Lowdtown Winter Release

The Lowdtown Friends & Freaks Winter Line is out now!

The Cleanbean Crewneck:

This is a character concept I’ve been working on for a while, you’ll definitely be seeing him again in the future!

The Voracious Crewneck:

An update to the Insatiable tee.

Unikid:

A collaboration with Attila Szamosi of Peachbeach. I did the character, and Attila did all the type, background, and coloring.

Lowdtown Leather Wallet:

The first accessory for Lowdtown. A high-quality, slim-profile wallet with an embossed Lowdtown mouth on the front and type logo embossed on the inside pocket.

Hype! Lowdtown Winter Release on Thursday

The Lowdtown Winter Release will be on Thursday Jan. 21, 2010, which is also the one year anniversary of Lowdtown!

Get Ready!

Lowdtown Holiday Sale – Shirts Marked Down

Lowdtown is having a holiday sale til the new year. All of the t-shirts are marked down from their original price, so it’s a great time to buy!

Go buy something: Lowdtown Store

Thanks!

Lowdtown Black Friday Sale

Hey Just wanted to give you guys a heads up about the Lowdtown Black Friday Sale! When you use the coupon code “blackfriday” at check-out, you’ll receive 25% off all orders. It’ll be active from 12:00am EST on November 27th, and end the same day at 11:59pm EST.

If you’ve been wanting to buy something, friday is the time to do it!

Thanks a lot!

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!

Lowdtown Friends & Freaks Summer Sale!

Lowdtown Friends & Freaks is having a summer sale! All items are up to 25% off! Go buy something!

http://www.lowdtown.com

Big Changes at Lowdtown

Ok, so I realize that I’ve really been missing in action for a while. Well first of all, I finished up freshman year at school and I was loaded with finals and final projects and stuff. Second of all, I know I haven’t been blogging or twittering or whatever, so I’ve really been out of the technological loop.

So here’s the deal, unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be releasing a new product for June. Though I wanted to, I was neither prepared, nor did I order them in time to release them.

I haven’t had an adequate amount of time to devote to Lowdtown recently, so I think that I’ve come up with a good solution. From now on, Lowdtown will be releasing new clothes by season rather than by month. I hope there will be no backlash, because I think I have good reasoning. Being a student, I don’t have the luxury of being able to work full-time on Lowdtown, so I barely have enough time per month to come up with new designs. Also, if I design lines per season, they will have a lot more thought behind them, and the lines will be much more cohesive. I have a lot of plans to evolve Lowdtown Friends & Freaks into an even greater brand. And with more time I’ll have the opportunity to release more unique, production-heavy products too.

Don’t worry though, I have a bunch of great ideas for the future, but right now I just need some time to sort things out. When Lowdtown returns, I guarantee it will come back with a bang. Til then, I’ll try to spend some time over the summer on promotion and hopefully have more time to spend on blogging to keep my fans updated.

If you have any thoughts, leave a comment!

Thanks for all the support guys!

Release: Lowdtown Mook Toys

I proudly present the first ever Lowdtown toys!

Description:

This is the first official Lowdtown toy named Mook. There are only SIX of these super rare collectible toys, so grab one while you still can. Comes in custom Mouthcan packaging with a clear mouth. Own a piece of Lowdtown history today!

Note:

-These toys are completely handmade, therefore there are imperfections.

Details:

-Completely handmade plastic resin toy.

-Approximately 2″ (5cm) tall and 2.5″ (6.35cm) wide

-Comes with custom handmade Mouthcan packaging.

-Hand numbered one through six on the bottom of foot.

Price: $25.00

A lot of love went into these so hopefully you’ll like them!

Thanks for all the support guys, I’m really proud to finally release these.

http://www.lowdtown.com/toys.php