Wear your favorite celebrity tweets and customize your own
I started Tee Tweets as a way to combine streetwear with comedy by bringing people together with laughter. It would later evolve to be much more, with an infinite amount of possibilities. The feedback has been great.
Introduced sweatshirts & hoodies around this time. You might be thinking it's probably not the best idea to introduce crewneck sweaters and hoodies during the summer, but it took a LOOONG time to mockup every single design, and on multiple products nonetheless.
Plus, it takes a while for SEO to kick in, so the sooner the better.
Another reason to do this is because there are people living in places where it's still hoodie weather in May, or it's hoodie weather year-round. This is especially true outside of the USA, so we actually had a few crewneck/hoodie orders internationally believe it or not.
It was around this time I did an entire website revamp. Whole new theme, look, feel. Made it more modern, elegant, and easier to navigate.
In retail, January is usually the month of returns. That wasn't the case for Tee Tweets. In fact, January had an ever bigger sales month than December, with not a single return yet since inception in 2017.
August had been the best month to date. Then it became September. Then October overshadowed it. November then beat October because of BFCM, and December then overshadowed November as people bought gifts for themselves and their friends & family.
A couple of orders start rolling in, in what would become the beginning of a snowball of sales in the coming months.
Since I didn't have any money to test digital ads, I decided that I would learn as much as I can about SEO. Needless to say, mistakes were made. And expectations were way too high. Search Engine Optimization became the #1 priority, which meant that sales were not going to show up for another 6 months, at least, unless I hit the jackpot with some extremely relevant and well-targeted digital ads.
The first sale came in at around 3am my time. The notification from my phone woke me up, and as soon as I saw it, I couldn't go back to sleep. Not just because it was my first sale, but because I realized that the Tee Tweet that had been ordered was actually out of stock.
This meant that I would have to either refund the customer, or find a local supplier that would charge me an exorbitant price for a single shirt on which I would lose a lot of money on.
It also came from a place that is very far away, so I remember thinking it could very well be a fraudulent order. Thankfully, it was not.
I graduated on my birthday. My graduation present to myself was officially launching the online store for Tee Tweets. I didn't even want to attend graduation–all I wanted to do was launch.
But the 'launch' wasn't just comprised of setting up the website. There were many hurdles still present, and I just wanted to focus on that.
So while everybody was out taking pictures around campus, getting drinks, my mind was all-in on Tee Tweets.
Can't focus on finals. Need to figure out how to move $800 worth of inventory. No studying was done this week. Instead, all time was devoted to setting up and online store and learning about SEO, since I didn't have thousands of dollars to throw at digital marketing.
I started Tee Tweets as a way to combine streetwear with comedy by bringing people together with laughter. It would later evolve to be much more, with an infinite amount of possibilities. The feedback has been great.