Running a Collaboration With Another Brand
By The Velocity Wear Team
Before anyone opens a design file, agree three things in writing: who pays for what, who physically holds and ships the stock, and who owns the artwork afterwards. Everything else in a collaboration is negotiable and pleasant. Those three are the ones that end friendships when they are left as an assumption.
Pick A Partner With A Different Audience, Not A Bigger One
The point of a collaboration is reach into people who do not already know you. A partner with an audience five times your size but heavy overlap gives you very little. A partner half your size with a completely separate crowd, a different city or a different scene, is worth far more. Chasing the biggest available name is how small brands end up doing free promotional work for somebody else.
Check the fit is real. If their audience buys technical outerwear and yours buys heavyweight hoodies, a shared graphic tee may land awkwardly with both. The best collabs make sense to both sets of customers without a paragraph of explanation.
Agree Who Pays For What, Before Artwork Starts
Somebody has to actually place the order and pay the invoice. The clean options are a straight fifty-fifty split of the production cost, or one party funds the whole run and the other buys their half at cost once it lands. Both work. What does not work is a vague sense that it will even out.
Cost the whole thing out together, in one shared document, using the free instant price calculator so you are both looking at the same numbers as the specification changes. Include blanks, decoration and its setup, delivery, packaging and any samples. Setup on screen printing is charged per colour, so if one party keeps adding colours to the design they are adding to a bill you are both paying.
Somebody Has To Physically Hold The Boxes
This is the least glamorous and most predictive question in the whole project. Stock arrives as boxes that need storing, counting, picking and posting. Whoever holds it carries the workload and the risk of it being damaged, miscounted or slowly eaten by the tail end of a size curve.
You can split the run physically, with each brand holding half and selling through its own site, which keeps things simple and separates the money cleanly. Or one party holds everything and fulfils centrally, with an agreed handling fee for the effort. The split approach is usually better for two small brands, because it stops one person quietly becoming the other's unpaid warehouse.
Put These In Writing Before Anyone Designs
- Who places and pays for the production order, and when the other party settles their share.
- How many units, in which sizes, and who physically holds them once they arrive.
- Who owns the collaboration artwork, and whether either party may reprint it alone later.
- How revenue is split, at what point it is paid across, and who absorbs payment fees and refunds.
- What happens to unsold stock, and who has the final say on discounting or bundling it.
Artwork Ownership Is The Argument You Will Have
Assume the collaboration goes well. Assume people ask for it again next year. Now decide, in advance and in writing, who is allowed to reprint it. Joint ownership sounds friendly and is a mess in practice, because it means neither of you can do anything without the other for years afterwards.
A cleaner arrangement: each brand keeps ownership of its own marks and existing assets, the combined artwork is licensed to the collaboration for this run only, and any reprint needs both parties to agree again in writing. State who holds the print-ready files and the shoot images too, because whoever has the files ends up with practical control regardless of what anyone intended. If real money is involved, have someone qualified look at the agreement.
Splitting The Money Without Splitting The Friendship
Decide whether you are splitting revenue or profit, because they are very different and people routinely say one while meaning the other. Splitting profit is fairer and requires trust plus a shared cost sheet. Splitting revenue on separately held stock is simpler and needs almost no trust, because each of you keeps what you sell from your own half.
Agree how refunds and chargebacks are handled before the first one arrives, not during it. And agree a date by which money moves, because unpaid shares drifting for months is the most common quiet ending to an otherwise successful collab.
“"Collaborations do not fail over the design. They fail over whose garage the boxes are in and who owns the file afterwards."”
Coordinate The Launch Like It Is A Job
Pick one launch date and time, agree who posts what and when, and share the images in advance so nobody is scrambling. Production starts at artwork approval rather than order placement, so build the announcement schedule backwards from a realistic completion window: usually around 10 to 15 working days from approval for screen printing and embroidery, nearer 15 to 20 for sublimation or anything complicated. Announcing a date before artwork is signed off is how collabs acquire a reputation for being late.