How to start a Clothing Company

Stop trying to do it all and delegate

Jon Kruse — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:05:59 +0000

When I started mediocore about 2 years ago I wanted to do everything. I wanted to design the shirts and website, screen print everything, and do all the marketing myself. This is how a lot of self employed people think when they start a business. They don’t trust others and they want to do it all themselves. It’s also hard in the beginning when you aren’t making much money to pay someone else.

My first shirt I did wasn’t bad. It was just a one color shirt I did for my missing turtle shirt. Building my own screen press and learning how to screen print really made me appreciate all the work that a screen printer does. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do anything more complicated then 1 color prints so I went out to find a screen printer.

I started making some money on my first shirt so I decided to print my second shirt. It was a line from 30 rock that said “Live every week like it’s shark week”. I did my research and went with a company I thought was reputable. I printed 100 shirts which looking back was a bad decision. Any new shirt you want to print the minimums and use that information to know what sizes sell or even if that design is a good seller. I talk about it more in the article “How many shirts should I print”.

The shirts turned out terrible. The printer was nice enough to reprint the shirts for free but it was still hard for me to trust a printer. The next printer I chose was much better and I was 90% satisfied. I say 90% because they didn’t have the best communication with me and sometimes left me in the dark. Also sometimes the ink would turn out thicker then I wanted or the colors didn’t match up perfectly. He was a great printer but I knew things could be better.

The third printer I found when I was starting up Shred a year ago. They sent me digital proofs of the designs on a shirt and their service and quality has just been amazing. They were so awesome I decided to become a sales rep for them. They are called Storenvy and you can check them out online at storenvy.com. Send me any questions or orders and I can walk you through the process jonkruse@storenvy.com (it just goes to my jon@doubledragonstudios account for now). Besides being on the ball with their service they also have printed some amazing shirts for my clothing companies. They were able to print some 9 color oversized prints and make them still feel soft. I am going to do some articles with the screen printer over there and get you guys some more information about storenvy and the printing process in general.

Back to starting out… I could have just given up after the first bad batch of shark week shirts and my story could have ended but I pushed through. After a couple month ordeal they reprinted the shirts just in time for Shark Week. I sold around 30 shirts that first weekend, it was awesome. Shark week is still my best selling design and this last Shark Week season I sold 150 of them during the week. I was pumped. It was very much like winning a big pot in poker, my adrenaline was rushing and I knew I could make a living out of this.

My next step of letting go and delegating work was hiring other artists. I am not a great artist, I did the Shark week, Missing Turtle, and Complimentary Colors shirts and as you can tell they are all very simple. I found great artists through emptees.com and always pushed their work to be as great as it could be. This made a big difference in my company, the shirts that I was making were awesome and there wasn’t anything getting in the way anymore. Just because I couldn’t do something didn’t mean it was impossible it just meant I had to find someone that was great at it and hire them.

When I deal with artists or my partner Jordan Andree at double dragon studios I try my best to communicate the best that I can. With shirts I usually mark up the changes in photoshop with notes so the designer clearly know what I am talking about. The same goes for Jordan, when I need him to make changes in a site I pick my words very carefully so he knows what I am talking about and will sometimes include pictures. My girlfriend always says I am very direct and and can be overwhelming for some people. It is very true, but I need to be direct and tell people exactly what I if I expect them to do it. A few words of encouragment always goes a long way to.

The parts of the business that I have been focusing on are e-commerce development, internet marketing, and product development. What everyone should do is find what they are best at then hire out help to fill in everything else. You will have a lot more well rounded company and make more money that way. Also the goal with every business is to have be self sufficient. You want to hire creative directors in charge of designs, a marketing director, president, you want to get the best of everything and be able to walk away from your company for a year and see it making even more money when you return. It’s hard to think that I will ever be able to do that but for now I am taking steps towards that goal. These are my first businesses and they are all a huge learning experience for me.

Let me know what you think of this post. It was a lot less on point and had more of my personal story. Do you think this is better or worse then just writing down the facts.?

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Stop trying to do it all and delegate

Lowdtown is Closing Down – Clearance Sale

Jon Kruse — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:51:48 +0000

Ray at lowdtown has written some awesome articles for this site and I thought it was only right that I help him when he needs it. Here is his post he wrote

This post has been a long time coming, but it should definitely clear everything up for those confused with the state of Lowdtown.

First of all, to save the drama, Lowdtown will be closing in the next month or so. As the story goes, I was contacted by an artist who has a logo concept very similar to mine. Though I didn’t hear of the artist til he actually contacted me, he apparently copyrighted his logo, and I made the mistake of never doing so. Immediately after, I had to remove everything with the mouthcan logo and the lowdmouth logo.

As you can probably guess, this caused a whole mess of problems for me, and is the reason I had to take down nearly half of the products listed on my store. And as you can imagine, this is at a huge financial loss to me. Especially so because he contacted me literally weeks after I had received my Winter line. To make matters even worse, I’ve been working with Hong Kong since late 2009 and finally received fitted hats in February in which I spent several thousand dollars on; I will not be able to sell those off either.

It is hard to explain how frustrating this is for me, considering I’m a college kid who put my own hard earned cash into making Lowdtown, and the reason why I was able to do wallets and sweaters was from the culmination of my hard work and dedication for Lowdtown. With this event, I pretty much lost all the profit that I’ve been building up to make my future lines even greater.

So what I am asking for is your support. I’m having a clearance sale where I’m literally going to try to get rid of all remaining stock. Shirts will be $6, and the crewnecks will be $12. These prices are pretty much the price I bought them at, so it’s an unbelievably good deal for you guys. Please tell your friends and spread the word about it; I just really need to cut my losses and try to rebuild. If you’re a blogger, I would truly appreciate a post!

On another note, please don’t harass the artist who contacted me, because the logos are in fact very similar. It’s an unbelievably unfortunate coincidence on my part, but I would’ve thought the same thing if I were him.

On a happier note, I can promise you with my utmost conviction that the rebirth of Lowdtown will be glorious. I’ve already been working on several projects that will definitely put Lowdtown on the map. I’m not one for braggadocio, but I have a secret project that I’ve been developing since November 2009 that I think will blow everyone’s socks off. I’ve never seen it done before, and I’m more than excited to see what everyone’s reactions will be.

Lowdtown, as you might’ve already guessed, will be going through a complete rebranding. I’ve shared the concepts for the new logo with a bunch of my designer friends, and I’ve gotten really positive responses so far. In addition, the website will get a complete overhaul. I’ve been really flexing my web design muscles lately, and if all goes to plan, the new website will be the slickest and sexiest yet.

I’ve also been receiving an amazing amount of support from my twitter followers, so I just want to thank all you guys! I’ll probably post up WIPs and sneak peeks when it gets closer to the relaunch, so if you’re interested you should follow me: @Lowdtown.

Right now, I’m shooting for Summer 2010 (probably late June or July), which is a really ambitious date, but hopefully I can pull it off. I’ll keep you guys posted! Thanks again for all the support!

-Ray (Lowdtown Friends & Freaks)

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Lowdtown is Closing Down – Clearance Sale

We are on Facebook!

Jon Kruse — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:47:56 +0000

I just signed up for a page at Facebook. I know I am behind the times but at least I am starting now. I think it will be a good way for store owners to connect with each other. You can post in the discussions section, upload photos of your products, or just post a link to your store.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/How-to-start-a-clothing-company/333842945937

Also does there have to be that long number there for the link? it doesn’t seem necessary but it doesn’t work without it.

I’ve got more stuff in store for this site in the future to create a community instead of just a blog.

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We are on Facebook!

Typography for t-shirt designs

Jon Kruse — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:08:17 +0000

Article by: Austin Martin

I could go for days about typography. Typefaces, kerning, leading, tracking, etc., etc.

I thought, “Hey! I’m sure most people don’t really know the basic fundamentals of typography!”. This is not an insult to anyone’s knowledge. Many people on here haven’t gone to school for design or haven’t really done much reading on typography (which I suggest you get on!). I’m a huge lover of typography and love nothing more than a well treated type based design.

The largest typographic cardinal sin I see is poor kerning. I have mentioned this on many designs, but until today did I realize that most people probably don’t have the slightest clue what the word means. Now I will give you some dumbed down definitions of important words in the typographic universe.

*I’m going to use the term “grayness” a lot. This refers to the visual density of the type.

TRACKING
Tracking refers to the space between three or more letters (ie. a word, sentence, paragraph, etc).

Before you start kerning, track out your type until the general desired grayness is achieved. This will make the kerning process a little easier.

KERNING:
The word kerning refers to the space between individual letters. The adjustment you make to this space is also referred to as kerning.

http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/text/kerning.htm

Kerning is tedious, but critical. It can make or break a design. The goal of kerning is to make the space between all the letters of a work to be visually equal. I say visually because in terms of measurement, most of the spaces will not be equal. This is due to the fact that each letter pair will have a different visual relationship. V and A are basically spooning. That rules, but it sucks when you have a couple like L and A in the same word. VALHALLA rules, but from a typographic stand point, it fucking sucks. There are a lot of pairs that just fucking suck and those are the ones that need special attention. The more you pay attention to type, the more you’ll notice these problem pairs.

Kerning will also vary between typefaces. The same word in a specific face will be kern totally different in another because of type anatomy.

One general kerning rule is the larger your type, the tighter your kerning can be. The smaller your type, the more space it needs.

One of the easiest ways to check your kerning is to look at your type as if it was just a bunch of nonsense shapes that interact with each other. What’s affecting your type is the negative space, not so much the letters themselves. My favorite way of doing this is printing out the sentence/headline I’m having difficulty kerning and I’ll tape it to a window, backwards. This forces you to ignore the standard way of looking at your words. Yes, many of us are talented at reading reverse, but doing this allows you to really see the letterforms for what they really are; shapes. What I’ll do then is go in with a highlighter and mark the trouble areas, go back to the computer, fix them, then print it out again. I’ll usually leave it and come back to it later. Maybe even a couple days later. This lets you get rid of all your bias and come back fresh. Doing this will greatly improve you sense of kerning and give you a new perspective on type. I promise.

LEADING
Leading is the amount of space between two or more sentences/lines of type.

Improper leading can result in a design that is either unreadable or un-united. To maintain unity in your design you need to make sure that space between lines is aesthetically pleasing. Make sure it’s not so tight that it becomes unreadable, though.

Once again, this varies between typefaces. Certain typefaces have very short ascenders and descenders and can have less leading. Others, like Bodoni, have very tall ascenders and need generous leading between lines.

*Leading is called so because typographers actually put blocks of lead between lines of type.

Being able to apply these three major rules is key to a properly executed type tee design.

It is also very important to use the appropriate typeface in every given scenario. This mostly comes from doing your research (an innate capacity for typographic aesthetics doesn’t hurt). I’m sure a lot of designers on here have no desire to know the history behind Helvetica or Rockwell or American Typewriter or News Gothic, but I personally don’t like to use a typeface until I’ve read up on it. Sometimes it’s nice to have ulterior motives for using a given typeface in a design. It’s all about intelligent design (not in the religious sense).

One more thing:

It is NEVER ok to stretch or squeeze type for ANY reason, EVER.

Oh and…

Here’s some book suggestions for you typophiles/aspiring typophiles:

Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton

The Complete Typographer by Will Hill

Typography: Macro+Micro Aesthetics by Willi Kunz

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Typography for t-shirt designs

T-shirt design process – Greg Abbot

Jon Kruse — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:38:44 +0000

By Greg Abbot

I get asked about my regular working process quite often so decided to post a basic overview for those who are interested.

I produce my work in three stages. I use Corel Painter 11 for sketching and Adobe Illustrator CS4 for designing.

1) The Sketch

Firstly I sketch my ideas. This allows me to rough out the design and also see how I can expand on my initial ideas. The sketch acts as the foundation for the design I hope to produce. I try to make sure the sketch covers as many elements of the design as possible before moving on to the next stage of the design, smaller details can be added later.

2) The Line-work

I place the sketch in a new Illustrator canvas, reducing the opacity of the image if necessary, and then lock the layer so that I can go over the sketch digitally in a new layer with the pencil tool. I draw everything by hand with the use of a Wacom Cintiq 12WX graphics tablet and name all of my layers for future reference. Once I have gone over the whole sketch, I then hide the locked layer and am left with clear paths to work with. I then group these paths based on what element each set of paths belong to. For example, if there are two characters, I would group the paths belonging to each character separately. This makes it easier to modify, arrange and colour individual elements in the design.

3) Colouring

Once I have finished grouping the paths and arranging all of the elements in the design, I then lock, duplicate (I keep a copy of the line-work layer incase I should need to make alterations at a later date) and hide this layer. I then go through each group and fill the paths with their respective colours, usually working within a five colour limit. When producing the line-work I am only concentrating on drawing and not the relevant position of the line in the design; this can lead to some objects which should be in the front, being at the back and vice versa due to the order in which I drew the paths and / or created the groups. Once everything from each group has been coloured accordingly, I arrange everything so that what should be in the front, is in the front and so on.

4) The Design

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T-shirt design process – Greg Abbot

Line Work for t-shirt designs

Jon Kruse — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 05:51:32 +0000

Written by: Sol Amstutz

Here are a lot of ways an illustration can be ruined, and a big one is line work. The line work is almost like the skeleton of an illustration, because you build everything else from it.

There are a few very simply steps you can take to take your line work to the next level.

I’ve started off here like I do any drawing, with just a basic rough sketch where I lay out the form and maybe some shading. Sketching is a very important step because it helps you determine placement and gives you something to reference when you’re doing your lines.

Okay, so I’ve traced over my sketch with some lines. Now obviously, this is my example of some bland line work. The widths don’t change, which leaves it looking flat, and there isn’t really much detail. So lets take it to the next level…

Above is an example of a few things that you can do to spend just a little more time with your lines. Varying line thickness makes the piece more interesting to the eye. You also want to use light and dark spaces to you advantage to give the illusion of depth, like with the eye sockets and nose cavity on the skull above.

Adding details is another good way to sell the viewer. Even if you aren’t going for photorealism, making the subject believable will make it that much better.

The more time you spend with your lines, the better you will become at getting a feel for how things should look to keep it interesting. Cheers, hope this was helpful!

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Line Work for t-shirt designs

How to connect multiple paypal emails – tutorial

Jon Kruse — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 04:15:11 +0000

Paypal has a lot of different options but it always seems like you will never use most of them and it is difficult to find the ones you want.

Today I got a paypal payment to the wrong email. I did a bit of research and found that you could connect up to 8 emails to the same paypal account. This is very helpful if you run different companies and want to process everything through the same bigcartel. I got a payment to my Double Dragon Studios email from Eric Terry at Linty Fresh and did some research and found I could connect that email to my main paypal account.

Login to paypal
Click on My Account
Click on Profile on the far right of the sub menu
Under Account information click Email
Add your other emails and paypal will send you a confirmation email

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How to connect multiple paypal emails – tutorial

Sometimes you don’t need Internet Marketing

Jon Kruse — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:23:24 +0000

I am fortunate enough to help a lot of clothing companies create awesome sites with my company Double Dragon Studios. While I am in there putting in all the code I also get a chance to look at all their web statistics. The one thing that surprised me the most was how little internet marketing a lot of these companies do and they still bring in a lot of sales.

What I see is most of the traffic comming from are simple google searches with the clothing companies name. So most of their traffic comes from people seeing their brand in stores and then searching them on the internet. This is one of the reasons why I think tags are very important to be well designed and have your internet address on them. They won’t always make the purchase at that store and might go online and order directly from you.

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Sometimes you don’t need Internet Marketing

Coloring Tips for T-shirt Designs

Jon Kruse — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 05:46:05 +0000

Written by: Sol Amstutz

Ah, coloring. It’s something every artist has loved since childhood, and some have grown to hate. Once again, like most things that are part of a greater whole, how you choose to color a piece can make or break it. Being color savvy is key, especially when working on things that are going to be screen printed.

Here we have some beautiful line work. Okay, neat. You could just stop there and print a cheap, one color design. But what if a client wants some color added in there?

Okay, you’ve got some colors going on now. However, can you really call this a finished piece? Some would, but there are some simple things you can do to give it that extra oomf. For example, the face is pretty blank and uninteresting, and the colors seem pretty basic.

So here I went in and added another (notice how its darker) color on on the face to give it some depth. This is where lighting comes in. Since I wanted to create the illusion of depth on the face, I added a color that is a shade of the color beneath it. If you want to save a color with this, you could make it a halftone of an existing color to achieve the same effect. There still seems to be something lacking here though…

Whoa! You can use the tee color as a color in the design to save on printing?! Yes, yes you can, and you often should as much as possible. The other thing you will notice is that I made the lines a shade of the hair color. What? Line work that isn’t black? Yes, you can do that too. This is more prominent if you’re working with a lighter tee, obviously.

Very often, clients like to see a few different color variations. When you’re doing these, keep the same principals in mind. Using shades of the same color gives it more depth and keeps in cohesive at the same time. Yeah, sometimes people want off the wall crazy colors that don’t match, which is fine if you can pull it off gracefully. You’ll also notice that I added a few little background elements just to fill up some space and make it look pretty (oohhh).

*Spoiler* Try using the hue/saturation slider in Photoshop to get a feel for what color combos work or don’t work.

I’ll leave you with a color combo that I would kinda barf at if I saw it on a tee. As I said, some might be into a more wacky color palette, but these colors just clash. The facial shading is too bright to be on top of that color, and overall they these colors are pretty vomit inducing together.

So as always, keep in mind how you can go the extra little bit to take your design to the next level. Cheers!

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Coloring Tips for T-shirt Designs

Pool Tradeshow Review

Jon Kruse — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 06:10:14 +0000

I found this post by someone who went to the Pool Tradeshow and thought his experience was something my readers would be interested in. I’ll see if I can get him to answer any questions you guys put in the comments.

You can check out his site Fur Face Boy

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009
POOL TRADESHOW RECAP

Ever since attending Agenda back in January, I knew that it was a MUST to exhibit at a tradeshow, so last week I exhibited at my first tradeshow – the Pool Tradeshow in hot as F Las Vegas, Nevada! Let’s see what my hard work, determination, sleepless nights and bank account got me into…(Brace yourself, this is an EPIC post)

2 months ago after signing up for Pool, I was already doodling up my booth set up…

1 month ago, I started mocking up my booth set up on the computer…

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PRE-POOL (SET UP DAY) – I was at Pool ready to make my doodle / computer mock up happen…

It wasn’t easy. All last month, I was in “Pool Tradeshow – Berserker Barrage” work mode. Not only was I in a furious flurry to get samples of Series 2 ready, but I also had to get on Series 3 line sheets, stickers, look books, business cards, intro kits, picture frames, hangers and wall graphics…

While putting up my wall graphics, I swear there was one point where I was gonna give up. I could’nt seem to line up the second section with the first section, I placed and removed the graphic about 50 times over to the point where the adhesive backing was losing it’s stick! It was also hot as a Mutha Fer in there (NO A/C!) With my arms trembling over my head and sweat dripping from my brow like a running faucet, I pretty much got pissed at myself and said…“F! QUIT BITCHING! YOU WORKED HARD ALL MONTH LONG AND YOU’RE HERE! YOU’RE FINALLY RIGHT MOTHER FING HERE! SO GET THIS SHIT DONE!” After blasting myself – I got it done.

I wanted the set up to be clean and subtle. It’s pretty much my website made into booth form. I wanted the constrast of the big cyan FUR FACE BOY name to instantly grab the attention of bypasser’s eyes and steadily lead them into my booth.

Hanging on the left side were Fur Face Boy Series 1 AND 2 shirts…

While on the right side were my lucky FFB Pillows (thanks Mom and Shogun Keith!), pictures of YOU, folded FFB shirts, bagged FFB shirts and a few Limited Edition FFB boxes (I stored my look books, intro kits and stickers in there). Looks like everything was finally set up and ready to go for the Day 1…

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DAY 1 – I came to the tradeshow solo, but while in Vegas I met up with my homie from Dallas, Deadstock Stephen. Stephen was in Vegas to handle some day job shit, so he swung by to give me a hand. The night before, me and Stephen hung out at Paris, had a few beers, hit the blackjack table and banked! Stephen started with $100 and ended with $400! I started with $20 and ended with $220! Stephen had his eyes on some Air Jordan Countdown Packs, I on the other hand needed this money to pay back my screen printer…ugh.

The Moxsie Crew came out to support FFB! Moxsie looks for hot new independent labels and sells them direct from their site. They found me on twitter and have been supporting and backing my brand ever since! They do whatever they can to help push and promote FFB and that I am very grateful for! I thought it was very cool of them to make it a priority and visit me at my booth. From left to right – Jon, Diana, Shilpa and Julia.

Moxsie even helped pushed my brand while at the show! They linked me up with Merriliz from sojones.com to do a short interview about Fur Face Boy. I was really nervous while doing the interview (NEVER have I done a live interview before!) so I’m definitely NOT looking forward to seeing my dorkyass on sojones.com in the next few weeks.

I was after it on that first day. I was doing whatever I could to draw people in and explain to them my brand.

There was some slight down time, when this guy came in – John from deLux. He told me that his eyes were drawn to my booth and asked me how my first day was going. I told him that…“alot of people are coming in. They’re giving me their contact info but there’s no immediate buyers.” He then took a step back and gave me some tips on how to improve my set up.

He said…“The setup is FING FANTASTIC!“ He loved the clean / subtle look but reminded me that…“buyers aren’t designers! They’re buyers looking to FING BUY!” He then goes on to say…“They don’t give a F how the set up is, they need in your face, this is my product, this is what I have, BUY ME NOW type of shit!”

I left Day 1 feeling disappointed and heartbroken that I couldn’t draw in a single order. I stayed up the whole night not able to sleep and constantly thinking what I could do to improve. My head was so much in the clouds, that I totally forgot about my meeting that the Moxsie crew set up for me! I was supposed to meet the editor of Thrillist! DAMMIT! I was also too bummed to even attend the opening night Pool party. Instead, I went to Walgreens and bought some hanging hooks…

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DAY 2 – I woke early and rifled my way straight to Pool. I was so early that the Pool doors weren’t even open yet! When the doors opened, I took John’s advice and set up my booth with a more IN YOUR FACE set up…

I even decided to rotate my chairs a bit to draw an invitation to come in and sit down.

I met alot of great / interesting people and collected alot of contact info on day 2…

…including this cute, funky-fresh Asian girl, she stopped in front of my booth and was like…“Fur Face Boy? Hmmm…I LIKE IT!” At first, I wasn’t too sure who she was, then it struck me…“Hey! I know you…don’t you make those food scarves? Aren’t you, of course…TWINKIE CHAN!” Without a doubt it was! I hooked her up with some FFB shirts, who knows…maybe she’ll wear ‘em or maybe she’ll make a badass scarf from ‘em! Either way, NEAT-O!

During some down time, I checked out this cool artist, David Garbaldi who was on hand at the show. His style was a mix of Van Gogh and Chris Brown! See for yourself and you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about. The end result was AMAZING, SO AMAZING!

Day 2 came and gone and still not a single order. UH-OH! One of my biggest enemies was starting to creep on through…self-doubt.

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DAY 3 – The last and final day of Pool has come. Going 0 for 2, I wasn’t expecting to get any orders on this day either. Instead, I just wanted to take in just being at Pool. I wanted to have some fun, hang out and learn from as many people as I could. Who else better to learn from than Simone Legno.

Simone is the founder of Tokidoki. I went up to Simone and told him that though his brand is SUPER HUGE and internationally known, I came to get to know him and his brand by watching videos on lynda.com. I got to ask him first hand on how he made his brand blast off into such incredible heights. Bottom line…he says it was simply hard work. He also said that he loves Japanese girls. Who doesn’t?

I also got to talk a bit to Jiro. He was the Pool Tradeshow photographer and a damn badass one at that! Check out his work if you want to be blown away! He’s also a tallass Mother Fer!

Karin Anna Cheung knows what’s up. Don’t know Karin? Well, she’s an actress. She’s been in movies and TV shows such as Better Luck Tomorrow and Drake & Josh Go Hollywood. Look for her in an upcoming romantic comedy called The People I Slept WIth later this year. After that, look for her to be my girlfriend.

I just really dug this guy’s look. I told him to stand in front of my booth so I can take a picture of him. I then gave him a shirt. I don’t think he said a single word back to me. That look though…IT’S SO GANGSTA!

This is Don from Skullastic. Don swung by my booth and loved what I had going on with FFB. Me and Don are pretty much the new kids on the block. Fur Face Boy is just now turning 8 months old, while Skullastic is 11 months old. Also, don’t you think Don looks kinda like Agent Smith from the Matrix?

These guys came to the FFB booth like 5 times! Great guys, but no order…what’s up with that?!

This here is Mike Hahn. He’s the intern for Beautiful / Decay. Mike’s a riot and a definite Fur Face Boy! Follow him on Twitter and check out his site, The Stache Life.

Awwww…young love. DAMN how I envy those who are in love!

This lady came through and bought a few FFB Series 2 shirts at wholesale price for her son! Smart lady with a fashionable kid!

These two were my booth neighbors. On the left is Maggie and on the right is hubby, Michael. Together they form the greatness of SUPER MAGGIE! Maggie and Michael taught me so much during the show. Everyday, they would give me new advice. They told me to keep my head up and not to worry. They’ve been to many tradeshows before and let me know that the very first show is ALWAYS the toughest. They told me about their first tradeshow experience and how horrible it turned out, but they stuck with their brand, kept doing their thing and eventually things started to take off.

Asides from giving me plenty of advice, Maggie and Michael are really fun people! We talked about pomeranians, hotel cleaniness, foods they could / couldn’t eat (Michael is Vegan and Maggie is Vegetarian, or is it the other way around? Hmmm…?) and squat sitting. I, being Asian squat alot. Maggie loves squatting too. Me and Maggie squatted in the Super Maggie booth for a bit and asked Michael to join us. Michael tried but it was so awkward because he’s so long and lanky he actually started to tip over! It made for good times all around! I really mean it when I say Super Maggie are some of my new favorite people. You’d love ‘em too if you were around them. They have a nice harmonic vibe coming from the both of them. Check out their stuff! It’s very cool, very eco, very green, very organic driven clothes. And most importantly – VERY SOFT!

To the other side of my booth were Madgods from Austin, TX. On the left is Ryan and on the right is Chris. Both are total opposites of each other and both are real cool. Ryan is the artist / designer of Madgods and Chris is the business / accounts man. With Chris, I talked about how to manage my brand, how to take in an order, how to handle taxes, tips on inventorying and tips on how to make the sell. With Ryan, I talked about pen / brush techniques, how to separate a 4 color photo for screen printing and different artists like Michael Sieben, Barry McGee, Kaws, and Ryan McGinness. Both of them love joking around and bullshitting, which made it extremely easy for me to hang with.

On the night of Day 2, I hung out with Madgods. We hit up the Undftd and Stussy stores on Paradise Rd. I was witness to Ryan buying his first pair of Jordans (Air Jordan I – blk / steath / grey – white) after that we stuffed our faces with some In-N-Out burgers! (Double, Double – Animal Style!) Along our ventures we talked about Robocop, the unnessesaryness of butthole hairs, Japanese buyers, relationships, Asian / Swedish massages, H&M and a MASSIVELY WIDE assortment of other off topics. I’m planning on meeting up and hanging with Chris, Ryan and the rest of the Madgods crew sometime soon in Austin. Check out Madgods, it’s really awesome! I now own 3 shirts myself!

Across from me, down to the right was Brian from Profile Apparel. Although Brian is an total smartass, he’s a pretty cool guy. Brian also taught me alot about tradeshow preparation, taking in orders with a heavy focus on the business side branding. Constantly on his laptop, Brian knew how to run his brand. On the last day he even helped me pack up and bring my stuff out to my car. Nice huh?

On Day 2, Brian let me know that if I ever needed to run to the bathroom or get lunch to let him know and he’ll watch my booth. Well, one day I did a bathroom / getting lunch combo and since I wasn’t getting any buyers I just left my booth as is with a “Will be back” note….

When I came back I found a note on my table that had a massive order! I was CRAZY EXCITED! Finally! A real deal order! I posted it on twitter and facebook and was just about to call my mom when Brian came by and had lunch with me. I was so excited that I immediately told Brian about my order. He then said…”Good for you! I told you you’ll get that order. Oh yea, it’s a fake order.” Turns out Brian was disappointed that I didn’t let him know that I was going to get lunch so he had to play this cruel joke on me. I laughed it off, but in my head – I was thinking knives, brass knuckles, guns and a really Fked up / bloodied Chinese guy.

This here is Rueben. Rueben is a manager for American Apparel, whose booth was right across from mine. He gave me some GREAT advice about my brand. He told me to keep my head up and to not get so down on myself that I wasn’t getting any orders. He said that when American Apparel first started, it took loads of hard work year after year until AA finally hit their big break sometime around 2000. Did you know that American Apparel has been around since 1989?! He was totally down with FFB and told me to just…“Keep doing what you’re doing and you’re gonna do great things.”

Rueben also helped support the FFB movement by buying the LIMITED EDITION, Sample 1/1 Bearmaibrick pillow for his daughter. What a sweet man. I asked him when I could catch him in the next American Apparel catalog he then chuckled and said…“You won’t find fat Mexican guys in the American Apparel catalog.”

Instead you’ll find this…

Yes, I was lucky enough to have the beautiful ladies of American Apparel directly across from me all week long! The many times I was down and depressed, all I needed to do was look up. TOWEL! NOW! I MEAN IT!

Fur Face Boy shirts are printed on American Apparel, so why not!?

A very special shout out to my new friend Jerrell Moore from New York City. On day 1, Jerrell came straight to the FFB booth to look for me. He knew that I was gonna be wearing my Black Toe I’s so he knew EXACTLY who to look for. Right from the get go, he told me how much he loved FFB and how he read the blog on a daily basis. He swung by everyday to help me at my booth. His dad actually had a booth over at MAGIC repping LOCO SUPER STAR but it seemed like Jerrell was over on my end more than over at his dad’s! Haha!

It was good to have Jerrell around, not only did he help me everyday by straightening out shirts, passing out FFB print material, getting me some FREE Bustelo Cools and watching my booth when I was playing Guitar Hero but he also provided great friendship. We talked about Kobe vs. LeBron, Bapes, the NBA, the NFL, music, girls, relationships and the future. Jerrell’s a good kid with a very good head on his shoulders. He has a swagger to him but at the same time was real humble. He’s extremely determined and ambitious. He’s actually trying to start a line of his own…Apocalypxcow. Everyday he would have a new idea. He not only wanted to keep up with Apocalypxcow, but he also wanted to start up a jean line, a shoe line, a pillow line, a sticker line…he wanted to do EVERYTHING! At just 19 years old, there’s no doubt in my mind that if he stays ambitious and kept it up he could do anything he wanted to do.

During the last day of the show, I showed Jerrell my appreciation of him helping me out by letting him pick out as many FFB shirts as he wanted. He picked out 8 for himself and his girl. I think he really wanted to pick out more, but his humbleness came through. He also wanted a Limited Edition FFB box…No problemo, Jerrell definitely deserved it.

Also on the last day I finally made my first order. The weight that lifted off my shoulders as I was sitting down and writing in the order felt AMAZING! It’s crazy because before the show, I was planning on a million orders from all around the world. I was starting to worry about how I was gonna ship all my orders and how my mom was gonna sew all of these labels on in time. I was ready to come home and put my 2 weeks in at my day job, I was ready to buy my mom 10 Gucci purses, I was ready to be the next big thing! But reality struck (What the F)…

I’m definitely not a political person, but all throughout Pool everyone was saying how the economy played a MAJOR role in buyers not wanting to take the chance on a new brand. Most buyers were repeat buyers of an established brand. And though Pool looked HUMUNGOUS to me, everyone was saying it actually shrunk by like 3 times! In the end, I wasn’t down. I actually talked to other new brands and they said they didn’t get a single order in, so I feel EXTREMELY grateful with my 1 order. I learned so much during the show and made so many new friends. I’m gonna combine everyone’s knowledge and come back even better! SO WATCH OUT!

I get so many emails from people saying that they’re starting a T-shirt brand too. I hope everyone realizes that it’s NOT easy. No, it’s not just opening up a design application, drawing something out, slapping it on a shirt and making instant money. It takes alot of skill, time, energy, effort, promoting and money. Ever since I started FFB 8 months ago, I started it with the intention to just be 100% happy – NOT for money. In fact, I haven’t made a single ounce of profit off FFB. I do it because I love my brand so much. In the morning when I wake up, as I’m working at my day job, right before I sleep and as I dream, I constantly think of FFB and how I can make it even better. I still have loads of work to do, I’m gonna start by contacting each and everyone of the contacts I gathered up from Pool…

I congratulate you for reading this EPIC post! I hope that though I only received one order, many of you still believe in my brand, for those who still believe are the TRUE FFB fans! Tough it out with me, I’m not quitting. We’ll get there. Happy September!

P.S. See more of my trip in the RANDOM section as well as bonus footage / behind the scenes extras on my twitter!

Post from: How to start a Clothing Company

Pool Tradeshow Review