Evan Carmichael breaks down how to start a clothing line with no money: learn from successful designers like Giorgio Armani and Vera Wang, find a mentor by working at a small company, and use print-on-demand services to test designs without buying inventory.
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How to start a clothing line with no experience and no money. So I got a great question from one of my YouTube viewers, love you guys, Danny wrote in to say, "I'm 16 years old, I recently got the passion to be an entrepreneur, I have no experience in the field, I don't have a lot of money, I'm really excited to start a business, preferably a clothing line. What kind of advice do you recommend for people like me? And also I'm wondering on how I could start it off. P.S. I find your videos very helpful." Hey Danny, congrats on finding your passion and thank you for watching all the videos. My advice for you to get started, okay, I have 3 steps for you. The first is learn, the second is find a mentor, and the third is start part-time. Okay, learn. What I don't want you to do is go out, spend a lot of money, buy a whole bunch of inventory, and you have these t-shirts sitting in your garage, your apartment, or your mom's house or whatever, because that's, that's the surefire way to fail. So learn is go out and research all of the famous entrepreneurs that you look up to, and specifically in the clothing line industry, okay? So maybe it's Giorgio Armani, or maybe it's Sean Combs, or maybe it's Donald Trump, or maybe it's Vera Wang. Whoever it is, doesn't matter. Go and research these guys and look how they got started. What you're trying to do here is learn from their mistakes. See what led them to become successful and model their success for your own company. You gotta learn, because if you have no experience You've never done this before. Just like anything else, you're gonna make a lot of mistakes. And if you go and learn from somebody, then you're gonna increase your chances of being successful. Okay, the second is get a mentor. What I would encourage you to do is go find a job with somebody who you look up to, who you respect, who's built something that you want to build, something that's still small and manageable and easy to understand. So I would look for a company that has 10 employees or less and and has done what you're trying to do and go offer to work for them. Even if it's volunteer to get started, anything, because you want to learn. You gotta understand this business, and ideally you're connected to the entrepreneur, right? You're not gonna go work for Sean Combs and be some low-level, you know, assistant and never get to talk to him. You want to deal with an entrepreneur who's got a 10-person company, and that's what you want to eventually build up, right? And you're gonna get paid, ideally, to make Mistakes, right? They're gonna teach you how to overcome all the mistakes that you're gonna make because you're brand new. It's like trying to learn any other skill. You're trying to learn a language, the fastest way to do it is go to that country and immerse yourself in learning the language and talk to people, right? You're trying to learn how to skateboard, the fastest way to do it is to go learn from somebody who can teach you how to skateboard, right? They'll get you on the board and show you how they do it. It dramatically cuts down your learning time. You'll pick up things that you never thought was possible before, or didn't even think of, and it really dramatically increases your chance of success. Okay, at the same time you're gonna be making contacts, you're gonna understand how to run that kind of business so that when you do launch your own company, you're way ahead of the game. Okay, the third thing is start part-time. You don't need to start this full-time. You don't need to have tons of inventory lined up. I'd look at the sites that allow you to print on demand, you, you barely make any money on those sites. Okay, that's the truth. But what it allows you to do is test your concepts, test your designs. You don't make a lot of money, but you're not spending any money either. And I'd much rather have you be able to test a concept, test a new t-shirt, test a hoodie, whatever your line is going to be, show that it works, show that people want this. So then when you go out and create your own line all on your own, you know it's gonna work, right? You have customers, you have momentum, you have feedback without investing thousands of dollars into something that just sits on your shelf or in your mom's garage. That's what I do. And when you've got your first design, send it to me because I want to check it out. Believe. For those of you watching, like this video, thumbs up below. Let me know what you think. Leave a comment underneath. How would you start start a clothing line with no money and experience. I'd love to hear from you. Leave it in the comments and click on my face, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much. I'll see you soon.
