Expanding our product line via direct to garment printing and relationships with multiple licensees has enabled us to turn around a business that was struggling mightily. Larger store based brands and some content sites have jumped into the fray, too. Recently I’ve seen Hot Topic, Pac-Sun, and IGN Networks join the fray. Many of them are willing to accept much lower margins because these products are “add on” sales for them and not their bread and butter. Therefore if they make an extra couple of dollars it’s all good. We can’t afford to make a few dollars on a transaction at our size, because there’d be nothing left to pay for our marketing costs. The challenge here is that our suppliers only care about sales, so they’ll likely treat these bigger players better than they treat us.
So the new challenge will be how to face off with a bevy of new competition who are all competing for consumers that are rapidly being overwhelmed with choice. We won’t go down easily. We have the advantages of a tight niche and a skill in acquiring customers via online marketing. In fact online marketing is our primary skill, and we’re going to branch out to as many online marketing channels as we can make work profitably.
Ecommerce is a tough game. 80sTees has been around for 20 years because we’ve shifted when needed, and we’ll continue that process into the future.