Best Ways To Produce Booster Club Apparel

Introduction

Representing your school through booster club apparel and merchandise is a great way to show team spirit. Clothing (hoodies, t-shirts, hats, etc.) is a one of the key ways to generate revenue for your school activity! By using your school’s colors, mascot, and other identifying marks, you can proudly represent your team and and garner the community’s support as well. In the past there were limited ways to produce booster club apparel and distribute it to your supporters, however these days, with the advent of the internet, there are a multitude of resources to handle your booster club apparel needs.

Basic Steps To Produce Booster Club Apparel

Whether you choose a local or online vendor to produce your booster club apparel, there are some basic steps involved in almost any apparely production process. First you need to decide how to produce your apparel design, including: screen printing, embroidery, or heat printing. The next step is to create the designs for your booster club apparel. Don’t worry if you don’t have a designer that you can use to implement your own design, most vendors have designers you can use, or applications to design it yourself.

Now that you have a design, you can choose your local or online apparel vendor. Talk with different apparel vendors to decide on clothing quality, style, the size of your print run, sizes of apparel you will need, set up costs and any other associated fees. All of these factors will impact the cost of your booster club apparel production run.  With your vendor chosen, you now need to spend time marketing and preselling as much of your booster club apparel as possible. Don’t worry about over-selling as you can always increase the size of your run or do an immediate second run.  The final step in the process is receiving your booster club apparel and distributing the pre-orders.  Any remaining clothing should continue to be sold at school and events to help continue to raise money.

Why Use A Local Vendor To Produce Booster Club Apparel?

Choosing a local vendor typically costs a little more per unit printed, but you will save on having zero shipping cost. The flips side with shopping locally is you store the product yourself, adding a level of labor. That being said, local purchasing is advantageous in that you are able to restock faster. Just like online, you can buy as little or as much of your booster club apparel as you would like, with vendors discounting the larger the order.

The risk with ordering locally comes when you are left to deal with any booster club apparel that doesn’t sell. This means you need to understand how much you can buy for price breaks, that will turn over at a price that covers your costs and generates enough revenue. As you build a relationship with your local apparel vendor, they may be willing to offer your club terms to help potentially ease up front costs.

You can use sites like Yelp check reviews on local screen printers, or post on Upwork to have someone produce your merchandise locally. For a more detailed list of locally available screen printers, consider researching them on printers.screenprinting.com to develop a list of local vendors.

Why Hire An Online Vendor To Produce Booster Club Apparel?

Choosing an online vendor to produce your booster club apparel has many of the same costs as buying locally, except you do have a ton of vendor choices. As you are talking pricing with online vendors, make sure that the shipping costs are very clearly noted as you need to factor those into your per unit cost. Keep in mind that shipping costs really becomes more of a factor when you are dealing with the printer as single unit drop shipper. However, utilizing the online producers to handle online sales of your product might be an easy turn-key solution to selling your booster club apparel online – rather than managing an online store, plus shipping, plus returns etc. At the same time, you can also order bulk through many of the online vendors which will give you local inventory to sell at school, events and around your community.

Custom Ink is a great website to start with as it has a wide range of options for you to choose from and what routes are possible when deciding on a look. Spreadshirts is a great online tool you can you to design, order, and sell your booster club apparel as well and also gives you the option of buying your product in bulk, or hosting the design on an online store. Other great options to look at when trying to make your decision would be Printful, Underground Printing, and Gallore which all give more options and price point to look at to see what avenue would be the most beneficial to you.

Cost To Produce Booster Club Apparel

There are various factors that comprise the cost of producing your booster club apparel. Material, article of clothing, design, clothing brand, quantity, and shipping are all contributing factors when it comes to pricing. Depending on what you are producing, pricing will change from article to article. Pricing will also vary based on region, vendor, season, and a host of other factors.

Basic t-shirts start at around $5 per unit, leggings begin close to $20, and hoodies start at close to $25. There are various other options that can affect the price, such as brand, style, fabric, and sizing that can also add to the total of producing your apparel. Take your time with all options as each can be adjusted depending on your budget and market.

Just like garment pricing can vary from vendor to vendor, so too do your booster club apparel design costs. Adding additional designs to other areas of a clothing article can add $.75-$10 per article (depending on the article and the design needs).Furthermore, the number of colors you use in your design can impact pricing – the more colors used, the higher the cost per article.  Finally make sure that you are aware of any one time fees such as screen burning or printer set up fees as those need to be factored into the cost per unit.

Finally, order quantity also plays a huge part in your overall pricing. The more of any design you order, the bigger your discount. Discount can range from less than 10% on single digit orders, to 80% for orders in the hundreds.

How To Price Your Booster Club Apparel

Pricing any product for sale can seem tricky. While you are looking to make a profit, you also need to be aware of what your community will spend on booster club apparel.  This can also depend on the type of apparel you are selling.  To help you with pricing your booster club apparel, we recommend the following:

• Booster Club T-Shirts – 2-3x cost of shirt. If cost is $5, charge $10-$15 retail.
• Booster Club Hoodies – 2x cost of hoodie. If cost is $25, charge $50 retail for it.
• Booster Club Beanies – 2-3x cost of beanie. If cost is $3, charge $6-$9 retail for it.
• Booster Club Leggings – 2-2.5x cost of leggings. If cost is $20, charge $40-$50 retail for it.

While the pricing above is full retail for your booster club apparel, keep in mind you can always  discount it or offer package deals.  By starting with a higher retail price, it gives you room to offer different incentives to people to encourage purchases!

If after reading this, you feel printing booster club apparel may seem like a daunting task, remember that logo T-shirts, hoodies and hats never get old and are usually easy to sell within your community. It doesn’t matter if you are looking to outfit your team, or expect to generate revenue, your booster club apparel will show team and school pride to your community and the world! Need help with marketing, managing or Fundriasing for your booster club?  Follow our blog and learn about a range of booster club related subjects!