MY BUCKET LIST // CREATING MY OWN CLOTHING BRAND

It is finally about time to share with you my #needleworkbucketlist. I have been waiting for a long time to do this until I was ready to share all the informations I wanted with you. Since I am pretty new on the industry of fashion and sewing, only two years, there are generally so many things on my bucket list to learn about and experiment with that I would need a whole truck to fit them all😂. But experience and knowledge will come with the years, I am sure about that and I have all the patience for this.

My main goal for this year is something that I wanted too much to do and I have dreamed about it many times before. Create my own clothing brand. It is basically a streetwear brand with casual clothes that has my personal touch. I am starting this from zero, decided to take my risks and give a shot to launch my first clothing collection on this summer which is something I really wanted to do. Of course the more I am getting involved in this the more I understand how complex and hard can be if you are all alone. I mean I never thought about how many things you should take into consideration when you are starting a brand and how many people you will need to help you with several jobs. Well if you have a good budget you are pretty lucky cause you don't have to get involved with extra works, only design the clothes and propably sew them, maybe not even. If you are starting with a low budget like I do then you have to do almost everything on your own. And this is how you fill a whole bucketlist of things you have to accomplish working on a deadline.

Have To Do

Starting with the things I haven't done yet and with one of the most important, I should soon settle down to a brand name and its logo. I can say that is the most difficult part by far...I want a name that represent my clothes and me as a creator. The problem is that many of the names I loved were already taken when I did some research on the internet so I couldn't take any risks at this point. I believe choosing the one and right brand name for you is such a big deal so I don't want to do this in a rush until I am sure about it.

For the next months I have to put some big efford to sew and prepare all the men's shirts, women's dresses and tops and also some accessories. On that point I would like to talk a bit about my idea of my collections. I do not support massive productions or fast fashion clothing in my daily life, I always prefer to support small businesses with handmade products or secondhand shops. So this is how my brand will work as well. A small brand with a few pieces of each design in order to avoid waste and ethical ways of production. At a polluting industry like fashion it is really important for me to leave as less negative impact on environment as I can or ideally in the future none.

Except from the sewing, I also have to print and sew lebels on my pieces. I should also find the right theme and place and do the collection photoshooting. The deadline to launch the collection is June.

Done

Let's talk about the things that I have already accomplished from the bucketlist. Having designed the collection, I designed and tested the templates in different sizes. I wanted to choose a fabric that is easy to wear everyday and also feels good on summer months. Nothing more ideal than viscose, light fabric and also allows body to breath. My main idea about the fabrics was to design my own seamless patern and find a business to print them on a fabric. I wanted to make three different patterns which share a common theme. I talked with many businesses and the prices were too high to print on viscose and for sure much highier than my budget. They told me that print on polyester fabrics would cost me less but I didn't want to use synthetic fabrics. It feels the worst especially on summer. So in order to reduce the cost without changes my preferences I decided to stay with viscose fabric but use one of my patterns and only for the men's shirts. So this is the pattern I decided to print. I put a black and white effect so I can show you the pattern in another post when the shirts are ready!

I found a viscose fabric online with a digital printing that I liked. I couldn't find something similar to my pattern but I think this print will look good for my outfits. I will use this for the women's collection on dresses tops and maybe some accessories. I am also keeping the original fabric color for the next post that I will show you the proccess I have done with the clothes.

One more thing that I have accomplished from my bucket list is that I sewed the kimonos for the collection. I had bought this fabric from a huge warehouse that I had talked you about at a previous post. It is a kind of satin, black with butterflies on it and I found it cute to use it for making kimonos.

As much as I love those fabrics they are so slippery when you cut them or sew them.

Thankfully the biggest part of the project was done on the serger machine which makes it much easier to handle with these fabrics.

Genarally kimonos are easy to sew, pretty loose and cool clothing.

Of course I am not talking about the original Japanese kimonos. Those kimonos can be really complex and have an amazing detailed work.

I only worked the hems of kimono with the sewing machine. Satin fabric can be so easily ruined by a wrong stitch or a pull so you have to be extra careful with that. That makes it a bit difficult at least for me that I am not so experienced tailor.

So having finished all the kimono pieces is a big check on my bucketlist. Of course the next months until summer there are much more things that I have to accomplish but this is important to me and I have all the patience and love to make it work. At this point I want to clarify that this post isn't made for commercial reasons or anything but I just wanted to share with you my personal goals and how I experience all this crazy proccess of creating something new from zero. Any opinion or review is more than welcome! I would also love to hear any advice if someone here has already his own clothing brand and want to share any stories from his first baby steps on this.

Thank you all for stopping by guys, I wish you a great week.🙂