Over the past few weeks we’ve created a series of blog posts to assist people in creating their own t-shirt line.  The past blogs have acted as an introduction to the process, help with design, and knowing your audience.  Today we would like to focus on a topic which goes hand in hand with knowing your audience, knowing your competitors.  This is something which we’ve touched on lightly in our past blogs and today we would like to nail down a few more of the specifics.  We hope that you’ll find this helpful and we encourage you to check out the other blogs in the series as well.

Knowing who your competitors are is essential.  It lets you know what you’re up against.  If your customers repeatedly mention ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ or compare your products to ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ then you can bet that getting to know a little bit about ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ is a good idea!  If possible, find out:

-how long they’ve been around
-how large are they in terms of sales, capital, and profit
-how large they are in terms of employee size
-where they are based
-how much they spend in advertising sales
-how many products they offer

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of the possible information you’ll want to find out about them, but it’s a good start and it’s general enough to be helpful in most cases.  Basically the function of all of these different questions is the same; they questions will help you learn about your competitors and it will put everything into perspective for you.

For example, you might be bummed out after your first year to find out that you only made a fraction of the sales that ‘XYZ T-Shirts’ made.  On the other hand, if you know that XYZ has been in business for many years, that they have a huge staff size, that they spend tons in advertising and other overhead, then you might not feel so bad about your own first year.

Knowledge about your competitors will also help you know what you need to do to set yourself apart. Remember, you want to continue to successfully appeal to your target audience like they are (presumably) doing, but you also want to find a way to brand yourself and find a competitive edge.  Without knowing about the competition in the first place, that becomes impossible.

Finally, knowing about your competitors will help you figure out what you need to do to successfully market your line to your buyers.  If you’re producing similar items and selling them to similar kinds of people then it stands to reason that you will want to employ a lot of similar strategies for advertizing and marketing.

Remember doing your homework and learning about the competition and the market will be invaluable to you in the long run!