Vinyl Shirt Club, a new Kansas City-based subscription service, will start signing up customers today.
Each month, the business will ship a T-shirt featuring the logo of an independently owned record store to subscribers. It’s the brainchild of Ashley and Lea Bailes, a married couple who are combining their love of music with previous experience in the subscription business.
“Starting Vinyl Shirt Club has been a blast,” Ashley Bailes said. “The feedback has been incredible. After putting up a simple launch page and Facebook page to gauge interest, we received hundreds of emails, social media comments and messages with feedback on favorite vinyl stores and what people would like to see from the club.”
Vinyl Shirt Club should make its first shipment in early October. It’ll offer monthly and bimonthly subscriptions, as well as discounted prepaid plans on a three-, six-, nine- and 12-month basis.
Discovering an Opportunity
The Baileses were inspired by another subscription business, the Dive Bar Shirt Club, which sells cool T-shirts spotlighting bars and saloons across the country.
“With a renewed interest in vinyl, we found our way back into record stores and started looking around for record store t-shirts to represent our love for music,” Lea Bailes said. “We quickly realized that they were hard to find. We thought, ‘Hey, it would be awesome if there was a place that sent out a new record store T-shirt every month, kind of like Dive Bar Shirt Club.’ We love what they do, and we wanted to do something similar with a completely different group.”
Lea Bailes already has a successful track record in subscription businesses. A few years ago, he co-founded Sock 101. The company ships stylish men’s socks to about 4,000 subscribers every month.
When Sock 101 debuted, it was designed to be an e-commerce site. A subscription model wasn’t in the plans until customers began to ask for one. “So we just kind of jumped into it,” Lea Bailes said.
Keys to a Successful Subscription Business
One of the differences between Vinyl Shirt Club and Sock 101 is audiences, he said. Sock 101 has a larger, but less-defined potential market: men who want a more stylish choice in footwear. Vinyl Shirt Club’s ideal customers, meanwhile, are people who are passionate about independent record stores. That’s a smaller audience, but more sharply defined and easier to target.
As the Baileses have built Vinyl Shirt Club, they’ve tried to abide by two other keys for successful subscription companies: keeping the idea of their product very simple, while keeping the quality and value high.
Having an easy-to-explain product makes it easier to introduce yourself to customers. Keeping the quality high allows you to maintain the relationship with subscribers and prevent them from jumping ship.
“It’s absolutely got to be the highest-quality T-shirt,” Lea Bailes said.
Bandwagon Merchandise, a Crossroads-based screen printer, will handle production for Vinyl Shirt Club. They’ll print on a private-label shirt, which normally could cost $28 to $32. Because a subscription business offers a relatively stable, predictable volume and quantity of orders, the Baileses are able to get their pricing down to $23 per month.
For more information about Vinyl Shirt Club, check out its website here.
