Piece 4: Selling Your T-Shirts

Now that you have a good product you will want to sell the T-shirts.

After you know your costs from the printer, you can set a price to sell the shirts. It is a good thing to be able to tell those buying a shirt, "for every one shirt sold, we will send two t-shirts to Iraq."

When I sold the shirts in my Department, I had a flyer and a sign up sheet in each house with an explanation of the project. Don't forget to post sign up sheets and flyers with your dispatchers and your mechanics. I found this group of people, many times left out, were great supporters of this effort.

I asked the Firefighters to mark down the number of shirts they wanted, the sizes and their money. The sign up sheet had a color pictures of the back and front of the T-shirt which was provided by the printer. I asked one person from each house to collect the money. I left the sheet up for two weeks before I collected them.

I than had my list of those ordering shirts, the sizes needed and the money to place the order. I also asked and received generous donations from the Firefighters Local and the Fire Officers Local.

I called the printer and ordered the correct amount of shirts for the Firefighters and a separate order for the T-shirts for Iraq.

If you have a smaller department, this is where you would want to sell the shirts to family members, civic organizations and any other places you see fit. The more T-shirts you sell, the more will be heading to Iraq.

Now that your T-shirts are sold lets see how they get from NJ to Iraq....