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Idea: Sell T-shirts

A friend and I recently came up with the idea to sell t-shirts based on gags from popular TV shows. This is not an original idea, but after hammering our brains against it for a while, we saw the real value in this project and realized why it is worth doing. Mainly, for the following reasons:

1. These shirts would be very easy to market. Our first idea was based on a gag from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. To see how we might sell this shirt, we looked at how many fans of Always Sunny could be found on Facebook, and how many of them were males older than 21 (who we think would buy the shirt). There turned out to be about 300,000 people who matched this description and we could market to them for a meager $.70/click.
2. This kind of business can take very little time to manage/operate. The whole operation is based on the fact that we could do the whole thing without ever touching a single shirt. By using other companies who specialize in printing custom shirts, we would eliminate our need to ship, store, or buy anything. Of course this reduces our margin on each shirt, but I’m looking for ways to automatically generate income, not another job.
3. The content for new t-shirts is automatically generated by popular shows on television. Apparently, there’s no need to obtain permission for using the content from the TV shows as long as we don’t use any character likenesses, trademarks, or copyrighted material. No one can really sue us for making a T-Shirt with a can of wine on it, they don’t own the idea. This, again, is helpful because there’s not a required hours of slamming our heads against a desk until we come up with a great idea, we only have to watch TV and log particular moments which could be used for shirts, then test them against an internet audience.
4. This idea is very testable. The fact that the entire marketing strategy is PPC based, we can repeatedly test a variety of material to see what people like/will buy without having to invest in any shirts beforehand.
5. My girlfriend can make the designs in illustrator for me. I’m not an illustrator genius. I can get her help, fortunately. If she decided she wouldn’t want to I’d have to think of some other way to make the designs, or learn myself, a slight setback.

Why am I sharing this idea publicly instead of locking it away in a vault? The answer is because no one reads this blog, because this idea could be copied a thousand times and it could still make me money, and because if I don’t get around to doing this, maybe someone else can benefit from this good idea.