Hot Tee Talk

In the t-shirt business, companies live or die by one thing:  Whether or not their marketing plan works.

Launching I’m a Hot Tee entirely out of pocket, I had a limited budget for marketing, and really want to make sure that every dollar was well-spent.  I had just read Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant book The Tipping Point, and it gave me a number of ideas.

One of them was to use YouTube as a marketing platform.

It has gone better than I ever could have dreamed.

What I did was by no means perfect, but it is a really terrific case study, I think, and might be of use to you guys.  So here’s the story of how I used YouTube to sell sixty shirts the night I launched.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to make sure my company was different than other “funny tee” places out there, because – and I’m not trying to disparage their character or anything – I always felt vaguely uncomfortable when I saw crude humor shirts on other people when I was a kid. Now, I’m twenty-four years old, but I remember vividly having to look away, having to pretend I hadn’t seen them. I also remember feeling sort of badly for my parents, who tried to shield me from that stuff.

Anyhow – it occurred to me that the best way to market to people who love clean humor as much as I do would be to get in with someone who does that sort of thing on YouTube. So that’s what I did.

is, as of this writing, the 68th most subscribed comedian of all-time on YouTube, and his popularity has been skyrocketing lately. Ed has a really loyal fanbase, and part of his schtick is that he does all these different characters during his prank phone calls/pranks in public. One of the most popular ones is a cowboy named “Mumbles.”

So I made Ed a video letter, asking if he’d like to help me promote my tees in exchange for us making him a one-of-a-kind “Mumbles is My Homeboy” shirt.

He called me within an hour and said he’d like to work with me and sell the “Mumbles” shirts to the public.

I was floating.

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Fast-forward to six weeks later: Ed put up a prank call video titled “Mumbles Shirts!!”

Two minutes later, I got my first order.

This was at something like 10 PM. As I drifted off to sleep, I kept hearing my Outlook Express e-mail alert chime sound.

When I woke up, we had sold over 60 shirts. Literally overnight, with no other marketing whatsoever.

The best part? When the people went to get the “Mumbles” shirts, approximately 1 in 10 of them picked up another one of our funny graphic t-shirts.

Now, I’m really not bragging: I just wanted to share this incredible information with you guys, because I really don’t know of anybody else who has done quite what we have. Yes, the sales have definitely trickled off, but Ed and I are going to make another video soon to promote the shirts again. And I’m also currently getting my shirts off to as many YouTube celebrities as I can, so they’ll wear them and hopefully link us.

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So, what lessons can be learned here?

1) Find out who your target market is, and then find out who are, to use Malcoln Gladwell’s term, “The Influencers.” You do gaming tees? Try to hook up with the Angry Video Game Nerd, or the Irate Gamer, or maybe even the guys at ScrewAttack. You get the idea.

2) Put effort into your presentation to The Influencers! I spent a solid couple days filming and editing a fairly simple, but elegant, video for Ed. He said that it was the professionalism of that video that made him become convinced I was someone he could feel comfortable working with.

3) A video that receives a lot of views will get you more exposure than almost any CPC campaign – and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper, too! Total cost of getting Ed to put up the video (which currently has 10K+ views)? About sixty dollars worth of free shirts for him and his family.

4) Three words: Synergy, synergy, synergy. Ed had been wanting to get t-shirts made because he wants to get his name and face out there; I wanted to get exposure for my tees. Ed actually was so happy about the t-shirts being made by a high-quality company (he’d experimented with, and been hugely disappointed by, Cafe Press) that he refused to be paid for what we made on the shirts. He just wanted a number of free ones for himself and for his family.

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There have been so many other wonderful things that came from this. First of all, Ed has become a good friend of mine. And I think the t-shirts lend a certain air of excitement to his persona. (Not that he totally needed our help or anything: His popularity has more than doubled since August. It took him almost 2 years to get 10K subscribers, and he’s gotten 12K since August. And, he may be being featured on MadTV in a couple weeks.) Also, Ed is setting up his own website now, and we’re probably going to team up to do more shirts together.

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I apologize if this post was ramble-y; but I thought it would help you guys out. Let me know if you have any questions; I’d love to answer ‘em.

- Mike
I’m a Hot Tee | Funny Graphic T-shirts for Everyone | “Hot Tees You Can Take Home to Mom!”