It's not a secret, starting and running a clothing brand is not easy. There are so
many different working components that you need to consider. It doesn't matter if you're just
starting out on your business journey or you've been at it for a while this video is for you.
i'm Wes Tate with BELLA+CANVAS. In today's video we take a road trip out to Las Vegas to meet with
John Santos entrepreneur and creator. John has been in the apparel and e-commerce world
for years and has helped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs along their journey. If you
stick around until the end of this video John will open up about his journey success and give you 5
mistakes to avoid when starting your apparel line. All right, we've made it to sunny Las Vegas. It's
currently 101º We are here to see John Santos at his new studios that are right through these
doors. Wes what up man. Thank you guys for coming into the Vegas studios we got. Yeah thanks for
having us, this place looks awesome. So can you guys show us around? Tell us what you do here?
Well definitely. So we moved into this place at the beginning of this year. So it's still at its
infancy into what we plan to do with it. As we started building the team and kind of organizing
our operations we realized we need more space. Yeah so over here we got some of the editing that
happens with more of the video production social media side. And then we got some campaign videos
being worked out on this side as well as some business development happening there. Pretty cool.
Back here is where it's like a mix of some sampling mixed with ideas that come to be executed
on. Yeah we just got some BELLA+CANVAS blanks a few weeks ago so we're laying these out. Testing
to see how it applies with different print methods like this is a heat transfer method uh just to see
how it all really affects and washes and stuff. So we know that we're providing the best information
and also the best products. Okay! Place looks awesome you got so much stuff going on.
What do you have in store for us today? So as you guys are coming out here, I wanted to share 5 key
mistakes that entrepreneurs often make. Okay. That i made. I made these mistakes and way more like
when we started, when we first got started out of high school i banged my head, i learned a lot
of lessons and i think these 5 is not necessarily a catch-all but definitely a good starting point
for you to not make these and continue to grow in your journey as an entrepreneur.
All right excellent. Let's sit down and dive in. I think i got the chair set up over here.
So what is first? What's our first mistake? Number one mistake i think a lot of people often make
is not treating what they're doing like a business. I feel like a lot of times when
somebody says i want to start a brand, i want to start a clothing brand they treat it like a hobby.
To begin with it's okay because it is a hobby. It's a side hustle, but if you're side hustling
it for years it's you haven't transitioned into the business side. So you have to keep in mind
that there's three things that you really need to focus on and that's knowing your industry, that's
having a plan and holding yourself to a higher standard. What i mean by that is knowing your
industry in terms of what it is that you're doing. Right now people are watching this video they're
doing research on how they should be starting a clothing brand. So you're on the right channel,
you're on the right piece of content that's going to guide you into the research stage of knowing
your industry and this also means looking at different blanks like ordering different
fabrics different garments really getting to know the ins and outs before you start to do business
and start putting money towards the business. On our channel we share a lot of ins and outs with
different manufacturing processes to ecommerce, to product development, and design, marketing
tips. And we also have From the Ground Up Academy which is an a to z program that essentially walks
through all the mistakes i made from the successes and how those successes came with the end goal to
help you, kind of like, clear through a lot of the failure that you'll potentially have when starting
up any custom product line. And then the second part of it is having a plan. So there's a lot of
people that just consume, consume, consume, they consume content and there's all this information
thrown at you and you have this big list but you don't have a plan on how that list is going to
come together. To actually start your company. So creating a plan is the thing that you need to know
and that you need to start doing. That means prioritizing what's more important than others
and ultimately it falls into holding yourself to a higher standard. And John's channel is great and
so we'll leave a link for his channel and also From the Ground Up Academy in the description
below. So check those out. So what is our second mistake that we need to avoid? The second mistake
people need to avoid is build - thinking that you need to build everything from the ground
up yourself. Right now what this means is as you come up with an idea for an apparel brand,
people are always like, i want to create a better version of a t-shirt,
or i want to create a better version of these shorts. And unless your product is radically
different meaning radically functions different, it has some type of proprietary application to it,
there's no reason why you should be building something that's available in the market from
the ground up yourself. That's what we did when we started. i learned that mistake myself. So
i'm speaking from experience here that is a very costly mistake. It's going to cost you years of
doing and thousands of dollars, right, until you realize like i could have leveraged other
suppliers that are already making this piece or this this garment or making this this accessory.
And i could have focused on branding it, selling it and then moving into custom production myself.
So i feel like what BELLA+CANVAS has to offer is some of the best quality blanks in the market
and you can leverage suppliers and resources to help you print. You don't have to
do be the one printing it yourself or doing the embroidery or any of that. Like there's resources
out there. Use it. Don't do every single piece yourself because it's going to take you away from
what you should be focusing on and that is the branding and marketing.
Yeah totally and like BELLA+CANVAS has decades of experience of innovating, and trial and error,
and market research to create this product that you now can take advantage of to elevate your
brand and get your income going, get things started. Well definitely and we even have a
couple videos on our channel if you guys will find link some of them down there where we go
through the facility. Like you guys can see the massiveness of what they have and i'm sure it's
changed and become even more massive since that video came out. Yeah, but what i see there is
millions of dollars of investment into a company to truly make a great product and there's no
reason why you need to be investing millions of dollars to do the same. So what do you have for
us, our third mistake that we need to avoid? So the third mistake is not thinking about branding
before creating your collection, your brand, your products. Right? A lot of times people start to
think, "oh i have this name that i want my brand to be." All right and people throw away, they
always throw the term brand out there because it's just like oh i want to create a clothing brand,
but the difference between creating a product and a brand, there's a true difference. One can
be sold very cheaply with the same materials the other can be sold for hundreds of dollars with the
same materials. Right? So creating a brand means knowing what it is your product line and what your
mission stands for, right? And it's, and it's able to really be thoughtful about how you're designing
your collections. To the colors that you're using, to the silhouettes, to the marketing,
to the visuals that you're presenting. The way that you're positioning your clothing brand to be
different so when somebody wears that product they feel like they're emotionally tied to that design
or to that garment. And by them feeling that way, they're now like you need to check out this brand,
like i love the way that they do x y z. I love how they're donating 10% to save the ocean or i
love how they're donating x amount to homeless youth. Right? There's, there's a real mission
and thoughtfulness to how you're operating and people can see that. And it's a genuine thing. So
not focusing on your branding until after you launch is oftentimes what people do. They'll
design stuff and then they're like, oh now i got to focus on branding. right? But no it should have
been the very first thing you do is look at your branding. What do you actually stand for
and how is your marketing and how is your products gonna help spread the word of mouth on its own? So
then you don't have to spend you know hundreds or thousands of dollars trying to retarget
on instagram or facebook to get new customers. The customers that you should be getting should also
be spreading that message and helping you sell and they should be rebuying regularly because they
love the brand message and what you stand for. Right? Would you say it's part of like developing
your core? Yes, your branding is part of like it's the probably the most important part of
starting a clothing brand. It's honing in on that brand message and what it is you really stand for
and what kind of designs will resonate with that message. Cool so what's our next mistake we should
avoid? So the next mistake is it kind of falls in line with the branding part and that's the
marketing. Not thinking about marketing and how you, and creating your marketing plan to launch
your product line. A lot of times i get messages - I was, like, i launched, i launched my brand
i just need a way to sell more products. Can you, is there, is there a strategy to sell
more products? People always want to sell more without planning on how they were going to sell
what they had. Right? So people create something they have stock and now they're like all right
how do i go out and sell it. Like my friends and family bought it but now nobody cares about it
anymore. Like why is that, right? It's because they didn't think about the marketing side of
it. It's like how are they going to position their products to be in front of an audience?
Whether that's a live event, whether it's online, whether that's through social media influencers,
whether it's through advertising. As you're planning your marketing campaign you'll know
which efforts you should focus on because maybe you're really good in person. Maybe you're,
you're an amazing sales person uh you have a team that's really, that's really good at selling so
you should probably start funding it with in-person events like going to a festival or
a trade shows like more of a you know the farmer's markets or more of the markets and local events
because you know that your audience is there. You know that the people that you want to sell this
product to is going to be there so what better way to get your products out than an event.
If it's more of an online play - knowing where you're going to be spreading those designs and
messages to. Is it a part of a Facebook group? Is it a reddit forum that you might want to be
a part of? Is it an instagram social media influencer you want to align yourself with
because they resonate with your brand's message? Again, it all really falls back into the branding
aspect of it. Like what it is that you stand for and then the marketing side is like the execution
of that brand's message, right? And knowing that there's different outlets for it and making a plan
on how you're going to go out and do it. What's amazing is this is all like stuff you need to do
before you even start like designing what it is you're going to sell, right? If you want to start
a t-shirt line it has to happen before you do it but if you if you've already launched the first
time and you're sitting back watching like wow i wish i would have done this before - it's not
too late to get started on it now. totally. Like there's always a reinvention and i think as you do
business you'll learn that your initial idea of who your market was going to be may not be that
person but now you have a little bit more fine tune of a message, you know, that it's going to
be this subset of that group, right? And now you could create a campaign and products towards them
so i think business a lot of times is like having a really good idea of how you're going to do it,
so then that way you're not just running around trying to figure it out later. You know what you
got to do and then you take some of the lessons you learned and you make it better the next time
so it's never too late to make adjustments. Yeah excellent that's great encouragement. i love that.
So what's our our last piece of advice here? Our last mistake to avoid? Our last mistake is not
thinking about the logistics before you go out and launch or plan to grow your brand. So a lot
of times what happens is entrepreneurs will launch their storefront and they'll say DM me for orders,
right? And now they're going through messages like oh what size do you need? small? large? And now
they have stock in the back and they sold 5, 10 larges and maybe they only made 9, right? So now
they, now they oversold their large and they don't know until they start shipping everything out.
Then they got to tell their customer, hey we actually don't have that size, we got this.
And multiply that with hundreds of customers and you're going to be focusing on customer service
and logistics for your entire week. You're not going to be able to focus on the growth of the
brand you're going to be stuck in the day to day because you didn't think about the logistics
required to actually grow your company. What this means is finding the right suppliers for
for your t-shirt blanks. Finding the right suppliers for who's going to print or if you're
not going to print in mass who's going to print on demand, right? Which supplier is going to be
the one handling which designs and how are those designs going to come across to the customer. If
they order one print on demand product, one screen printed product how are you ensuring that they get
that same experience, right? Even though it's coming from two different locations the product
looks identical or the brand message that the tag that's in the that's in the uh the t-shirt looks
the same as the tag that's on the screen printed garment, right? It doesn't look like it came from
two different sources and that's just one part of it is finding your suppliers for printing.
The other part of it is having a good logistical system in play. Meaning how are the orders going
to automatically deduct from inventory when somebody buys online and somebody buys in person?
There's tools like Shopify that allow you to do a POS, point of sale in person that also connects to
your storefront so if somebody buys something in person now they're also taking that inventory out
of your stock. So if somebody buys it online it's not being resold twice. So finding tools that help
you logistically manage your inventories key. A big, big tip here is always getting into the
rhythm of creating a skew system for all of your products, okay? A skew system and having barcodes
even though it's still like you might be in it, in the early stages, you need to
get used to creating barcodes and skus for your products because what you want to be able to do
is essentially have it all packaged in a nice bag with a barcode in it and a sku number. And that
can get shipped out to a fulfillment center or if you're fulfilling products on amazon
like all of your barcodes are the same across all channels so people can quickly get your products,
scan it, ship it out to customers and you don't have to worry about did i send them this amount?
Like you know exactly how many products were sent to each facility or when you're selling in person
it streamlines the process of checking out. You grab the product, scan it , it's adding up the
total and you're good to go. So yeah logistics means making everything that you're doing simple
to do so you could focus on the growth of the brand versus the everyday fulfillment of each
product or responding the messages like we don't, we ran out of a small, you know?
if i'm wanting to leave this video and do one thing right now, what would you suggest would be,
like, one step i could take right now? i would suggest subscribing to this channel and to my
channel which is going to be linked in the description. Yeah, aside from that though
the one major thing to do i think that pays the biggest dividends is laying out your plan.
People go through life with nothing planned and life always happens to them. You need to take
action on what you're doing and if you're taking action on starting a brand then you need to take
action on holding yourself accountable to doing that, right? Regardless if it fails or works. By
you doing that it's going to give you an outlet it's going to open up your opportunities in your
mind to what line of business you might actually want to be in or what line of
service or industry you really want to work in. Maybe, maybe it wasn't making the apparel designs.
Maybe it was on the printing and fulfillment. Maybe you really enjoyed the logistics for the
actual making of the product versus the designing and marketing of it. You'll really get to learn
more about yourself in the process. So laying out a plan with some deadlines to yourself
and then leaving a comment with when you're going to be launching. Hey there you go. And then have
everybody in the community hold you accountable to it. Yeah i like that. cool. Well John thank
you so much for taking time out of your busy day to just enlighten us with all this information.
It's really great, and definitely check out the description below for links to all of John's stuff
as well as some stuff from us. And yeah let's see those comments. See you guys in the next one.