First Steps When Launching Your Clothing Brand

one of the most common questions i receive is how do i start and grow my clothing brand look with the rise of companies like printful where you literally can start a t-shirt brand with no money there's so much noise in the marketplace and millions of people are trying to start their own brand so how do you stand out and grow a viable business now in this video we're going to talk about it because the answer may not be what you think we're going to go over three things that i think everyone should understand before they launch and grow their clothing brand if you're new to the channel my name is devin lars and for the past 15 years i've been in the branding merchandising and advertising business i run an agency called curio where we work with some of the biggest brands in the world to help tell their story on and offline if you want to see some of our work from our agency you could click the link in the description below so i'm excited to start this new raw and uncut series um i want to create these videos as nothing this isn't going to be super fancy there's not going to be a bunch of editing it's not going to be a bunch of music a bunch of things popping up this is just going to be a raw uncut kind of documentation of the process of building doing everything different now i started this brand in 2008 with the concept of being able to use it to build relationships to be able to test out ideas and to be able to just get you know my creative ideas out there into the world and there's been a lot of stuff that i've learned around building this brand and around doing different releases and launches i'm using this as a tool to kind of like i said test out those ideas and then also build our agency right using this as lead generation to be able to build relationships with people to then get accounts to help them grow and establish their brands we work with some of the biggest brands we do a lot of merchandising and product for for tesla for uh for nike for the warriors um for starbucks for a lot of different big retail uh brands and then also people that are starting brands and stuff like that so i think with this series i'm really excited to just upload and show the process of what we've done and kind of what we've learned and step by step we kind of took a step back and really been focused on the agency side of things curio and working with our clients and stuff like that and so i'm really excited to relaunch doing everything different and kind of use this as a tool to showcase how do you create a brand um in the modern world right using technology using social media being able to storytell different things of that nature so i really wanted to create this kind of series that is going to go into um the process of everything right how do we structure everything how do we structure our content how do we structure our releases how do we structure our sampling how do we do production how do we take uh inventory and do um build relationships how do we do online set up the online store and do fulfillment literally walk you guys through step by step the entire process so super excited about this series some of this stuff isn't gonna be for everybody right this is just gonna i'm literally doing this to speak to my experience and the things that i've learned so you can take the things that apply to your situation and be able to build on it and be able to grow it from there i literally just wanted to make these videos as like a younger version of myself of like what does a younger devin need to know um and what is the process that they need to that he would need to see and so that's what's going to be in these videos so the three things that we're going to cover in this video um that i think is very important everybody should know no matter where you are in the process of building growing starting launching your brand or just business in general right so i think number one is what does your brand mean right a lot of people think that um they just kind of go with trends and they just kind of go with whatever you know is is popping right now which is cool right there's a model for that but again i'm going to talk to my experience and thinking about okay having a brand that actually represents something and means something then we're going to talk about what is your business model i think this is where a lot of people get confused where they think that they have to have everything and all their source of income from product sales right and the actual brand and the clothing which is cool if people want to just do a clothing brand but i think with so much noise with so many options out there with so many other people that want to do brands and especially if you're only doing like t-shirts and hoodies and imprinting stuff you're not actually doing cutting so it's kind of hard to to separate yourself from the crowd so thinking about your business model you know how do you set up a structure where you're not just making money from the product but you're able to build out multiple streams of revenue and things kind of work with each other so we're going to go over that and then the third thing is going to be building a team the importance of building a team i mean it's a cliche where they say teamwork teamwork makes the dream work and it couldn't be more true i'm going to talk about my experience and how we went from just kind of doing it myself to then establishing a full team and being able to build it and i was always curious of why i kept hitting a certain level of success trying to do everything by myself and it wasn't until i was able to really trust and build a team and i was able to go to the next level so those are the three things we're going to cover so let's jump right into it so number one what does your brand mean i think this is a very important topic because there's there's again so much noise out there nowadays right everybody has a brand everybody's starting a brand everybody wants to have a brand and i think that there are a lot of opportunities now with social media right because of technology because it is so easy to start a brand i think that there's a lot of competition but then there's also a lot of opportunity and i think the opportunity comes from being able to find out what and who your brand represents right what does your brand mean right there what is the connection what is the meaning behind um your product and what it is because i think that there's a lot of things that people do where they get in and they want to just start this t-shirt brand or they want to start this clothing brand or they want to do you know cut and sold product whatever it is and they don't really understand their niche they don't understand where they fit in the marketplace they don't understand what their story is they're just kind of copying what other people are doing right finding something that somebody's doing is working for them and then being able to copy that the only problem with doing that is you'll always end up late because you're copying somebody that produced an idea that's already out so they're on to the next thing and so you're gonna constantly having to play this chase game of like trying to chase and find the new trend of what's of what's hot and so i think that you know while some of that stuff is good in terms of trends of like maybe you know the cut of hoodies or the cut of t-shirts you know back in the day in you know 2007 2008 it was these big wide cut jeans right and there's these long big old shirts and now it's evolved into more tapered fitted clothes so thinking about that in terms of like how you need to adjust with the trends of what happens is very important but then also keeping in mind of like okay what does your brand ethos mean what does your brand represent who is the audience that it represents i think that's very important to find that out and i think that comes with who the founder is right who is the creator who are you that is creating the brand and what do you represent what do you stand for what do you um what are your interests i think that now with the way that the internet is all and social media is all segmented you can find an audience in a niche audience that represents your tribe and what you mean and who you are and i think that's very important to identify um who that audience is and to create content and create stuff that is relevant to that audience you know back in the day before there was like you know you had to do tv ads and you had to do print ads you got to do all this stuff to cast out a wide net and you couldn't really get like super hyper focused on a niche or a group but now with social media you really can you can build out an audience you can build out a community you can build out something that represents this idea of whatever your concept of your brand is and then these products are just extensions of that idea right so i think that is so important to think about that sometimes you know we think when we're starting a brand that a brand is just you know just products or whatever designs and things of that nature but if you can start really thinking about what does my brand mean what does what is the idea in these products and these releases and the content are just literally extensions of this this main big idea so for us doing everything different it's all about accomplishing goals it's all about trying something different it's all about um achieving things it's all about finding that okay this didn't work so let me readjust it and try it again to see if it works so that's the idea right that's the big idea the overview of that and so everything and all the products that we want to uh create and put together is extensions of those ideas and as we go through this series i'm going to kind of break it down as we start designing our collections as we start designing our content as we start putting together our commercials and as we start putting together different pieces that represent the brand i'm going to show you guys step by step of what i mean and why this is like you know this concept we chose this concept and why it represents this idea and i'm gonna i'm gonna break it down so you can see it in real time so these are just some concepts that i want you guys to start thinking about and wrapping your head as we start going through this series and as you start you know growing and launching your brand is what is that main idea and how do you create an extension of that through the products and content that you put out the cool thing about product is and that's what we're gonna get into this next section um or or number two of like setting up your business model the product is just that extension of your idea think of it as as just marketing right it's just marketing so not necessarily like you have to make money from the product sales right you don't have to make a profit necessarily from the product sales and that's where you get all of your money and your income from so as we start going into this next section and talking about your business model start thinking about the product is just like i said an extension of your idea and for somebody to be able to take that idea that you create content online and to be able to take it with them so they can wear it and this is an extension of that concept and idea that you're building so i think that's why it's so important at least for us to create something that has some meaning right you wear a nike product you feel a certain way you feel like an athlete even if you're not an athlete right you you have these different you wear louis vuitton or some of these designer off-white or whatever and you feel like oh i'm you know it's a status symbol so there's there's these ideas that that these these these brands and concepts that they represent and so for us again this content is just going to be around speaking for us and through our experience and kind of what we found that works for us it may be different for you but i really think that finding that meaning and finding that pillar piece of what is our philosophy and what do we mean and then being able to create that content and products around that is very important um there there's a couple different things um there's one video that i've mentioned this video before but i'll link it down in the description about this guy named simon uh cynic and he talks about the um i want to say it's the golden circle i haven't watched it in a while but essentially you have like these three circles right you have this inner dot circle you have the wider circle and you have the outside circle so you have the why the what and the how um or it might be vice versa i just know in the center of the circle it's the y and so companies like nike apple these big brands they communicate why before they talk about what they do or or or how they do it right they don't talk about their computer and the speed and all that stuff all of their marketing especially in the beginning was about why they do what they do who this represents who you know who wears this product who represents this brand the why is going to be very very important so it's a really cool video to watch like i said i'll link it down in the description so if you guys are interested i think it's really helpful to just kind of like start thinking about your brand in a different perspective and like okay where do i want to set this up and what does my brand mean and how do i want to find that core audience and then be able to build that out i think another thing too is building out audience profiles like your customer profiles i may cover that later on down the line once we start getting into marketing and running our ads and stuff like that that i take you guys with me but audience profiles are very helpful because it helps you identify and know who that person is so looking at their age demographic looking at their interests looking at what other brands they like you know what what um um who they follow on social media just what they're interested in because being able to take that information and put it all in one place will allow you then to say okay cool how are we going to create content that's going to be relevant to this person and that this person is going to be interested in and like i said before a lot of the stuff especially in the beginning you need to create stuff that you're interested in because chances are if you're interested in it there's a bunch of people out there that are interested in it as well and you know what interests you right you know what what is going to interest you and what you would click on so the content and stuff that we create is just literally that's why i said this video is like for a younger version of myself i don't know who's going to watch this i don't know who it is but i'm just making this for a younger version of devin that needs to see this i want to create that and create around that and same thing that we're doing doing everything different we wanted to create this concept and this lifestyle and put together people that are trying to progress in life and and wanting to start stuff somebody that is not just going to take the status quo that's building not necessarily not necessarily just a business but growing anything wanting to become better whether that's in your career whether it's in your business whether it's your personal life whatever it is you want to be better and so that's our idea and that's what we represent all right number two setting up your business model now it's not always what you think so previously i talked about how you know your product is an extension of you um and your product is an extension of this idea and you don't necessarily need to make money off of the product now let me let me explain what i mean when we started doing everything different yeah we wanted to start a clothing brand but we also had an agency where we provided different screen printing services marketing services campaigns for other clients and other businesses so the way that we looked at it is okay we don't necessarily need to make all of our money from the clothing brand which allowed us to have the freedom to have another source of revenue and income to not just solely rely on doing everything different which allowed us to be creative and not worry about making money from the actual brand so the way that this is kind of how we set it up for us personally is that we have two parts right we have our agency where we do you know work with some of the biggest brands small brands different things of that nature and then we have our brand which is like a way that we can number one it's just like a passion project of mine that i love to be able to express myself creatively and have these ideas and turn these ideas into reality but then it also allows us to have an extension of that idea it allows us to build relationships we've gotten so many clients for our agency because we had doing everything different and we've given doing everything different product to our potential clients that we wanted to work with so we literally were able to create a brand that people liked we were able to use it as an extension of us and a marketing tool right those products that you have our marketing tool of whenever somebody wears it and they see it they're going to think oh devin gave this to me i need to reach out to him or if there's a project that comes up and they happen to have a hoodie on it's just a constant subliminal reminder to stay on people's minds so instead of just doing the standard you know company swag with your company logo on it and just some like regular boring stuff that other agencies do we said how do we create our in-house brand that allows us to be able to have an extension of our voice and have a really dope message around it that people could connect to that we're able to build relationships with we're able to start conversations with and we're able to um use this as a tool to test out ideas and use this as a portfolio piece right so everything that we're doing with doing everything different is gonna help our agency because now what we're gonna do is all the processes that we build from content creation to podcasts to product to retail side of things all of that stuff is going to be uh um services that we're going to be able to provide for our clients essentially right and we can use this as a portfolio piece to show our true creativity when you're working with clients it's a little difficult because sometimes they're not as open to um creative ideas they're kind of locked in a box and so with this this is gonna allow us to really solely express our creativity and to be able to build um build with them um so i think that like having these multiple streams of of businesses and these multiple ideas there's pros and cons to it right and so i'll i'll be honest with you in the beginning there was a lot of cons because it was like we were doing all these different things we were trying to like build doing everything different i was doing like public speaking and and doing um like workshops with students high school students which was another passion of mine because i was just sharing my story of how we've been able to work with some of these biggest brands and artists and stuff like that how we've been able to build a business with no business background that was like a real passion of mine that we were doing the screen printing and doing everything all of our screen printing in-house we built out our whole manufacturing facility you know so we were doing all these things and this was like in my early 20s well throughout my whole 20s um and during that time a lot of people were saying like you're doing too much you're like focused on so many different things what are you doing you need to have one single focus which i think that a single focus is important but then i also think about diversifying your ideas into multiple buckets in the long run is better because it allows you it allowed me to test out to see what i was good at it allowed me to um stay creative in ways and allowed me to like test out ideas i have 80d so i can't like focus on one thing for too long i need to have this like creative stimulation from other places so this allowed me to kind of build all of it out and then the crazy part is it all connected together right so the speaking i was able to um to talk about my story and promote doing everything different which was the product side and then for the product side we were able to give um you know sell more shirts and sell product and then we were also able to give packages to people that we wanted to work with and then in turn built a relationship to get their business from the for the agency so now thinking back in hindsight it all made sense that it all connected and everything that i'm doing is in different um categories but they all work together um and so i think that like that was a lot of the cons in the beginning it was just like it looked like i was all over the place and i didn't have one single focus which means that it took longer to build this entire kind of empire versus just focusing on one thing and building that up and then moving over to the next thing this may not work for you this may not be a good strategy for you you may just want to focus on one thing you may just want to focus on the clothing brand um which is is totally fine i mean this is your business you create it however you want again these are just experiences of mine that have worked for me that i've been able to build that i've seen worked and in in retrospect it's worked really well to be able to have these three kind of buckets to be able to pull in from our agency service side of things where my team creates and campaigns and stuff the the speaking that allows us to build relationships the whole reason why we got the starbucks account is from speaking i went to a youth event i spoke i met somebody um there that worked at starbucks he got us in with the bpn we started building a relationship with the bpm black partner network we were working with them for two and a half years two and a half years later we're doing 250 000 shirts for every single employee in the us and canada if i never would have spoke if i didn't go to that event and i didn't speak at that event i didn't get paid it was just a youth event that i was trying to i just like doing but if i didn't speak at that event i wouldn't have met fred who wouldn't got me into starbucks who wouldn't have got us this account for our agency right the way that we got tesla is we started building a relationship but we reached out to them and they met us we went in there and we we started a cool relationship but then they seen what we were doing in terms of the speaking and then they liked the doing everything different products so we gave them a bunch of doing everything different stuff to allow us to build the relationship because after that first initial conversation there was nothing else that we could build a relationship on it was just kind of like oh hey you know can we put an order in there was nothing that we can do to provide them to give them value but since they liked the brand we were able to open and keep that conversation which then in turn got us the tesla account where we were doing all of the product for the tesla employees in the factory all the aprons the t-shirts 30 000 units like it was it was a crazy um way that we were able to build that so that goes to show you how all these things connect right the doing everything different brand got us in the tesla speaking got us into starbucks building the relationship on the agency side has gotten into us but you know us with a bunch of stuff the reason why we were able to build a relationship with a lot of these celebrities is because we offered people screen printing services that allowed us to build a relationship to then get our brand in there so as you can see and illustrate it or how i'm trying to illustrate is that everything connects together for us and it works really well so like i said your business model might not be what you think don't just think so short term and just think about just one-sided of just oh i just sell t-shirts or i just sell a brand what can you build that connects everything together right what can you do that like brings multiple um things that that can work together but work separately and individually but they all kind of cross and build together and so those were those were the things that i i think um have been that that have been helpful for me and then i think that like if you guys start thinking that it could be a little different of how you structure your business and how you structure um your brand and what you're building all right and number three i want to talk about building a team and why it is so so so so so important you know i one of the biggest one of my biggest challenges in business has been delegation right in the beginning starting off building a business you don't have much money of course you don't have a team um you know you don't have a lot of resources you don't have stuff so in the beginning you have to do a lot of these things by yourself which i think is great i think it's really good to have to do all of these different things and these departments by yourself in the beginning to understand kind of the concept of it so what i did in the beginning is is i had to do every single department so you know how i talked about we had the different divisions right we have the agency side where we're doing different so many different pieces and moving pieces with the agency with our manufacturing facility all that stuff then i had the speaking then we had to doing everything different so i had to play every single roll i had to wear so many different hats from uh designer to pre-production preparation to screen printing to setting up the screens to shipping to invoicing to customer service to marketing to building relationships with the influencers with um uh customer service and dealing with returns and putting out fires to quoting people so many different things so many different things i'm not gonna get into all of the stuff that i had to do but i had to learn all these things before i had an actual team so as i was building out this business i started to get into the habit of just doing the things and getting it done so like even if i had somebody on my team i would say instead of taking the time to train them on how to do something it would just be faster if i do it myself so i got into this rut of like trying to do everything myself and then it was starting to get to a point where it was like so much stuff that i was taking on that i had a team around me a team of people around me that were more than capable but i was trying to take on too much myself because number one i think i felt that i felt guilty asking somebody from my team to do some work so i was like always in the mindset of like oh i need to i need to lead by example i need to be able to do it i can't ask them to do something i'm not willing to do that was a mindset that i had and so as i was starting to do all this stuff i realized like i'm only reaching a certain level of success because i'm trying to take everything on myself and i had trouble asking my team for help even though my team was here and they were like hey how can i support and so i think that what was a real breakthrough for me was i had a conversation with my mom and i was i was just telling her i'm like you know i just kept hitting a certain level of success and and i just realized i'm like man i was kind of going back and forth and going through that imposter or what is it um imposter syndrome whatever it is to thinking of like that i just i'm a terrible entrepreneur and i'm not made for this i'm not built for this this is like you know as an entrepreneur you go through these things right you go through these extreme ups where you're just on the on the top of the the the moon and then you go down to these really really down lows where you're just like i suck and this this just isn't working and i was just in one of these spaces where i was just like you know i just i suck at this and then i had to start realizing me and my mom were talking and she said well why don't you your problem your the problem is just delegation you have a team you hand-picked your team you know your team is more than capable to execute on this stuff why you need to delegate you need to get better at delegating so she told me to go get some sticky notes right you get some sticky notes and write delegate on it and stick it all over the house so i literally wrote delegate on i want to say 30 post-it notes and i stuck one on my refrigerator door i stuck one inside the refrigerator door i stuck one by the coffee maker by the the front door where you go and leave to my window my bathroom on my computer on the printer i literally had 20 to 30 sticky notes that just said delegated all through the house because i realized that it wasn't that i didn't know how to delegate it was just that i didn't think about it top of mind like it wasn't like my first initial response of like oh i need to delegate this to my team my first initial response is like oh i just need to do it and i think that um with seeing these stickers and these delegate stickers everywhere it really helped me because it allowed me to kind of like see that everywhere and so i started to remember delegate delegate delegate delegate so now when i'm on the phone with some somebody and a client needs something i'm looking down and i see the delegate sticker i'm like oh cool okay i could get nick to do that let me call nick and cc him and loop him in there or i could get mike to do this i guess she needed to do this like how do i loop all this stuff in and that was like a game changer for me i swear i swear to god as soon as i did that and i started to get into the habit of delegating and understanding that i can't i don't need to feel guilty about not doing this it's not about feeling guilty and saying that oh if i can't do this i'm not asking my team about it it's not that i can't do it it's that i need to be doing something else and somebody from my team should be doing that right and and i need to be focused on something different something that i can't delegate something that i can't pass on to the team and once i started getting that philosophy and that concept down of like oh this is how teamwork works like your team that's why you have a team right to focus on these different departments and different things that you can build out and you can focus on the things that you can't delegate there's certain things that i can't delegate i can't delegate making these videos i can't delegate building the relationships that i'm doing so i need to focus all my time on the stuff that i cannot delegate and utilize my team and delegate to them now i know a lot of you guys may not be in a situation to have a team right now or to be able to build it out but i think there's a lot of things that you can do as you start to build out your team thinking about this of delegating and stuff like that but i i think now with technology there's a lot of stuff where you can have freelancers you can have people that can help you with this stuff um finding a team and building a team finding people that you trust you know one thing that i am very adamant about that i told my ceo and i told the whole team in general is that i don't care how skilled you are i don't care how good you are i don't care how much how talented you are if you're not a nice person if you're like an to work with if you are a difficult person if you are not a team player if any of those no matter how talented skilled whatever you are you're not going to be on this team that's just one thing that's one thing that i just am not i'm not i don't want to build a team of i want to build a team of nice people good people nice people thoughtful people and i think that that is is so important as as for me i found to build this out of people that you actually want to work with right people that you actually respect people that actually respect you people that actually respect your clients people that actually have integrity people that actually do the right thing people that that actually are able to um um you know that you can trust do stuff and and granted our team is very small right it's about 20 of us so it's not like we don't have like a super big team right some people have thousands and thousands of employees and i know that that must change and i know it changes once you start getting a hundred couple hundred employees but the good thing about creating a business is you get to build the business that you want to build right i don't want to necessarily have a team of a thousand people that's not what i want to build i want to have a really core um dope team right that i like working with people that i enjoy uh working with and talking with and doing projects with and executing stuff and accomplishing things and that's how you have to start thinking as you start building out the business this is your business what life do you want what lifestyle do you want what type of business do you want you get to create this that's the dope that's the such a dope thing about building a business is that you create what you want and i think it's just been such a blessing to for me to have like the team that i have i we couldn't have accomplished anything without my team like i said i kept hitting this level of success and just it wasn't where i seen everything because i was trying to do everything myself but as soon as i i really took the concept of oh i need to delegate and trust my team that's why i hired them to be able to execute on this stuff and and trust that they're going to get it done it's changed everything it's truly changed everything for us and i think the way that we just stay on the same page is we have monday meetings right we we meet every monday my team and we have all hands meeting and we just go over our projects and just make sure that we stay on track and so it's definitely been a different learning experience of like okay managing a team versus doing the work it's a different skill that you have to acquire and i feel that i'm still building that out and i'm trying to become the best leader i can in terms of you know trying to lead a team but i think it's it's just dope man you guys are just you have to understand like you guys are building something and it's not going to be easy this stuff is going to be hard i mean i've been literally doing this since 2005 since late 2005 i've been in business trying to figure all this stuff out so it's been a long time you know it's almost been 16 years of just figuring stuff out and messing up and learning and getting better and and and repeating the same mistakes and getting frustrated with myself and like so just know that it's like it's it's not going to be it's not going to be easy right it's just it's not but um one thing i can tell you it's going to be worth it as long as you don't give up as long as you actually are built for this that you're not being delusional and thinking that you're an entrepreneur when you really should be a number two or three or find an entrepreneur that you need to work with you know i think that it's um it's an amazing feeling and i think you should find what what you're good at i think you should um you know think about what it is that you want to do and how you want to build that out and so that's um that's really where where we're at um for this and i hope those three principles were helpful i hope you got some takeaways again take this with a grain of salt you may find one or two things that will work for your situation take it apply it try it discard the rest um and then be able to build that out so i want to talk about coming up next so next week i'm really excited about what we have going on so next week we want to take a deep dive into basically setting up your line sheets right so we have our new collection that is coming out so we're going to go over how we set all this stuff up so we have like custom poly mailers we have some um some poly bags that we we're getting ready to put in we have some new products um we have some cut and sew pieces with hats that we're gonna go over our line sheets and how we set all this stuff up we're gonna talk about how you can go through and get custom tags and labels um vetting vendors and then also sampling so we're gonna talk about setting up your line sheets vetting vendors and sampling next week and we're going to show you this new collection that we're working on how we're building it out and the whole entire process of what we're going through to be able to um to turn this idea into reality and what i like about these videos is it's going to be raw and uncut behind the scenes you guys are going to see step by step of like kind of how it's made um and see uh behind the scenes and then all on the doing everything different channels from instagram facebook um youtube you're gonna see the final product so my page you're gonna see the behind the scenes rough raw how was it built and then on the doing everything different pages you're gonna see the final products how it's all done with photo shoots videos everything like that so super excited to take you guys along with me on this journey if you found this video and you're looking forward to the series or want to stay up to date with the videos make sure to turn the bell notifications on make sure to subscribe um and leave a comment i i love feedback to see what you guys are are thinking how you guys are liking the content that helps me shape and make sure that i cover different topics and things of that nature so um yeah super excited to have you guys with me and until next week i will see you peace

Channel: Devin Lars

Views: 103,841

Keywords: #devinlars, #tshirtbrand, #launchingaclothingbrand, #clothingbrand, #startingabusiness, #business, #businesstips, #firststeps, #startingaclothingbrand, #howtostart, #screenprinting, #heattransfers, #fearofgod, #2020, #garyvee, #streetwear, #streetwearbrand, #bigprinting, #threadbirds, #customink, #customclothing, #sneakers, #hypebeast, #complex, #complexcon, #DTG, #printful, #shopify

Id: CcyUER1t3NM

Length: 34min 3sec (2043 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020