24 Hour Tees

When Chais and Shawna Meyer founded 24 Hour Tees, they had a couple of major goals in mind. First, create a custom shirt design service that gives everyone, even people without artistic experience, the opportunity to express themselves. Second, build a company and a customer experience that is collaborative, simple, and fun.

Their strategy proved successful. In just the few years since its launch, 24 Hour Tees has grown from a boutique service handling mostly small orders—often just a couple of shirts for a person who had a fun design idea—to a sophisticated print design house fulfilling corporate orders for thousands of units.

“Our mission has always been to make the process of designing and ordering shirts frictionless and fun for our customers,” says Chais. “But as the company grows and the orders get both more frequent and more complex, fulfilling that mission gets trickier. As the business took off, one of the first things we needed to do was automate some of our processes so we could handle the increasing demand without complicating things for our customers.”

The RingCentral API helps 24 Hour Tees automate while still providing its human touch

When they launched the company Chais and Shawna set up their office with a few landlines and a standard service from the telephone company. “That was okay at the very beginning,” Chais explains, “but it didn’t give us much flexibility in our business communications, and it didn’t allow us to automate any of our processes.”

In one of his previous businesses, a web development service, Chais had used RingCentral. “As soon as we realized this shirt company was going to grow, we went right back to RingCentral, and that’s when I discovered the RingCentral API, which could help us automate key parts of our operations.”

“For example, RingCentral lets us use the same business number not just for voice but also texting. So when a customer places an order on our site, we automatically generate a confirmation text message from our business number that goes out to that customer. And because the RingCentral API integrates easily with other apps, like our shared to-do app, when a text request or question comes in from a customer, we can automatically create a to-do item that everyone in the company can see. This way, we make sure each customer request gets dealt with quickly.”

“We’ve even created automated text messages specifically for our fundraiser-based orders,” Chais continues. “If a customer places a shirt order for a fundraiser, we’ll send them not only a confirmation but also a message letting them know they’ve raised X dollars toward their goal. It’s a great way to let these customers know we understand who they are and why their order really matters.”

With the RingCentral API, 24 Hour Tees has also been able to utilize artificial intelligence to send relevant, customized messages to the right people at the right time. “When someone texts in a specific question—for example, ‘What’s my order status?’—our system can do a search of our database for that number, then check to see if that person has an active order and what its status is. Then we can send an immediate response, a pre-written note with our 24 Hour Tees fun tone, which no one in the company has to manually write in that moment. This saves us from needing a call center rep to answer questions like these.”

“I’d estimate this automation with the RingCentral API has saved us the need to hire about four additional full-time employees.”

RingCentral also makes internal company communication easier than ever

Although it’s a small organization, the 24 Hour Tees team is distributed international. “We have a full-time employee in Mexico,” explains Chais, “and a freelance developer in Palestine. Thanks to the RingCentral apps we all have on our desktops and mobile phones, we’re all easily able to 

communicate much more easily and cost-effectively via phone or text from our business numbers, and it doesn’t matter where anyone is or whether they’re at their desks.”

RingCentral is even helping the company scale up and expand its operations

24 Hour Tees is growing so rapidly that Chais, Shawna, and their team have recently launched a sister company, Screen Print USA, to focus on larger-scale orders for organizations.

“We’re going to be running both of these companies using the same

team and the same resources,” says Chais. “A lot of what’s making this possible is that we now have the communication and automation tools to increase our capacity without needing a lot of additional staff. We couldn’t do a lot of what we’re doing without tech automation like RingCentral.”

Although it’s a small organization, the 24 Hour Tees team is distributed international. “We have a full-time employee in Mexico,” explains Chais, “and a freelance developer in Palestine. Thanks to the RingCentral apps we all have on our desktops and mobile phones, we’re all easily able to