Evan Carmichael explains how to launch a clothing company without upfront cash. Get pre-orders before you manufacture anything, sell to local businesses in bulk instead of individual customers, and study brands like Johnny Cupcakes and Threadless to see how they started lean.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my YouTube viewers, Kicks, who's starting a new clothing line and wanted my advice. So he wrote in saying, "Hi, how you doing? I'm trying to start a clothing company with my friend, but our budget is really low. Can you help? Kicks." So a couple of things for you kicks. Starting a clothing line is definitely capital intensive, and you want to try to make sure you're not spending a lot of money until you're making money. So my advice to you is dream big, have this big vision for where you want to go, but start super small and start going to customers who you think have a need and get them to place some orders before you're actually spending any money. And I know it's hard because you don't have samples to go in and show them, and you're using paper or using a computer or laptop to show them designs. But it's super important to go out and get some orders and make sure you're on the right track before you start spending a lot of money on different designs that flame out. And it happens all the time where you spend a ton of money creating your samples or creating an entire line and you produce it and you try to sell it and nobody wants to buy it. And that's, that's the problem you want to avoid. So you want to make sure you're on the right track and you can sell whatever you're going to make. So go and start talking to customers and get them to place orders before you make anything. And make that a goal of your business. It's a lot tougher to get it started, but you're much more likely to be successful because when you do launch, you'll have paying customers in hand ready to buy from you. The best way to do this, I think, is go after the business market. And what I would try to do is talk to companies who are local to you, you can get access to, who are aggressive on the marketing, maybe a little bit edgy, and could see working with you to create something that could help promote their business. So I don't know what you sell in the fashion business, but say it's t-shirts. I go and try to find a company who, again, is a little bit edgy is spending a lot on marketing and offer to create a custom t-shirt line for them that can help expose their business to a greater audience. And that way, when you're dealing with a business instead of dealing with consumers, A, you have somebody who's probably gonna be a repeat business person for you, and they're making much bigger orders. So you might sell 100 t-shirts, you might sell 1,000 t-shirts, and that's from one customer instead of trying to make one sale here, one sale there. To individual consumers. So it's a great way to get cash flow positive, start building money into the business, and then you can expand it and later go after the consumer market. But I'd see if I could start off going after the business market. The last thing I would do is also try to model success. So there's a ton of fashion guys who've made it big, started from nothing, and look at what they did to be successful. So again, if you're t-shirts, look at Johnny Cupcakes, which has an actual store. Look at Threadless, which is all online, and see if there's something that you can model from them and other companies that you look up to. Look how they got started, how they how they make extra money now doesn't really concern you, but how did they go from nothing to those first few orders to having a full-time business that they can support themselves off of, those are some lessons there that you can learn to help grow your business. So I hope that helps, Kicks. Good luck, sounds exciting. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up, and I'd also love to hear feedback if you want to comment under the video. Those comments help me determine what new videos to make, so I really look forward to them. It keeps me going. So please leave a comment and stay tuned for the next episode.
