So, you’ve been tasked with organising the t-shirts.
Team t-shirts might be needed for a charity fun run, a team-building away-day, or for a conference. Or you might have come up with a great idea for a cheeky slogan that you think people might buy from you in their thousands, or you might be a band on tour.
Now you have to do the hard part. Firstly, you’ll need to contact printers to get a quote. This can be a time consuming process itself, and I’ll address this in a later post — it’s why we’ve built the fastest, smartest t-shirt ordering website in the world. But one of the main questions you’ll definitely be asked, and often the most difficult to answer is
“So, which sizes do you want”?
Sizing is probably the area where we see people get ordering t-shirts most wrong. They make crude judgements about what sizes they should order (“I dunno, 20 of each!?”), and inevitably end up with a bunch that they just can’t use or sell.
But time and again we see people waste effort, time and money by ordering the wrong sizes, colours, or types of merch, and been left with hundreds, even thousands of dollars’ worth of t-shirts sat in a box. We’ve seen plenty of people even lose money on merchandise! Whether you spend the next 12 months with a box of unused t-shirts under your desk, or you miss out on 50 shirts, and hundreds of £s/$s of sales
So, we’ve taken the data from the last 15,000 direct-to-customer sales worldwide we’ve made via our platforms, and we’ve analysed it to bring you some great insights that can make your next bulk merch purchase more efficient and more profitable. We’ve built data into the very heart of Ramp T-shirts, so it will predict the sizing that you will need, based on the country that you are in. And we’re giving you a sneak peek into the mens/unisex t-shirt data here.
The quick headline here is “go big on Mediums and Larges”,
especially if you’re in Europe or North America (more on the difference between countries shortly). This is where you will make the majority of your sales. In fact, two thirds of male/unisex t-shirt sales are accounted for by Mediums and Larges. In fact, you’re really not going to be losing out too much if you don’t go for any Smalls or XXLs!
Armed with this broad data you’re equipped to make a better judgment on roughly how many t-shirts you should buy to minimise the likelihood of ending up with a bunch of unused tshirts. But what happens if, for example, your a band going on tour overseas? Or you’re planning to give away 1,000 t-shirts at an international conference. This is where more detailed data starts to make things even more interesting.
Here you can see that European countries and Australia broadly follow a similar pattern, with the Mediums and Larges accounting for the majority of the sales. However, when we turn our heads to USA (purple) we can see there is a much stronger percentage accounted for by XXLs (approx 15%), with Mediums and Larges being the apparent “victims”. In other words, it appears that t-shirt wearers in the US tend to take larger sizes*. In fact, they buy about double the amount of XXLs t-shirts that their European brethren do! Japan (orange) also turns the Euro-centric view on its head, with a much more small-medium bias in its distribution, with almost zero XXLs sold in Japan at all**.
More data:
So, if you’re touring Colorado instead of Cornwall, or you have a team in Italy instead of Indiana, this is something that you need to take into account. And don’t forget to check out Ramp’s super-simple system, which makes ordering and predicting the sizes quick and easy. It also even collects the sizes for you if you have a known group of people. Just use the code “DATA” for 5% off your order.
* This data doesn’t take into account cultural preferences for “fit” — i.e. We are hearing increasing anecdotal insight that Americans prefer to wear their t-shirts more baggy, whereas Europeans have a tendency to go for a more “fitted” look.
* We have fewer sales, and therefore less data, for Japan, so this is still a work in progress
Any questions?
If there’s anything we can do to help, just ask in the LiveChat box, give us a call, email us, or use the QUOTE REQUEST FORM below:
And don’t forget the free checklist below so that you have all the things you need to know before ordering custom t-shirts and more in one quick and easy document.
Neil Cocker is the CEO of Ramp, the world’s fastest, smartest team t-shirt ordering website in the world.
