I’ve made it an ambition of mine to acquire a t shirt from as many teams as possible and add the hem to my wardrobe to be circulated amongst my vex and Robodox shirts. The question being, does your team sell shirts to members of the public?
No mine does not nor do most teams to my knowledge but they do exchange shirts, mine included, If you pm someone who you are interested in acquiring their team shirts pm them I am sure they will find someone.
This is a plan for us in the future as a possible way to raise funds, but we weren’t sure if the interest was there and ended up just ordering enough for our team. We may end up with extras, though.
So, are you interested?
I am a particularly interested person. I do not know if I am in the minority but I do know that I would be willing to purchase shirts from teams. I also think that we’ll designed shirts for support of your team would be a decent fundraiser for selling to your school’s student body.
I will note that for many teams, a team shirt is kind of like a privilege of the team members – representation of sorts of the team’s you’d been involved with in some form (student, mentor, etc).
A better (and much less expensive) collection may be buttons/pins. I have over 200 pins I’ve collected from various regionals through the year. I did think about finding ways to make a complete collection by trading pins with folks from other regionals.
I tried pins and buttons, from the past three years I have accumulated nearly 300 buttons. However, they don’t work particularly well as a kind of random thing. When I wear a Robodox shirt, I find that someone usually strikes up a conversation with me and I get to expose someone new to robotics in some way. In the same way, I get the same responses wearing a vex volunteer shirt. Plus, it’s a bit easier for me to throw on another teams shirt to wear for the day than to cycle my buttons. And some teams have really nice looking shirts :p.
This is just my opinion, but I don’t think most members of the general public would be interested in buying typical team t-shirts. There are a variety of reasons I can think of:
- No connection to the program. Everyone on CD knows what a ThunderChicken is, but to most people it’s just a chicken head on a shirt.
- The walking billboard look. Most team shirts are plastered with sponsors on one side, the only time I’ve noticed people with shirts like that is free shirts from fundraising causes (Race for the Cure, Relay for Life, etc.). I guess robotics shirts could fit into that same niche, since they could be sold as a fundraiser…
- Cost. Most team shirts are printed in small batches, which drives the prices up into the $10-$15 per shirt range. If you can’t get shirts donated that would require charging close to $20 per shirt to use them as a fundraiser.
I would expect a handful of shirts to sell well, but most would need an overhaul on how they are laid out, the color scheme, and the logo (if the team even uses one consistently). If teams made shirts that “fit” with other common shirt designs there could be a market. Back when 498 was named the Armor Plated Serpentines I had a guy at Panda Express mistake my team shirt for a heavy metal band, maybe I could have sold it to him :rolleyes:
The only shirts my team sells are my Koko Ed is My Homeboy shirts ($15). Our team is not allowed to give team shirts away.
We sell shirts…
Although we don’t sell our team shirts, we do sell our Scrimmage shirts. We now have on-site capability to print our own shirts, no more middleman. Each shirt shows what the year & game theme is. We usually sell them at the Suffield Shakedown Scrimmage. Most of the post-season competitions here on the East coast also sell at their events.
Just keep in mind that you cannot sell t-shirts at any FRC event (Manual, sect. 4.15).
We’ve been considering running an extra print of various interesting logos that have innate appeal (like my profile picture) and adding some words and an FRC logo and selling them to our school’s populace to raise money. Cheerleaders already operate almost entirely on funds they make selling scrimmage shirts (which look like they were made in MS paint), but the only thing we’re fearing is whether or not they will generate enough interest. But even in this instance, it would not be an arbitrary extra T-shirt printing, but rather pre-orders that would decide how many we would print. I’m not sure how the rest of my team would feel extending this pre-ordering privilege to all of the internet, but I would think that they’d see it purely as an extra fund-raising opportunity. As for how all of Chief Delphi would feel about such practices, I have no clue. We may try this if we’re able to go to nationals this year.