Around two years ago a friend of mine and I started working on a project on fashion business in our spare times. My friend has some connections in clothing manufactures and found some opportunity on it. So he came up an idea that we could build a platform to bridge fashion designers and the customers directly.
Unlike TeeSprint and TeeSpring where you could get commodity products, we offered limited quantity of custom made clothing by named designers. We targeted on those designers who received rewards in recent years. They may not be as famous as those top names, but they have great potential and many of them already have quite a number of followers. With our platform, designers will have a channel to sell their products, and those people who desire unique fashion can buy the custom design clothing with moderate price. The price will be relative low because they will be made directly from the manufacture without other intermediate costs. In addition, designers themselves will introduce our site to their followers, another save of marketing cost. Of course we expected a lot of challenges but we believed there's still a chance. He was in charge of the business aspects and I mainly worked on technical stuff.
About a year ago we had built a complete eCommerce website with some cool features. We also had an agreement with a manufacturer who makes high-end clothing (they OEM some famous brands). Everything was ready to set our business online except the key part: not many designers trust us. They just don't believe an unknown small company in Canada without fashion background would actually help them to sell their design and products. Some designers who had positive feedback at the beginning didn't end up doing business with us.
That was really tough. At some point we realized that without some help from an influential person in the fashion field our approach may not work at all. But it's hard to find such a person to join us. We didn't have money to promote our idea and prove ourselves. If we would have met those designers in person and presented them some nice samples made by the manufacture, there may be another story of ending.
Time flies and lives move on. My friend got his first baby last month and he enjoys the new role of being a father. We haven't talked much about the website and the designer sign-on topic recently as we both knew it's not working out and it's basically failed. The initial business build up can't last that long. If you can't launch such online business after two years of work, then it may never be launched in the future. The website is still running in a secret domain and it may never be public. It's simply sad.
On the other hand, although we did not succeed the way we would have hoped for, we did learn a lot in the whole process. For me those are valuable experience.
