- I started a clothing company.
In this video, I want to break down
how I started a clothing company
in a weekend and how we got our first sale
within six days of starting, hopefully
in a lot of detail.
Here's the shirt.
By the way, wohello.com is where it all is.
These are a lot of videos from Instagram,
so expect lot of vertical videos, coming up now.
Here's how I started Wohello.
I promised I would stop workin' on the weekend
but I'm excited about this so here...
I changed the name.
I think it's gonna' be called Wohello.
And I set up this storefront.
I've got some designs here.
I don't follow fashion.
Nothing's final here,
this is all probably gonna change.
It's just cool to see it come together.
The only thing that needs to change
is this price is probably going to go
up to 75 bucks.
We're trying to hit high-end $50 t-shirts, ya know.
And, check out this about page:
"High fashion is for chumps, this is low fashion."
It started simple enough.
I wanted to mess around with Facebook ads
and learn a little bit about how to sell e-commerce.
And it started with me wanting to sell my art
and I used Teespring because
it was easy in theory.
I'll tell you what went wrong
with Teespring in a second.
Today, I'm messin' around with Facebook ads.
I realized I was sitting around waiting for art
but I had a couple paintings already done,
so here's what I put together for today.
This sweater on Teespring and I wrote some copy.
I'm pushing about $30 worth of Facebook ads to it
and we'll see how we do.
I tried to write copy like that catalog
from Seinfeld that Elaine worked for.
"I was in Shenzhen, China, a city known
as the art forgery capitol.
The artists here have reproduced thousands
of paintings from creators like Van Gogh..."
Then I created a simple logo.
The company originally started out named Holy Wow.
Facebook's still reviewing.
I'm doing an ad spend of $7.50 a day
for the next few days to add up to $30,
so the next four days.
And we'll just kinda see.
I wanna show you this, this is a logo
for the fashion brand I came up with.
And the initial ad push didn't do very well.
Here's an update on the ads.
We've got 591 impressions,
it's been about 6 bucks so far.
Not that many clicks, only 12 people have clicked through.
No sales yet.
So I designed a couple new sweaters
and other pieces of clothing based
on some stuff that I saw at a high end
fashion store called Barney's in Las Vegas.
And I figured it was the design
that maybe was throwing people off.
This is Arshile Gorky, he's been hailed
as one of the most powerful painters
of the 20th century and he said,
"Abstraction allows man to see with his mind
what he cannot see physically with his eyes."
So I said, "See with your mind."
Didn't have the best luck with Facebook ads,
at least initially.
So we'll see, we'll see how it does.
I've spent about $11.
I like to think of it as people walking
into the retail store.
So we got 20 people walking in total,
and no sales, and that's fine for now.
Also we got to try on...
We got the three ads running.
Click through rate is there, cost per click,
cost per impression and then return on ad spend,
if I had some.
Then my friend Fernando Avila, sent me this video
from Virgil Abloh, he's the founder of Off-White,
which apparently is the company that created
that sweater that I copied.
And I highly recommend this talk.
I'm trying to get him on the podcast as well.
He has a couple different rules that he follows.
One is the 3% rule, which is: any creation
you make, only edit it 3% and don't touch it after that,
because we're trying to create that moment
of insight, and keep that moment of insight,
and a lot of that gets lost in the editing process.
The other big thing about Virgil is he is a dj,
he's a fashion designer, he designs shoes for Nike,
he designs furniture for Ikea.
He also talks about this in the talk,
the way he gets these opportunities
is by reaching out.
He cold emailed Nike and they let him design a shoe.
He cold emailed Ikea and they let him design furniture.
And that's just incredibly inspirational.
On the weekend I had an insight
and after watching that Virgil Abloh video,
I tore down everything that I had built
the few days previous and created wohello.com.
And I created new Facebook ads
to match the new brand.
The next day, which was Monday,
I was talking about it constantly on Instagram
and people started giving me feedback
on the business as it stood currently.
I was using Teespring completely,
it didn't even have a custom domain.
It was like wohello.teespring.com or something like that.
I love this feedback from you guys so far.
You know, one comment was basically,
"Alex, why are you using Teespring for your shirt designs?
What are you (bleep bleep)?
You should use Printful."
And I responded back, "You know what,
Printful sounds amazing, I might use that."
I'm really loving this thing
that I've been doing recently of launching
half-assed or half-planned ideas
and then letting the audience course correct
'cause they think I'm dumb.
It's been great for business so far,
it's actually super cool.
And he was right, so I built the site again
on Printful, integrated with Shopify
which should lead to higher quality designs.
And to celebrate the new site,
I ran a new series of ads.
New Wohello site is built, got new ads running,
I'm putting 30 bucks behind this testing
and we'll see how we do.
Pentalex said he wanted to jump in
and do a couple ads too.
So hopefully we can get our first sale.
Script is reviewed, let's do another ad test.
So here's where I am, I'm doing just the basquiat shirt.
"The scribbles are Twombley-esque
and the face is abstract,
reminiscent of John Michel Basquiat.
I love this shirt."
Did I make up that quote?
Of course, I just started.
Anyway, here are the other ads.
"I want a t-shirt that truly reflects
what I look like at 3 am."
Continuing with our quote series,
"This is my new favorite Wohello.
Tag a friend who needs to see this."
And then I went to Barney's
and saw how they were selling their shirts.
"This cotton t-shirt features an original
portrait with red highlights and Wohello
signature calligraphic scribble."
That's describing it more like an art piece,
talking more like it.
And in that same vein, "Black cotton jersey
t-shirt printed at the front with
a limited edition Wohello portrait
white on red."
Let's see if those do better.
And then I went over to barneys.com
and looked at how they sell their shirts.
They describe every shirt like a work of art,
so I went through and re-wrote the copy
on the Wohello site as well.
Alright, this is the last Wohello
update for today, an update of
the actual page itself too.
"Black cotton jersey t-shirt is printed
at the front with a multi-colored original
portrait. This piece features Wohello's
signature red and white calligraphic scribbles.
Featuring an original portrait from Wohello.
Rib-knit crew neck, pulls over,
available in black, 100% cotton, machine-wash,
made in America."
That's it, last update.
Then I talked to my little brother, who buys t-shirts.
Mostly I just wear blank t-shirts
that are black American Apparels.
So, he buys t-shirts and he told me
that my prices were insane.
I was starting like 60 bucks a shirt,
which is great for the high-end fashion market,
but he was saying if I wanted to sell shirts
to people like him, to dj's, and younger people,
I should probably price them lower,
so I asked him what price.
He said like 32.99 would be good,
so I dropped the pricing on everything to 32.99.
I know yesterday was all Wohello,
so I'm gonna try not to talk about it too much today.
I added one new item, one I posted in my feed,
and I've lowered all of our prices
to something more reasonable,
instead of $60, now it's 40.
I'm drawn to it, but at some point
I do have to let it sit,
just kinda let these ads go.
We've got two Facebook ads running,
and we'll see if people buy, I don't want
to get too committed to this.
Then over that night and the next day
I designed a couple more shirts
and I had the insight again from Virgil Abloh,
which number two, number one was edit 3%,
number two is: create a signature.
According to Virgil, more important
than the artistic quality of the work,
which I'm not a trained artist as you can tell here,
more important than that is the ability
to easily tell that this specific piece
of work is from a specific artist.
And so here's this insight:
besides that I'm working on Wohello.
We launched the new shirt.
I've got kind of an artistic style,
which Virgil Abloh said was extremely important.
It's like, even if you don't have a style,
just make one up, make a signature up,
and that's what we're tryin' to do.
The having a signature thing is super important.
Check this out, these are the four shirts
we have on Wohello right now and they all look
like they're from the same artists.
I don't think I've ever drawn four pieces
that looked similar before.
Then I got the shirts that I ordered
on Sunday from Teespring, and I wasn't
really impressed with the quality of most of them.
Shirts are here and we've got this monster, this.
I changed my supplier on this one, this is bad.
And then this one, also, I'm glad
we changed suppliers on this too,
this isn't too good, but this one's great.
Which is why I'm glad we switched
over to Printful, so thanks a lot for the advice there.
The guy who gave me the advice
about Printful and Shopify, his name
is Mohamed Choukairi.
Hopefully I pronounced that right.
So I'm glad I switched suppliers
but I was just happy to be wearing the shirt.
Had three Lorelai calls today, two went good,
and got the shirts.
Woo, successful day.
I posted me wearing this shirt
up on the Instagram, I was happy.
And then @jacksbusiness, who's a consulting client,
posted a few comments, we went back and forth,
and I'll put those up here, and he bought a shirt,
and we got our first sale.
First shirt sale, wohoo, Jack Randall, thanks dude.
So that's where we are with Wohello.
If you want to check out the shirts,
that is over at Wohello.com.
We'll put the url down in the description
but also on screen.
If you found value in this video I'd love
it if you would share it with a friend
who could also get value from it.
If you want more clients for your digital agency,
you want to meet with billion dollar brands,
check out experiment27.com and that's what we do all day.
And if you want free stuff, for instance,
the proposal that we use for our agency
Lorelia Pictures, we make documentaries,
that is over at experiment27.com/proposal.
And there's a ton more free stuff
in the description below.
If you wanted to grab a shirt as well,
we got a ton of good designs on there,
that's wohello.com, hopefully you like them.
This is the official Alex Berman merch,
as of right now.
Alex Burman, thanks for watching.