How to get featured on t-shirt blogs?

Something tells me that we’re quite experts on this one, we’ve been asked this question by our friends and fans very often, most often.. over and over.. really!

This deserves a guide that applies to all the t-shirt blogs out there and I’ll name them as we walk through. I’ll also share my honest experience since we’ve taken over TeeHunter in september 2012.

Guide contents:

1. — Look in the mirror
2. — Put yourself in the shoes of the blogger
3. — Be a reader
4. — Build a relationship
5. — Be specific

1. Look in the mirror

First things first, you’re either a talented designer or a you want to start a shop where you’ll sell gazillions of great graphic tees designed by others. Picture it, people wearing your designs every single day, bragging about them, filling your ego – that’s fantastic!

Next thing you realize you’re just starting out and you have created 3 or 4 graphic designs, had them printed, you’ve setup your shop over at Shopify, BigCartel or the communitee and you’re ready for a flock of buyers. You don’t get much traffic so you have a couple of options:

— FF (Family & Friends)
This is probably the best step you’ll take. You’ll start with calling your family: mom, dad, grandma, sister and then your friends: Joe, Jill, Jon, Jennifer and sell quite a few t-shirts but it’s not really the scenario we imagined together, you want more!

— You think advertising is the next stepping stone. You decide to budget a couple of $$$ into Facebook Ads, AdWords maybe. You’ll need a great creative and a catchy headline “Cool T-Shirts!”. In most cases, when you’re just starting out, you’ll fail with this one. Trust me!

— The obvious and less expensive step, you approach bloggers. It’s quite easy, you shoot everybody a piece of email that you’ve written in a .txt file, just change their names and expect them to contact you back with their opinion on your t-shirts. Your imagination goes even further, you see them “WOWing” in their next email reply and writing blog posts, one for every 4 t-shirts you’ve made. They will remember you and check your site daily in case the 5th t-shirt is out already! end of sarcasm goes here.

Note: We at TeeHunter sell t-shirts for our sponsors – those that you see in the brands section marked in yellow and blue background – I also happen to work in advertising and I also happen to own TeeHunter. While the above might sound like the harsh truth, my goal with this article is to point at the elephant in the room. Keep reading!

You need something completely different than what others are doing, like a sound reactive t-shirt or you simply need to wait until you have a good sense of where your brand is going and keep getting better and better graphic tees out there.

To conclude for this bullet point, if you just started out then stand up from the crowd. Check Dale‘s article over here: http://teehunter.com/2013/03/are-you-asking-for-advice-or-do-you-want-me-to-run-it-for-you/

2. Put yourself in the shoes of the blogger

Most will blog because they are passionate about great designs and dressing sharp.
They will blog about the t-shirts they love, they purchased or they own. There is quite a sense of providing good feedback for the merchandise that you have purchased, you’re biased, you have decided to purchase that tee therefore you want to give kudos back because now you wear it!

Take advantage: If a t-shirt is great and you send great samples over to the bloggers, it’s very likely you’ll receive some sort of review. It might not be a blog post, it might be a tweet but you’re on the that blogger’s radar for a long time. We do this on TeeHunter as well and pretty much every other blogger out there is doing it. Even if they don’t mention anything about samples, they do it!

Look behind the passion, I’m blogging because I love to dress sharp and I love graphic tees yet I’m running TeeHunter as a small business as well. We’ve started by creating free brand pages and sharing the love for the community and we ended up with hundreds of requests to review. Imagine how much it would take for me just to browse all the shops? I already know who the big players are in the industry and luckily for me, I have a great relationship with them. I’ll name DesignByHumans as one of the brands that have always sponsored and supported TeeHunter (kudos to Darren and Sage here) and boy.. they do have amazing t-shirts in their store.

 3. Be a reader

Worst case scenario of an email is “Hi guys! I love your blog, here’s my brand, what do you think?” .. and that’s it. What do you expect as a reply?

Have something to offer, provide a discounted coupon code, be willing to do an interview with your amazing design, have an idea about the blog post yourself and propose it. We already think of thousands of ideas of blog posts ourselves, put something on the table.

Take advantage: Be a reader, know a bit more about the blog, I always reply to an email coming as “Hi Sergiu” or “Hi Andreea” and even if it’s not a sponsored post, I still blog about those new, young brands if schedule allows and they come in with a more personal. Keep reading!

4. Build a relationship

I’ll share you a story here about Dreamwear. I’ve met Tauseef when he started promoting his brand. We first talked a bit about what he does via email, then a close friend of mine actually recommended me meeting this guy that fits well with TeeHunter, coincidentally enough it was the very same Tauseef. I picture that if my friend recommended him in the same time-frame, he’s up to something big! We then jumped on Skype, exchanged a few ideas, chit-chatted and so on. We kept in touch!

Dreamwear never actually sponsored TeeHunter – although we would have loved that too, let’s be honest here – but he provided a genuine, honest approach, we built a relationship, he sent over some samples, his t-shirts were of great quality and we kept writing about Dreamwear since then. It’s on our radar.

Take advantage: instead of spending 10 minutes to copy/paste a template reply and email over 100 bloggers, reach out to just a handful of bloggers and take the time to build a relationship, it’s infinitely better in the long term.

5. Be specific

Follow this checklist:

— You’re reading the blog and you know who writes, what material they love to write about and what’s the general feel of that t-shirt blog.

— Like them on facebook/twitter, exchange a few tweets first and start slowly building a relationship

— Have something semi-exciting to offer (at least!): either it’s you coming with an idea for a blog post or just think of a way to tickle their ego (a link back, an article on your very own shop, a couple nice things to say about the blog publicly on the social media channels, etc..)

— Be straightforward and just ask for it! Don’t go generic with “What do you think about our brand?” – Be specific what you’d like from that t-shirt blog that you read and love. “We have this new collection, here are the shirts. We’d love to talk about them on your blog and show you behind the scenes on how we came up with this idea.”

To conclude: I’m hoping this guide helps brand owners out there approach blogs better, expose themselves to more buyers and build up a relationship growing and curating this industry. I might come up as sarcastic or mean, that’s okay if it sheds more light on how to approach things, my goal here is to help out.

How do you promote your shop? Let me know your thoughts about the article in a comment below! I’ll address every single comment, if any!