My first try

 My first brand 

In this blog I’m going to tell you my experience when I tried to start my clothing brand with one of my best friend. 

For a while now I wanted to start my own clothing brand, then quarantine came and I saw the perfect opportunity to start it. I decided to partner up with one of my best friend, for a long time we talked about it a he was down with the idea. First we had to came up with the name, after a brainstorm we came up with several names and we began a process of elimination until we decided which name was the one. The name we both finally agreed with was Øn/Øff. We had the first step there, the name, then we asked a friend if she could be our designer, she agreed, she gave us two designs, I only saw future for one of the two designs, we started to design the t-shirts on a website only to see how they looked. My friend and I FaceTime everyday to talk about the brand. The next step was to find a good quality t-shirt in which we could print the designs, while we searched for that, I made a little survey to all my contacts in which I asked them what designs they liked, what designs they didn’t like and some other questions related to clothing. At that point we had four designs.

As the day passed I notice I was the head of that brand, the one that gave all the orders and checked my friend was working on what I assigned him to do. I told him to search for the t-shirts while I did some other things like search for a company that could print the t-shirts, I learned a lot about textile, types of cotton among other things. We decided we wanted to start with 100 t-shirts, one would think that we found the perfect t-shirts, but no, two months had passed and we didn’t have neither a place to buy the t-shirts or anything. 

I started to do all the work, look for t-shirts, bags, create a logo, parcel companies, all the basic things we needed it to start the brand. The only job I gave my friend was to open a bank account in which we could receive the payments of the t-shirts and the account we would be using to pay all the stuff. I was getting way over my head and I started to do things like open a website before we even had the product. 4 months passed we were still stuck in the same problems that we had at the begging, no t-shirts, not a way to convert the format of the images, no bank account and the costs were going over $8000. 

One day, I went to my girlfriend’s house and I talked to her dad who is a successful business man asking for some advice, he told me that I should cut him off the brand, because I was doing all the work and I had all the initiative. After that I talked to my friend and we had a pretty rough fight, I cut him off, luckily our friendship was stronger than that, so we are still friends and it’s all good now. 

I decided I would do it all on my own, I contacted a professional designer, I found the perfect t-shirts, all the things I didn’t do in the last for months with my friend, I was doing them in the first week after our break up. I reduce my cost from $8k to $5k. I learned a lot about the business and how it works from my father-in-law. Right now the only thing missing before kicking off is to get the money, other than that I’m all set. I didn’t keep the name of the brand that my friend and I agreed to, I did a brainstorm again, the new name I came up is Lykke, it’s a danish word that means happiness. 

I hope you enjoyed the short version of my experience trying to open a brand, and the lesson I learned about partnerships. If you want to read more about my experiences or to know more about business I’ll be posting two blogs weekly, so don’t miss them.