This is may not be the best advice, but I wanted to share my experience. In the end I just broke even.
When I was in high school, at the age of 16 I decided to start a "clothing company." At the time I already had been working part-time on the weekends, so I had been saving up. When I had about $700 saved up I told my mother I wanted to start this business of my own, she encouraged me and gave me $300, so I now had 1K in funding to launch my "business."
I knew with this small amount it would be limiting as to what I could do. At the time it seemed the cheapest thing to do was to only start with t-shirt prints. I headed to several screenprinting shops around town, but it was costly unless you got a bulk of shirts 100+. I did some online research and found this pretty cool screenprinting shop in Auburn, Alabama (I'm in California). Got in touch with them and I was able to work a great deal.
Next, I had to think of a name for my company. This process took a while, I went through probably hundreds of candidates before I chose one the one I felt was right. I think this was the most tedious yet most important step of the process because it is what represents you.
Once I had the name down. It was time to do some designs. To me this part was the easiest since I've been drawing for years and had recently started using Photoshop/Illustrator enough to manipulate it. I did several designs and showed them to friends and family so that they could give me feedback. I especially paid attention to friend's feedback because they were the targeted age group. I must also add that I would constantly look at clothing companies websites just to get an idea what the current "trend" was.
To start off, I just had 3 t-shirt print designs and got 50 t-shirts of each. So that was 150 shirts to start off, if my memory serves correctly it came out to roughly $4 per t-shirt. What helped a lot was that they cut the design fees since I designed the shirts myself with photoshop/illustrator.
As the shirts were being printed across the country. I started promoting it on MySpace (I should note, this was around 2004) and launched a website for it. Also wrote what was the beliefs and life-style that the company represented.
Several of my friends and acquaintances had bands in high school so I talked to them so that we could cross-promote each other. At the time my website design skills were limited to HTML and graphics so I had no idea how to even put an ecommmerce site together.
Nonetheless, once I had the shirts in my hands I started selling them to friends and family for $10 a pop. So I was making about $5 per shirt. Being promoted by friend's bands really helped since I sold several at local band shows. I sold all 150 and went through a couple more batches, but eventually sales dropped and I didn't want to take the time or effort to try to improve it. I decided it was a good experience and ceased it. In the end I cut even and had about 3 dozen shirts left. I gave many away for free and til this day I still have a couple left in my closet for memories.
When I was in high school, at the age of 16 I decided to start a "clothing company." At the time I already had been working part-time on the weekends, so I had been saving up. When I had about $700 saved up I told my mother I wanted to start this business of my own, she encouraged me and gave me $300, so I now had 1K in funding to launch my "business."
I knew with this small amount it would be limiting as to what I could do. At the time it seemed the cheapest thing to do was to only start with t-shirt prints. I headed to several screenprinting shops around town, but it was costly unless you got a bulk of shirts 100+. I did some online research and found this pretty cool screenprinting shop in Auburn, Alabama (I'm in California). Got in touch with them and I was able to work a great deal.
Next, I had to think of a name for my company. This process took a while, I went through probably hundreds of candidates before I chose one the one I felt was right. I think this was the most tedious yet most important step of the process because it is what represents you.
Once I had the name down. It was time to do some designs. To me this part was the easiest since I've been drawing for years and had recently started using Photoshop/Illustrator enough to manipulate it. I did several designs and showed them to friends and family so that they could give me feedback. I especially paid attention to friend's feedback because they were the targeted age group. I must also add that I would constantly look at clothing companies websites just to get an idea what the current "trend" was.
To start off, I just had 3 t-shirt print designs and got 50 t-shirts of each. So that was 150 shirts to start off, if my memory serves correctly it came out to roughly $4 per t-shirt. What helped a lot was that they cut the design fees since I designed the shirts myself with photoshop/illustrator.
As the shirts were being printed across the country. I started promoting it on MySpace (I should note, this was around 2004) and launched a website for it. Also wrote what was the beliefs and life-style that the company represented.
Several of my friends and acquaintances had bands in high school so I talked to them so that we could cross-promote each other. At the time my website design skills were limited to HTML and graphics so I had no idea how to even put an ecommmerce site together.
Nonetheless, once I had the shirts in my hands I started selling them to friends and family for $10 a pop. So I was making about $5 per shirt. Being promoted by friend's bands really helped since I sold several at local band shows. I sold all 150 and went through a couple more batches, but eventually sales dropped and I didn't want to take the time or effort to try to improve it. I decided it was a good experience and ceased it. In the end I cut even and had about 3 dozen shirts left. I gave many away for free and til this day I still have a couple left in my closet for memories.
Also check out http://shop.johnnycupcakes.com/story/ Johnny's story was really inspirational to me!