Everpress is for everyone; whether you’re an artist, musician, charity, restaurant or just somebody who wants to put a T-shirt out into the world. We’ve created our platform to make it as straightforward as possible to run a pre-order T-shirt campaign, and to make sure your campaign reaches the widest audience too.
Still, the question of whether it’s better to use Everpress or branch out on your own to create your T-shirts will depend on a whole range of factors; everything from your needs, to the amount of time you want to commit, to the kind of tees you want to offer. To help you weigh up the pros and cons we’ve put together a deepdive into the benefits of DIY T-shirt making versus running a campaign with us.
Do It Yourself
If you’re time-rich, very confident about the number of garments you will sell, and you want full control and responsibility over every aspect of selling your pieces, there’s a good chance DIY could suit you best.
Greater Raw Profit
As there is no supporting infrastructure around you, when you run a solo T-shirt campaign your raw profit margins will be higher. As with a lot of things, there’s a tradeoff here in terms of effort and time invested and the profit you’ll get back; while your profit margins will be higher, this will come at the expense of investing your own labour and time into the campaign.
There’s also the harder-to-calculate notion of the number of T-shirts you’ll actually sell overall. Going DIY you’ll make a higher profit for each garment that you sell, but there’s a good chance you’d sell more garments in total, and therefore make a higher profit overall, if you had all the support of a shop, a dedicated social team, customer support and more around you. We’ll delve into this a little more below.
Full Control Over The Process
To have as much control over the entire process as possible, it’s best to opt for DIY. That means if you want to have full say in how your garments are printed, how many you print to sell, handle all the liaising with your buyers, and manage all the shipping out of your orders, it’s best to go it solo. There are benefits to this; if you have a lot of experience and knowledge about printing techniques, and want to bring this into play, DIY could be for you. Or, if you’ve run a lot of similar campaigns that involve mailing out orders, and you’re comfortable with that process, DIY could be your best option.
This is though, of course, a two-sided coin; full control also means full responsibility, so if there are any aspects of running the campaign that seem a bit daunting, or if you’d just rather funnel your time and energy into your practice (or anything else you want to do!) DIY may not be worth the time tradeoff.
Finally, the pre-order model is a relatively unique but simple way of gauging exact demand for your garments. If you’ve printed runs of garments before and have a very strong sense of how many pieces you’ll sell, the security of the pre-order model may not be necessary for you.
Everpress
The benefits to using us, as opposed to printing your own run of T-shirts, are manifold, but they all fall roughly under three umbrellas:
Firstly, there’s the sheer ease. With us, all you have to do is upload your design to the site and then we take care of the rest, that’s everything from postage, to liaising with customers to printing.
Second is our inherently risk-free pre-order model; there are no upfront costs whatsoever, and as you only print the exact quantity of T-shirts ordered there’s no risk of boxes of unsold tees.
And lastly, audience reach. We’ve spent years creating a platform that’s both a wealth of resources for our creators, and more than just a shop for our buyers, and when you make a T-shirt with us you bring it to our audience too. Here’s the breakdown in full.
We Take Care Of The Process From Start To Finish
Apart from the design, we handle every aspect of your campaign from start to finish, which means you save the time, energy and effort of running a whole campaign. In other words that means we handle:
- Stock: We have an ever-growing range of garments, and we keep constant track of what’s available and what’s not so you’re never caught out.
- Printing: We have dedicated print studios and offer both screen printing and direct to garment printing. Our screen printing metric means any campaign which hits a certain order threshold is automatically screen printed too.
- Packaging: We package all your tees in carefully sourced sustainable packaging.
- Shipping: We ship globally, and our team handles every aspect of this, plus any returns too.
- Customer Queries: From the very outset of your campaign launch to after your tees have arrived with their buyers, we have a dedicated customer team who handle any and all queries.
- Post-campaign: Once your campaign has ended, your page still exists on our site, and you can relaunch with the click of a button. Meaning it’s super straightforward to re-run your campaign at any time.
The Pre-Order Model
The pre-order model means that only the exact number of garments that are ordered per campaign get printed. Plus, our order threshold means all campaigns have to hit a minimum order number to cover their print costs, otherwise they won’t go to print. In short, this means it’s a risk free way to run a T-shirt campaign. There are no upfront costs whatsoever, there’s no risk that you’ll put money in that you don’t get back, and no deadstock is produced either. That means no risk of boxes of unsold T-shirts piling up in your studio, and no dragging T-shirts round from gig to gig in the hopes of making a sale.
A Bigger Audience
Your Everpress tee will live on our site for the duration of your campaign (and after too), so all the buyers who come to Everpress will get a chance to check out your campaign. But that’s only a small part of what we offer; we also have a team dedicated to spotlighting the garments on our platform, with initiatives including:
- Editor’s Picks: Our curated selection of favourite tees of the moment.
- Social Channels: Dedicated social channels with sizeable followings, all to showcase your designs.
- Our Newsletter: We send out regular highlights newsletters to our audience, featuring curated selections of our garments.
As well as this, you can opt in to our ad network. You can check out our full explainer for all the details of exactly how this works. But in short, across the last year, of the thousands of creators who opted into the ad network, each creator made on average 35% more campaign sales.
Years of Expertise & Support
We’ve seen thousands of campaigns over the years, and we bring everything we’ve learned to helping our creators. We have a dedicated team of account managers and customer support reps working across the sectors of creative, music and charity/content creators, who can advise on everything from how long a campaign should be, to what kind of garment might be best.
Plus, we have the Creator Toolkit, a bible of tips, how tos and case studies for our community that’s constantly being updated and added to.
The Profit Margin
We’ve put together an in-depth look at our costs breakdown, but in short it looks like this:
