Why My Clothing Brand Failed

5 minute read time

Running a business takes a lot of work. You can attest if you’ve ever tried to build a business of any sort. When I was 17 years old, I decided to start a business. At first, I didn’t know that was what I was doing, but it quickly grew into a small business. My small business was a clothing brand called OMNICIDE. I had many ups and downs in this endeavor, which eventually collapsed. In this post, I will explain how that came to be.

But first, I will give some background on how I became interested in owning and running a clothing brand.

The Beginnings

The year was 2017, and I was in my senior year of high school. I didn’t have an idea of what I wanted to do. I was interested in a couple of things at the time. I had a gaming youtube channel, did some graphic design, and my tiny friend group and I loved clothing and underground music. I loved expressing myself through clothing. The only problem was no clothing brand made the aesthetic I was interested in. This aesthetic was the grungey clothing style which later developed into the “e-boy” clothing niche. I always thought I was a trendsetter. I painted nails on my fingers black before it was cool, had the Bieber hair before it blew up, etc. That’s not to say I was the first to start this. I was probably delusional about my “trend-setting-ness.”

The point is, no one really made what I liked to wear, and I always toyed with the idea of making clothing. So the only next logical step for me was to make my clothes. After researching how to put designs on t-shirts for weeks upon weeks, I bought a heat-press machine, vinyl cutting machine, tables, and other necessities to start making clothing for around $2,000 total, which was about all I saved up working part-time at the time. I set everything up in my family’s home basement and made that my little workstation. I had already made my first couple of designs before purchasing the items needed to put designs on garments, and once bought, I was ready to start making my own.

Jakob in his basement with clothing brand equipment

I printed on my first hoodie using the vinyl cutter and a black, blank Gildan hoodie. After school and work, I would spend every waking moment coming up with designs, making the website, marketing, researching the logistics for production, how to ship clothing, literally anything you could imagine. I fell in love. I could do this forever, and nothing else mattered. I went from being a depressed kid to having a real, genuine purpose. It was one of the best feelings I’ve ever had. This feeling lasted about a year and a half, and a couple of clothing drops later. Since graduating high school, I could focus on the clothing brand. I grew the clothing brand to approximately 2,000 followers on Instagram. Then, things took a turn for the worst.

The Downfall

In early 2020, COVID hit the United States, affecting everybody imaginable. Including me. The world just stopped. At that time, I was living in New York and working as a restaurant manager and had to go on temporary unemployment. Luckily, New York paid many other people on unemployment and me as much as they were making pre-pandemic. With all the new free time I had during this temporary unemployment, I took it upon myself to learn new skills and look into new hobbies. These hobbies included investing, frugality, and minimalism. With these new hobbies, I replaced these hobbies with my old ones, including my clothing brand. Clothes became less intriguing. I started getting into the stock market, real estate investing, Roth IRAs, etc. But, it wasn’t just COVID and my newfound hobbies.

After leaving high school, I didn’t have an excuse to wear cool clothes. I didn’t hang out with anyone, and I didn’t go outside. I became more of a homebody and introvert than I already was. These changes were the perfect storm to fall out of love with clothing. Although I kept working on the clothing brand in 2021, the most successful year of my clothing brand’s history, the last nail in the coffin was moving to Florida. In late November of 2021, I moved from New York to Florida alone. I lived with my parents before this significant change and was essentially using all my income to fund my side hustles, including the clothing brand. Before moving to Florida, I figured this was the journey’s end. I was already falling out of love with the clothing brand, but with the lack of capital, the brand was essentially dead. Nevertheless, I accrued 4,000+ followers, 40,000+ store visitors, 200+ total orders, and made dope-ass clothes.

The Lessons I’ve Learned

While the clothing brand may be dead, I don’t regret anything. I did almost every aspect of the brand myself. I was the marketer, the graphic designer, the accountant, the customer service representative, the web designer, the model, etc. I did about everything but sewed together the garments. There were so many lessons, and the journey was the most challenging and stressful thing I have ever done. Everything thrown at me in life now seems easy in comparison. I learned so much about running a business and the skills to run a clothing brand that I can now use those skills in my other endeavors. For example, I specialize in graphic design merchandising. I know what most people don’t understand in the clothing industry, so I can now leverage my industry knowledge to get clients. Without my clothing brand, you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now. I’m proud of what I accomplished.

There is no success without failure.

And I’m glad I’m a failure.