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This post was inspired by a message I was going to bring across in the article Career Suicide: Top 5 ways to sabotage your own clothing line, but thought it was a better fit for its on article so that I could go more in depth with multiple areas I wanted to touch on.

The title is referring to the two types of entrepreneurs entering the apparel industry and seeing the business from each of their perspectives. Your probably wondering what the hell does this have to do with sabotaging your clothing line…Well give me a chance!

From the designer entrepreneur point of view is where the fault is created. Many designers including myself at one point expected to succeed off of?their designs alone and how they have a certain mindset that their talent alone will make their clothing business a success. In the fashion business natural talent will only take you so far and being business savvy will get you ahead of the rest. If you ever read any decent business book on fashion you will notice that most talk about how the business of fashion is 90% business and 10%design/fashion talent. I believe it a 100%, because their is a lot of mess out their that is flying off of the racks due to creative marketing and good product placement. You can have a book full of the most original, creative, unique designs, but if you don’t know how to market?and sell your garments your going nowhere fast.

I mean think about it who doesn’t think they have the greatest designs? If you didn’t think highly of your clothing line than your bound to fail regardless. Truth be told a buyer could care less about how great your designs are its only your opinion, but he/she’d rather know how are they selling at retail, do you have any kind of brand awareness, what other stores are you selling in, who wears your clothing any celebrities, are they priced where they can make double, maybe even triple what they paid for them at wholesale. These are the questions that most?buyers will want to know, but most likely want ask you they will simply look right over your clothing line.

Designer Entrepreneur:

That’s why as a designer you must educate your self on both ends of starting a clothing line and the same for a business entrepreneur (We will get into that later). Get yourself familiar with the process of filing taxes, promoting, marketing, invoices, and why customers buy what they buy! You have to know your target market. That’s why I stress the point of researching any business before you dive in it head first. Not only will you be more knowledgeable for your business sake, but because there are some slick business men and women out there in the field and any chance they get to take advantage of your lack of knowledge they will. Save yourself the headache and know a little bit about?both sides of the stick from?clothing line production?to the clothing line finances.

I remember my partner and I attended our first trade show, which was the Atlanta, Ga Americas Mart. We thought we were prepared for?anything we had coming to us, because I stepped into the business as an art, hand drawing, designer type and my partner had a degree in accounting. So I guess you could say I was a designer entrepreneur, because I knew more about the design aspect as far as photoshop, illustrator, production process, line sheets, tech packs and other areas of design. I really thought that with what we thought were great designs that we would truly receive orders and then we could use the orders to finance anything else we needed, not really calculating much just using some ballpark figures and examples from myth like stories from the likes of Fubu (How they setup in a hotel room at a trade show and still left with $300,000 in orders) needless to say what they did was great, but let’s be real it was back in 1993-95…times have changed. At the time they did those numbers the urban/street wear crowd wasn’t really what it is today and they were introducing their designs to a new market. Compared to us doing our thing almost ten years later…clothing line market?flooded and all. We ended up leaving the show with more business cards than anything else (zero orders) something I’m not proud of, but definitely glad that it happened it was sort of a wake up call. I learned so much from that one experience it pretty much paved the way and made me stronger toward other obstacles that we would come to?face in the future of our clothing business and even today.

Business entrepreneur:

The business entrepreneur is the person who knows about payroll, taxes, financing and handling invoices, plus their interested in the fashion industry and the money to be made in the industry,?but they don’t know squat about getting a shirt produced. They are either investors or just an entrepreneur at heart. If you choose to partner up I’d hope for the latter.

Same as?I mentioned above it’s also good for them to know a little about the fashion end?or as much as possible to greater increase their chances of success. I know I have tried to learn as much as possible about the business side as much as the design. If you know nothing about the production aspect of a clothing line than how will you know when you’re getting a good quote or if your being jerked around by a sewing contractor. If all you know is numbers, but nothing about the quality or turn around time on your production order….you won’t know you’re being took for a ride?and most likely you will find yourself bouncing around from one manufacturer to the next until you find one who either?suckers you or a manufacturer who actually cares about giving a customer quality and actually tries to make the process as less painful as possible….it will take a few bumps before you get there.

If you really think about what I’ve mentioned above it makes sense! Most businesses have each side working for them. If you know the story of Ecko how Marc Ecko?is the designer/creative genius and Seth Gerszberg?is the business savvy friend who invested what I believe to be $5,000 (Yes that is correct I checked a source)?for the first initial run of garments. Together they made a $billion$ dollar empire.?Most businesses that investors acquire, buyout or buy into usually contain a lonely designer waiting to be suckered by the millions or thousands they throw at you (When they know the potential is hundreds of millions). Most likely they will hire people to put on board and you will be nothing more than a designer, because to them that’s?all your good for. They know about business and they think if you could get it to a business with a wholesale volume of $1 million with their professionals on board they can make a return on their investment ten times over. You already did all the hard work of making it a brand name and building awareness all your business needs now is some funding to take it to the next level.

What do you consider yourself as coming into the fashion business? I think most will be designers or the creative types and less of the business entrepreneur.

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