Welcome to Musictees.co.uk for band and music t-shirts

I'm afraid we've decided to call it a day here at Musictees.co.uk. We've given up because the cost price of genuine licensed t-shirts from UK wholesalers is high and the wholesalers themselves then go and sell the shirts on major online marketplaces (or on their own websites which they heavily promote) at little over cost price, making it impossible for independant online retailers to make a living.

We also found it impossible to get any sort of service from Universal, who were totally disinterested in providing us with decent profit making deals and who were unwilling to make the slightest effort to help us to make any money from selling their t-shirts. It was great to discover that the shirts that we had paid £8 a time for were, a few months later, being offered by a big online retailer for £4 with "free shipping" (whatever that is), you keep on giving  your favoured big retailers exclusive access to the clearance deals at the expense of the "little people". Go you.

We'd also like to thank the wholesale distributors that we dealt with for their unresponsive ordering systems which meant that we were unable to offer shirts with the confidence of being able to order them in to meet demand because they would constantly go "out of stock" with the suppliers after we had taken orders which meant that we could never count on actually getting the stock we needed from one week to the next which in turn meant having to effectively gamble on physical stock which was then invariably discounted a few short weeks later (and sold to other retailers who could then sell them on at prices that were impossible for us) making our cashbound stock virtually worthless. A great way to run a business.

Add to this, the insane Royal Mail postage costs have delivered the death blow - it now costs £2.70 to post an adult sized pouch packed t-shirt in the UK - nobody is willing to pay this when the big wholesalers sell directly on Amazon and other marketplaces offering free shipping. Congratulations on killing the smaller resellers.

If you came here looking for genuine licensed t-shirts and band merchandise visit  Bravado on Amazon. When we were selling, they were doing the same shirts that we were able to source from their wholesale distributor cheaper than we could possibly sell them for and with "free shipping" (see above) which made it impossible for us to make a sale (or a profit) on Amazon (we didn't even bother it was clearly going to be impossible). They are now charging more so maybe they have realised that either their so called "business partners" were being strangled by their tactics, or they're just pushing to make more money, or maybe their prices have gone up a lot (we haven't ordered from them for over 2 years - we're still trying to clear the shirts we bought back then). We don't care any more. We thank their "sales people" for not being remotely interested in us.

For anyone thinking of starting up a business selling licensed music merchandise in the UK, our advice would be not to bother unless you are selling from a retail outlet in a strange bubble where people love t-shirts and are happy to pay more than £3 for them. The big companies don't care about you and will sell you "new lines" for circa £8 including VAT and they'll be selling them on the same big sites or their own sites (or other "big preferred retailers" will be selling them) for £3 three months later "to clear". Your stock value will depreciate in a few short months by 60% or more and the people you are trying to sell to won't understand why you're "so expensive" and they won't believe that you need to clear £15 a shirt on Ebay just to make an 8% profit on your "investment" after covering the ever increasing ebay and paypal fees plus postage and packing. Then you have the ar**holes who claim they never got the item or, as we've recently had, "it was rusty but we can't return it to prove it to you because we have thrown it away" (this was a licensed belt not a shirt, which we have sold many of, all to generally acceptable feedback) who then neg you because you haven't given in to their feedback blackmail (which ebay aren't interested in).

Rock and roll.