How I added 35k MRR with a T-Shirt Subscription

Good morning. Good morning. Happy Monday. Today I wanna talk to you a little bit about how I added $30,000 in recurring revenue into my subscription offering with a t-shirt subscription. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. I'm gonna talk about how I did that, what happened. We're gonna talk a little bit about the specifics of that, but let me know in the chat if you've been thinking about starting a t-shirt subscription or adding a t-shirt subscription into your current subscription offerings? I would love to know that in the chat. Also, if you're brand new, if you're new around here, let me know in the chat. I would love to say hi to you as well. And here's one more thing. I'm going to pull up the little banner, but if you would like to get the text message, I send out a text message every morning, right? Not every morning. I'm not going to text you every morning. Every Monday morning before I go live, I send you a quick little text message just saying, hey, I'm about to go live, come join me, here's the topic of the day. If you would like to get that text, if you will just text me Monday, the word Monday to my text number, which is 940-204-0023, I will send you that text on Monday mornings. And that way it's a little reminder that you can join me either on Facebook or YouTube. We're streaming today on the How to Start a Subscription Box page on Facebook. We're streaming also on the Sarah Williams YouTube channel. If you haven't, if you haven't subscribed to the YouTube channel, it's a great location for you to go back and watch past Monday Momentums. Also, I'm creating some new material specifically for YouTube, so you won't see this material anywhere else. So if you are interested in just those little quick videos that get you inspired, that get you motivated, some actionable things, make sure that you follow me and subscribe to my YouTube channel. Team, will you grab the link for the YouTube channel and let's pop it into the chat today. But we're inside Launch Your Box, we're inside Scale Your Box. So we're streaming in 4 places this morning. So I would love to come to the chat and say good morning to everybody. I see Andrea's here over on YouTube. Hi, Lexi. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Rebecca. Hey, Antoinette. Hey, Myra. Good morning. Lynn says, yes, I've been thinking about the t-shirt subscription. Lexi says yes. Allison says yes. Good morning, everybody. Good morning, Cameron. Good morning, Vicki. Good morning, Stephanie. Good morning, everybody. Okay, so here's what we're going to talk about this morning. Um, I'm gonna walk you through how I started my t-shirt club, a little bit of things that I want you to think about when you're starting a t-shirt subscription, and then I've got some details for some more in-depth training for you if you would like that. But first of all, I had my subscription box, the Monogram Box, for about 18 months before I added the t-shirt club. And I think that's important. I don't want you to make multiple offers, multiple subscriptions when you're first starting out with your subscription box business because more options create decision fatigue. Okay. So if I have all these options, people don't know which one to pick. So I'm really a proponent of picking one idea, going all in with that one idea and not giving people too many options. And I say this a lot, like I don't want you to give too many options on how many, how many different types of boxes. Okay. So that's what we're talking about here. One subscription. I started with one subscription. I also started with one payment option. Monthly. And still to this day, they can only sign up for monthly. So I don't give them a monthly price, a 3-month price, a 1-year price. Like, some of you offer those packages and that's fine, but every time you require someone to make a decision, there's a higher percentage for them to bounce off your checkout page. So the goal here is really to get one offer, one price, one decision so that they don't, they feel good about that and they don't have to think about it. When someone has to pause and think about whatever decision that is, like which subscription, which pricing, you know, set, they, there's always a higher risk of them bouncing off of your checkout page. So I want you to just, let's think about that. Everyone that has multiple pricing structure as far as monthly, 3-month commitment, 6-month commitment, whatever that is. I only offer monthly for that. And in the same respect, I don't want you to make too many different subscription offerings right out of the gate. So if you're new, I want you to focus on one thing that could be a t-shirt subscription by itself. Okay. So I had my subscription for 18 months and I was getting ready to plan the next full year and I sent out a survey to my subscribers. And let me tell you, in my subscription, I was adding a t-shirt about once a quarter. So once a quarter, a t-shirt was part of my box. So it wasn't new. I had incorporated it into the box. So they— it's something they got. So in this research that I was doing, in this survey that I sent out, I said I had about 10 questions. Here's another tip. When you send a survey to your subscribers, don't make it too long, okay? Because they won't answer it. Make it short and sweet. Right now is the perfect time for you to be sending out a survey to your existing subscribers. But one of those questions was, what do you want to see more of in your subscription? And because I had put a t-shirt in their subscription box 3 or 4 times throughout the year, They were, they got that, they were used to that. That was 85% of my responses on that survey said they want more t-shirts. And that's when the idea was born for me to add a t-shirt subscription. So when you're thinking about adding the offer to your existing subscriber base, one, I want you to test it. Put a t-shirt in their box at some point, make it a bonus item, do something and put a t-shirt. Spring a t-shirt on them, put it in their box, and see how that's received. Do they want that? Because we got to make sure they want that before we go create a whole new subscription for it. Okay, the other thing that I really want you to think about, and this has kind of been a hard lesson for me to learn over the last few years, when starting a t-shirt subscription, you've got to get niche-specific. Okay, so if I just had T-shirts for everyone. They're not niche specific. I think about my subscription box, who my audience is, what I'm putting in the box, and then what is that T-shirt niche that I can align with my subscription box? And for me, that was inspirational tees. So if you have a faith-based box, you're going to want to do faith-based tees. If you have a pet box, you're going to want to do pet tees, things like that. So you need to make it align with your current niche so that your existing subscribers will want it. And your existing followers and your list will want it. Okay. So for me, I put a lot of inspirational things in my box. It's called the Monogram Box, but there are lots of quotes, there's lots of positive sayings, our stickers, things like that. So I needed to align my t-shirt subscription with a specific niche. Now, when I go rogue from that niche, that's when I have a problem. I do something a little funny, a little snarky, and my whole thing blows up. So that's why I want you to be specific so that you will attract the same subscriber that has your box if you're going to add it to your subscription offerings. If this is your one offering, I want you to think about what audience do you want to attract. You can't just say I'm starting a t-shirt subscription. What kind of t-shirts? What niche of t-shirts? So I want you to get niche specific. So number 1, I like to put numbers on things so that all my thoughts are fluid. Research what your existing subscribers want or your existing audience wants. That's the first thing you can do. Some polls, some posts, surveys, um, reply to emails. I want you to research what types of things they want. Number 2, I want you to get niche-specific, and I want it to align with your existing subscription box. I don't want you to make a t-shirt subscription that's very different from your current subscription box. Okay? I don't want you to do that. Now, number 3, what I did then was I added it as an upgrade to my subscription box or a standalone subscription. So 85% of my current subscribers were telling me they wanted more shirts. And I thought, okay, if I add a t-shirt to every box, that's really going to limit the, the dollar, my budget, the dollar amount I have for other things. So I can't really do that. But what if I made it an add-on? What if I made it its own subscription by itself where t-shirt lovers could just subscribe to it And I offered a discount to my existing box subscribers if they wanted to add it to their subscription. And so I made it part of my current subscription. Okay. And I made it standalone. So I had now these two offers so they could get the box and the subscription and I called it the combo box and or they could get the t-shirt subscription by itself. And so you can do that. You can add it as an upgrade. And a standalone. And what happened when I launched the t-shirt subscription, I offered it as an upgrade and I offered it as a standalone. That's when things really started to grow for me, because if someone didn't want all the things in the box, I didn't have anything else to offer them. But if they specifically just wanted a t-shirt every month, now I had an offer for them. I also had a downsell when someone canceled. Hey, don't want all the things? How about just getting a t-shirt every month? You know, and I know as women and probably guys too, but I just don't know the mind of the guy as much as I do the woman. We want something new to wear. We want something new to wear all the time. Yes, we love our favorite shirts. We love our favorite shirts, but we get sick of wearing our favorite shirts. We want something new and fresh. We want something new and fresh for the season. We want a new and fresh color. We want a new fresh look. Like we want something new and fresh all the time. And I knew that that's what a t-shirt subscription would offer. It's a consumable, even though you don't think of it as a consumable. Clothing is very much a consumable because we use it, we want more, we use it, we want more, even though it's still hanging in our closet. Women want more. We want the new fresh look. So in my mind, it was more of a consumable item than, say, my tumblers, my bags, those things that we typically use for longer periods of time. We will wear out a shirt. We will wear it every week for like 4 months and then we'll be sick of wearing it and it will go into the graveyard of our closet in the very back end and we won't probably ever wear it again. Right. So I knew that about women's buying habits. And so for me, it was a consumable item. It's not something that you eat and you want more of. It's not something that you use and you want more of, but it's something that you use for spurts of time and then you're going to want something different. Okay. So number 3, you can add it as a standalone subscription or you can add it as an upgrade to your current subscription. And that's what I did. And immediately I already had an audience base because I had my subscribers. So when I launched my t-shirt subscription, I got 350 subscribers on my first day. Half of them were upgrades. And half of them were standalone. And so that told me there was a need for my subscribers to upgrade and want all the things. And also there was a need for people that just wanted the t-shirt and they didn't want the box. So instantly it was a winner for me. And now I had to figure out how I could make it part of an overall experience of my box, right? Because I carefully— if you guys have seen my subscription boxes, you know that I carefully create and curate every month with a theme and a color palette, right? So I've got this beautiful box. We'll just take December, for example. It was navy blue and mauve colors and everything in there and blush pink. So it was all those like soft colors. So I can't have a hot pink t-shirt go with that, right? I can't have something that doesn't match that because for for all those combo subscribers that get the box, I really needed to hone in on how I could make the t-shirt feel like it was part of the box. And this was also part of my marketing. So if you're going to add on a t-shirt subscription to your box, it needs to feel like it's part of your subscription box. So whatever the theme is of my subscription box, I need to make the t-shirt match. Let me see if I've got a picture in here of, Um, let me pull it up real quick. I'm gonna pull this up so you get a really good understanding of what I'm talking about. Let me pull a picture in here real quick. Hold please, I've gotta, I've gotta do technology, and you know how that is for me. I'm gonna get— I'm gonna grab the, the December, um, monogram box picture. December Here we go. Let me pull this in really quick. I'm going to show you what I'm talking about because this is where people that start a t-shirt subscription have a miss. Well, that's not what I wanted. Hold, please. One more time. I'm gonna grab this. From my Google Drive. They tend to just make it random, and that's not what I want you to do. I want you to make it fit your subscription. And that's why it becomes a miss, because it is random and then it doesn't feel like it's part of the bigger whole. We need it to feel like it's part of the bigger picture. Okay, here, let's do this. Let me add this. Look at, look at me figuring out technology while I'm live. It's the scariest, most vulnerable thing, figuring out technology while you're on live streaming. But I got this. I always got this. No matter what comes up on the screen, we'll figure it out. Okay, so here's what I'm talking about. So you can see my December box. I had this really cute tote bag. I had these pink and mauve accessories, had a zipper bag that had the name on it. I had a file folder, um, I had some clips. And so you can see on the left, um, over here you can see the t-shirt. I used the rainbow design that was also in the bag. I used the colors from the box. So when this gets added to the subscription box, you can see it kind of rolled up in the front there. It doesn't feel like it's different. It feels like it's part of the subscription. It doesn't feel like it's just a random t-shirt in my box. So that's what I'm talking about when I want you to really make it feel like it's part of the box, because what this will do for you Not only does this help you with a theme and everything, it makes it feel like it's part of it. But now people that get the box and they see the t-shirt that matches, they're going to, they're going to be like, oh, I want to upgrade. This all goes together. I'm missing a piece of this. I want all of this. Okay. And so that's what I want you to do. I want you to make it a part of your monthly theme. And then every time you do the box opening, I always do it with the shirt and I always say this is the combo box and that always leads to upgrades because my subscribers are going to see like, oh, I have all these other things. I don't have the cute t-shirt, even though you don't need the t-shirt to wear the— to use the bag or anything else that's in that box. But you can see how it all coordinates together. And that's the experience that you're delivering. If you— if I had a random hot pink shirt in that box, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to me and it's not going to make sense to the subscriber when they unbox it. So we want to make sure it, it matches. Okay. And then think about all of those things when you are building up your t-shirt subscription. Number one, is it niche specific? I'm sorry. Number one, do the research. What, what does my subscriber want? What does my existing audience want? If you don't have any subscribers yet, Hey, let's start doing some polls. Let's start asking questions. Okay, so we need to get niche specific, number 2. Number 3, you could make it a standalone offer. You can make it an add-on, an upsell. And number 4, I want you to make it cohesive into your monthly theme so it feels like an experience. Now, in the fall, I developed a brand new course and it's called How to Start a T-Shirt Subscription, and I take some of the very specific things that I learned building my t-shirt subscription, and I put it into a comprehensive course. It's all prerecorded and you can basically get all of the videos downloaded. And I'm going to talk you through what that looks like a little bit. Let me share my screen and I'm going to show you a couple of things. So if you're interested in starting a subscription, all we have to do is really go through these items and you can really get started on that quickly. Let me see, here's the link here. Okay, so here's some of the lessons in this new— this is the, this is the course, How to Start a T-Shirt Subscription. And in that I have different lessons. So audience building is number one. We've got to make sure we have an audience before we start selling. Picking that t-shirt niche, and I just talked about it on this Monday Momentum. I'm going to walk you through different t-shirt brands and styles because there are so many options when you start to look at buying the t-shirts. I'm going to talk you through what and why and what I use. Okay, graphics are a huge part of your t-shirt subscription. You don't have to be a graphic designer to have a t-shirt subscription. There are lots of resources where you don't have to be creative, you don't have to make the designs. Um, so I'm walking through lots of options for you if you want to make the designs or if you want to purchase designs. Lesson 5 is probably one of my favorite, most comprehensive lessons because there are so many types of printing. We're talking direct-to-garment, direct-to-film, sublimation, heat transfer, screen printing. There's so many things to consider when we talk about the types of printing for t-shirts. I go in depth into all of those and when and why and how you would use them. So why would you use screen printing over something else? Why would you use DTF printing over something else? And so I walk you through that in Lesson 5. I'm going to show you how to make mockups so you don't even have to have the t-shirt in your hands to sell it. So mockups are a huge part of a t-shirt subscription. We talk about shipping and fulfillment. I'm going to tell you that shipping our— fulfilling and shipping our t-shirt subscription, we can do thousands of t-shirts in a half day. We have it locked and loaded and we know what we're doing. And I'm teaching you that in lesson 7 right here. And then let's talk about pricing. I'm going to talk about what you need to consider when you start to price your t-shirt subscription, how to price it, and to make sure you're profitable. My t-shirt subscription has a 65% profit margin. So if you look at the numbers, if you're a data person, $30,000 a month with a 65% profit margin— do the math— it's a huge lift into my business. And it started with the 340 subscribers I got with my first launch. Okay, I'm going to walk you through product listing and sales page for your t-shirt subscription. And then of course, you know, I love a good add-on and an upsell. We're going to talk about what you can do to add on. I have an add-on with my t-shirt subscription. I also have an add-on with the box to the t-shirt subscription. So we're going to talk through all of that. And then I have a bonus. It's called Sarah's Faves, and I'm listing my go-to vendors that I use to buy t-shirts. I'm listing my go-to styles, the ones that I use in my t-shirt subscription and why. I'm listing the packaging. All of my favorites about my t-shirt subscription is in this bonus. And so that's available to you. It's a mini course that I've created. Um, but I wanted to walk through that. I would love to— I see some questions in the chat, um, and I would love to answer those. So let me come over to the chat. Stephanie says it's a great training. Stephanie must have my t-shirt course. Um, so this is separate from LauncherBox membership. This is a separate course, and you have it for a lifetime. So once you purchase it, you have it for life, and you can go back through it anytime you want to. Um, okay. Do you ever have issues with sizing? Okay, so sizing is one of those things that we just, we have to figure it out. Okay, so when someone signs up for my subscription, that's where I capture their sizing. And if you're going back, if you already have a subscription now and you want to add a t-shirt to kind of test the waters, all you have to do is send out an email and get sizing and follow up and things like that. Okay, so that's not that hard to do, especially if you don't have a ton of subscribers. But you want to capture this information at checkout. Now, what happens if they request a size, you send the size and it doesn't fit? So we have the option that they can exchange, but they have to send that back to me and we will exchange their size for them. So they have to do the work on that. So they'll have to— we'll exchange it for them. But typically, because we have sizing charts and things like that, we don't have a lot of issues with sizing. That's one of the other things that I teach you in the course is using similar or same brands consistently so that your sizing doesn't fluctuate from month to month. Because you and I both know as women, sizing on shirts fluctuates by brand. It really does. Like, I could wear a size in this brand and I could wear a bigger size in the next brand. You know, it, it fluctuates. So that's one of the really important things as you're building this t-shirt subscription is be consistent with your brands and your sizing. Okay, um, let's see. Do you have— do you suggest shirt printer provider? All of that is in the course. I tell you what I use, I give you some options in there. We talk through what— how to find a printer. Um, I use one locally, so I talk about that in there. Um, okay. So I think that's all the questions that I see in the chat. But here's the thing. When you're thinking about what you can add or what you want to add to your offering this year, a t-shirt subscription is really an easy fit for a lot of you. It's not for everyone. That's why I want you to test the waters with it. I want you to try it. I want you to suggest it. Say, hey, I'm thinking of starting or adding a t-shirt subscription. Let me know your thoughts. I want you to put some time and effort into the research. We can't just lob lots of different styles and types of t-shirts. And when I say styles, I mean like themes. So again, it's that inspirational theme that I work with because that's what's in my box. There's lots of inspiration in my box. When I did a snarky tee one time, I got roasted, and I had a lot of people cancel and a lot of people mad because they would never wear that t-shirt. And it's become the running joke around here for a few years of this one t-shirt that will haunt me forever. But I went off my theme, and I can't do that. So you have to really pick a niche, pick a theme, and stick with that because The person that wants inspirational tees, it could be the person that likes my snarky tee. Like, I like snarky stuff and I'm inspirational, but it wasn't across the board. And I had to be very— it taught me a huge lesson, okay, in picking a niche and staying with that niche because I found the right customer that wants the inspirational tees. So whatever that is for you, we need to stick to that niche. Okay, do the research, figure that out. And then as far as being overwhelmed with designs, it's as simple as going through the 6 in 60 workshop that I have. It's a free workshop and it helps you line out 6 months of subscription boxes in 60 minutes. And you can really take that workshop and apply it to a t-shirt subscription. It's great for a one thing of the month subscription because I'm really just taking each month at a time, and I'm planning that on the Six in Sixty. Now, because I make it coordinate with my subscription box, I already have the boxes planned out ahead of time. Like, I'm all the way done with 2024, so now I can look at every month, I can see the color and the theme of that month, and then I can design a t-shirt to go with the color and theme. So I have a starting spot every single month with my t-shirt club. Okay, so that's what we're talking about today. What would it mean for you to add $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 in recurring revenue to your business this year? What would that change for you? Is a t-shirt subscription an answer to that? I want you to think about it. I want you to think about the 4 things that I talked about today. And if you want to dig in and add a t-shirt subscription to your subscription offerings this year, go grab my course and let's get on it. Because an extra $10,000 in recurring revenue to your business, um, is over $100,000 in revenue this year. It's really that simple. We just have to make progress. We have to do the research, pick a niche, Make it coordinate and make your offer. All right. All right. I'll see you guys later this week inside Launch Your Box. We have tech talks this week inside the membership. Y'all have a good day.