Business Pitches: Interested in funding a college startup?

Hey everyone! I know these types of requests have not come up a lot on here, but I wanted to throw this one on here and see if I can get any response.

Anyway, through an organization on my campus which I am very involved with, the Collegiate Entrepreneurs ([url]www.collegiateentrepreneurs.org[/url]), I am working with some other members to start up a himor t-shirt business. We will be starting out by selling 10 different designs to students on our campus as well as through the internet.

We are currently working on finishing up our business plan and will soon be seeking different ways to fund the project. Although we have not fully calculated our startup costs, we are looking at anywhere from $1,000-$10,000.

I know this may seem like an odd request, but I just wanted to see if anyone on the board would be interested or know anyone that may be interested in learning more about the business and possibly putting up some startup funding, which can then be paid back overtime. All details can be worked out later.

So if you yourself would like to hear some more information or know someone who may be interested in this type of startup funding, please contact me either via PM or email and we can talk more.

Thanks for your interest!

jimmiejo- thanks for the advice. we already have most of our shirts designed that we are going to be starting out with (10 designs to start) and are planning on having one design produced within 2 weeks for our members to wear around and start to get our name out. I am currently working on developing the website which we will also use to start to take preorders for shirt designs.

We have not been able to find a low enough priced manufacturer willing to only produce a shirt or two at a time and directly mail them out, so we are going to be using a local company which will produce the shirts in quantities of 12 or more. This will give us the ability to still keep our prices reasonable and also if we happen to rack up more than 12 preorders, it will lower the overall price to us as a company, and also increase our profit per shirt, say if we had 20 produced instead of just 12 but they all still sold at the same price.

I appreciate the links, but I am very well familiar with them already after having done research for this concept for the past 4+ months.

Currently, we are still looking just for small personal investors and not any large organizations investments because (1) we dont need a huge amount of money and (2) they usually require ownership and all those sorts of things.

We are currently working on wrapping up our marketing plan and completing the business plan.

If there is anyone on here that may be interested in learning more about the start up or hearing how much funding we are searching for and talking more, please feel free to contact me.

Thanks!

I am not saying that we have to have preorders to get the shirts, I am sorry if that is how it sounded. We are going to take preorders to be able to pay for the shirts right away instead of having to use money from an investment made by someone. The preorders at say $15 a pop will go towards purchasing the shirts (12 for around $9 each, total 108)...so the 12 preorders at $15 or $180 total will pay for the 12 shirts of $108 and the profit from the shirts will be put into the business to repay an investor (if we have one) or just to fund the business activity.

As we progress in the planning of the business, we are leaning more towards the idea of self financing the business via preorders for the shirts.

I do understand what you are saying by just buying the 20 shirts and making more profit off of them, but we do not have the funds to directly purchase the 20 shirts, hence where the preordering comes into play.

Thanks for the comment.

jimmiejo- I dont know the exact brand of t-shirts that the company is using. They do screen printing for my university as well as many of the different on campus organizations as well as another university that is right down the road and their clubs, besides the corporations in the area. This is going to be something that we will be looking into in the next week or so, but right now I have been on spring break and havent been able to do a whole lot of work on minor details such as these.

As far as the preordering system taking extra time, I agree with you and I dont to different extents. The preordering can be timely if we are only able to get 5 people interested in a shirt but arnt able to get the other 7 to meet the 12 shirt minimum per order. However, if we can exceed the minimum orders of 12 shirts per design, then this should not be a problem. The company does very fast work and has a great turn around time (less then a week usually). They carry the different colors and sizes of shirts all in stock so there is no worries with having to order the blank shirts and waiting for them to arrive. As far as labeling goes, there is no additional labeling being done to the shirts to include our company logo or anything. All that is being done is the design printed on the shirt. Processing the payments will all be done before hand (automatically when an order is placed through the internet or in person via cash/check) so there will be no lag in this area, once printing is done for the shirts, we cut a check to the printing company and we have the shirts. Most of our sales will be to students in the local area of our university, so there will not be a large need for shipping. In most cases, we will packege them (slip them into a plastic bag or some sort with our advertisment and thank you note) and delivery them to the person ourselves or they can be picked up from our location when they are in. We are not going to be shipping a large amount of shirts to other parts of the country unless things really happen to take off and our designs become very popular.

So from the time of order to the time you get your shirt, I would guess we could probably run about 1-3 weeks. This would ofcourse depend on where along the line your order comes in (whether you are the very first of the 12 shirt minimum or if you are the 12th person and the order gets submitted to the printing company right away).

Thanks again for the comments, hopefully I addressed your concerns. Please keep them coming, this is helping me think about different details that otherwise probably would have been overlooked.

Thanks!

In the way I described it above, that assumption would be correct. I suppose this is where a limit of orders needs to be decided to as what number is not enough to place the orders and just cancel them or to what number means that we will have to "bite the bullet" and order all 12 shirts, hoping to sell the remainder quickly.

Any suggestions on how to get around this problem?

I see what you are saying Kevin. We have been playing with the idea as well as offering discounts on bulk orders (say a bulk order of 5 shirts by a greek organization on campus gets them a free shirt) which could also offer extra encouragement to purchase more)