What did your shirt cost? Name your price t-shirts

The interesting thing about the t-shirt industry is that as competition is high, cost of product and product usp’s are low companies have to find novel ways to ring out remaining value in the product.

Spreadshirt does this by allowing an entirely custom print, for mass produced pricing and our shop platform.

la Fraise takes the contest, crowdsourced approach. It also offers anyone the chance to pick what becomes a product and offers strict limited editions as do many other sites to add extra value to a design.

T Post offers shirt subscriptions - one shirt, one month, a surprise direct to your mailbox each month.

There are many more, one of which I’ll tell you about below.

Unless you live under a media-less rock, you probably saw that Radiohead trialled a “pay what you want to pay” price for their new album In Rainbows recently. Pay a penny, pay a million pennies the choice was yours. A revolutionary, philanthropic “its about the music” gesture or a brilliant marketing incentive for a band that could start a big money bonfire and not be in any danger of getting cold until the year 3007. Now they abandoned the experiment and decided to sell it on CD again.

No data has been revealed on the average purchase price of the Radiohead album and speculation is running high and low. See this nice write-up at Gizmodo about this and the recent bolder approach taken by Saul Williams.

Today I’m writing about Tasty Tees who took this approach with shirts. Their “how much did you pay for the Radiohead album” shirt was offered in the same way, name your price for it.

Want to guess what the average price was in $’s?

$10? Nope, lower

$7? Nope, lower

$5? Nope, lower

$3? Nope, higher

$3.37 to be anal.

via (Hide Your Arms)

I would have guessed lower had I not known the answer and ruined the mystery.

20% paid a penny.

25% paid a $1

One rich, generous soul paid $20.

The shipping fee was $5 so presumably they saved themselves a little bit to skim there, resulting still in a loss I would guess depending on how many were sold which I don’t think has been revealed.

I think there is some potential in this model. Firstly I think Tasty Tees could have maximized it a little more, by improving the design and opting for a coloured over a white shirt. Secondly asking you to judge how much you’d be willing to pay for something you’ve never seen, felt, got less naked from is better done after you’ve enjoyed it not before.

This pricing idea is spreading far and wide, from restaurants , cafe’s, second hand cd’s
(research was completed by the University of Frankfurt across Cinemas, Hairdressers, Hotels - only in German I’m afraid) the conclusion being that the revenue received was about the same as with the old pricing, but with services proving much more effective in this area as people value experiences higher than products.

Here is how I would do it:

- Show average price paid so far.

- Ask by mail 7 days after product is shipped

- Start with a default price amount that can be easily changed (say $5).

- Offer limited runs of the product.

- Reveal full costing information or at least when you hit break even point.

It would be interesting to see how much these variables would effect the price paid.

What do you think about this donation pricing model? Do you think you would you pay more or less given the option? How long do you think before we see a new t-shirt startup adopting this as their core business model? (My guess less than six months).