Lowdtown Q&A: Direct Wholesale Brand

Question:

Ray,

I just checked out your extremely helpful tips about building and running a clothing line, so I figured you could help me further. I am creating a urban line consisting currently of men’s t-shirts. I they will be sold currently at wholesale prices since I don’t have enough startup money to create an online store. I am having the most trouble trying to find a manufacturer. I need someone with low cost so I can lower my wholesale prices and create a better opportunity to sell. Do you have any insight on the matter?

Thank you

Answer:

Hmm.. that’s interesting. So you’re saying that you’re going to directly sell your shirts at wholesale prices to retailers instead of trying to sell them at retail price because you can’t afford an online store. I suppose it can work, but I’ve never really considered that strategy before. You have to keep in mind that selling at wholesale price is an extreme discount from retail price. For example, say my t-shirt costs $7 to produce. Wholesale price would usually be roughly double of that at around $14 and retail price would be around triple at around $21. So it’s the $7 you’ll be making as opposed to the $14 you’d be making if you were selling at retail prices. And honestly, it’s not that difficult to start an online store. You can even try the free version of bigcartel, and see if you can make enough start up money from selling your first 5 shirts or whatever. I probably wouldn’t recommend starting off selling directly to retailers with wholesale price, but if you have some stores and boutiques that are waiting to carry your product, then, by all means go for it. My advice would be to try to sell as many shirts at retail to actually have enough start up to get your stuff into stores.

I hope that helps,
Ray

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If you have more specific questions shoot me an email at: ray@lowdtown.com.

Lowdtown Q&A: Custom Website and BigCartels

Question:

Hey Ray,

My name is —- and I’m going to launch a clothing line I read the article about how to design the best website for a clothing line. In the article you stated that you don’t use big cartel and the you suggest going about it without bigcartel. My question is what shopping cart software do you use and is it easy to install? I’ve worked on my own web designing before I’m no expert but I understand HTML a little.

Thank you

Answer:

I never suggested that you shouldn’t use bigcartel. I just said that if you do use bigcartel, you should customize it so that you can stand out from all the bigcartel sites out there. For my shopping cart, I use cubecart. But there’s dozens of great alternatives to bigcartel out there. But bigcartel is definitely really easy to get started with, and I would probably suggest that.

With limited understanding of HTML, I would also recommend that you hire a designer. It’s a pretty large undertaking to try to learn how to template an ecommerce site by yourself.

Hope that helps,
Ray

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Afterwards:

Hiring a designer is an essential task if you’re serious about having a good website. You should fully be prepared to pay a lot of money $400-500+ for custom templating and $1000+ for a fully custom website. Don’t try to cut corners and hire some crappy myspace web designer. Learning it yourself is an alternative, but if you’re strapped for time, there’s no way it’s a rational alternative. It took me a good couple of years to get to the skill level to code and design my own website, and most people don’t have that kind of time.

If you have more specific questions shoot me an email at: ray@lowdtown.com.

Get A Job – Grand Prize Winner at Tilteed!

So as some of you may or may not know, I just took the win at Tilteed’s first t-shirt competition. The stakes were really high at $3500 for the grand prize winner and $1500 for the runner up. And my t-shirt design, “Get A Job” won the entire thing! It’s a really exciting day for me, and I’m sure the money will go to good use.

I’d really like to thank Patrick and his wife over at Tilteed! I couldn’t be happier.

I’ve gotten a lot of emails from a lot of you guys saying that you wish you could’ve bought this t-shirt, so now you can! It’s up for pre-order for a measly $12, so I recommend picking one up sooner than later.

Get yours here: http://www.tilteed.com/shop/featured/get_a_job/

As for the prize money, I promise good things for Lowdtown. Since I now have some money to play around with, I think I’m going to be more experimental with Lowdtown’s future products. I’ve already planned out my Fall line so that will still remain as it stands, but I might have some exciting new products for the winter line.

Thanks to everyone who supported me!

-Ray

Lowdtown Q&A: Custom-made Clothing?

Question:

Hi Ray,
I came across your post regarding Starting a Clothing Line and was very pleased to find someone like you. I too am graduating soon and starting a clothing line with a partner at my school.

Surprising enough, we haven’t been given any information on how to go about making a career out of our studies. We both want to start a ready to wear clothing line and to be honest are a bit terrified.

We are working on creating our business plan to approach possible investors in the company. Any words of advice for a ready to wear clothing line start up – books, favorite sites, contacts in the Miami area? We have ethnic and original ideas and look forward to branding ourselves in the near future.

Answer:

That sounds really exciting and interesting, so you should be more excited than terrified. I’m sure you already understand how much time, money, and effort this will take so you should be fully prepared. You said something about how to make a career from your studies, but I honestly would think that it would be vital to have a steady source of income while starting-up your clothing company. No offense, but clothing brands flop all the time, so you shouldn’t go straight into the deep end. Be sure you do a lot of research before you begin. Florida happens to be a hot spot for t-shirt designers, and there are a lot of great screen printers in the area. However, you said that you’re starting a ready to wear clothing line, so I’m assuming that you’re more interested in the design of the clothing rather than having prints on already made articles of clothing. If you’re thinking of mass production, you’re definitely going to have to look into cut and sew, which is extremely expensive with very high minimums. But if you’re are literally making each product by hand, you should look into handmade outlets like etsy.com.

In terms of advice, there’s books for literally everything. When I was first planning my brand, I read a lot of books on marketing and branding, but of course there are books about starting businesses and what not. But if you’re literally just trying to figure out where to begin, there are a lot of great resources available online. T-shirtforum.com and emptees are great. Perhaps they might not really be your demographic, but the people on t-shirtforum are really professional and I’m sure they could lead you in the right track.

Good luck with everything.

-Ray

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If you have more specific questions shoot me an email at: ray@lowdtown.com.

Lowdtown Q&A: How many shirts do I start with? Wholesale?

Hey guys, I’m back! I’ve obviously been neglecting the blog, but I’m finally ready to get back into it, I think. I recently moved into my new apartment in Brooklyn, and we didn’t have internet for the first week and a half, but now I’m pretty much up to speed with everything.

Since I’m not very good at regular updates off the top of my head, I think I’m going to try to focus the Lowdtown blog more on helping out people who are starting out. Well of course, I’ll have updates about Lowdtown and designs and whatever, but I’m going to try to answer as many questions as I can.

So if you’re dying to learn something about the clothing industry that you think I can help you with, shoot me an email at: ray@lowdtown.com. Just keep in mind that I’ll probably post up your question anonymously onto the blog because there might be other people with the same questions as you.

Alright so here we go, onto the first question:

So here’s a couple questions from the guest posts I made at Jon Kruse’s How to start a clothing company website:

how many shirts do i start off with? and how many designs/types of shirts. which sizes/how many.

Wow, quite a lot of how-many’s but I’ll do my best to answer. This question is pretty difficult to answer because a lot of it has to do with your budget. But I’ll try to give you an idea of what I did. First of all, since you’re just starting off, it’s very very unlikely that you’re going to be selling out on things immediately unless you’re some well known artist.

My advice would be to test the waters a bit. See if the people are actually interested in what you’re selling, and see if you are actually able to sell things. Honestly, there is nothing worse than having boxes of shirts that no one wants. If you want to test a design, I would order a limited run of around 50 shirts. If these sell quickly, you’ll know to get like 100 shirts next time, and maybe more if they keep selling.

As for the amount of designs, you definitely don’t want to start with just one, but you might be overwhelmed if you start with over five. I feel like the magic number for smaller brands is around four. Just be sure you have diversity with your launch. If you have three or four similar looking boring designs, they probably won’t give a good impression of your brand.

For sizing, people say that you should print 1-2-2-1. That means that for every one small you print, you make two mediums, and so on. I wouldn’t say that this rule is something that’s set in stone. I mean, I certainly play around with the numbers. It’s all about understanding your demographic. For example, if your brand is predominately for men, you don’t want to print equal numbers of guys and girls tees. Also, say you’re a street brand, and your demographic likes to wear larger shirts. You’re not going to want to print a lot of smalls, and instead you might want to keep your sizes in the larges, x-larges, and xx-larges.

negotiating with retail stores. setting prices / wholesale accounts.

Honestly, I don’t have that much experience with contacting retail stores, but it’s actually a lot simpler than you think. Basically, if there’s a boutique that you like, you can pretty much go in there and talk to the owner/manager and ask them if they’re interested in your product. Be sure to bring some samples and a sheet with all your wholesale prices and suggested retail prices. If they don’t want to carry your product, no big deal, just move on. It’s the same deal for online stores. You should be able to find a corporate email that you can contact and inquire about holding your product. Just don’t be rude, and don’t act like you’re the shit.

For wholesale prices, the general rule of thumb is that your wholesale price is usually double of your raw t-shirt’s value. For example, if I produce my shirts at $6.50/piece, a good wholesale price would be $13, and the suggested retail price would be roughly double at around $20-26.

where you get your raw tshirts from/where you print them. can you get discount / interesting deals?

I really don’t want to get into this because it’s so easy to do a google search for t-shirt brands. My only advice is to get a bunch of wholesale accounts with the major t-shirt wholesalers and getting samples to see which brand you like. There are always discounts with having a wholesale account, and usually the more t-shirts you buy at a time, the cheaper the shirts become. As for t-shirt printers, it’s the same deal. Try going to emptees and searching the forums, because this question has been answered a million times.

Hope that helps, I’ll try to post more regularly from now on. Peace!