Starting a Clothing Brand: What to Do in the First Three Months
By The Velocity Wear Team
Start smaller than you want to. Order a first run at the 20-piece minimum with mixed sizes to validate the design, the blank and your size spread before committing capital to volume — then reorder what actually sold at a quantity that brings the per-piece cost down.
The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes
The instinctive first move is to order a lot, because the per-piece cost is lower and it feels like commitment. It is also the fastest way to convert your capital into boxes. Before a single sale, you do not know which of your designs will sell, which sizes your customers actually are, whether the blank you chose feels right in hand, or whether your print scale works on a real garment rather than a mock-up. Every one of those is cheap to learn at 20 pieces and expensive to learn at 500.
Month One: Decide What You Are Actually Selling
Not the design — the product. That means the specification.
- Choose the garment and fabric weight deliberately. A 220 GSM heavyweight tee and a 150 GSM promotional one are different products at different price points, and the decision cascades into everything else.
- Decide the decoration method based on your design's colour count and your quantity, rather than defaulting to whatever you have heard of.
- Work out your size spread honestly. New brands consistently over-order small sizes and under-order the middle of the range.
- Establish your brand colours as Pantone references now, before you need them. Every subsequent order gets easier.
Month Two: Produce a Small First Run
Order at the minimum across a full size range. When it arrives, do the things you cannot do from a screen: handle the fabric, check the print scale against the body, wash a piece and see what happens, and put one on. This is the moment to discover that the print is 20% too large or the blank feels thinner than expected — while it costs you twenty pieces rather than a season's stock.
Production runs around 10–15 working days from artwork approval for screen printing and embroidery, or nearer 15–20 for sublimation and complex jobs, plus 2–5 working days tracked UK delivery. Build that into your timeline rather than discovering it.
“"Twenty pieces will teach you more than any amount of planning, and cost less than one wrong decision at volume."”
Month Three: Sell, Then Reorder Properly
Sell the first run and pay attention to what happens rather than what you hoped would happen. Which design moved? Which sizes sold out and which are still sitting there? What did people say when they saw it in person? That information is the entire point of the small first run, and it should directly shape the reorder — more of what sold, adjusted size spread, and a quantity high enough to benefit from bulk discounts, which reach up to around 40% as volumes rise.
What Not to Spend On Yet
In the first three months, resist elaborate packaging, a large product range, custom labelling and paid advertising. Each of those makes sense once you have a product that demonstrably sells, and each is money that could have gone into stock of a proven design before then. The exception is decent photography, because nobody can buy what they cannot see properly.
Getting Started
Build and preview your design in the free Design Studio to check placement and scale before committing, and model garment, method and quantity combinations in the free instant price calculator so your pricing is based on real numbers rather than estimates.