These 5 People are Crucial for Starting a Clothing Brand
Starting a brand requires building a great team. Here are the five crucial people I worked with during my journey.
In the world of start-ups, you’re not blessed with infinite cash to hire talent for every single role that needs doing. In fact, when you start out, as the founder you’ll be the one assuming multiple roles across different departments of the business. Although this might sound overwhelming, understanding the foundation across your businesses’ different departments is critical to its eventual success.
However, you can’t do everything alone. There are certain roles that you need people with experience and knowledge to help out with. Having come from a background in fashion buying, I had a good grasp of how the fashion industry worked. However, when it came round to the manufacturing side, I was a complete novice. Buying and manufacturing are two completely different departments. When it comes to actually making a garment from scratch, you need an in depth understanding of the process.
Before that though, I would argue building a brand is the first step to building a successful business. This brings us onto the first person a start-up needs when it comes to building an sportswear brand, the branding guru.
A Branding Guru
I’m a brand guy, I admit it. I love all things branding, art direction and identity. There is something about ‘brand’ that captivates me and many other consumers alike. I don’t have to tell you that there are multiple brands out there that are offering you the same, if not, very similar solutions to your problem. You already know that. What differentiates them is brand.
Case study: Aesop
Let’s take Aesop for example. The brand founded in Australia back in 1987 was recently acquired by L’Oréal for a whopping $2.5bn (their biggest acquisition to date). Aesop, a skin, hair and body brand wasn’t acquired because of their products, or special formulas (albeit very nice); it was acquired because it’s one of the most sought after brands for consumers and luxury hotels, restaurants and bars all over the world. The 500ml hand wash will set you back over £30, but the value it brings goes far beyond its price for consumers.
Aesop is a mark of success, status, luxury. When you walk into a Aesop store, which undoubtedly will be one of the most beautiful stores you’ll have ever seen, you’re greeted with a zen like calm. Surrounded by Aesop’s infamous beige-yellow colour palette, dark brown bottles with minimalist labelling, beautiful fixtures and fittings, you know immediately you’re in a luxury store that values brand so highly.
Aesop has made a name for themselves as the go-to skin, hair and body brand for luxury clientele. They’ve done this through creating a beautifully crafted brand through typography, art direction, packaging design, customer experience and store interiors.
A brand's first impression is rarely its product, but the brand. It's rare you’ll come across a clothing brand in a store you haven’t heard of; you’d likely have been subjected to the brand through social media, advertising, blogs, friends, and so on. This shows the importance of making a great first impression, and brand identity is crucial to this.
It’s really worth investing in brand building from the beginning. Building a strong brand identity and voice will help shape future decisions, and ultimately lead to consistency across different mediums, something which is vitally important.
To stress the importance I personally put on brand identity, back in 2018, as I started my journey with our freelance creative director (brand guru), I flew out to Los Angeles for a three day trip to meet with him. Let me tell you, an 11 hour flight across the Atlantic for three days is not easy, but being able to sit down with him and discuss the true essence of what I wanted to create for Torsa was so worth the journey.
A Designer
If you’re looking to start a clothing brand, you’ve probably got a strong idea of how you want that product to look. If, like me, you weren’t previously a designer, what you won’t have is the technical knowledge to bring that concept to life.
A designer is responsible for taking those initial ideas and building concepts and exploring ideas around them. How much creative freedom you give a designer is really up to you. You may have a really strong idea for a certain product, and hire a designer to do the technical drawings you can send to the factory for sampling. On the other hand, you could go to a designer with a loose brief allowing more for creative freedom. For example, you could approach a designer saying you want to create a 5-piece Winter training capsule collection, send over some potential product briefs, and allow the designer to concept and build a story around that collection.
Of course, a lot of this depends on the budget. Hiring a designer to produce specific technical drawings based on a solid framework is going to be far less expensive than enlisting a designer to create a full capsule from scratch. You have to decide what is right for you at the time at the stage of the journey you’re currently at.
I’ve worked with a number of very talented designers, and they all have their own way of doing things. One of the most important parts of choosing the right person for the job is gut instinct. Having conversations with multiple designers is crucial. This way you can ask relevant questions, and compare answers against each other. You may feel one designer has more experience than another, but have a better feeling from the less experienced designer.
Ultimately, you can only know this by getting in front of them and talking to them. Gut instinct above anything else is the most important factor when I am making a decision on bringing someone onto a project.
Garment Technician
I like to use the term ‘problem solver’ when talking about a garment technician. Once you have worked with a designer/developer to produce your first clothing samples, this is where your garment technician starts to play a critical role. Even before this stage, they have been part of the design process, sending measurement specs to accompany the designer tech packs.
These tech packs are essentially a blueprint for the factory to follow, and include all the key measurements needed to create the garment, which has been put in place by the garment technician.
Once you have received your first sample, you’ll need to do what’s called a fit session with your garment tech. A fit session is essentially a first review of the garment the factory has created for you. You’ll garment tech will evaluate a number of things such as;
Are the measurements right?
Do we need to change any measurements based on how it looks on the fit model?
Are there any issues with construction that need to be addressed?
How are the placements of the pockets, trims and any other essentials?
You’ll be surprised just how many unforeseen issues you’ll have to solve at this stage. A few things we’ve had to address at our initial fit sessions when creating our Onyx T-Shirt; wrong thread tension on the neck line, incorrect glue application on our bonded hem, puckering on our main T-stitch, incorrect neck binding thickness, and many more.
This is where the garment technician plays a seemingly crucial role. They can identify these issues, come up with solutions and go back to the factory with detailed comments for the next prototype.
Website Designer / Creative Agency
If you’re a direct to consumer brand, or any brand for that matter, your website is vitally important. Look at it as a digital shop window for your brand. When I started Torsa, I made the mistake of trying to work on a tight budget with the website, hiring multiple freelancers to try and code frameworks I had built in Adobe XD. In reality, this approach just ended up leading to more issues than solutions; slow loading speed, poor responsiveness on mobile, clunky UX and a whole host of other problems.
Last year, I got to work with the creative agency IN-COL who helped relaunch our website. We sat down and discussed what we wanted to achieve at the stage of our business. We optimised for seamless user experience, fast loading speeds, and clean, minimal aesthetic which fit the Torsa brand.
Working with a creative agency that also does website design has been vital for the growth of Torsa. Not only do IN-COL help with website design, but they also help plan and execute our creative, studio and lifestyle campaigns.
Much like branding, finding an agency that can bring your story to life through your website and creative campaigns is essential to the success of your brand.
Photographer
When it comes to the final stage of shooting a campaign, you’re reliant on your photographer to deliver. Of course, they are guided by a brief, art direction, shot list and so on, but the value a great photographer can bring to a campaign is unparalleled.
As a brand, you have likely spent months, maybe even years bringing your product from concept stage all the way through to a finished article. Your job is to now photograph that product in a way that speaks to your customer, and evokes a sense of emotion; enough emotion for them to make a purchase. Simply put, having great imagery can often be the difference between a sale and not.
When you’re shooting a campaign, whether studio or on location, your job is to lay the foundation for the photographer to come in and do their job. By laying the groundwork, this includes finding the right location, making sure you have the right talent, having a solid art direction concept and understanding of how to execute it, and having a timeline for the day of the shoot.
Case study: Tracksmith - Emily Maye
There are a number of photographers and brands that produce wonderful campaigns, but none more so for me than Emily Maye’s work at Tracksmith. When I talk about evoking raw emotion, few do it better in the sportswear industry than Tracksmith. As a brand it does very little marketing, instead, they invest resources into producing beautifully curated lifestyle campaigns, with 90% of them shot by Emily.
The running brand, which was founded in New England back in 2014, has paved the way in the running market through its ability to tell stories through imagery and video. The ‘amateur spirit’ of a runner which they do a great job of capturing is done so by Emily’s ability to bring the brand’s concepts to life.
Not only this, by choosing Emily to shoot a majority of their campaigns, they are able to achieve a level of consistency which is more important to the customer than you think. By having a similar aesthetic across the campaigns, you start to build brand association through imagery, a very powerful tool for customers who buy into your brand.
Of course, starting out, we don’t all have budgets like Tracksmith, but being able to find a photographer that can consistently deliver great imagery that portrays your brand’s aesthetic is a great starting point for any new brand.
The roundup
The people you choose to work with our ultimately far more important than your impact as a founder. An integral part of the role as founder is finding the talent to bring your ideas to life. I’ve had the pleasure of working with incredibly talented people, but I have also made mistakes in the past. What I have learned is that trusting your gut instinct is of the utmost importance.
When building a team of people to work on a project, don’t just talk to one person, talk to ten if you have to. Through these conversations, and experience, you’ll soon realise who is going to add value to your business.