The 24-Hour T-Shirt Business: How To Succeed Without Really Trying

In his regular life, Timothy Lim is just a mild-mannered audiologist in Little Rock, Arkansas. But, to the thousands who flock t-shirt websites like TeeFury, RipT Apparel and Shirt Punch, to get the one-of-a-kind pop culture designs being offered at $10 every 24 hours, he is Ninjaink, and he is a god.

His designs -- usually clever mash-ups of pop culture franchises from the '80s, '90s and now -- have been seen on Comics Alliance, BuzzFeed, MTV's Splash Page, G4's Attack of the Show and then Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, after one of his shirts was modeled by Avatar movie star, Sam Worthington.

"It's funny about that because ninety-nine percent of the time I don't find out about this stuff until someone tells me," says Lim.

That's exactly what happened when Worthington appeared on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon wearing Lim's "Holy Tri-Neeson" design. The art features The Holy Trinity, as represented by the roles of Liam Neeson, in the form of "The Father" -- Zeus from Clash of the Titans, (co-starring Worthington) "The Son" -- Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia movies and "The Holy Spirit" -- Qui-Gon Jinn from Star Wars Episode I.

"Prior to that, only four people in the world had bought the shirt and the night of the Fallon show I was checking my receipts (I get an e-mail every time somebody buys something) and my inbox was flooded," says Lim. "I look at them and it's all the same shirt. I woke up the next morning and saw the same thing was happening, so I asked on Facebook, 'Does anybody know why I would have a sudden spike in the sales of this shirt?' and they said my stuff was on Jimmy Fallon last night."

Lim had no idea that his work had become an overnight sensation, but learned a valuable lesson from the experience that he now passes on to other artists trying to make it in the 24-hour shirt game.

"Whenever you have a shirt that isn't selling well, don't get discouraged because it kind of sends shivers up my spine and gives me goosebumps to know that here I was, only a month before, thinking, 'that was a bad idea, only four people bought the shirt'. Hell, one of those people was Sam Worthington! You never know who buys this stuff and the market can change just like that. My Red Bubble store lists the top-selling shirts in my portfolio and "The Holy Tri-Neeson" is number one right now, all because of one person, which is really all you need, just one person to make that endorsement."

In the same way he is often in the dark about his own notoriety, Lim had no idea about the 24-hour t-shirt business until his friend persuaded him to give it a try and submit some designs.

"I always liked drawing as a hobby and I've been doing it since I was a kid, but I was always dissuaded from it because I was told it wasn't a very lucrative field and it was very competitive. I'm not a very competitive person at all by nature. I hate competition. So, I kept doing art as a hobby, always thinking in the back of my mind that if I had a chance to make money at it, I would. I just kept doing it on the side and getting more proficient, until eventually someone introduced me to these t-shirt websites."

His friends remembered that Lim had designed a few t-shirts in high school and encouraged him to try again, but noted that anyone could submit a design for consideration at these websites and many of them filed thousands of submissions a day.

Fortunately for Lim, the first design he submitted was accepted within two weeks and it was a huge hit. In fact, it's only been within the last few months that he has topped its sales numbers. The design was called 'Peace in Space' and it was an art nouveau pin-up of Samus Aran, the female bounty hunter from the Metroid series of video games.

"That first design was the gateway drug for what has come next, simply because once you get that high, you have no idea how the numbers are going to turn out," says Lim. Artists on all of these sites are told that for every $10 shirt sold, they will receive a single dollar.

"You're thinking to yourself, A dollar per shirt? That's not a lot. I didn't realize that the pay was so low. Then you realize that people buy this in bulk simply because they can't beat the deal. Where else are you going to find a shirt for $10? Plus, you only have a small time window in which to purchase it, so of course, when people like the design, they're going to come in numbers to buy as many as they can. So, when I got that first online pay stub I thought, Holy cow,this is a lot of money!"

That first 24-hour run earned him over $1,000 and he hasn't looked back since. Even more remarkably, he looks back now and thinks it was one of his shoddier pieces.

"I took a semester of basic drawing when I was in college and in high school I was part of an extra-curricular art program," confirms Lim. "But, ever since I was a kid, I've always been self-taught. I collect a lot of books simply for the art. For example, I didn't pick up comic books for the writing, I got them because I like the artist's style. I would try to get behind the artist's eyes and ask myself, 'What is it about this artist's style that makes it their own?' I would then try to mimic that."

People have begun to take notice. One writer on the science fiction culture website i09 called his ability to mimic other people's styles "Cameleonic". Lim says that's fine because when people purchase his work, and they don't care who the artist is, that's the biggest compliment he can receive.

Another huge secret to his success is that his internet handle Ninjaink isn't just one person, but a team of people. Relax, it's no conspiracy. Unlike Batman creator Bob Kane, he doesn't employ a team of ghost artists who do the work while he takes the credit. No, he employs a brain trust that do nothing but come up with ideas and franchises to parody for his next project.

"A lot of my ideas are not based on the '80s pop culture that I loved and grew up with. Instead, a lot of my ideas come from the pop culture that my friends have grown up with. For example, a piece called 'You Got the Touch' is a mash-up of Transformers and Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam and that was not my idea. The idea belongs to my friend Robert Simpson, same with a recent design that featured Breaking Bad. I do not watch that show and I have no idea who those characters are, so that also was a team effort."

For their contributions, his friends get an equal cut of anything earned off of a collaborative design, as Lim cuts them a cheque himself. "I'm very blessed to have these friends and they're very enthusiastic about it. They think it's really cool to see their ideas come to life as illustration," he says.

Of all the websites where his work appears, Lim's favourite site to submit to is RipT Apparel. They tend to host his designs most often and they even printed a charity tribute to Optimus Prime voice actor Peter Cullen with all proceeds going to The Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

"I think their communication is great," says Lim regarding RipT Apparel. "They're very open in terms of communicating with artists, getting their payments to them on time and giving artists good feedback in terms of what's working and what's not. Never has communication broken down to the point where I'm waiting for an answer. They're pretty consistent with their replies."

And though Lim is satisfied with his experience, the redesign of RipT's website this summer will make the artist's experience even better. "Whenever an artist submits a design our system will tell them whether we've looked at it yet, whether we've decided not to go with it, whether it's in consideration, or whether it has been scheduled," says Ingleby. "They'll have their own personal page that shows all of their submitted designs and where they stand. On top of that, when a shirt is selling that day, they'll be able to see those sales come in as they happen and look back at the numbers from past shirts of theirs that we printed."

Lim has also worked with TeeFury and says that their gargantuan size within the industry makes the site highly competitive when it comes to submitting a design. "They really are the standard for looking at how the industry operates," says Lim.

"As an artist, I think they're more indicative of what to look forward to because you could submit ten designs and maybe have one taken if you're lucky. You can ask them for feedback, but they're so busy, that's not something you can expect all the time. The bar that they've established is very high."

TeeFury also limits their artists to six colours per design, which Lim says inadvertently assists him as an artist. "As an artist, I like it and the reason why is when I'm illustrating something that has no colour limit it can be very bothersome to have that much freedom because you're thinking to yourself, 'Does this look alright'? 'Should I put more colour into it?' When there are only six colours I can actually move faster. I've never felt limited because, for a shirt, you want consistency in the design."

And TeeFury agrees. The company limits the colours because they say a small number of colours looks better on a t-shirt. "Selling a t-shirt design that may be pop culture themed, can't all be about the theme," says Jason Guiterrez, TeeFury's co-founder.

"The mash-up has to look good as a t-shirt. We've been doing this for four years and our curators do a fantastic job. You can have a really solid idea for a mash-up, but if the colouring is bad, if it's on the wrong coloured shirts, if it's the wrong size design, if the placement is wrong, if there are too many colours or not enough colours, it's not going to sell well, even if it is a fantastic idea."

There is at least one company out there trying to prove TeeFury's monochromatic theory wrong. Oshawa, Ontario's Shirt Punch wants to be the rebel of the business and will tell you that they will print anything, as long as it's fun and entertaining.

"We have one rule," says founder Russ Montague. "For those few minutes you log on to Shirt Punch each day, we want you to feel like you did when you were a kid, it's Saturday morning, you got your bowl of cereal and your just about to watch some awesome cartoons. It's that excitement that we wanted to bring. Whether you buy the shirt or not, it should always invoke a sense of awe."

That means bolder, brighter colours and references that are more obscure, properties long forgotten and a few tricks, such as metallic or glow in the dark ink. Montague even borrowed from comic books with 'Variant Sunday', a day that features a design from earlier in the week that has one element that has changed. Suddenly, the green and brown Boba Fett is the blue and white Jango Fett or suddenly a storm trooper is depicted riding a tricycle instead of Darth Vader.

Montague likes to mix it up and have fun, but until a landmark deal with Canada Post this year, Shirt Punch's Achilles heel had been their shipping time. "The only option we could get was standard mail ground transportation into the U.S. and we had to pay a dollar of our own profits towards the shipping of every shirt just to stay competitive. Now, through this exclusive deal with Canada Post, we can keep the price the same, but we're going from ground transportation that can take up to six weeks, to air transportation that takes five or six days maximum," says Montague.

Lim has yet to design for Shirt Punch, but he has been successful enough with TeeFury and RipT that he scored himself a job as a freelance designer for a more traditional online pop culture t-shirt shop called WeLoveFine. There, he gets to design licensed shirts for companies like Marvel, Hasbro and Lucas Films. He believes that the fact he is a business man first and an artist second is key to his success.

"I'm not from the artist world, so whenever it comes to how I interact with people, I'm not looking at it as an artist. I'm looking at it more from a business angle," says Lim. "I know other artists who have had their beefs with certain t-shirt sites and maybe it's because they take certain things too personally if they don't get printed. I don't advertise my grief at all because what are you going to do? If people don't want to print something, you just have to keep going. I'm not going to air my grievances to other people, which is why I think I have such a good working relationship with these sites."

But what keeps Lim, and others like him, in business, is people's love for these pop culture mash-up t-shirts and if people keep ordering them, he'll keep submitting designs.

"I think licensed work is great, it's very legitimate, but I think the beauty of these t-shirts is that you kind of have to be clever. It's one of those shirts that the average person isn't going to know just walking down the street. It will only be a fan of the franchise who will notice it, so it becomes sort of an in-joke to a specific group of people and that's what I like about it."

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