Key to Starting Your Own Clothing Company

[Ffaust]

Key to Starting Your Own Clothing Company

Originally article is HERE (http://english.telejob.ru/home-business-idea-38-key-to-starting-your-own-clothing-company.html)

Starting your own private label clothing company is not as difficult as you may think. I assure you that the founding members of Volcom, Paul Frank, Hurley and Von Dutch, are not mad geniuses of fashion. You can duplicate their rise to brand stardom provided that you have the following:

1. A decent logo

2. Creative concepts and graphics - Design Talent

3. A unique, blank apparel supplier

4. A decent screen printer

5. A Line Sheet to show potential buyers

6. Sales and promotional talent.

Which do you think is most important? Its obviously design talent you say? Are you Joking? You must be joking. Have you stepped out of the house recently? Have you seen Von Dutch clothing? Crayon weilding Chimpanzes produce better designs. Furthermore, I imagine the monkeys are more sanitary, but I digress.

#6 is clearly the most important element. You can create an entire line of fashion forward, beautiful clothing but if you can't pitch it - no one will ever see it (excluding your mom of course). So, unless you want a closet full of your fantastic designs, ask yourself the following two questions:

Can I sell?

In other words......can I hit the pavement with my line sheet and walk into every boutique clothing store I can find? Then will I harass the hell out of retail clothing store buyers so that they'll try to squeeze 5 minutes of time in for me at Magic 06' (Clothing Convention) ?

Will I be able to make a professional presentation to a Nordstroms buyer?

Can I promote?

Do I have and creative viral or gureilla marketing ideas to get this label kickstarted?

If the answer to both of these questions is No - you better get some help. Namely, find someone passionate for fashion who also happens to be ridiculously outgoing, great on the phone and aggressive as hell. Lastly, (and superficially) it would help if your sales rep is hot.

I know, how horrible.....so sorry, buy I didn't say anything about this being an equal opportunity blog :)

That being said, let me welcome you the shallow end of the pool..... i.e. the fashion world.

Good luck with your label!

Bradley J

Fashionable Wholesale Clothing (http://www.blankstyle.com/shop/)

[GoingLiveSoon]

I think you forgot one important thing...MARKET RESEARCH!
If there's no demand for your product, no amount of marketing is going to make it hit the big time.
Actually, read "The Tipping Point". Very interesting book about why some things become epidemics. Interesting case study about Hush Puppies in the 1990's. And NO...I'm not the author, or the publisher. :-)

[MamaSoul]

Great point about market research! Find out who is your target audience and go after them in a big way. A friend of mine owned a screen printing company and printed for Quicksilver and a bunch of other big name surfwear companies. He then realized that he could do his own clothing line...he already had most of the equipment. His slant was snowboarding rather than surfing so he already knew who his buyers would be...he printed 1000's of stickers with his new snowboarding wear company logo and paid a bunch of skater kids to plaster the stickers on everything they could, paying close attention to places like street signs where there were likely to be 1000's of passersby daily. His name was out and it was HUGE way before he printed his first t-shirt! Later he came out with some eyewear and did the same thing...there was nothing special about these sun glasses, they were imported from Japan or Taiwan for pennies...but they sold for hundreds of dollars each in surfwear shops...not that I'm for big mark-ups, but just goes to show how we can so easily be pulled along by a name.
Peace