Gnarly Tees is a print-on-demand tshirt shop that is seeing huge success and growth through their streamlined process which takes minimal work and their creative designs that take advantage of current trends, always giving them something new to talk about and sell. Head to their listing and start up a discussion with the owners in order to learn more!
Tell us a little about yourself, what’s your background and how did you start with GnarlyTees?
I’m just a good ol’ boy from a small town in Texas. I’m a Communications Officer in the United States Marine Corps. I studied Russian Linguistics in college, but I have a passion for entrepreneurship. GnarlyTees is one of the projects that myself and three other veterans dove into last year. We wanted to see if we could take a website with potential that wasn’t performing and fix it up. Think of it like a house flipping project but for e-commerce. It’s been a blast so far and we’ve been learning a lot.
How have you marketed the product and where are your customers originating from?
For how little advertising we’ve started with, this website has done well. The sheer volume and history of this website brings in customers organically even when we spent $0 on ads. Currently, we’re ramping up the ads as we progress. The majority of our customers come from organic Google searches and Pinterest. Pinterest is basically free advertising. Many of our very niche products that you would never expect someone to buy, are purchased through Pinterest. In short, Pinterest is how we do very specific targeting. Also, my other business partner, Peter, created a bi-weekly email list that performs really well. We draw a lot of returning customers this way.
It sounds as if the majority of the business is automated at this point. How much time is spent managing the business by you and/or your partners? How many of you are there?
Between myself and Peter? 10 minutes a day maximum. The other two partners (Ryan and Josh) just send out funny T-shirt ideas whenever they feel like it. Peter did a tremendous amount of work automating the entire sales process at the beginning. At first, the website required us to manually enter each order and track the manufacturing process ourselves. It was very efficient. Nowadays we just kick back with our feet up.
This is a great business, why are you selling?
Believe me, it was a heated subject in our latest conference call. But we honestly just want to move the money into other business ideas. However, if the business doesn’t sell right now, we’d be happy to continue operating as it’s been a great experience.
Can you list a few opportunities for a prospective buyer to grow the business?
If a buyer already had experience in advertising with Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook, that would be a home run! Currently, we really only know Google and Pinterest. I can’t imagine the growth we’d have if we started successfully branching out across all social media platforms.
