Hey guys, some of you may know me from years ago and there may be some here that are new to RTD that have no idea who I am. I have decided I wanted to get back involved in the RTD forum after being absent for about a year/year and a half.
I originally got involved back in 2009 when I stumbled upon RTD when looking for an online designer for one of my sites, mycustomhoodies.com. I was pleased with the customization you could make and then the awesome forum that came along with it.
I did a lot of work on that site and then actually sold it to another company and then decided to put all my focus into my new venture, mycustombandmerch.com. I started working pretty hard on the designer for it in late 2011 when I had the chance. By 2012 I was so busy printing for bands, I didn't really have much time to put into it. However, in late 2012 I decided to really push and get the designer done for an early 2013 relaunch of the entire website.
My initial thought was to create the designer with just t-shirts in mind and allow bands to design on different brands and styles of shirts. I would be the first band merch site to allow bands to actually design and order online. Once I got to thinking about the versatility of RTD, I thought, why stop there. I decided to go into all types of apparel, banners, buttons, bracelets, stickers, hats, bags, anything I could think of. I realized that RTD had the power and capability to handle all of this.
I would print band merch all day and stay up all night creating the hundreds of products and then the mockups, and color combos for each item. Alex and I worked hand in hand on working out the CSS for the designer which eventually led to allowing us RTD users to completely customize the look and feel of the entire designer. I am forever grateful to Alex and him putting in so much work, allowing me to push him at times, and being so flexible to make my designer become what it did. I eventually relaunched my entire site on February 14, 2013 with the online designer and all the new products. I did not get every product created like I wanted by that deadline (still havent haha) but got very close.
I immediately saw results from the redesign. Part of this is because I redesigned my actual site (custom built on wordpress), but the other half was having all the new products and a brand new designer on my site. I immediately was getting all these orders for all these different items on the designer and knew that RTD was the right choice from the get go. I already had the traffic coming to the site because of the SEO I had done for about 3 years to get this site to the top of Google (this is the main reason for my success - without traffic, you have no conversions!)
So here I am just passing a year with my RTD designer live and fully functional and feel like I had enough orders and a big enough sample size to know what worked and what didn't in this past year. Let me touch on some key points:
- The coolest thing about getting the designer up and running was that my constant back and forth of contacting clients about wanting to place an order dropped down to about 20% of all orders. There are always going to be customers that won't want to use the designer, or have too high res of files to load, or a PSD or something that they would rather contact you instead of going into the designer. However, now 80% just order through the site and I have no correspondence with them before they even order. It's awesome waking up to 3 new orders that you were not even expecting. Eliminating so much of the back and forth with clients freed me up to acutally do the work that was coming in. Also, the request for custom artwork was pretty much eliminated as well once I had the designer with some artwork in there (I need way more artwork haha).
- I run mycustombandmerch.com all on my own and have no employees. Whether this is smart or not, I don't know. I know I will have to get some here in the next couple months as my sales continue to skyrocket. I know people want to hear real life stories of success and it is a motivator. I love hearing them and that is what pushed me to become my own boss years ago. I was a struggling screen printer for years, barely making it by. My wife fortunately had a successful photography business that helped carry us. We were living pay check to pay check (even though there was no consistent paycheck being we were both self employed). I knew that if I got my site redesigned and the designer going, it would explode and would work. Since the start of the relaunch in Feb. 2013 to Feb. 2014 I pulled in $190,000 in sales and made around $75,000 in profit. I worked my butt off this past year when I probably should have hired someone, but I am stubborn and don't mind making a bunch more. This may not seem like a lot of money to some on here, but for me it was way more than I ever had made probably over a 3 year time span. I only do the apparel screen printing and then outsourced all the other items on my site. I would say that probably 80% of those sales came directly through the designer and the checkout on it and then there were about 20% that I would send an invoice to because they couldn't figure out the designer, it was reading colors wrong, artwork was too large etc. All this to say, if you work hard, it can happen and it wouldn't have been as successful if it had not been for the RTD design tool. I am already projecting to do $300,000+ in sales for this next year!
- I created templates for many things like e-mails, invoices, etc that were key in keeping things straight over the past year. I will more than likely put those on here so that others can utilize them.
- I hate to do this part, but not everything was smooth with RTD. Probably the biggest issue I ran into with customers was the color count issue in the designer. This obviously was not a problem with our own supplied artwork or fonts, but when a customer would upload their own, they would tend to run into problems. The biggest thing I noticed was that really low resolution would create the color count nightmares. And obviously, gradients, full color images, etc would make these pretty bad if they were working on an item where there was a color limit. I probably got the most calls, emails, chats about this problem more than anything. "Why is my 1 color white on a black shirt being counted as 356 colors." This was a recurring theme. Will probably talk to Alex about a better solution or what we can do to fix this.
- Another issue was artwork generated with RTD. I really do believe it does a pretty good job of generating artwork that is WSIWYG compared to what they designed. My dilemma was and still is a catch 22. The high resolution vector artwork that is created can be outputted at the 300DPI that I need, however, there are too many items that are not scaled right, there is no archs (which I know cannot be done), and things don't seem to line up like they should when comparing to what the designer is showing. On the other hand, you can output a JPG or PNG and it will come out exactly as needed, but because of the size of the design I need and then the max load on the RTD end, I could only get shirt files for example up to a DPI of 134 which worked but was far from ideal. I am hoping in the coming year we can come up with a solution for this. I believe the sole purpose of the RTD tool is to create print ready artwork to save us business owners time. If I have to recreate or piece something back together, it kinda defeats the purpose of the designer in my opinion.
- One last negative (more a feature request) if you will and I will be done with my problems with it, I swear!!! On our site, we offer free 2 week shipping. It is hammered home everywhere on the site on every page. It is in the checkout, the e-mails, everywhere. Yet, the number of phone calls, e-mails, live chats, etc asking about the turnaround or can I check the status of my order is mind boggling. It wastes so much of my day it is unreal. You truly want to believe people have reading comprehension but most dont. Someone will order one day and then the very next day they want to check the status of their order or need a tracking number (for custom products mind you!). This really isn't even a negative of RTD, but more a feature request I have mentioned before. We e-mail the tracking manually to customers when the order ships and I had talked to Alex about possibly adding a field that we can fill in on their order that would show up in their profile when they access it on our site. More importantly, everyone wants to know the status of their order. It would be great if we could have a way to select from a dropdown or whatever where the order is at in the process and it would show up next to their order when they login. I feel it would eliminate quite a few headaches.
Those are my major take aways from this past year. I am going to really try and post more. Do some tutorials, some overall philosophies on how to build your RTD, etc to really try and give back to a community that I was able to pull from early on. Let me know if you have any questions or request and I will try and stay on top of it.
RTD is truly the BEST design software out there right now and if you work with it, it can give you great success!
-Scott Cline
mycustombandmerch.com
