Whenever you start a business, especially one that you have zero experience in, you are bound to make mistakes. We've made a TON of them so far here at 704 Shop, but this one was by far our biggest and most costly.
A couple of weeks back we placed an order with our printer for some new logo shirts. With football season right around the corner, it was definitely time to get those Panthers colors on a Logo Tee. Check out how the shirt was supposed to look:
Visually, this looks correct. It would've been awesome if this is what we had gotten. Instead, we got a shirt that was the correct color combination except the logo was twice as big as this.
So how did this happen? At first, I wasn't sure. I thought the printer had made a mistake and just printed our logo too big. After further investigation, it turns out that this was completely my fault. When you use a 3rd party printer like we do, you have to approve mock-ups of each shirt. The mock-ups will have a LOT of information to review and approve before the shirt actually goes into production. Things like size break downs, the color of the shirt, the color of the ink, what type of ink, what color the ink for the printed tags are, what brand of blank shirt you are using, what address the shirts are being shipped to (learned this one the hard way too after the shirts got shipped to Pittsburgh by accident), as well as the part that I overlooked in this scenario, the dimensions of the logo. If you look at the mock-up visually, it looks correct, however that doesn't necessarily mean that it will look like way in real life. Off to the side of the mock-up sheet, the dimensions of the logo are listed in inches i.e. 3"x5". I totally overlooked verifying those dimensions.
I can't blame the printer for an oversight on my part. I also can't expect our customers to buy a shirt we aren't proud of, nor meets our quality of standards. Right now, we aren't sure what we're going to do with the shirts but we know we can't sell them. We have talked about donating them to a charity for homeless or people in need of clothing somehow.
At the end of the day, this won't be the last mistake we make in growing our business. The key is not the make the same mistake twice. We're forging ahead!