For the purpose of this blog a business called Clever T-shirt Co. (CTC) has been invented, and this hypothetical business will be used to outline the ideas expressed within. Now, it might be appropriate to give you some kind of a back-story to this made up business, so let’s just say that Clever T-Shirt Co. is an Australian start-up company based in Sydney that makes T-shirts with clever prints on them.
They are still in the midst of establishing their business, and they have been watching the market and collecting data on what their consumers want and what their competitors are doing. They can see that they would benefit from having some presence online, but the team that they have in Sydney at this point is just a small collective of artists who want to sell T-shirts, they don’t really know how to go about it all. They could hire a graphic designer from Melbourne, programmers from Buenos Ares, and content writers from Delhi, London, Seoul, or anywhere else in the world. Outsourcing work has never been easier than now, and freelance workers are fast becoming one of the most viable resources available, these freelancers could build their online profile for them in a fraction of the time and cost it would take if they had hired locally. CTC could essentially become a twenty four hour operation in this period, but who’s to say it has to end there?
There are companies like Brisbane based clothing company Black Milk who have managed to successfully run an online-only business, to the point where the cast of Game of Thrones are posting selfies of themselves wearing the company’s leggings on Instagram. Black Milk has built up a strong brand online, and they use social media way to market their product – at times it’s almost like self-willing celebrity endorsement. While it may seem counter-intuitive to run a clothing business solely online, this company has flourished within those parameters and might even act as an example of things to come in a world that is increasingly digital.
If CTC were to take this online-only approach, they would eliminate the need for a shop front, and if they outsourced their manufacturing & distribution, all they would need to do is provide designs and hire a couple of people to market their product and manage their social media networks. If they chose to go online, they would open themselves to a much larger portion of the market as they would not be restricted to the borders of their city in terms of consumer base.
Smaller companies now have the chance to compete with the big brands and corporate-powerhouses that dominated the market in the past, and this is because the internet has done so much to level the playing field. It has given ‘the little guy’ access to resources that would have been impossible to attain in the past, from the skilled workers needed to build a website to the manufacturers who make the product.
If you set your mind to it you can achieve great things in our new world of work, we have more opportunities than ever before to create things and collaborate with brilliant people and it’s time we took advantage of the age we live in.
