How to start a Clothing Company » Uncategorized

Shows: go big or go home

Jon Kruse — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:53:47 +0000

When I first started I sold shirts at community colleges. It only cost $25-50 for the day but I never made very many sales. Another vendor at one of the colleges told me to keep on doing the colleges with small fees. She said even if you don’t make a lot of money you can’t lose anything. I am giving you the opposite advice, go for the big shows or go home!

The community colleges and small shows wore me out. You have to set up be there for a couple of hours and you aren’t making that much profit for the amount of work you are putting in. Right now I am just doing the big ones in my area. Renegade LA, SF and Unique Christmas show in LA. These all cost around $300 but they are worth the money. I go in for two days and usually make around $1,500-3,000 at these events. You can also fly to the other Renegade or other craft shows around the country and make a pretty penny. Always talk to the vendors and see what other shows are good. You’ll find out a ton of great info from these guys.

At the moment I wouldn’t suggest doing the Unique LA regular season show (I haven’t done very good at them) but their Christmas show has been really great for me. All of the Renegade shows I’ve seen have had a huge crowd and I would recommend them all.

http://uniquela.com/

http://www.renegadecraft.com/

I would really like to hear your guys feedback on some good shows to do, and even ones that vendors should avoid.

Post from: How to start a Clothing Company

Shows: go big or go home

Tips for Art/Craft Shows Eric Terry, the owner of Linty Fresh, shows you how to prepare for a craft show. ...

Effective Web Design

Jon Kruse — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 21:54:34 +0000

I am surprised I haven’t written about web design in the past since it’s what I have been doing the past two years at double dragon studios. There are a lot of things to think about when it comes to making an effect web design for your clothing company. One of the most important aspects is web usability.

Web usability is an approach to make web sites easy to use for an end-user, without requiring her (or him) to undergo any specialized training.^{[citation needed]} The user should be able to intuitively relate the actions he needs to perform on the web page, with other interactions he sees in the general domain of life e.g. press of a button leads to some action. The broad goal of usability can be:^{[citation needed]}

Present the information to the user in a clear and concise way.
To give the correct choices to the users, in a very obvious way.
To remove any ambiguity regarding the consequences of an action e.g. clicking on delete/remove/purchase.
Put the most important thing in the right place on a web page or a web application.

In short communicate what your company is all about within the first couple seconds of a user visiting your site then make the site simple and intuitive so anyone can use it.

A great book on web usability is Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. I’ll try and go further in depth in posts later about how to communicate what your company is all about and how to improve your websites usability.

SEO (search engine optimization) is another thing that you need to think of when designing a web site. I use wordpress to run the blog or clothing companies and any pages like about, faq. Wordpress has great plugins for SEO and you can tweak your SEO as much as you want. If SEO is something that you don’t understand use the search in the upper right of the site and you can find some good articles on the subject.

I have been using bigcartel to do the stores and cart but it doesn’t give you a lot of options for the individual pages SEO. You can basically just change the meta tags on the layout and it goes on all the pages. The names of thumbnail images aren’t descriptive and you can’t change the url of any items after you create the product. It leaves a lot to be desired.

I have started to use magento which gives you tons of SEO options and other plugins and it has everything you want. It takes more time to develop and you need to get a better host to run it since it uses a lot of resources but it is one of the better carts out there and probably has the most features of an of the free carts right now.

CMS, or content management system is a must. I still have friends I knew from college making static websites or all flash sites and it just makes updating anything a pain in the ass. You will need to have a webmaster update everything which can get expensive. Wordpress, big cartel, and magento all are great CMS’s and you’ll be able to update everything with no knowledge of coding. Unless a client needs a new design I don’t do any updates on a site.

Social bookmarking and user coments are also important.

Facebook has come out with http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments you just insert the code into your site and people can easily leave comments on your products. the beauty of it is you just need a facebook account to make a comment, it’s super easy.

I also have a social bookmarking plugin I use on wordpress. You can check it out below you can easily share my posts with the click of the button.

On my e-commerce product page I use this thing called add this. http://www.addthis.com/ I use a custom icon set which you can check out on the site I made http://heartsofkings.bigcartel.com/product/the-king-logo

So that’s what I’ve got off the top of my head. Put up some comments or questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Post from: How to start a Clothing Company

Effective Web Design

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How much is enough?

Jon Kruse — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:33:01 +0000

I was talking with my sister the other day and she was unhappy that she is still making 50k at her architecture job which is what she made 3 years prior. 50k to me is a lot of money, and it’s hard to understand where she is coming from that 50k a year isn’t enough.

I can’t remember the book but they interviewed a lot of people and asked them how much they made and how much they would need to make to consider themselves rich. Pretty much everyone gave the same answer. If they made $20,000 a year it would take $40,000 for them to consider themselves rich, if they made $200,000 it would take $400,000 for them to consider themselves rich. Everyone wanted to be making twice as much money for them to consider themselves as rich.

Even though I want to make more money I still consider myself rich. I don’t have to go to a 9-5 job 5 days a week. I don’t have a set number of days off a year. I can do whatever I want and since I believe time is money I am richer then most.

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How much is enough?

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How much should you charge?

Jon Kruse — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:32:18 +0000

When I get new products like sunglasses or accessories sometimes I ask my friends how much they would buy them for. I’ve done this a few time and most of the time they come back with the question “We’ll how much did you pay for them”. The question is not how much you pay for something it’s what you can sell them for. The actual costs of rayban sunglasses are probably a couple bucks and they sell them for 100 times that. They spend a lot of money on advertising so you believe they are worth a lot more.

So don’t get stuck on how much you paid for your product but how much the market will buy them for.

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How much should you charge?

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It doesn’t matter how many friends or followers you have on social networking sites!

Jon Kruse — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:21:33 +0000

I think everyone has done it. Got some tool where they can send out hundreds of friend invites. It just isn’t worth the time you put into it. Most of the people that will accept your invite will be the kind of people that accept everyones invite and don’t even care about what your doing.

If you had 100 friends (or is it likes…) on Facebook that responded to every comment you put up that would be way better then having 1,000’s of friends with little to no interaction.

Social networking sites are about building a community. You need to figure out what your community wants to hear and deliver it in a personal way. No one wants to read facebook updates that sound like they are coming from some business. So be person and most importantly be entertaining.

This is also one of those areas you can hire someone else to do it. There might be a fan or friend that will do it for a few shirts.

Post from: How to start a Clothing Company

It doesn’t matter how many friends or followers you have on social networking sites!

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Make Decisions

Jon Kruse — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:29:18 +0000

I’ve been reading the 37signals book called Rework and I really liked what they had to say about making decisions

Decisions are temporary so make the call and move on

Done. Start to think of it as a magical word. When you get to done it means something’s been accomplished. A decision has been made and you can move on. Done means you’re building momentum.

But wait, what if you screw up and make the wrong call? It’s ok. This isn’t brain surgery, it’s a web app. As we keep saying, you’ll likely have to revisit features and ideas multiple times during the process anyway. No matter how much you plan you’re likely to get half wrong anyway. So don’t do the “paralyis through analysis” thing. That only slows progress and saps morale.

Instead, value the importance of moving on and moving forward. Get in the rhythm of making decisions. Make a quick, simple call and then go back and change that decision if it doesn’t work out.

Accept that decisions are temporary. Accept that mistakes will happen and realize it’s no big deal as long as you can correct them quickly. Execute, build momentum, and move on.
Be An Executioner

It’s so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an nda to tell me the simplest idea.)

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Explanation:

Awful idea = -1

Weak idea = 1

So-so idea = 5

Good idea = 10

Great idea = 15

Brilliant idea = 20

No execution = $1

Weak execution = $1000

So-so execution = $10,000

Good execution = $100,000

Great execution = $1,000,000

Brilliant execution = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.

That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas. I’m not interested until I see their execution.

check out their site.http://37signals.com/

I have had a hard time making decisions in the past and I can say nothing ever gets solved by waiting. I usually am never more prepared waiting 2 weeks then making a decision then just making the decision immediately. Just do it and get it done. You can always make more decisions later.

Post from: How to start a Clothing Company

Make Decisions

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how NOT to contact a T-shirt blogger

Jon Kruse — Fri, 21 May 2010 08:54:29 +0000

This was originally posted by Dejan at Tee Zine

Tee zine is around for quite some time now, and as you may presume I get a LOT of emails from various T-shirt labels, asking if they could be featured on Tee zine. Among all of them, there is a certain amount of emails which seem to be sent out just for the cause of it, which can actually be quite iritating and detract relatively severe T-shirt blogger like me from the original idea – to get me interested in particular tee label or a shirt.

Now, I know this is a case with many T-shirt bloggers around, and if you’re a blogger you can just skip such emails, thinking: “who cares about those people anyway”? Well, okay, but I wanted to give a couple of advices to newly established tee labels on how NOT to contact a T-shirt blogger in order to actually GET a feature on desired T-shirt blog (don’t get me wrong – I’m not trying to “sell you brains” here, I just think it could be really useful if you’re getting started in this whole T-shirt business).

First – do NOT start an email with a matrix. I get a lot of emails starting something like: “hello (insert name), I really like your blog and I think we need more blogs like yours out there”. I mean – if you want me (or any T-shirt blogger, in that sense) to actually check out the links or images you’ve added to your email, please take some time and in fact DO check out that particular blog you’re trying to contact. Read a couple of articles, see what kind of tees / designs the blogger is into, try to write something that will show a blogger you REALLY like what he writes. Matrices are good only for mass emails. We bloggers are people, too

Second – do NOT send emails with a lot of info - I mean, it’s great you started this wonderful T-shirt label with those amazing designs, but giving me a lot of info in your initial email in which you ask me for a feature on my blog may also turn me over. In other words – be relatively short and to the point, and if I really like what you do and decide to write about your line I will surely reply to your email with some questions on particular details. I am sure many T-shirt bloggers have this problem, so if I’m writing “me” you can be sure that it in fact means “us”.

Here’s an example of a well-written initial email from Connor Fathers of Alive & Well tee line, who’s “Owl” tee design can be seen below the text: “My name is Connor and I run a small, independent line, Alive & Well, from my garden shed in the south of England. I really like what you have going on, it looks really clean and you pick out some great shirts, I was wondering how I could go about possibly being featured? I’ll keep it short and sweet as I’m sure you’re very busy, here is the link to my store so if you like what you see, please let me know! aliveandwell.bigcartel.com Thanks for your time, I really hope to hear back from you”.

Third – do NOT expect a reply right away – like I already said, there are a lot of emails coming to T-shirt bloggers’ inboxes, so give us a chance to read them all and decide which ones we’ll feature on our blogs. It’s also the case that some labels send out an initial email and get my reply some weeks later, but I cannot tell you how many times I didn’t hear the label back. I mean – why did you contact me in the first place?

Fourth – do NOT be the same as others – in other words: try to be original and think of something unique which will set apart your email from dozens of others. Some kind of contest for the readers of particular blog, a discount coupon, an original idea of promoting your tee or a line… It guarantees you almost 100% blog coverage, and some curious blogger (like me) may really like what you’ve got going on and write a couple of extra sentences on your original and unique little company (even if she / he doesn’t like your designs so much).

For example, Richard Wilde of art & design community ArtyBuzz.com, which also features T-shirts, needed a judge for his next tee contest, so he wrote me an email to see if I was interested in it. Why not, I thought, and so I’ve checked his site and found out a great new place for tee designers and other artists, which I now visit more or less often. There I found this particular shirt I really liked.

Fifth – do NOT neglect the contact once you’ve been featured – I really don’t know why this happens, but there is a certain amount of labels which just don’t stay in touch after they’ve been reviewed or mentioned on a blog. Isn’t it logical you want that particular blog to write about you again? So why not add it to your mailing list and shoot an email once in awhile with some news on your latest activities? To me, as a more or less dedicated T-shirt blogger, it’s important to make lasting connections, plus it’s always nice to have some “fresh juice” in my news section.

Another good example – Dalene and Alexa of T-shirt designer community Springleap.com often inform me on their tee design contest winners. Now, I know they may be using matrices for such emails, but it’s always nice to see they haven’t forgotten what’s my birth name By the way – one of their latest winners is called Whoo Hoo!!! and the winning design is called “Rabobi, Rabobi” (it’s the South African version of Spiderman).

At the end – I hope this article doesn’t sound like some kind of T-shirt preach. Also, these are not “the sacred rules” or something like that. I just want these tips to be useful and help you get a feature on desired T-shirt blog. Since you obviouly got into T-shirt business to CREATE, and not neccessarily just to SELL, why don’t you start with creating a good & (kvalitetan) relationship with a T-shirt blogger?

This was originally posted by Dejan at Tee Zine

Post from: How to start a Clothing Company

how NOT to contact a T-shirt blogger

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Print to order sites don’t work

Jon Kruse — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:02:06 +0000

Alright they work but they don’t have your best interests at heart. There are sites like spreadshirt, zazzle, and cafe press that will take care of the printing and shipping to your customers but the quality and profits aren’t amazing.

Like most things the greater the risk the greater the reward. Lot’s of people want to put up no risk in starting a clothing company and with that attitude you won’t get very far. With most of these direct fulfillment sites your costs per tee are $13-20. Average shirts you would probably sell for around $20. So that’s a $7 profit at the most but you don’t have to take care of any of the printing or shipping.

If you printed 50 white shirts, 1 color, on something inexpensive like tultex it would probably be around $6 per shirt depending on who you print with. You have up front costs of $300 but your profit per shirt is $14 for shirts you charge $20 for. That’s twice as much profit as with one of these direct fulfillment companies. You have other costs like shipping materials and shipping costs but you usually recoup all those loses having the customer pay for shipping to the order.

I wrote this post because lately I have just been getting so many emails asking for direct fulfillment sites.

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Print to order sites don’t work

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It’s not just about the product

Jon Kruse — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:08:44 +0000

I was reading Cashflow Quadrant and I thought a lot of clothing companies could benefit from this information. The cash flow Quadrant has 4 sections. The left side is an Employee and Self-employed and the right side is a Business owner and Investor. So many clothing companies with me included are actually just self employed and true businesses.

The following is an excerpt from the book

“Can you personally make a better hamburger then McDonald’s?”

So far 100% of the people I have talked with have talked with about their new idea have said “yes”. They can all prepare, cook, and serve a better quality hamburger then McDonald’s.

At this point , I ask them the next question: “Can you personally build a better business system than McDonald’s?

Some people see the difference immediately, and some do not. And I would say the difference is whether the person is fixated on the left side of the Quadrant, which is focused on the idea of the better burger, or on the right side of the quadrant, which is focused on the system of business.

I do my best to explain that there are a lot of entreprenuers out there offering far superior products or services than are offered by the mega-rich multinational corporations, just as there are billions of people who can make a better burger than McDonald’s But only McDonald’s has the system that has served billions of burgers.

-Robert Kiyosaki “Cashflow Quadrant”

This quote really opened my eyes that the product isn’t the only thing to worry about and I need to focus on creating a strong system for my clothing company to succeed. It’s not all about the product and the sooner you understand that and work on all the other areas of your business the sooner you will succeed.

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It’s not just about the product

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Craft Show Tips with SEIBEI

Jon Kruse — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:00:34 +0000

I talked with David Murray of Seibei a little bit about setting up at Craft Shows. Here are some of his words of wisdom. You can check out all my comments in red.

STAY ORGANIZED

In reality my setups aren’t that crazy, usually. Just hang up some shirts, display your banner, and have all of your ducks in a row so finding any item is a snap. I definitely got the shelving idea from Eric Terry, which REALLY changed the way I did things. I’ve done shows where I was VERY disorganized and it definitely lost me some sales – I remember back in 07 I was doing Stitch in Austin, and I was selling out of cardboard boxes I’d shipped to the event and the suitcases I came with. Over the course of the event, digging through and putting back shirts, I got super disorganized and had to spend a good few minutes looking for shirts, not even sure if I had any left in that size or not. Absolutely awful. You’ve got to put yourself in the customer’s shoes – when you go to a regular store, would you rather have a clerk know almost immediately whether they have your size or not (and pass it to you to have a look), or have to make small talk while digging through bins? Even if it only takes one or two minutes, that’s an ETERNITY in the mind of the customer, and only gives them reasons to not seal the deal in the end. You want to make it as easy as possible for someone to exchange their money for one of your products.

You can get some basic shelves at Home Depot or a local hardware store that you can assemble at shows. I agree it is a must to stay organized.

STAY POSITIVE
You want to extend the spirit of your brand into your booth design – I try to make my booth as bright and fun as possible because you want what normally attracts people to your brand to attract new fans into your booth. Even when sales are looking meager, you have to try your best to stay energetic – this is still a problem for me sometimes, because ALL shows start off slow or have dead points, and you can’t let these get you down, but it’s very easy to think “oh no, we’re not going to make any money, everyone is finally tired of my work, etc” during slow points in the day. When a booth is dead and the person running it is letting it get to them, it just radiates a cold vibe, a sadness, that turns your self doubt into a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I take breaks at shows (which is why it’s vital to have a friend at least help you out for a while), I usually walk around and check out other booths to see what’s working and what isn’t, to say hi to my road doggs, etc, and sometimes you’ll see sights that just bum you out. I was at Renegade Brooklyn, and I walked by a booth of handmade glasswares (which, it seems, is always a hard sell at craft shows – they are not nearly as durable or ubiquitous as t-shirts). The stuff looked gorgeous, but, at the time, the booth was empty, and the one guy running it was sitting behind his table, looking super desolate, and practicing yo-yo tricks. You’ve got to have a smile on your face. Commiserate after the show. It’s tough, and even I let it show sometimes when sales drop or it just seems to be a cold day, but you’ve got to try.

It’s hard to stay focused when stuff is slow but you have to find ways to have fun even when your shit isn’t selling. At warped tour I brought a super soaker and soaked passers by. At craft shows I usually just try to give people high fives or show off all my slap on wrist band tricks. If you can keep yourself entertained and others enterained at the same time you’ll put out a positive vibe and the sales will come everntually.

SHOW YOUR PRODUCTS

If there is any way that you can display all of your main products at once, and within one clear field of vision, do it. I try to cover the walls with my shirts so whenever anyone comes into the booth, with one easy sweep of my arm I can show all of our products at once – “These are our current shirts, and we have them in all of these sizes.” I also like to have a bin of discontinued items on sale for super cheap, so once someone is in the booth, there’s an incentive to hang around and dig through products. The discontinued items bring in a decent amount of money on their own, and if there are already people in your booth staying there and digging through stuff, they will attract a larger crowd. At a recent show I set up a “Doodle Wall” – I had a big tub of pencils, pens, and markers and covered half of the booth in paper. This gave people a reason to stay and hang out in the booth, and if someone was a hard sell I could usually convince them to at least have a look at the wall, or draw something themselves. This sort of setup would be impossible at an outdoor show (you have to assume that it will be too hot, or too windy, or both).

Test your position of items and find out what your bestsellers are and put them front and center. It’s weird how the same show at different locations has different bestsellers. Just pay attention to the products that are doing well or which ones people are stopping to look at. Make sure everyone can see your products, a product they can’t see is lost revenue so make it easy for them to see everything.

PEACOCKING YOUR BOOTH

In repsonse to my article on peacocking David wrote this, and we had some back and forth comments about it.

Peacocking is good, but if you can, you want your whole booth to peacock for you. Certain booth layouts put out a certain vibe – I overthink this a bit, but certain layouts say certain things about how you want to interact with your customers. For instance, you’ll see some companies encircle the edge of their booth with tables, and they will sit inside with their stock. To me, this implies a divide between the consumer and the creator. This may make things easier for you and allow you to kick back and relax a little and have a place to eat in private or whatever, but my philosophy with selling at shows and SEIBEI in general is to LET PEOPLE IN. Let people into your world. My aim with SEIBEI is to make it feel like it’s a secret world that my fans and I share, an inside joke that I’m happy to let anyone in on. This carries over into my booth design philosophy. I keep it open to let people inside (this is great at outdoor shows, too, because people typically want to grab a little shade at summer shows), and have one nice table out of necessity (to hide drinks and sandwiches behind, to set my credit card machine on, to display signage, to have one person sit at when they’re tired). My favorite part of shows is making new friends and meeting fans and other artists, so I let people in the booth to encourage this. “Let people in” is my general policy – I share bits of my personal life on my blog and my Twitter, show works in progress, ask for opinions (but not to the point of seeming directionless or begging for attention – I think some owners ask so many questions of their fanbase that it starts to seem like the captain of the ship is unsure, that the ship is lacking a rudder, as it were).

I think it’s also good to put stuff up front. I think I have over analyzed all of this but so many people don’t even look into your booth. I like having stuff up front so it’s in your face when your walking by, there is no way you’ll miss it. It’s always nice to build a crowd around your booth. This year I am thinking something like doing both. Having my display with all the shirts up front then a table in the middle in the back with a bunch of stuff. Have people see it from the outside and also come in and check more things out.

That’s true too, but if you can build a crowd inside the booth by interacting with fans and having shit for them to look through then that’s going to help draw a bigger crowd. You want to make coming into your booth seem like the easiest thing in the world. It’s good to have something that stands out and catches the eye from a distance and brings them in closer – a big banner over the top, a sign that sticks out, something. When I set up for shows, and during the show, I typically walk by my booth from every conceivable angle of approach and try to make sure there’s something to catch the eye and draw people in at every angle.

REMEMBER

Also, I have a pretty decent memory, so it is ALWAYS good to remember people. If you’re unsure, say so. No one will be mad if you think you saw them at the show last year and it turns out you’re wrong. People are always stoked if you can recognize them – if one of your Twitter followers says they’re coming to the show, and they use an actual picture of themselves as their Twitter icon, recognizing them first and welcoming them and thanking them for coming and saying hey is HUGE. Even if you can’t recognize them first (it’s not like this opportunity presents itself all the time, and your brain WILL get totally wiped out from being sociable all day), thank them for coming when they do introduce themselves. Thank people for coming anyway. Politeness and kindness cost nothing, and making a good impression is everything.

Post from: How to start a Clothing Company

Craft Show Tips with SEIBEI

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