1. Find out who your Customers are.

Sowing is not necessary as important as the ability to find somebody who can sow. but when you are dealing with Fashion, you should find out first of all and create a strategy of who is your Customer is going to be and what price point is he going to be.



2. Find out the cheapest and the most effective way to make a Sample Line.

You don’t want to create an entire Line and not sell anything. What you will want to do is sow a couple of pieces, you get a couple of blind T-shirts and you screen print them and then you go and try to make a sale. And it’s important to make the sale for various reasons. I always tell people, do not try to judge how big your Company should be because you are selling only to your friends, because naturally, your friends who love you will support you. So if you sold 10 T-shirts or gave 10 T-shirts to your friends and if nine of them heard that it is the worst T-shirt ever, they are not going to tell you, but the one who heard that somebody liked that T-shirt is going to come and tell you how great the T-shirt is.

When I started FUBU, I had to physically get up in people’s face and show them a Shirt and try to sell it to them. Now these are total strangers, but I could only judge if I had a viable product only if that stranger would buy the Shirt. Now, until you make a sale, you don’t know if your Shirt can sell a 20, 40, 60, 90 or 100. You don’t know what the market will bare for your product and sometimes your report card can be a little depressing because, maybe nobody wants your product.



3. Sell you Products Online

We are in the good time and age of the Social Media and like I said you before, I had to get in everybody’s face, but now with a Company such as Shopify, you can get out there and put your product out into the World and people who don’t know anything about you will either buy your product or not because they like it and that is proof of concept as we call it in the market. Do not go and take out a $100 000 loan on this line before you start to sell it.

And before you sell any product, you should always educate yourself about the Business. How do you do that? Well, if you can’t go to School, then go Intern some place. Learn the Business from the bottom up. Take for example, in my position as a C.E.O now, I know every single position in the Company and so, my Employees can’t lie to me.



4. Go after Stores

Always start off with your local Store and become a local Hero and that’s how you get attention. Take a look at music Artists for example. Music Artist have to become popular in their Town first before they go out to be a National or Global hit. Another example is me. I got discovered doing local Fashion shows with my products and then a guy who had a Video show called Rap with Daniels highlighted me as one of the people that you have to look for. He started telling all the Artist in the Neighborhood and they started telling all the stories and it started to grow and I became a local Hero.

Then what happens is, you start to expand out of Territories and people in your hood basically go and tell everyone else, and so that’s how you start to get the attention you need. You don’t want to scale too quickly, you don’t want to take out this big Line until you start to sell, see what works, what doesn’t work, sell again, see what works, what doesn’t work and then when you have all the bugs taken out of the Line and you know that your extra-large Black with the silver roll tends to always sell as a classic piece, then you start to go further and further and then you start to look for distribution.