Andrew Hansons F

[khelmick]

Hello All

I would like to introduce you to Andrew Hanson's F.

Andrew is a L.A. based fashion designer who has worked to create his own style, techniques, and designs. His most recent collaboration is with the band The Used's Bert McCracken. You can find his most current line here: http://www.myspace.com/ahfashion

Hope you all enjoy this artist work.

[lms]

I fear that this thread is going to turn into a bloodbath. Self-promotion, especially of t-shirt lines, doesn't fare well on Superfuture.

I've been very curious on the economics and marketing of t-shirt lines and small youth oriented labels, so maybe I can hijack this thread for my own agenda.

Let's say it costs somewhere between $5-9 dollars to get a design printed onto an American Apparel t-shirt. The t-shirts are sold at $20, potentially leaving somewhere around $12 profit per shirt. How many t-shirts can you possibly sell, and how much money can you possibly expect to make?

If it costs $7 to produce the t-shirt, what price do you "wholesale" the shirts to boutiques? $10-14? Hopefully giving you a profit of $5 per shirt. Now don't most boutiques only buy extremely limited quantities of t-shirts? I know that American Rag in Los Angeles only buys around 20 shirts if it's a small label, making our hypothetical profit a mere $100.

Without visiting trade shows, how does one market one's line to boutiques internationally? Compose a list of boutiques then call them and send catalogues? Send news letters to magazines? Post all over the internet? Paste stickers and flyers all over the streets?

How many t-shirts do small labels sell? The Hundreds, Kenzo Minami, RVCA, Lad Musician, Corpus, Stray Boys, WoodWood, Hello Minor, It's Our Thing, and even smaller labels? If they can sell 20 shirts to 12 boutiques that makes 240 shirts, and at $5 profit, a total of $1,200. Then hopefully they could also sell on their website 5 designs of 40 shirts each at $12 profit for an additional $2,400. Totaling 440 shirts sold for $3,600.

I understand that some labels easily sell a few hundred t-shirts of each design, but realistically for a new t-shirt line like "It's Our Thing", how many shirts could they possibly sell? How much do they profit each shirt? How do they market themselves? Surely it’d be overzealous initially to whip up 5 designs in photoshop and send them off to a screenprinting company to get 2,000 t-shirts made.

Does anyone have any insight?