Branding on a Budget: The Impact of Customized T-Shirts

Branding is something that most businesses should perform well, but rarely do so due to budget constraints (or at least perceived constraints) or a misunderstanding of what it entails. This is unfortunate as it can lead to a loss in visibility, which is all-important as new competitors come online all the time and confusion among existing or potential customers as to where to find them.

However, it need not be this way since branding is something that can be easily achieved with minimal investment and that can pay off enormously when done well. In this post, we will take a look at one type of branding that can have a considerable effect without costing the earth.

What Are Customized T-Shirts?

We will start off this post by discussing what might seem like an easy question to answer but, in fact, has a little more complexity than you might think. While you likely already understand that a customized shirt is something that has your logo or image printed on it, do you really know how that image got there?

When it comes to printing, there are many options, but only one that is able to offer the best results (at least when it comes to showcasing your brand as high-quality). This option is called DTF Printing (Direct-to-Film) and gives you an enormous amount of flexibility in the designs you can generate while maintaining the kind of quality you want your business to be associated with.

Some of the primary advantages of this method of printing include:

• Versatility: Because of the way Direct-to-Film printing is performed, you have a tremendous amount of flexibility when it comes to fabrics and blends of fabrics you might want to use. Additionally, the colors produced remain visible even on darker-colored fabrics, meaning you can choose almost any style you want with little loss of quality.
• Durability: When developing a branding campaign that includes apparel, it can really pay to ensure you use durable materials. This kind of printing produces exceptionally durable prints that can last many washes and won’t crack as time passes.
• Full-color and detailed designs: Using DTF over other printing options allows you to turn the images your graphic designer has produced digitally into real-world designs without any loss in sharpness or color accuracy. That latter point about color can make a real difference, particularly when considering branding, which relies on people immediately associating your designs with your brand based on visuals.
• No weeding involved: Weeding involves removing additional material around the printed design and occurs with less sophisticated printing. By eliminating this step, you can lower costs and ramp things up far more efficiently. 

What Effect Can They Have?

Now that you have a decent overview of what they are and the best way to produce your t-shirts, we will explore what makes this option so great for your marketing efforts.

Custom Designs Make Your Brand Stand Out

While many larger corporations will be remiss in including too many superfluous designs outside of their usual logos, they are attempting to cement their brand as the go-to, which is slightly different from what you might want to achieve as a smaller option.

In your case, it can be a great idea to come up with several engaging designs that incorporate your logo along with something else that is connected to your brand. For example, if you are a local cake-making business, you could create a design that showcases illustrations of the cake-making process in the font, with your business details on the back.

By thinking outside of the box, you will make it more likely that those who receive your t-shirt will wear them more often without feeling as though they are unwittingly shilling for you (which is a blogger deal with the younger generation than you might think).

You Can Use Them For Promotional Events

Customized shirts are a fantastic opportunity to shotgun your brand out into the wild by giving them away at a price that everyone loves…free! So, you need to bear in mind that this will cost you, but you can chalk it down to a marketing expense because the impact this might have is worth much more than the initial cost of buying the shirts and having your designs printed on them.

In practice, you could charge for them, but if you are at an event for the sole purpose of brand visibility, then giving them away for free is likely going to be the better choice.

They Help You To Achieve Almost Free Advertising

There is nothing quite as sweet as heading out to your local town and seeing somebody walking around in a t-shirt you gave away at an event only the previous week!

This is the kind of free advertising that most companies can only dream of, and once you have tastefully saturated the local area with your brand, you will almost certainly begin to see an uptick in business. If you don’t, then something has gone dramatically wrong, and you should take a long, hard look at your overall marketing campaign to see where you can improve.

Design Flexibility For All Audiences

At the heart of it, creating t-shirts for the purposes of a branding exercise isn’t the most complicated thing in the world.

You invest in a load of high-quality t-shirts, then send them to your local printer (who hopefully uses Direct-to-Film printing) to print whatever designs your graphic design department has come up with. It is because of this simplicity that you also have the chance to move with the times and generate a raft of different options for the various markets you might want to get.

Moreover, you can create small batches of multiple designs and test them out to see what generates the most traction. Once you know, you can start to scale things up using the design that has proven itself to be most popular and get your brand started out on the right footing.

Custom t-shirts can have a much more powerful effect on your branding and marketing efforts than people give them credit for. The fact they are so ubiquitous, easy to create, and relatively affordable in comparison to other marketing techniques makes them the ideal method to promote your brand and turn the many potential customers that exist all around into actual customers.