My E-Commerce Journey

For one of the daftest reasons… I decided to start a football shirt printing business. I have been, and remain a huge football fan, still dragging myself to 6-a-side twice a week - my body disagrees with this decision!!

This has lead me to working with some interesting companies, as well as a behind the scenes glimpse of a sport and industry i have always been fascinated by.

Why?

As mentioned, the reason for starting this business was a bit mad, and it was actually down to the fact that our local sports shop hadn’t fixed their shirt printing machine in about 5 years!!

So finally, the people of Ashford, Kent could get their shirts printed using official Premier League shirt font!

It was somewhat daunting having to learn an entirely new skill, with very expensive repercussions to any mistakes! But i started to make real progress and embraced the challenge.

How did the first few year go?

I’m not going to lie, I learnt a lot in the first few years. Managing expectation, designing websites (that s is crucial - I think I’ve tried every build your own website platform there is!), not to mention just dealing with customers and their expectations.

As someone who went straight into my professional career, I didn’t ever have a public facing job, so communicating what we did, how we did it, and what is needed from the customers has always been a constant consideration.

Ironically the business was almost over before it even got going…

So what happened, and what changed?

I think I was around 3 years into the business and about £6,000 spent with minimal return. Ebay was a good if not inconsistent platform, and website orders were minimal, getting one a day was a nice change!

I was at the point where I was about to stop spending the £30 a month on Shopify, when I realised that the site actually ranked quite well on Google - which at the time was the most important thing. The next bit of fortune was that i was able to purchase some old stock from a football club, which despite being the old font, looked the same as the current one.

I obviously fully disclosed this in my listings! But the less concerning customer didn’t mind, and I had bought this significantly cheaper than the official wholesaler sold the latest product at.

I could immediately price lower, sell large bulk lots and start to really get my business name out there. The whole football shirt industry really exploded in 2020, with popularity and prices rising, so having official printing stock in high quantities was a huge benefit

And since then, what have you done with your E-commerce store?

I would definitely say for a long time I didn’t really treat it as it’s own genuine business. I refer to Accounting as my ‘real job’ and was slightly dismissive of the opportunity i had with the football shirt store.

It has been a testing business, with the effort put in not always equaling the output, however the passion I have for it, and enjoyment I get from being in the community warrants existing in that space.

My goal is to run Premier Shirts through my program and monitor the results. Its a bit of a ‘bus man’s holiday’ but i really believe the findings from it can elevate the business and prove the flexibility and validity of my system.