thread's not dead - doITlab

This shirt was
a collaboration
between Jeff
Finley and Ray
Frenden for
Fright-Rags.
My Advice to You
Start. As simple as that sounds, it’s the one thing that holds people back the
most. They get caught up in minutiae like copyrighting everything they do, or
getting a trademark, or worried about their ideas getting stolen even before
they have sold a single t-shirt. So my advice is to start right now. Dive in and
figure it out while you’re in it. Hell, I didn’t even have a DBA until I received a
check for $12,000 from Hot Topic and couldn’t even cash it because it had my
company name on it!
Trend Watching
Well, I have to say that when I started out, horror shirts (or even horror-themed
shirts) were in short supply. But since then I’ve seen zombies, robots, vampires,
etc infiltrate just about every type of t-shirt company. Plus, t-shirts have gotten
much softer and more comfortable. The trends have moved away from the 6.0
oz heavyweight shirt to the lighter 4.5 ringspun cotton which was popularized
by American Apparel.
THREAD’S NOT DEAD • Jeff Finley
My Secret to Success
Perseverance. While luck has a huge impact on our success, it was the perseverance
to stick it out long enough that even gave us a chance to be lucky. That,
and sticking to our guns. It’s too easy to get caught up in all the things you can’t
do, and not focus on the things you can do well. And I find our best successes
come from when we focus in on the things we know we can succeed at, which
is usually what we’re most passionate about. When those things align, magical
things happen. And cutting out all the distractions helps you do just that.
Your Personality in your Brand
I truly feel that in order to stand out and move from a side project to a brand,
you have to stick to what you’re passionate about and engage your customers. I
forget who said it, but the quote I like best to describe this is “People buy products
from people, not companies.” It’s all too common for people just starting
out to tout themselves as bigger than they are. They use terms like “we” when
it’s just one guy in his basement. I did the same exact thing... Ironically, as I really
did become a “we,” I gravitated to using my own name and identity with my
brand. I personalized emails to my customers, and even shot videos of myself
talking about how I got into horror and why it means so much to me. Little did I
know, I was crafting the story behind our brand and putting a face and voice to
the company so customers could relate to us.
I spend a lot of my time cultivating those relationships by doing things like
sending surveys, allowing customers to vote on designs, showing them the
process of taking a design from sketch to shirt, and even showing them how a
shirt is printed.
The Brand Sells, Not the Design
Too many designers get focused on the “design” as a way to express their brand.
To them, it’s all about what the actual design on the shirt looks like... Of course,
the design is important. But that isn’t what sells. It’s the brand that the design
is representing that sells the shirt. So you must spend as much - or more - time
crafting and developing your brand than you do on designing your shirts. If you
do that, then the shirts will sell themselves since they will be coming from a
place of passion and built on a foundation that expresses that passion in a way
that others can relate to.
Case Studies & Interviews 106