Step 1: World-building, foundation, purpose
Why do you want to start a brand? beyond making money? What values do you have? What do you stand for and against?What is your personal backstory? Where are you from, what do yo like to do, what stories are your favorite, etc.What aesthetic are you looking to create?
How to pick a name: Understand your brand’s positioning and the world you’re trying to create, and create a name that can be immediately associated with that.Example off-white’s came from the concept of the in‑between: not luxury vs. street, but the space where they meet. the gray space.Check to see if the LLC is availableCheck to see if web domain is availableCheck to see if social media handles is availableAfter you get LLC created, you’ll receive an EIN which you can use to start a bank account, do this immediately. Do not use your personal bank. using business bank account also helps a ton with taxes massively as well.
This is where you start to build your home, get yourself an identity (logo), a website (hopefully a Shopify), and think about your social media presence. I recommend documenting, showing the bts, and vlogging all of bts as you’re building this up. People buy from people, so showing who you are and why you’re building a brand will help people connect with you and ultimately lead to them trusting you and buying from you.
Start working on your debut collection. If you are the main designer, think about the story you want to tell with this collection. What stories are embedded in this? Making the stories personal to your experience helps you craft a specific POV that will stand out from the noise, and will also help people connect with you deeply, and as a bonus effect, it will help with the content creation process.Think about the level of work that you want to put into this. Is it just printables likes tees and totes, or are you planning cut and sew? This will also determine when you’ll actually be able to release clothing. Cut and sew has a longer lead times and often times needs a round or two of samples to get right. Printables are easy to one shot and you can create realistic mock ups to know what the end result will look like fast.
Once you start building out the collection that you want to make, you need to figure out where to get it made and understand the process of getting it made. Understand what fabrics or blanks you’re interested in exploring and if you’re unaware of what to look for, here’s quick guide on that (here ___).
Cut and sewn clothing is where brands separate themselves from others. T-shirts, hoodies, and totes are good foundational items, and you can keep them in your offering, but knowing how to mix those into higher offers like pants and outerwear is where you’re starting to separate yourself and really start creating your legacy. First, you need to understand how to make cut and sew clothing, and that comes from understanding pattern making, tech packs, grading and fit models, stitching styles, trims, pockets, coloring and dyes, and, of course, fabrics.
Screen printing, I firmly believe, is magic, and screen printing’s cousin is heat pressing. This is the quickest option for bringing ideas to life, with heat pressing being the easiest and fastest. Though screen printing is often of better quality, looks nicer, and lasts longer. Heat press can be fun to do as a live activation, and can be good for marketing in that. It can also be good for things you can wear that have canvas/sturdy fabrics, like hats and totes. Heat pressing onto soft goods like t-shirts and hoodies, I do not recommend; I highly suggest going the route of screen printing.
Now it’s time to think through how you want to present your clothing. Do you want custom woven labels as your size labels or do you want to screen print them or do you want to keep the label that’s on the blank? If you’re creating cut-and-sew garments, you need to create your own labels. Some manufacturers will offer to use some stock issues ones too, but those will look cheap, and you will lose an opportunity of branding.On top of this, I would look into packaging and how you want people to experience purchasing from your brand. This category alone can make or break brands. Some brands focus a lot of packaging as they want the moment the person to interact with their brand to be as rewarding as possible to create returning customers.
Pricing should achieve two goals. You should be sustainable as a business with healthy margins, as well as categorizing your products. Questions to answer: Do you want your products to be affordable and attainable, or out of reach and more expensive?
Status is something that affects us in some way or another. We want community but we also want to stand out. Think about how your brand allows someone to stand out and makes them feel special. There’s a reason why people buy Mercedes over Toyota. Both effect status, someone who is rich will make the decision buy the Mercedes if they want to stand out and show the kind of person they are to the public, another person with the same amount of money may want to get a Toyota because their neighbors also drive Toyotas, and they don’t want to stand out and seem like theyre better than everyone. Same amount of money, different effect. What kind of brand are you looking to create? Understand how to position your brand to create the effect of status that you want to happen.
When it comes down to selling your products, once you have a price figured out, it’s time to decide to go down the made-to-order path vs the inventory path. Both have their pros and cons, let’s go through them.Pre order: the pros of pre-order are that you don’t have to try to predict what sizes will sell and you aren’t guessing. However, the customer takes the hit in the method as once they buy the item they will have to wait for the product to arrive which is most cases takes about 2 weeks. This creates frustration and it also create less excitement when receiving the order. That feeling of excitement can still happen however most people will lose it after not getting it within the first week and often those people will also complain and reach out to customer service.Holding Inventory: In this method, you are either guessing or working off some model/formula of sizes to order. Still you are predicting certain sizes will do better than others. This is the biggest draw back from this method, however the pros is that you can ship quickly and customers can receive their item quickly, which can be a huge advantage. You want to give your customers the best experience you can offer and shipping their order as soon as possible is apart of that.
This, in most cases, won’t happen for most brands until later on. Still, think about what stores you’d like your brand to be in vs ones you don’t want to be in. Stores often buy and stock brands to create a world for the customer. Think about other brands you would want to sit next to and how that elevates your brand vs being in a store that downgrades your brand. Does this store reflect the values you believe in?You should also have margin in your production costs to wholesale cost so you can make money when selling to wholesale customers. Do not wait for this time to come to make this margin, do it from day one.You should also make this process as easy as possible for buyers. Have linesheets, lookbooks, order forms already designed and think through the terms you might offer to stores. Most brands offer net 30 to stores, meaning once the items are shipped, they have 30 days to pay the invoice. This gives stores incentives to sell and push products so they can cover your invoice off revenue they made off your products.
This is my personal favorite part, so much I have a business that I’m building around it called ZER0N0ISE.Content is a time to show the world what you made and why they should buy it. How do you want to present the clothing? What is the location that is crucial in telling this story? What props do you need? Who is the model you need to tell this story? This is just the tip of the ice berg when it comes to thinking about content.Lookbooks is where you show what you have to offer and the story that is attached.But that is only one part. Many brands build roll outs that contain teaser content, reveal content, UGC content, educational and behind the scenes content, lookbook and launch content, then sustain content. This helps create demand for your products and then to launch it and then sustain that demand.These roll outs also act differently depending on the platform that you share them on. Instagram vs Tiktok vs Youtube vs Threads/Twitter vs traditional outlets like TV and Print. Each platform offers their advantages and disadvantages and they also have their own differences and nuances that you must respect as users treat each platform differently.On top of this, you have your own founder account within these platforms that you can leverage and further create content on. Again, people buy from people, and your founder account can act as another touch point for your audience to engage with. Think about the brand you’re building and the effects that it has on your audience and try to make content that compliments this. If you’re creating a luxury brand, and you want to show an aspirational way of living, you need to make sure your founder account is helping to show this.You also have UGC which is user generated content, and this can be working with influencers or people you simlpy want to have your clothing. the goal of this is to have people share your brand across multiple accounts around a similar time to create a moment. This is why many influencers will receive a specfic product and you all of a sudden cant escape promos from it, it’s all planned.There’s also paid ads and retargeting strategiesThe rule of 7 — it is said that your content and product must been seen at least 7 times, before someone takes consideration of buying it. That means people will not buy simply buy seeing it once or twice, they need to see it at least 7 times. This is why it’s recommended to make between 15-21 pieces of content to promote your drop and roll out,
Navigating the digital and physical presence is key; you want to offer ways for people to actually be able to enter your world, and you can do this by doing pop-ups and events. What are the locations and stores that would make sense for your brand to do a pop-up in? Can you decorate and further immerse people in your world? Are there furniture items you can bring to add to the experience? Is there something that people can do there? Will there by any drinks or food experiences? Music?Events and activations are similar to pop-ups but with different goals. A pop-ups goal is to drive brand and get sales. You want to build space that represenitive of your brand but that also makes people buy.Events and activations are different, their goal is the event or activation itself and a way to build community. An example is for a hiking brand to put on a group hiking session. Does this bring people closer to your brand? Yes. Are they more likely to buy from your brand? Sure. However you aren’t doing this to get sales right here, right now. You are doing this to build community and to build trust, to give them an immersive experience that is representative of your brand.
Here is where you should create a dedicated email and also think about your purchase policies. Do you take returns or are all sales final? Do you do exchanges of sizes if it doesnt work out? What happens if their package gets lost? You need to think ahead of every situation that can happen and create a plan around that. Again, you want your customers to have the best experience possible but you also need to run a business, so decide which areas are worth it for you vs ones that aren’t.Also, answering comments, especially ones that address shipping delays, are crucial to answer. Don’t cool guy the people that want to buy from you.
Making sure all of these parts are in cohesion and complement each other is the goal of the brand and doing this consistently will make sure your brand not only succeeds but that will create a home for others and also create a generational asset for yourself and your family