Man Makes Living by Selling Shirt on His Back

Posted By: Paul

I’ve always believed that it was possible to make money doing anything. And I mean – ANYTHING. If you can design and market your product/service the right way, I’m sure that you can convince people to buy your stuff. That said, I’m always on the lookout for interesting business ideas that blow up and become successful. Recently I’ve stumbled onto a really interesting one. This is interesting because these guys got famous wearing T-shirts. Everyday, their job is to literally – wear a T-shirt.

What’s the Business About?

www.iwearyourshirt.com is an Advertising company that uses T-shirts to advertise for businesses. Founded by Jason Salder, the idea revolves around wearing a shirt emblazoned with a company’s logo. Sadler wears a different shirt for every day of the year. He advertises for the companies by taking pictures and by uploading videos about the companies to Ustream and YouTube. The site started on January 1st, 2009 and has been making Jason a very comfortable living by sharing his T-shirt wearing escapades.

Sadler initially came up with this idea behind I Wear Your Shirt after trying to come up with “a way to make some extra money without actually ‘working’”. In 2005, Sadler was inspired by The Million Dollar Homepage to create “something … that would hopefully be as successful and, maybe down the road, just as profitable”. He noticed that for promotional purposes, many companies gave away T-shirts for free. Knowing that T-shirts caught people’s attention, he decided to become a “human billboard” and “create an advertising medium through free social media tools”. After coming up with this idea, Sadler spread I Wear Your Shirt’s services through his group of family and friends and through Facebook.

How Does it Make Money?

Customers visit the website and purchase days for Sadler to advertise their products. For every day of the year, Sadler dons the shirt of a different company for a set price. On January 1, 2009 the price was $1. The price increased by $1 for every day after January 1. By December 31, I Wear Your Shirt’s last customer for the year paid $365. This means Sadler’s annual guaranteed income comes out to be $66,795. He’s publicly revealed that he received an additional $18,000 in 2009 from the sale of monthly $1,500 sponsorships. After factoring in the money gained from contests and other enterprises, Sadler’s total income in 2009 is $83,000.

In 2010, Sadler doubled the prices and expanded his operations by hiring Evan White, who lives in Los Angeles, California. Together they wear the same shirts on the both coasts of the United States and promote the company of the day by posting videos wearing a company’s shirt on Ustream, YouTube. They also discuss the companies that they’re promoting on Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve been browsing through some of their videos on youtube and they’re actually really funny.

(On a sidenote: I know the purpose of Sadler video is to convince me to visit the company website – but it’s working! I must have already clicked through to 3 or 4 company sites just to check them out in more detail.)

These two guys do such a great job making these companies look fun and snazzy.

Check out one of their videos below

Why is it Working?

The number 1 reason why I think this business has not only been successful but sustainable is that it flat out works. Sadler does an excellent job promoting these companies with his engaging personality and well edited videos. I hate to sound cliche, but I don’t think this site is really about wearing T-shirts. It’s about promoting great content on a consistent basis.

Let’s look at some facts, Sadler alone has over 1,300 friends on Facebook and over 21,000 followers on Twitter. It’s hard to develop such a large audience if you’re content isn’t engaging the audience.

Company’s recognize Sadler’s audience and this is the reason why they’re willing to pay such big fees for an one shot advertisement. Even if only a modest 1% of this audience converts that’s still over 200 new customers.

And of course a huge theme throughout the site is how much fun these two guys look like they’re having. Who knew work could be this fun?! These guys look like they enjoy what they’re doing and I bet they would be supercool to hang out with at a party.