Well? If not and you want to start a tee brand you should hop in the car and take a look around their tee section. With all over, over sized screen, and belt printing getting easier to work with and more printers offering it there’s a trend for a lot of new brands coming up to simply think that if they make use of these techniques and try to out ‘crazy’ the next guy they’ll automatically be the more appealing brand. Piling on more colors and making the graphics bigger will not in any way guarantee you success. That isn’t to say it couldn’t be a part of your brand if it actually fits within the style and look you want to continuously brand yourself with (Affliction for example). Having one shirt that is an 8 color all over print next to a 1 color simple clean logo tee…doesn’t work. You’re talking to too many people at once for a small company with that kind of spread of styles. We don’t have the built in audience a dept. store does and if you’re selling online you have about 5 sec. to capture someones attention. Make it count!

That brings us back to Target…for whatever crazy thing you think you’re doing it’s still small scale to what a huge company like Target can do, and best believe they can do it for a lot cheaper than you. So in a sense if you’re trying to outdo the next small brand you’re both running on a hamster wheel because someone else has more money and more connections to do it bigger and cheaper than any of us upstarts. So, here’s why branding is so important and why it’s shame that it’s so overlooked by young brands. You, being the small fish, have to give people a true reason to like your brand over the next and why they should pay more for something that, from a production standpoint, probably has less ‘worth’ than what a large department store can offer. I put worth in quotes because it’s up to us to create that ‘worth’ which brings me to…

The Johnny Cupcakes example; an expert display of good branding. Only within the last year or so has he started to use what you could call ‘high end’ printing techniques and adding in a wider range of apparel. This isn’t what got him where he is though…He could have kept creating tees and charging a premium because he’s created a brand and story that people care about. JC doesn’t need to spend extra money to out ‘crazy’ the next company because he’s built a solid foundation. On the simple image of a cupcake no less! Something he actually says a lot himself (”If I can do this with a cupcake anyone can do it!”), we aren’t talking about doing the impossible here. He could have dropped a bunch of tees with all over cupcake prints or a full chest water color-y belt print of an oven, but how would that have furthered the super iconic brand he’s created? Where JC is expanding his brand is by adding products that fit within the look & feel that he’s already built (cleanly branded gloves, belts, bags, etc.).

I’m only using Target as an example because they’re a large chain store with cheap tees that don’t look that much different than what I see from some small brands. Keep in mind pretty much every big chain (Pac Sun, Zumiez, etc.) has their own in house brand that’s also creating whatever’s current. So if you aren’t creating something iconic not only can they capitalize on your hard work in record time you don’t really have a case if you had a bunch of shirts with skulls on them before Target did right? To go back to Johnny Cupcakes whenever one of his designs is stolen not only is it easy to spot, his die hard fan base are on it like rabid dogs because of the ‘worth’ he’s created. If his fans let someone get away with copying him some of the inherit ‘worth’ of the JC products they own is lost. Making sense yet? Figure out what your brand is about and stick with it until it penetrates people’s collective minds.

Create a brand first, make awesome shirts second!

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