional shop solution with all the bells and whistles. You can open your free online shop at Spreadshirt in a matter of clicks. You choose the products you want your designs to be printed on, and Spreadshirt will take care of everything from printing to customer service. You’ll be able to focus on creating designs while being able to make money with your shop products.