Charity T shirts – a viable growing strategy

This month Gillian Suggett, DecoNetwork’s business development manager, Europe, explores the concept of charity T shirts and how you can make this approach work for you.

Buying a T shirt where a percentage of the sales value goes to charity makes customers feel good. As a business, giving your profits to charity might not immediately appear a good business model, but if you attract more sales because you give some of your profit to charity then you might sell considerably more T shirts overall by adopting this approach.

Blake Mycoskie, the founder of the successful footwear brand Toms, says: “Charity is a viable growing strategy for many companies, because consumers love to buy products that give back. Giving feels good, but it’s also good for the bottom line.”

Feel good about giving

Modern day philanthropy means that it’s not just the super-rich who can feel good about giving. How many of us have been invited to sponsor a friend who is climbing a mountain in flip flops or running a marathon dressed as a duck and who are using sites like those hosted by Just Giving or Virgin Money Giving to raise money? The available technology and the marketing might of social media is mobilising the man and woman in the street to feel good about raising money and giving to charity.

The practice of raising money by inviting contributions from a large number of people is often referred to as crowd funding. It is sometimes used as a way of raising money for a private venture but is also often used for raising funds for good causes or charitable events. Platforms like Frabily or Teespring and others, provide the technology for individuals to easily design a T shirt and promote it; in many instances this technology is used for a charitable event. The platform enables the user to design a T shirt online, set a selling price and then set a target for how many they plan to sell, with a minimum target and price set by the printer. Then, using their connections, social media family and friends, the user promotes their T shirt design to raise funds. For every T shirt sold the individual or the charity will receive a commission or donation. For the T shirt printing business this expands their sales force with no risk; the customer provides their own sales force. Sharing profits in this way actually helps the business print and sell more T shirts and grow their business.

Visionaries with ideas

In 2014 Teespring reported that they had sold six million T shirts. That means that one in 65 Americans have a T shirt printed by them. Co-founder and CEO, Walker Williams, said: “This isn’t about T shirts, it’s not about crowd funding, it’s about the concept that bringing something to market should be as easy as the idea. All we need is the visionaries with the ideas.”

Schools and clubs are always looking for new ways of raising funds, and if they are already your customers then naturally they should come to you. All you need is a way to facilitate their fundraising endeavours so that you can generate new business and share some of the profits.

If you connect with the growing number of modern philanthropreneurs and enable them to create and promote charitable T shirts, your business could be fulfilling all those new orders.