Dadsupply
Humorous t-shirts for dads, and the dad adjacent.
About
About This Project
Dadsupply started as a side project in 2020. There was some side-income coming in from other projects but not enough to support anything meaningful — so the goal was to try for a bigger market while following a similar playbook. The domain popped up on GoDaddy Auctions at a reasonable buy-it-now price, and the concept clicked: a t-shirt brand that took dad jokes and turned them into shirts, later expanding into other designs that featured "Dad."
The hypothesis was simple — every year kids buy their dad some gift that says #1 Dad or something along those lines. If shirts were offered to the larger market of "people with dads" and the designs were decent, selling 20+ shirts a day seemed achievable.
The site was built quickly on WooCommerce with a pre-built theme, and roughly 40 unique designs were created. Experiments were run with Google and social ads alongside the usual SEO optimization, and an Etsy storefront was set up as an additional channel.
Dadsupply was ultimately shut down because it wasn't making much progress, shirt design had stalled, and it made more sense to focus time where there was more opportunity.
Results
What Didn't Work
- Ads were too expensive. Google Shopping and search campaigns never hit a good conversion rate — cost per click well outweighed the profit margin from print-on-demand.
- Etsy never took off. Only a couple of shirts sold per month.
- Meta ads didn't convert either. This suggested that while POD is great, it works much better for a brand that already has an audience and wants additional revenue.
- Only the more offensive designs sold. The normal dad joke shirts never really gained traction. The broader trend seems to be declining interest in t-shirts.
Learnings
- Gained solid experience with Google Merchant Center and became more comfortable running basic ad campaigns — though this is still a weak spot.
- Google Search is still a great raw traffic driver, but expect to burn through budget while Google optimizes. Think along the lines of $100/day ($3,000/month) before seeing meaningful results.