Learn how two brothers earned over $2.7 million in sales revenue with Teespring

How does someone generate over $2,760,000 in sales revenue with Teespring? Just ask Keegan & Cortland Rush! They recently hit the 225k unit milestone and had some great tips to share with the rest of the Teespring Community. Last time we heard from Keegan he shared tips on how they acquired over 1k product sales in one day – read his last blog post for a refresher.

Just hit 225,000 Shirts SOLD. Wanted to make a post to give some thanks and pass on some guidance. No cliffnotes.

I want to give a huge shout out to the Teespring team (Walker, Bridget, Erik, Evan, Vince, Molly, etc.) for giving us a platform that has truly been life changing. It has altered the course of my life, my families’ lives, and the many people I’ve been able to help along as sellers.

I also want to thank the posters in this group, everybody in the T-Shirtbomb group, and most importantly Ty Huls who helped me get started in this world when others weren’t as open to help. When the many screenshot peddlers declined to offer ANY guidance and only insisted on buying their course, Ty brought me into a community of like minded people wanting to talk about shirts. Many know of T-Shirtbomb. Anybody associated with that group is on my “BUY THEM AS MUCH BEER AS THEY WANT” list. If you’re ever near North Carolina, give me a buzz.

Lastly, the many life-long buddies I’ve made along the way, have had some crazy times meeting up, thank you.

1.) For those wanting to do well in this industry, or continue to do well, you must offer consumers something they haven’t seen before. If you’re going to offer a basic idea/concept/design you better make sure that design is flawless. If it’s not, you’re padding the FB Slush fund by donating your ad spend to Mark.

2.) Your ideas cannot suck. If you aren’t creative, you need to get creative. It really is survival of the fittest. You can probably get by skimming off the top by recycling other people’s ideas. Or you could be the one coming up with the ideas, and be the 1st person to CRUSH them. I have NEVER paid for access to a spy tool. Not to discredit those who have but I prefer to do as much original stuff as possible. We do have a specified time during the week where our team will brainstorm ideas by skimming around the internet and seeing how we can twist certain niches together to create some unique designs. However my mind is 24/7 ideating. If somebody walks past me in a store and they are wearing a funny shirt, I will immediately try to twist that idea 50 different ways into all of the niches that I sell.

3.) Once you do find success, find a way to streamline it. If it means bringing on a partner or hiring your first employee, find ways to make your life easier. I was very much against hiring an employee. We would be on the hook on slow weeks for their pay if sales weren’t there. You want to talk about being motivated? That will motivate you. Slow weeks aren’t as good because you still have payroll to take care of but the big weeks become massive instead of big. Having a team or hell, another person to bounce ideas off of is insanely valuable. It seems in our industry it’s IMPOSSIBLE to openly discuss your ideas/designs/concepts without being ripped off. To those doing it 100% by themselves, you are missing out on a huge opportunity by keeping a lot of stuff bottled inside of your own brain. It’s been done for sure. Much less stress/hassle/grind this way though.

I’m going on my 3 1/2 years almost of selling. I sold by myself for almost a year and then partnered up with my brother Cortland Rush to truly formalize the business and scale. We complement each other well because I only want to focus on selling as much stuff as possible and training, while he’s able to handle the finances, taxes, payroll, as well as sell/train just as I do. We now have several employees (3 designers, 2 admins, an office, and a well-oiled machine.

4.) Schedule. I commented on a TS News post the other day with a very basic schedule for those looking to go full time on selling shirts.

Monday – Launch all campaigns to TS
Tuesday – Schedule Ads
Wed – Ads start, chill
Thursday – research/plan for next week
Friday – (48 hours post ads starting) cut/scale ads accordingly. Don’t micro manage them for first 48 hours no matter what. Always have your next step planned.
Sat/Sun – Put up lookalikes/retargeting (event based for Purchase, ATC, View Content, etc.)

If your schedule looks like mine, or if it doesn’t, find something and stick to it. You CANNOT be successful and be scatterbrained. I have yet to meet somebody who I deem to be successful that didn’t have some sort of process. Slapping up designs every single day of the week without rhyme or reason, makes it more work on you. If all of my ads start on Wednesday, by Friday when I am looking to cut the duds, it’s very simple because everything has spent a certain amount. I can quickly turn those off and then move onto the scale of the good ads.

5.) Get designs that don’t suck. We have 3 US designers in house that absolutely KICK ASS. They truly get it and understand that using the same recycled vectors that overseas designers are using off shutterstock isn’t going to net good results. They have the perfect balance of quality/quantity. I strongly encourage you to put a strong emphasis on getting designs that don’t suck. We had an overseas design team but the unreliable internet in those countries led to long turnaround times, randomly not talking for days, communication issues, etc. We spent more time trying to get that to work because it was cheaper, rather than just hiring locally. Best decision we ever made. Not everybody is looking to formalize to that level and get an office, hiring, etc.

6.) Peaks & Valleys and how to circumvent them. We have traditionally done VERY WELL at roughly all times of the year. Detlev gives us sh*t when people ask if sales are down and we say no. Because it’s always been true. We have really only hit 1 BIG valley and that was this September/October. We had one of our biggest TS months ever in August by selling 29,726 units. In all of September and all of October we sold 23,469 units combined in those 2 months.

We scaled down a bit and started testing a ton of stuff. We tested new ad accounts, new pixels, bidding strategies, crazy lookalikes, budgets, etc. We tested and tested until something caught. And then sales came back. When things get rocky, you should scale down until you can find some sort of consistency. You don’t want to just nuke your budget/last month’s profit/slush fund throwing shit at the wall. You still want to throw testing/theories at the wall but do it at a smaller scale/budget. I know some folks who were solid sellers but found themselves going back to their full time jobs because of that. You have to weather the storm and be smart. If I start ads on Wednesday, I am going to scale my budgets up on Friday ($$$ PAY DAY $$$$). Some of those folks didn’t have very well established schedules and they may have been looking to scale on Wednesday or Thursday prior to payday. A day late and a dollar short. Who knows, maybe if they had slightly adjusted their scheduled to be scaling up on Friday compared to another day of the week, if they would still be in the game.

Lastly on the peaks….when you’re hitting hard. HIT IT HARD. Not only will copycats copy the idea but also you want to hit your lookalikes when they’re the hottest. Don’t be content with putting up a couple of extra lookalikes and having good sales. Why be happy with 2k sales when you could TRULY SCALE OUT and put up every lookalike you can think of and sell 20k…..
1%, 1-2%, all the way to 9-10% for the following….

1.) lookalike off the page
2.) lookalike off purchase event
3.) lookalike off add to cart event
4.) lookalike off view content
5.) lookalike off initiate checkout
6.) lookalike off people who engaged with your page
7.) all of those lookalikes above, but with a different objective (PPE)
8.) lookalikes off emails of your buyers
9.) lookalikes off clickers to the campaign
10.) Ads to friends of people on your page then narrow by big broad interest.

I have made a pretty lengthy post on when we sold 1,000 Units in 1 Day. You can find that post here. We touch on some of the same things. A TON OF PEOPLE have told me many months after that post, how much it helped them. So just adding some more gold to the post, if you can take just 1 small thing from reading this, I will be super happy!

Here is the financial breakdown. Only posting this aspect because screenshots without an explanation can be VERY misleading. Ad spend for Teespring could actually be lower, I did the best to break it out for just TS as I could but chances are I missed a chunk of Shopify Testing or other platform stuff. FB hasn’t made it easy to pull exact reporting for just the TS stuff. Labor is an estimate, because we really only had employees the past year. The prior 2 years, I did a lot of my own designs, used a freelance guy awhile so I’ve overestimated on that.

Labor/Employees include 3 Designers, 2 admins. We could save on that # if we had an overseas team but we prefer in-house folks we can rely on without concern of consistency.

UNITS SOLD – 225,902
Sale Revenue – $2,760,040
Volume Discounts – $177,302
Total Revenue – $2,937,342
Ad Spend – $1.216,000
Profit – $1,721,342 +
Labor/Designs/Office/Misc. – $100,000
Rough Profit – $1,621,342

We have several other endeavors but Teespring is what got my foot in the door and I am very appreciative of those who have made this possible. Hope this can help somebody.