RIPT Apparel: How We're Growing With SMS

TJ Mapes

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Published: April 18th, 2020

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TJ Mapes

Founder, RIPT Apparel

$200K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

RIPT Apparel

riptapparel.com

from Chicago, Illinois, USA

started June 2009

$200,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books TJ recommends to grow your business!

Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong ... Joey Coleman

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usabi... Steve Krug

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Pur... Tony Hsieh

Want more updates on RIPT Apparel? Check out these stories:

1. How Three Friends Launched $2.4M T-Shirt Startup RIPT Apparel (2019) ➜

This is a follow up story for RIPT Apparel. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 5 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hey everyone, I’m TJ Mapes, founder of RIPT Apparel. We partner with independent artists all over the world and sell their artwork on t-shirts, hoodies, posters, and more in our marketplace. A portion of every sale goes back to them and we’ve worked with 10,000’s of artists over the years.

Our bread and butter really are our daily deals. Everyday at midnight CST, three new designs by three new artists go live at a deep discount. T-Shirts start at just $14 for instance.

on-partnering-with-shop-for-good-and-launching-charities

When I think about all we’ve done over the years, I am most proud that we’ve paid our artist community multiple millions of dollars. Many of our artists do this full time, while many do it on the side, and we want to help them no matter their situation.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?

Since we last spoke, we’ve really been trying to tighten things up and become as efficient as possible. We’ve been testing out SMS. Right now we’ve only tested automated campaigns like abandoned cart sequences etc, but the results are pretty promising.

The faster you can launch initiatives, the faster you can measure the results and make decisions, and also find losers

I literally installed SMSbump, followed the directions for becoming compliant, and built out a quickly abandoned cart sequence and left it alone.

Our ROI in the last 30 days on the $11.05 we’ve spent is just, well, ridiculous. Suffice it to say, I’ll be doing much more testing with SMS and will be diving in much deeper in 2020.

We haven’t launched any new products or hired any new employees (unfortunately) but did recently launch a new charitable initiative I’m pretty proud of and frankly want more people to know about.

As a global community, we are battling something unprecedented and coming together to help one another has never been more important.

That’s why we partnered with Shop for Good by DailyKarma. They have an amazing Shopify app that makes it incredibly easy to work with charities.

Now when you checkout at riptapparel.com, you can round-up your purchase and donate it to charity!

We’ve selected three charities: Meals On Wheels America, Greater Chicago Food Depository and No Kid Hungry.

We’ve had this live for a little over a week and have already brought in hundreds of dollars for these great causes.

I think we may continue doing this in perpetuity and have even talked about choosing new causes every month to help as many people as possible.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Right now, with the things going on in the world, I’m not able to think super long term so we’re staying the course and doing our best to navigate these rough waters so we can come out afloat post-pandemic.

I don’t want to talk about that all day because you can’t turn a tv or radio on without hearing about it, but it has been tough and has taken a toll on many industries, including ours. Our sales have been affected negatively, but all we can do it keep on keepin’ on!

My main short term goal is to explore advertising on google and even increase our budgets if possible on all other paid channels since inventory is high and costs are low right now.