By: Ernest Saco
On March 10th, 2016 (my 27th birthday) my wife and I launched an online t-shirt business. This post is to document our launch, which happened in less than 48 hours of having the idea.
On the night of Tuesday, March 8th, my wife [Nadia] and I were watching an episode of “The Bachelor”. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the show; it’s a reality show where 25 women compete to win the heart of 1 man, hence the name “The Bachelor”. The show is a little ridiculous, but it’s popular and entertaining.
During the episode, one of the contestants said a phrase “Being A Mom Is My Jam”. We loved the phrase and Nadia’s tweet about printing a shirt that had the phrase on it quickly caught the attention of many, including the contestant herself. We knew we were onto something.
I quickly bought momshirt.com and we began conversations with our friends and suppliers Kimball Concepts to help with printing the shirts. The next day we sent over the color scheme and the type of material we wanted. I began telling my co-workers about our new venture, and purchased Shopify to begin building the site.
The next day was my birthday and I had taken the day off. That morning Kimball Concepts had sent us 4 designs to choose from for our new shirt. Nadia began reaching out to her friends who are moms to get their opinions on the shirts. During lunch I began interviewing moms that I didn’t know at a restaurant which shirt they’d be more likely to wear. After a little bit of back and forth, we had made our decision.
Two hours later we had a sample ready. I picked it up and brought it home. Nadia put it on and a friend of ours came over with a nice camera to take a photo of her wearing the shirt. I uploaded the photo while Nadia began tweeting that we were live!
At 6:30pm on March 10th, less than 48 hours after we had the idea, we had launched our online eCommerce store momshirt.com! We had spent $25 at this point. Within a few minutes of Nadia tweeting that we were live, that original Bachelor contestant saw the tweet and retweeted it, to her 40,000+ followers. We got our first sale, then our second, then our third, and on and on all night.
The journey had begun!
The next post will go over the 3 days following the launch, and how we were able to generate well over $1000 in sales without spending any money on inventory… yet.