How to design, make, and sell 48 original T-shirts all in only 7 days

"What about selling our original logo T-shirt?" everything started from this one random idea at our practice in the basement studio at Takada-no-baba, Tokyo.

- Branding Myon-myon

During my stay in Japan last year, I made a band with my friends and named it "Myon-myon" after the initial letter of each of our first name. The band was not a serious one like aiming at being a pro, but just to have fun with music and mainly played cover songs. In fact, our slogan as a band was "Revive the school days." Four out of six members being working adults who already finished schooling a several years ago, we wanted to feel that good old school days in this band activity and also wanted our audience to feel that way. We decided to participate in a local spring festival and to play a popular song  back in 2005 when we were junior-high or high school students. However, I thought that is not enough. Even though this band is not a serious one, I wanted to stand out on the stage while there would be about 50 teams performing on the stage at the spring festival. I thought "This is time to use my marketing knowledge and passion!"

- Designing Logo

We had a meeting to discuss what we could do special and stand out in a crowd. One member came up with the idea of making our own band-logo. Luckily, one of our members, Misaki Kuma works at a designing office as a pro-designer. She was down for making our logo. I noted some requirements for her to follow in the designing process for the purpose of branding: 1.) The logo shouldn't be too cool. We need something that feels a little bit out-dated or retro; 2.) The logo should carry the young feeling of school days; 3.) It should be readable and make people easier to remember the name of our band. It was a difficult order since requirement 1 and 2 seemed to somewhat conflict, but our designer nailed it!

Misaki used the font that feels retro with the cherry blossom and cherry motifs. She wrote the name in Japanese Hiragana, because usually Japanese people think English alphabets are cool. By rather using Japanese Hiragana characters, the logo became tacky but friendly to our target audience. The red and blue colour also added to the retro feeling. In Japan, school starts in April when lots of cherry blossoms blooming everywhere. Therefore, cherry and cherry blossom motifs implies fresh start of school. The logo managed to mix nostalgia and young fresh feeling together. 

After having this logo, we started to think of printing this logo onto T-shirt to create our stage costume. But we all felt we could do more. We were so excited with this logo that now we wanted to sell some kind of original band novelties at the festival. However, the problem was our low budget and a limited time. The spring festival was only two weeks away from when we got our brand-new logo. 

- Manufacturing Original Logo T-shirt

Firstly we thought of using the service offered by some companies where we just have to choose the template T-shirt and send the design and they make them instead of us. However, soon we learned that the whole process takes at least a week including the shipping. Besides, the biggest problem of using such service was its cost. That way, one piece of T-shirt costs about 1300 yen (about $15 CAD). Of course there was economy of scale which means if we produce more, the cost gets lower, but we were very not sure of how many we could sell during the festival and we did not want to take the risk of having a big inventory.

Therefore, we have decided to print the logo by hand. The technique is called "stenciling" which requires a template sheet. Misaki curved out the logo on a regular plastic file folder with a cutter knife, and we used a make-up sponge to apply the ink. This way the cost got reduced a lot and the handmade texture added to the retro feeling of the brand image as well. I found a store that sells colour T-shirt at the store front, so we did not have to wait for them to be shipped. Also we went to a hand-craft store and found water-proof red and blue inks that are laundry washable . All this allowed the variable cost per T-shirt to go down as low as 300 yen (approx. $3.5 CAD) and we set the price to 1000 yen per T-shirt (approx. $12 CAD).  When we had everything ready for production, it was already less than a week away from the day of the festival. (For the detailed production process, go to Band T-shirt Marketing Project page.)

Because we did not want to carry any inventory, we decided to take built-to-order (BTO) production approach which production begins only after customer orders are confirmed. This left only 2DAYS for the marketing and 3 DAYS for manufacturing. Wow... no executive team on the earth would say "okay, go" for such a schedule. But after all... WE DID IT!!

We took direct marketing approach. I made a template ad e-mail that talks about the spring festival and the benefit of the T-shirt such that "You can come and wear this T-shirt to feel that you are a part of our stage, and this can be a perfect souvenir to bring back home to remember your experience at the festival. The design is perfect for spring and summer wear." Each of us emailed this to almost all the email addresses we know. As a result, we received 48 orders in 2 days!

The production finally started after receiving the orders via email. I took a train to go to the T-shirt store and bought 48 pink T-shirts of different sizes and brought them back to the factory --- a.k.a. my parents' house. Even though there were six of us, since all of us had full-time work, not everyone could come to manufacture T-shirt. The one who could find time came and contributed to the manufacturing process. Especially the designer Misaki and me did not sleep for two days. 

Finally, on the day of the spring festival. We were still very busy because we had to find our customers to hand the completed Myon-myon T-shirts before our stage started. We successfully handed all the T-shirts out and had a great moment with the audience. Some people saw those wear Myon-myon T-shirt, and we even got some additional orders in person after our performance. It was a great experience that I could try out all the marketing knowledge in a small scale real world market environment. 

If you are interested in marketing your original novelties, please contact Honami! I'll make anything possible (as much as I can)! ;)

**We donated the profit to the youth activity fund to support young people who is interested in similar activities.**