Evan Carmichael breaks down launching a clothing brand on a budget: study successful designers like Calvin Klein and Giorgio Armani for strategy, keep spending minimal until sales hit, partner with businesses serving your target market to reach customers directly, and seed products to influencers for organic exposure.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael.
Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of my Facebook readers, Braden, who's launching a clothing company and wanted my advice on how to get started. So he wrote in saying, uh, do you have any good success stories about clothing companies? I've started my own company, Rain City royalty, boisterous empire, and it's just starting to take off. I'd love to hear any advice you have for getting it off the ground. So thanks for the question, Brayden. Uh, first off, we do have a lot of famous entrepreneur profiles on the website. Uh, Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, and a number of others, and it shows how they got started. So I definitely suggest reading those profiles either on our site or doing your own research. I found when I started my business that it was incredibly helpful to research other people who had been in my industry and achieved success and to model their strategies to, you know, kind of shortcut all the mistakes they made and follow the path to success. So I found that really helpful, just getting their ideas, but also staying motivated, because you see they had dark days and they had trouble, and being able to model that success and see that they had problems kind of gave me the courage to keep going. Hopefully it will for you. So definitely it's a good place to start. In terms of my advice for helping you get off the ground, the big challenge I see a lot in the clothing industry people want to start up is they spend a ton of money. And it's an expensive business to start because you have a lot of product that you create and you don't necessarily have a lot of sales, right? It could be hard. You pick the wrong t-shirt and it bombs and now you're stuck with all this inventory that you can't unload. So I'd really try to focus on not spending a lot of money. Try to minimize your cost as much as possible. Preserve your cash to let you last as long as possible. And try to not spend too much money until you're making money. Anybody can spend money, but you want to try to get as close as you can to getting cash in the door before you start spending a lot of money on promotions. So that's the first thing. Second thing, and a practical strategy for you to try to copy, is to partner up. So look at guys who are already selling to your target market. Maybe they're already selling clothes, or they're selling other products to your target market. I don't know who you're selling to. If it's students, for example, you want to try to partner up with other companies who sell to students. And it could be another clothing company or unrelated company but has your same target market, and try to partner up with them to have them help you sell and they get some kind of cut for it, either a percentage of revenue, that's ideal, or you pay them a small fee to help promote you. So if there's a trade show, for example, again, if you're going after college students, something on campus, or if it's in a shopping mall or a convention or some kind of trade show, You know somebody's going, you offer to take a small part of their table, like an eighth of the table or a third of their table, something small. Either again, a revenue split or some kind of upfront fee, but hopefully not too much. And you see if that's the right market for you. So you're not spending a whole lot of money, you're not getting your own booth, for example. You're just taking a small part. You get to talk to your potential customers, you get to see if they like what you're doing or not. Hopefully you can make some sales. And you can figure out, okay, these designs really work, these ones don't. You know, people are asking me for something that I'm not making yet, so there's an opportunity for me to make some more money. And hopefully by talking to enough customers in as low-cost a way as possible, you'll be able to get some feedback and start producing some clothes that people really enjoy. The last thing is I try to seed the product intelligently as much as you can. So try to give your products to people who might be able to help promote you and showcase it. For example, and again, I don't know who your target market is, but when I go back to you to say I'm making a video for you, offer to send a t-shirt, right? I don't usually wear t-shirts in the videos, but I might, right, if it's talking about your company. And that's an opportunity to get me promoting you on YouTube and to the people who are watching the video. So whoever you're talking to, see if there's an opportunity to potentially seed the product and get people wearing it in a way that exposes you and gets your name out there, and hopefully you can make some sales that way as well. But I think your best strategy is through the partnership. Again, looking for low-cost ways to be able to talk to your customers, hopefully make a few sales, and also see what new products you can launch to be able to satisfy their needs. So thanks for the question, Brayden. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I always love seeing those coming. It gives me the motivation to make more videos for you. And if you have a comment about this video or question for your own company, feel free to leave in the comments below. I always read those and I try to respond to everybody as soon as I can. So thank you, and we'll see you in the next episode.
