One sale
BigBucks has a website, a print-on-demand partner set up to make and ship each order, and a sales record of one. We bought that shirt ourselves, to check that the checkout worked and that what arrived in the post looked like what was on the screen. It did. Everything works, and almost nobody outside the company knows the brand exists.
That's where this series starts. Over the coming months I'm going to try to sell t-shirts without spending money on promotion and without any training in marketing, and write down what I try and what happens. This first piece has no numbers in it, because there aren't any yet. It's the starting position, written down before anything can change it.
BigBucks and GlamBon are both my brands. This series is about my own product, and every installment will say so.
No design code
I'm an electronic engineer, and I spent the first part of my career in the data centre industry. Almost everything there comes with a datasheet. A client has a load to carry and racks to fill, you show that the equipment carries the load safely, and most of the conversation is arithmetic.
Engineering works that way in general. When I start a design I'm rarely starting from nothing. There are codes and standards, tables of loads, and a long record of things that failed and why, so I have a rough idea of what a sound solution looks like before I draw the first line.
Marketing, from where I stand, has no code I can read. An agency has one, built from years of campaigns and the dashboards that came with them. I have fourteen years of building and running businesses, and a decent instinct for what people will pay for. What I don't have is a method for this particular problem: putting a sentence on a shirt in front of strangers who have never heard of it.
I've worked as an entrepreneur since 2012. I studied computer science alongside engineering at university and kept learning long after, mostly because the businesses I wanted to build needed skills I didn't have yet. Picking things up as the work demands them is how I've always operated, which is the main reason I'm relaxed about starting this one ignorant.
What we sell
BigBucks prints one principle a month on organic cotton: a line, a short sentence someone might want to carry around with them. We aren't selling fashion, and nobody needs another t-shirt. The cotton is tangible. The reason anyone would buy it is a sentence.
The way we describe it to each other is a costume worn under the office shirt, the kind the superhero in the comics wears all day without anyone noticing. Nobody else needs to see it. You know it's there, and it reminds you who you are when the day is working hard to make you forget.
The cotton is tangible. The reason anyone would buy it is a sentence.
That makes BigBucks almost pure marketing and communication, which is a slightly ridiculous thing for me to have chosen. Everything we sell lives in the space between the words on the shirt and the person who reads them, and I don't yet know how to bring the two together.
What I believe going in
Before I touch a single tool I want my assumptions on record, so that in six months I can see which ones survived. They come from nothing more scientific than my own habits as someone who watches, listens and scrolls like everyone else.
- FirmSettled facts and published research, with sources at the end.
- My betWhat I expect to happen, which the coming months will test.
- My readingWhat I make of it, which you're free to disagree with.
Long articles
My betWe write long pieces on GlamBon and we don't run ads on it. I honestly can't tell you how many people read them to the end, or whether long-form still counts for much next to an endless feed. What I expect is that the few who do read to the end are the ones who end up caring, and for a shirt with a sentence on it, a few people who care will do more than a crowd that scrolled past.
YouTube ads
My betI listen to a lot of music on YouTube. The ads are almost never relevant to me, I press skip the moment the button appears, and a minute later I couldn't name the brand. Companies keep paying for that exposure, so it must work on someone. My guess is that it works for brands that can afford to repeat themselves thousands of times, and that we aren't one of them.
Podcast sponsors
My betHalfway through most podcasts the host stops, the tone changes, sometimes the voice changes too, and a sponsor segment begins. I skip forward to where it ends. What stays with me is something else: a host in the middle of a conversation mentioning the coffee in his cup because he likes it, the way Joe Rogan does with his guests. I expect a passing mention from someone you already trust to be worth more than a minute of copy read aloud.
Instagram ads
My betA paid post in the middle of a feed announces itself. I see the label, I know what it wants from me, and my thumb keeps moving. I expect most people to treat it the same way.
Influencers
My betIf someone with a large following posts a reel wearing a new t-shirt, does a stranger scrolling past feel any pull towards it? I don't know. I lean towards people with smaller audiences who actually listen to them, and I have no evidence for that beyond a feeling.
Direct messages
My betWriting to people one by one on Instagram feels like knocking on doors. I expect it to work only when the message is personal enough that I'd be glad to receive it myself.
One witness
Reading that list back, I notice that every bet rests on a single witness, and the witness is me.
FirmIn 1983 the sociologist W. Phillips Davison described what he called the third-person effect: people tend to believe that media messages and persuasion work on other people more than on themselves. The idea has been studied widely in communication research since.
My readingWhich makes "ads don't work on me" possibly the least reliable sentence in this article. I skip the YouTube ad and forget the brand, and maybe a month later I recognise the logo on a shelf without knowing why. I can't see that from the inside. The sales figures will have to settle what my own habits can't.
Try it on yourself before reading on.
Does it work on you?
For each one, tick whether it has ever led you to buy something, and whether you think it works on most people.
What I have
Zero budget means I'm spending zero euros on promotion. I'm also starting with far more than most people launching a t-shirt brand, and I'd rather say that before a reader does.
I have this publication, which is a channel most small brands would have to build or rent. I have a company that doesn't need BigBucks to pay anyone's salary, so I can afford to be patient. I can build or change a website in an evening, I spent years in Australia making videos for a living, and I still take photographs for pleasure. I have AI tools that let a very small team behave like a larger one. And I have time, which I'm choosing to spend here.
What I don't have is everything an agency would bring on day one: benchmarks, a sense of what a good conversion rate looks like, the list of mistakes everybody makes in month two. I'll make those mistakes in public. When something works, I'll try to separate the lessons that depend on owning a magazine from the ones anyone with a phone could repeat.
The rules
BigBucks prints a new principle every month, so the series will follow the same rhythm.
- One installment a month: which line we printed, why that one, how I tried to sell it, and what happened.
- Real numbers as soon as there are any: visitors, orders, what each attempt cost in money and in hours.
- The bad months get published the same way as the good ones.
- The shared ownership is stated every time.
Why bother
BigBucks doesn't have to pay anyone's bills yet, and some readers will take that to mean it's a hobby. It's a business, and I want it to make money. Not depending on it buys me patience, and the freedom to find out whether a sentence printed on cotton can reach the people it was written for without paying anyone to carry it there.
I did my military service with the 8th Alpini Regiment, part of the Julia Brigade. Their motto is O là o rompi: either it goes, or we break the rock to get there. That's the attitude I'm bringing to this. I like the constraint, and I'll work on it as hard as I can. I don't know yet what I'll be writing next month. For now the only honest figure I have is the one in the title.
The shirts are at bigbucks.net, if you want to be the second.
Frequently asked questions
A t-shirt brand that prints one principle a month on organic cotton, sold at bigbucks.net. It's one of Christian Bertolini's brands, like GlamBon.
A monthly GlamBon series in which Christian Bertolini, an engineer with no marketing background, tries to sell BigBucks t-shirts without spending money on promotion, and publishes what he tries and what happens, including sales figures.
A tendency, first described by the sociologist W. Phillips Davison in 1983, for people to believe that media messages and persuasion influence other people more than they influence themselves.
Yes. Once there are sales, each installment will report visitors, orders and costs, including the months that go badly.
It's about a brand that belongs to the same owner as GlamBon, and every installment says so. It's written as the record of an experiment, but you should read it knowing the connection.
