Evan Carmichael advises a 16-year-old on starting a clothing business: get a job at a small company first to learn from founders, like Vera Wang did at Vogue. Then use print-on-demand services like Zazzle to test designs without buying inventory, so you validate demand before risking money on production runs.
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How to start a clothing business. So I got a great question from one of our YouTube viewers, Yassin, love you guys, who wrote in to say, "Dear Evan, I'm 16 years old. I'm starting my own clothing retail business. Since my parents don't have a ton of money and me either, I wanted to ask you what I should do. Do you think I should get a job and introduce my first collection to investors or not? Please answer me in a video. Please keep doing what you do. Yassin." This is a great question, and I'm actually glad you're open to getting a job. I have two bits of advice for you. The first one is go get a job to learn the business. Okay, you're 16 years old. If you start now, you're probably going to make a ton of mistakes, and the easiest way to learn is to model success. Learn from somebody who's already done it. Now you may be thinking, Evan, come on, man, you're supposed to be the entrepreneur guy. You're telling me to go get a job now? How does that make any sense? Here's why it's important, okay? I don't want you to go get a boring job, okay? I don't want you to go work for some huge company where you're just getting coffee for people and you spend 2 years there, you haven't learned anything. I want you to get a job to learn. I want you to go find a company that has 10 employees, that has built up a business that you want to aspire to be, where you can be close to the entrepreneur founder, where you can actually learn and make mistakes and make contacts and understand how the business works. Because if you just start off on your own, you're going to make so many mistakes. You don't have a lot of money. You're going to burn through whatever little money you have, and you won't achieve greatness. Your chances are so low of achieving greatness because you're going to make so many mistakes on your own. A great model to follow is Vera Wang. Vera Wang started off, she was in the fashion business, and she started at Vogue, and she rose up the ranks. Getting promotion after promotion after promotion at Vogue. And she learned everything about the fashion business by being one of the editors at Vogue. And she made all the contacts and she understood what it takes. When she left Vogue to start her own business designing wedding dresses, she hit the ground running. She didn't make as many mistakes as she would have. She had contacts, she had a little bit of money saved up, right? She was able to launch this business and make it be successful. So that's number 1. Again, you want to go find an entrepreneur who you respect, you look up to, you can learn a lot from, and work hard. Like, be an ideal employee. Don't just do what you're hired to do. You want to learn the business, right? So get as close to the entrepreneur founder as you can, take on as many projects as you can. Imagine it was your own business, because soon it's going to be your own business, and you want to be able to make mistakes while getting paid. This is like being paid to go to university, to learn the ropes. So find that company. Okay, the second thing is get started. Okay, but start small. A lot of entrepreneurs, especially in the fashion business, they see the orders, right? If you want to make a deal with somebody to supply this stuff to you, whatever shirts, hoodies, whatever you're making, the cost per unit is so high in small quantities, right? You want to order 10 t-shirts? It's gonna cost you a lot of money. You're gonna lose money on those 10 shirts. Where these suppliers, they want you buying 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 shirts. That's when the cost per unit goes down. And you see those price breaks and think, "Wow, okay, you know what? To make this worthwhile, I gotta order 5,000 shirts." And you go out, you make the order, you make mistakes because it's your first time doing it. Maybe you use the wrong, you know, shirt quality. The colors don't come out great. It's the wrong pattern. Whatever it is, you're gonna make a lot of mistakes. You spend all your money buying these 5,000 shirts and you're stuck with 4,997 of them in your closet, in your garage, wherever, because you've sold 3 and the rest you can't get rid of. That happens so often and you're just stuck with all this inventory that you've poured all your money into. The better way to go is to start with a print-on-demand service. Look at Zazzle, look at CafePress, whatever it is, a t-shirt print-on-demand service where you're not spending any money. Now you may be saying, okay Evan, well that's great, but those guys make all the profits. I barely make any— I may only make a dollar a shirt if I'm selling through those guys. It doesn't matter because the first part of your business here isn't to make tons of money, it's to prove your concept. What I want you to do is, is go to one of those sites and sell 100 t-shirts, sell 500 t-shirts. Then you know, hey, this design really takes off. You may have 1 out of 100 designs that really take off, and then you know, okay, you know what, I can afford now to go and make this one design that's doing awesome for us and do my own print run and keep all the profits for it. Your chances of success go up dramatically because you've tested your designs without having to spend any money on it. So one, go get a job, learn from somebody in the business who has done it, who's built the ideal company for you, and get as close to that founder as possible to learn from them. And two, start small. Don't go out spending any money. Put your designs on a print-on-demand service. Test it. Make sure you get some results. Make sure you get some people buying your stuff and are excited by it before you create your first order. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video, please click on the link that, that supports me in making these videos below. Leave a comment, let me know what you think, and click on my face, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much. I'll see you soon.
