The shirts are the easy part

People launching a clothing brand on Shopify spend about ninety percent of the run-up on the designs and the name, and then the first month happens to them. Almost none of what goes wrong in that month has anything to do with the shirts.

We have launched our own labels and we run stores for other people, so we have watched this from both sides more times than is healthy. The same handful of things bite nearly everyone.

You will launch with too many designs

Twenty designs feels like a brand. Six feels thin. Launch with six anyway, the six you would actually wear, and let the other fourteen wait. A first customer cannot tell you are early. They can tell when half the range is filler, because they will not buy it, and then your store looks like a place where things do not sell.

The other reason is simpler. Every design you launch is a design you have to photograph, describe, size, and answer questions about. Six is a weekend. Twenty is the reason you are still not live in March.

Print on demand is not a compromise

The single biggest thing that separates the launches that survive from the ones that do not is whether the founder bought stock. Buying stock means guessing sizes in advance, and nobody gets the size curve right first time. You end up with a box of larges and a customer asking for a medium.

Printing to order means the size decision is made by the person who wants the shirt, at the moment they want it. You give up a little margin per unit and you get to be wrong about everything else for free. For a first year that is the best trade in the business, and we say that as people who also print in bulk when the numbers earn it.

Checkout is fine. It is everything after checkout

Shopify will take the order. It is very good at that. What it will not do is answer the email that arrives four days later asking where the order is, and that email is the whole customer experience as far as that person is concerned.

Tell people when it will arrive before they ask. If it is going to be late, tell them that too, early, in a sentence a human wrote. Almost nobody is angry about a late parcel. They are angry about silence.

The quiet week is the real test

Launch day is a party. Your mates buy things, your mum buys things, and the graph goes up. The number that matters is the second Tuesday, when nobody you know is buying and a stranger arrives from an ad or a search.

That stranger lands on one product page, not your homepage. If it is missing a size, or the photo is on a mannequin, or there is no mention of what the shirt actually feels like, they leave and you never know they came. Write every product page as if it is the only page on the site, because for most people it is.

Things you are overthinking

• The store name. You will spend a week on it. Nobody who buys from you will ever say it out loud.
• The theme. Pick a plain one, make it your colours, stop. The fancy one has a slideshow you will regret.
• Apps. Every app is a monthly fee and a slower page. Install nothing in month one that you cannot name a specific reason for.
• Discount codes. A first customer who paid full price will pay full price again. One who did not, will not.

Things you are underthinking

• Photos on a person, in daylight. Not a mannequin, not a flat lay. People want to see it on a body that looks like theirs.
• The size guide. Measurements in centimetres, for the actual garment, not a chart copied from a supplier.
• Your reply speed. In month one, answer everything within the hour if you are awake. It is the cheapest marketing you will ever do.
• Who is on the other end of the freight problem. Find out before the first parcel goes missing, not after.

Your first hundred customers are not buying a shirt. They are finding out whether you are real.

They decide that from the parcel, the email, and the reply. The design got them to the door. Everything from there is you.