Printwear & Promotion The Total Promotional Package
Part two of a veteran T shirt printer’s view: 32 years of winging it, 72 hour weeks, stress headaches and the rollercoaster of being in the T shirt printing game. Arron Harnden of Shirtworks reports.
I know, it’s sounds crazy to think of a pre-internet world. It seems weird to think that a business could survive without a website but in 1997 you couldn’t find many T shirt printers at all who had a website.
We got a local company to build us a basic site and within a year we had number one ranking in the entire UK for all search phrases relating to T shirt printing.
It was a maniacal time for growth and it tested our resolve and stamina just to match demand. 72 hour weeks are not for the faint hearted, particularly when you are unable to stop moving to eat and where every second counts in order to hit your deadlines. I lost a stone and a half each summer from 1999 to 2003.The stress diet is not a diet I recommend. The winter was just about quiet enough for a physical recovery.
An arms race of websites
This period became an arms race of websites. The smart players realised that you could win business outside of your local geography with a website, and a proliferation was afoot. Google had not yet applied its algorithmic meddling to only produce local search results. Our dominant position in ‘search’ began to become eroded. We had not yet become savvy as an internet player, we had no strategy and we began to lose ground with web traffic.
Fortunately, staying in business is not just about finding new customers all the time. One half of the survival/growth equation is keeping customers. Luckily we were pretty good at that, most of the time, but this wasn’t going to put bread on the table forever. Then 2008 hit.
A tough time
It seems such a long time ago now and yet the ripples are still bobbing under the bow.
It was a tough time for T shirt printers, particularly if their customer base was promotional work. Marketing expenditure is nearly always the first thing to get the axe and it happens quickly. It definitely happened in 2008.
Since then it has seemed like there is rarely any good economic news, with pundits proclaiming that the can kicking has run out of road.
Shirtworks is not so gloomy. The world still needs T shirts and as long as you can continue to evolve you might just stay in the race.
Our continued evolution as a business took two paths.
We wanted to become more sustainable and environmentally aware and we wanted to push a new digital strategy.
Being environmentally aware and doing something about it are two different things. Each year we are audited by the Soil Association with what seems like an ever increasing and robust set of adherences. Constant monitoring of our waste and adjustments to our production processes is just par for the course.
On several occasions we have been found coming up short which has required attention. The payoff is that we feel better about what we are doing and it gives us a USP which wins us business.
All of this helps to feed into our digital strategy which we have had to learn while running a very busy printing company.
Now, let’s pause and consider the double edged sword of the internet.
A website is vital, no-one will argue with that, but if you can be ahead of the Google algorithmic meddling and ensure your website is full of engaging content and quality inbound links, you are on a winner, no doubt.
If your user experience for quoting is simple enough to navigate through without requiring your customers to think too much to be able to get a price, you are on a winner, no doubt.
If you are able to assign a budget to your web activity and spend it intelligently with regular activity, you are on a winner, no doubt.
The difficult bit is the negative effect on cash reserves and the amount of attention it requires from you while working hard in other areas of the business. Your competitors also have strategies that they are working on and it is an ongoing exercise to stay ahead.
Our main focus since 2010 has been digital. We create content that is interesting and that satisfies Google’s requirement for relevance, as well as create videos for products so that customers can actually see what products look like. We also write blogs regularly to keep content fresh.
It is an imprecise science, it is time consuming, it is vital.
Reaching the summit
What lies just beyond the horizon is anyone’s guess, what the summit looks like I will never know.
My Everest has slippery ridges, whiteouts and sections where I must leap to make the other side.
Thankfully the 72 hour weeks are history, we are better organised and have plenty of staff.
Thankfully the stress headaches are no more.
Thankfully the rollercoaster has evened out and we feel like we have gained some control.
We know nothing is guaranteed, we know we must keep pushing for the summit that will never come. It is the journey and not the destination that creates us… and all that guff.
