Ever since I was a teenager, I have dreamed about creating my own streetwear company. After one failed attempt at starting a clothing brand while I was in university, I’ve decided to take another crack at it.
When I first created a clothing brand, I made quite a few mistakes. I had just started teaching myself graphic design and the designs were not very good. I started with 10 different designs printed on t-shirts, long sleeves and hoodies.
The business model used a print-on-demand service, which meant each individual shirt was getting printed as the orders were placed. This resulted in regular supplier errors, such as the wrong designs getting printed on a product. It also resulted in poor quality and bad supplier relations. I decided to shut down the company after just a few months of operation.
I’ve made quite a few changes to my process for the second attempt, which has been instrumental in the process of building this brand. My design process has changed, from creating a moodboard of relevant inspiration to designing each piece with a clear brand vision in mind.
I also decided to invest in a bulk order on 3 pieces; a hoodie, a t-shirt and a hat. I was working closely with a local supplier/manufacturer from Mississauga (while I was living in the area). We ended up sending hundreds of emails communicating about the every aspect of the order and products. We also met face to face, which has added a layer of trust to our relationship. After getting my hands on the samples and giving the thumbs up, we went through with creating 25 of each piece to keep the drop limited and to test the market.
There are two key areas in which I will focus on in this case study, the first of which is the company branding and graphic design for the clothes. For this part, I created a moodboard of clothing designs I found that fit with the brand vision of a punk-rock style, streetwear brand. At this phase, I of the process, I was also working out what to name the company. There were a few notable ideas such as Always Anxious and Send Return, but I decided on Cathedral Forever as it aligned best with the type of message I wanted to send out; you can break free from society's expectations.
The second area that I will cover during this case study is the website user experience and user interface design. For the website, I wanted to make a similar experience to that of my favourite streetwear web stores such as SSense and Revenge. These websites have very simplistic and clean designs, that make it easy for the user to find and purchase what they want with minimal distraction. I decided to design the Cathedral web store, with a simple, white background and hope for the clothing to sell itself.
Additionally, I wanted to make sure that I had a simple website with the right amount of pages. In the end, I decided on three key screens; the homepage, the product page and the checkout flow.
For the branding design, I’ve always appreciate the simple yet bold appearance of Helvetica and this stole the cake for the main font of the brand. Brands like FTP and Supreme have made this font synonymous with the streetwear style. Another font I selected was Chomsky, which is a cursive newspaper masthead font. These two fonts ended up working out and appear as the major fonts in the designs for the drop.
As discussed in the previous section, I wanted to create a simple design for the website. On the left side, you can see Exhibit 1, which is a low-fidelity mockup of the homepage above the fold. This concept stood out to me and is essentially how the higher fidelity version ended up being laid out with a few small changes.
For the clothing design, I picked a few of my favourite pieces from the moodboard and tried recreating and remixing several different pieces. The more I created, the more that I was able to refine the design and style into something I was happy with and ready to put on a shirt.
On the left you can see Exhibit 2, which is a Vector Mockup of the Castle T-Shirt dropping from the first Cathedral drop. I really appreciate the black and white design style, with the use of colour to add contrast in key areas to make them shine.
Once I was happy with the graphic’s I’d created as well as the look and feel of it mocked up on a shirt, I decided to have a sample printed. Once the sample arrived, I put together product pictures of each themselves with a white background using photoshop, as well as working with a local photographer to create model pictures. This was a big learning curve and required quite a few attempts at both the picture taking and the editing.
After the product pictures were completed, I got everything uploaded onto the website, designed the product page, and stocked the virtual shelves of my website (refer to Exhibit 3).
The review process for this case has been interesting as I’m the founder and only major stakeholder. As a result of this situation, I’ve asked friends, family and mentors to help me out with the review process.
Most of my focus in this are was to ensure that the product images looked good, the website was optimized and that everything had been accounted for. I also had lots of time, as the sample took 15 business days to finish manufacturing and another 15 business days to have the bulk order completed (this was a frustrating part of the process). During this time, I focused on building the website on Webflow and continuously refining the design.
The launch/drop date was set for September 15, 2023. Below you can see a demo of the live website on both Desktop and Mobile (refer to Exhibit 4 & 5).
After the initial hype from the launch campaign, I continued to promote the company in 2 main ways. The first was to use social media (mainly Facebook and Instagram) as much as possible. I ran lots of organic advertisements, as well as running contests such as giveaways to help gain brand exposure.
The other method I used to generate exposure was to reach out to local influencers within my network that have a solid following on social media. I leveraged those relationships to trade my clothing in return for them to share a post of themselves in the post on their socials. Two of these influencers I used were Return of the Jaded and Jason Hersco, who both have around 10k followers on their Instagram. These are house music DJs that I’m friends with and leveraging these relationships allowed for the brand to grow further.
At this point in time, all of the inventory is gone. I was able to break even on the sales and felt great putting together a much superior clothing brand, but it was a ton of work and in truth, I overestimated my ability to quickly sell all the clothes. Out of the 75 garments, I ended up selling about two thirds and giving away the other third. This took me about 4 months to do - majority of the sales came within the first month.
I fully intend on doing another clothing line in the future with this brand, collaborating with other artists, companies and brands to provide high quality streetwear clothing at reasonable prices. In the meantime, if you’d like to get started on a product line of your own and want some help with the design or marketing, feel free to get in touch.
