Worldwide t-shirt sales topped $206 billion in 2018 and are projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 6%, reaching $328 billion in 2027. When you consider comfort, affordability, fashion, creativity, and self-expression, few apparel products offer a better value proposition than t-shirts. Online t-shirt sales have posted impressive growth, but because t-shirts are often an impulse purchase, the opportunity for sales in brick and mortar stores will continue to be strong. Today’s blog is about a new, improved, and creative t-shirt displays that we designed to maximize retail sales.
Given the size and growth of the market, effective t-shirt merchandising is a worthy topic. If you are interested in checking out some of our other blogs on this topic, you might be interested in:
T Shirt Display Options from RICH LTD.’s Line of Stock Displays
Sell More T-Shirts with the Right T-shirt Display
Should you Invest in a T Shirt Display or Just Continue Selling on Amazon?
Creating Impulse Sales with an Effective T Shirt Display- Part I
Creating Impulse Sales with an Effective T Shirt Display- Part II
Our main objective today is to share with you a very short video that demonstrates our new t-shirt retail display. But before we do, a little background might be helpful. A few years ago we designed a t-shirt cubby display that we still offer as part of our stock line. We designed the 20-cubby and 10-cubby displays shown below, both of which do an excellent job of merchandising t-shirts.
In designing these T-shirt merchandisers, we had 5 primary objectives in mind:
- Capacity– We wanted to create high capacity merchandisers that would maximize retail sales per square foot. The 20-cubby display works for up to 20 SKUs and 240 folded t-shirts, while the 10-cubby display can handle 10 SKUs and 120 folded t-shirts.
- Versatility– We designed these displays for versatility. They both have casters so they can be easily moved to any place in a store or outside, and they both spin so they work in any area, including corners.
- Shop-ability– People obviously want to see the graphics on the t-shirt before purchasing which is a challenge with folded t-shirts. This problem has been solved in different ways in the industry, but we chose to include a clear acrylic sleeve that can accommodate a printed graphic adjacent to the cubby with the folded t-shirts.
- Cross-Merchandising– We wanted to be able to offer a solution for cross-merchandising other complementary items. We designed a cap pocket attachment that attaches to the top of the unit to facilitate impulse cap sales.
- Ease of Set-Up– Both of these displays ship assembled so there is no assembly involved, and both can easily ship with t-shirts loaded for a complete ready-to-go solution.
While these t-shirt displays are very effective at driving sales and easy for retailers to set up, we wanted to design another version specifically to address 3 issues:
- Freight cost– Shipping these units assembled requires them to be shipped on pallets which can be fairly expensive. In many cases, the more expensive freight cost is worth it given the ease of set-up for the retailer. However, we knew that we needed to design a knock-down version to make a meaningful dent in freight costs.
- Ease of Assembly– Since we had decided on a knock-down version, we wanted to make it as easy as possible to assemble in the store. You will see from the video that our new design assembles in 5 minutes or less.
- Durability– For MDF displays that do not ship on pallets, there needs to be careful attention paid to packing to avoid shipping damage. We wanted to minimize that risk so we created the new versions out of plywood instead of MDF, which will also improve the durability of the displays.
So with that background, it’s time to share the video introducing our new 10-cubby knock-down t-shirt display. You can check out here. We used the same design and construction on our 20-cubby display. Both are designed to create significant retail presence and maximize t-shirt sales.
Jim Hollen is the owner and President of RICH LTD. (www.richltd.com), a 35+ year-old California-based point-of-purchase display, retail store fixture, and merchandising solutions firm which has been named among the Top 50 U.S. POP display companies for 9 consecutive years. A former management consultant with McKinsey & Co. and graduate of Stanford Business School, Jim Hollen has served more than 3000 brands and retailers over more than 20 years and has authored nearly 500 blogs and e-Books on a wide range of topics related to POP displays, store fixtures, and retail merchandising.
Jim has been to China more than 50 times and has worked directly with more than 30 factories in Asia across a broad range of material categories, including metal, wood, acrylic, injection molded and vacuum formed plastic, corrugated, glass, LED lighting, digital media player, and more. Jim Hollen also oversees RICH LTD.’s domestic manufacturing operation and has experience manufacturing, sourcing, and importing from numerous Asian countries as well as Vietnam and Mexico.
His experience working with brands and retailers spans more than 25 industries such as food and beverage, apparel, consumer electronics, cosmetics/beauty, sporting goods, automotive, pet, gifts and souvenirs, toys, wine and spirits, home improvement, jewelry, eyewear, footwear, consumer products, mass market retail, specialty retail, convenience stores, and numerous other product/retailer categories.