So I mentioned in one of my previous posts that I’d be starting a new project on designing a product and making it come to life. I’ve decided that I would experiment with producing my own clothing brand. Yes, I know what you are thinking guys… clothing is an extremely saturated market. I already know that… But it will be my first experiment ever and clothing seems to be the easiest business to start in my opinion and to get my feet in the water. I am not planning to put a lot of money into this project for sure I will need to make a budget. I just want to start taking some action and make my life a little more exciting! I need to find ways to make money and this will be a fun project to start doing on the side.
The next step was to figure out who I am going to target and I’ve decided that I’d like to target other aspiring entrepreneurs particularly women. I’ve always known that picking a niche is extremely important, the more narrow your niche, the more likelihood of your success in your business. I’ve checked a bunch of sources on how to start your own clothing brand using sites like teespring.com where you simply have to design your clothes and they will produce, package and ship out all of your shirts to your customers for you so you don’t have to take care of any of that. The problem however with teespring is that even though they have a very good concept, the market is overly saturated. To increase your likelihood of success, you need to narrow down your niche like I said. You can’t expect to make a shirt catered to everyone and get rich (unless you’re very lucky!). So unless you are willing to do a bit of research on your niche market and it’s potential, you won’t be able to get very far.
After figuring out which product I want to focus on and figuring out who I would like to sell these products to, I need to start creating my own designs. There are loads of websites that offer free graphics or designs for a very affordable price depending on the designs you are looking for.
To name a few, there’s:
1001 fonts (for fonts)
Noun project (fonts & graphics)
Graphic river
Creative market.
There are other sites that you may pay for more customized designs such as:
Fiverr ($5+)
T-shirt factory ($10+)
Designious ($15+)
Freelancer ($$)
Upwork ($$)
Dribble ($$$)
Behance ($$$).
I got all of this information from my Shopify e-mail newsletter which was extremely useful. They provide you with an entire step by step process on how to create your own clothing brand.
So this past weekend, I tried to be as productive as possible. I wanted to be able to come up with a design by the end of the weekend but realized there was so much more to it than merely coming up with the design. I needed to vectorize all of my designs for the manufacturers to print out onto the shirts I desired. What is a vector ? Well, for starters, there are two types of images. There is the vector image and then there is the rastor. Rastor images are pixel-based and stay a certain size. They are best used for non-line images. If you try to resize it, it will lose it’s clarity and suffer from image degradation. Vectors on the other hand are based on mathematical formulas, they are best to represent more structured images. They are more versatile, flexible and easy to use. You may resize it and it won’t lose it’s quality.
There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done on this but I will try to keep you guys posted on my progress.
Until then, stay tuned…
X.O.X.O.
– Fifster
