Before Wholesale T-Shirts Were Sold Online
One of the earliest businesses I built started with a printed catalogue.
At the time, wholesale T-shirt suppliers operated very differently from the way online retailers work today.
If you wanted to order stock, you browsed through a physical catalogue, found the products you needed and then placed the order by phone or email.
That was simply how the industry worked.
I already knew many of these suppliers because I'd previously run a design-your-own T-shirt business. I regularly bought blank garments from wholesalers, so I understood the products, the pricing and the ordering process.
The more I used those catalogues, the more obvious the opportunity seemed.
Why couldn't customers browse all of those products online?
Building the Online Catalogue Myself
Rather than waiting for the suppliers to build their own websites, I decided to create an online catalogue first.
There was no convenient product feed to import and no automated system connecting everything together.
Every product had to be entered into a database by hand.
That included:
- The product information
- The available colours
- The different sizes
- The wholesale pricing
I then calculated the customer price by adding my markup, VAT and shipping costs.
The result was a complete online shopping experience where customers could browse the products, select their options, add items to a basket and check out.
It sounds completely normal now, but at the time it removed a lot of friction from the buying process.
Instead of working through a printed catalogue and contacting a supplier manually, customers could simply order online.
My Goal Was Number One on Google
Building the website was only part of the challenge.
I also needed customers to find it.
My goal was very specific.
I wanted the website to rank number one on Google for “wholesale T-shirts”.
I already owned several websites related to T-shirts, so I used them strategically to build authority around the new business.
I linked the sites together and focused on making the wholesale website as relevant as possible for the search terms customers were using.
Eventually, it worked.
The site reached the top of Google.
Competing With Much Larger Businesses
Once the market became more established, larger wholesalers began appearing online.
They had warehouses, more stock and much bigger operations than mine.
On paper, they should have been able to overtake me easily.
But they couldn't immediately displace the website because I had already built the audience and the search visibility.
I had reached customers first.
That early position gave the business an advantage that wasn't based on warehouse size or stock levels.
It was based on discoverability.
The Competitor Who Bought the Business
Eventually, one of those larger companies contacted me.
Instead of continuing to compete with the website, they decided to buy the business.
That became my first exit.
Looking back, it was a strange outcome for something that had started with me manually transferring products from a printed catalogue into a database.
But it also showed me the value of building the audience before the larger businesses fully recognised the opportunity.
The Opportunity Wasn't Really T-Shirts
For a long time, I thought the main lesson from that business was about search engine optimisation.
Ranking at the top of Google was obviously a huge part of why it worked.
But looking back now, I think the bigger lesson was about recognising friction that everyone else had accepted.
The industry had always used printed catalogues, phone calls and emails, so nobody seemed to question whether there might be a better way.
The real opportunity wasn't selling wholesale T-shirts.
It was making wholesale T-shirts easier to buy.
What I Took From It
That experience shaped the way I've approached many businesses since.
The best opportunities aren't always completely new inventions.
Sometimes they're existing products or services presented in a way that removes unnecessary difficulty.
People were already buying wholesale T-shirts.
The demand already existed.
All I did was make the process easier, get in front of the customers searching for them and build the audience before the larger competitors arrived.
That printed catalogue became an online business, and that online business became my first exit.