Sunburst Logo LLC

There is so much to consider when trying to launch a St. Louis T-shirt printing company and one has to be very selective and discriminating when it comes to allocating whatever dollar amounts you have to work with in order to get the very most impact. There are so many different components to launching any business and the custom screen printing and embroidery industry is certainly no exception to that rule. Somebody once said that experience is the best teacher, but I think that person never owned a business. I would much rather learn from someone else’s mistakes so I can avoid making my own.

I see a lot of young entrepreneurs make the mistake of investing in a large shop as well as very expensive equipment before they have the clientele established to the point where it can support this type of major investment. Just an embroidery machine brand-new can cost up to $100,000 and more and that’s just one machine. That does not include an automatic screen printing press or a digital T-shirt printing machine. I think the first thing you should think about is how are you going to market yourself. I have always been of the opinion that marketing is the foundation that everything else is built on. It doesn’t matter how much expensive equipment you own and how large of the facility you are in if you don’t have any customers. In other words, nothing at all will happen until the sale starts. When you break down the anatomy of any sale it normally has two major components. The first and by far the most challenging part of this equation is finding the potential buyer. It doesn’t matter what you are selling or how good you are at creating a perceived value in the potential buyer’s eyes if they don’t happen to need whatever it is you are selling at that very moment in time. You can be the best closer in the world, but if they don’t happen to need what you’re selling, then you won’t get the sale.

I have found that the most cost-effective and successful way to promote my St. Louis screen printing company is by social media and optimizing my website. The Internet is the way people find whatever it is they’re looking for these days. They simply go to the search engine of their choice and do a relevant search and who ever happens to be on that particular landing page is who they’re going to call first. I can’t stress the importance of being on that first page, because people have a very short attention span and we live in a society of instant gratification. If they can’t find what it is they’re looking for immediately, then they’re going to give up and go to whatever it is that’s in front of them. For example, if they happened to do a search for something as simple as St. Louis digital T-shirt printing company or custom embroidery, we want to be the very first option that shows up on that landing page.