Bespoke manufacturing and brand monetisation

So my Dad said to me, “So you reckon I should order an initial stock of 10?”. I said, “It’s the 21st century. You don’t need to hold stock”.  We were talking about a new way of monetising his Greypath brand, because I had just turned my first dollar of profit from selling Churchill Club t-shirts.

The best thing was that after an initial setup that took around two hours, I then had to do nothing. Very Tim Ferris, Four hour work week! So here’s what I did.

1. I setup an account at https://www.redbubble.com and downloaded their t-shirt template.
2. I opened up paint.net which I downloaded for free from www.getpaint.net and created a couple of templates.
3. I uploaded my t-shirt templates, and configured and priced the t-shirts.
4. I then used the automatically generated t-shirt images at RedBubble for advertising in our newsletter and website, and hyperlinked this to the RedBubble sales platform.
5. I received notification from RedBubble a couple of days later that my first t-shirt had sold and $8 was winging my way.

Now $8 may not seem like much, but it’s a start and I don’t have any extra work to do. RedBubble handles the sale, manufacture and delivery. I have a number of designs up, and will add a couple more as digital images cost us nothing but design time.

I’m pretty excited about this concept and thinking about how I can do the same thing with https://www.lulu.com that will generate books for us. Unfortunately my father has issues with this, as he just can’t come to grips with the concept of bespoke manufacturing for low priced goods.

By the way, I wrote this article sitting in a deck chair at a campsite in Warrnambool, using and iPad and a wireless hot zone. Starting to get excited about the mobility technology can bring.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.