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Once you have your line sheet started, you can begin to play with your budget. But first, two questions to get you started: How are you getting funding? How much can you spend on your first order of goods? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you to start playing with the numbers in your line sheet. It will give you a clearer picture of what’s possible for your business as it starts out. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Scenario 1: Let’s say I have $50,000. If possible, I only want to spend $25,000 of that on my first order of goods. I already knew my target cost, retail price and margin from my original line planning work. https://www.unmarkedstreet.com/post/apparel-line-planning-top-10 I can now play with the “Units to Buy” column, allowing me to understand how many garments I can purchase for my $25,000 initial investment. I can then also see that the profit I’ll make on the first order is going to be $54,689.40 (my total Revenue minus my total cost). I now have another $54,000 to put into my next order! Here’s the tricky part about Scenario 1: Not many factories will be willing to make only 150-200 units of a garment, so you may need to figure out how to have a bigger first purchase. It might look like Scenario 2. Scenario 2: After walking through Scenario 1 and talking with potential manufacturers, I’ve learned that the lowest number of units I can purchase for any one given style is 600 units. My color minimum purchase must be 200 units. So instead of starting with an up-front purchase amount, I can start with minimum number of units: This helps me to understand that I need $80,000 on hand to make my first purchase. I already have $50,000, so maybe I will apply for a $30,000 Small Business Loan to cover the remaining cost. First, I need to understand if I can afford the monthly payments on the loan before I agree to accept it from the bank or the SBA. If I can, there is a really good chance that I can pay it back quickly, because my new profit is going to be $166,814.76 after I sell through these goods. It might take me longer to sell through these units though, as I did have to increase my totals, so I need to make sure to take that into consideration as well. This level of budget evaluation can continue to evolve and refine as you learn more about what is possible in manufacturing and fundraising. I’ve gone through these scenarios many times where you also learn that you can’t make every garment you want to make in the first round. It’s important to remember that this is an investment over time, and starting within reason and within a solid and steady budget will give you a much better chance of success. Once you know your numbers and what you can make, purchase and sell, that’s when the fun part starts! Designing and Fabric Research are up next.

I wanted to use this week's post to thank everyone who has surrounded me with support and enthusiasm as I've started this new adventure with Unmarked Street. From friends and family to colleagues and co-workers, I have experienced an outpouring of kindness and joy throughout this journey. There is still so much farther to go, and you've all made me feel that the opportunities are endless. Wishing you and your families a Happy Thanksgiving Holiday in 2021. May it be filled with rest, relaxation and all your favorite foods. All my love, Rachel

Over the years, my idea of a line plan has grown to a 60-column wide spreadsheet that can give me every detail of my product plan, budget and potential revenue at a glance. But it’s really not necessary to include so much information when you’re just getting started. I’ve put together the 10 items you need to start your apparel line plan: Style Name: Naming your product can be as complicated or as simple as you want to make it. I like to start with something generic when setting up an initial line plan. For example, I’ll just write: “TECH TEE” in the style name description at the beginning of my process. Eventually, that could evolve into a more personalized name for the item that ties back to your brand. But to start out, you just need to know what kind of products you plan to make and sell. Keep it simple at first, because we’re going to get into some more complicated items that will take up a good deal of your time in this process. Target Product Cost: What do you think your product will cost you to make at the factory? Understandably, this is a complicated question. Working with an expert who understands apparel manufacturing and costing can help you to estimate a realistic cost that can then become your “target.” Don’t guess. This piece of information is crucial to understanding everything else about your costing and revenue plan. All of the below cost components will be calculated off of this target cost, so you really want to be as close to a real cost as possible. Duty Rates: Before you can calculate your importing and customs duty rates and their cost per garment, you need to understand what country you plan to manufacture your apparel in, and where you plan to ship it to. This can be the simple part if you already know what factory you plan to use to produce your garments. The trickier part is that you also need to have an understanding of international duty rate classifications. For example, if you want to make a polyester tech tee in China and ship it to your warehouse in New York, you are going to pay more than 30% as the duty rate on the cost of the product. However, if you want to make that same tech tee in Mexico, you can greatly benefit from NAFTA agreements and you will pay 0% to import your goods to New York. Every single type of garment has its own duty rate percentage for each country it could export from. Not only that, but the main fabrication of each garment will also affect your duty rate. It is one of the more complicated parts of manufacturing to understand, and getting it wrong could mean hold-ups, fines and rejections through our customs clearance processes. Working with an expert in this area is crucial for your business and for your line planning purposes. You can’t know your projected costs if you don’t know the cost of importing your goods. Shipping Costs: Importing your goods will also cost you in shipping fees. Ideally, you want to get these costs calculated down to cost per garment instead of per box or palette, so that you can eventually understand the exact total cost per unit that you plan to purchase. It will include the fees typically paid to customs for importing goods into the country, any shipping insurance you have and the actual cost with the carrier. Target Landed Cost: Once you have all of these details figured out, you can calculate the “landed” cost of your garment. Essentially, this means: What did you pay for the garment to land on the ground in your warehouse? This adds up your target product cost, duty rate fees and shipping costs to come up with a grand total. Retail Price: How much do you want to sell each garment for? Do some research here with competitor brands. If other apparel brands in your segment are selling their tech tee for $50 and you want to sell yours for $100, you might find that you’ve over-priced yourself, and you won’t see a lot of sales. Be careful not to under-price yourself though either, because consumers tend to equate super low prices with low quality. Target Margin Percentage: Here is where we start to get into your revenue plan for profit. Knowing the total landed cost of your garment and the price at which you plan to sell it will help you to calculate your margin of profit. This will be different for companies selling their goods as a wholesale product (selling to a store who then turns the product around and sells to their customers) or for companies selling their goods direct to consumers (DTC). Your percentage of profit is what will allow you to grow your business, so this is something key to pay attention to. Units to Purchase: Now that you know what your garments are going to cost to produce and ship to your warehouse, you can determine how many units of each garment you can afford to make. Many factories will hold you to a minimum order quantity (MOQ), so you need to make sure to take that into account when choosing a factory. If you can’t afford to buy 1,000 pieces of each garment and that is their MOQ, then you need to find a new manufacturing partner to get yourself started. And maybe you’re thinking, “But wait… didn’t you say that I need to know which factory I’m working with to know my Country of Origin to calculate my duty rate first?” Yes, I did say that. Line planning and understanding the intricacies of building an apparel line are extremely complex, and it is crucial that you find someone who can navigate the ways in which all of these pieces come together for you. Again, don’t try to guess. It will just create issues for you down the road. Total Cost: Adding up your cost per garment with the number of units you plan to buy will give you a total cost for that particular piece. Then, add up all of your garments’ total costs to come up with your first purchase order amount. This is the amount of money you need to have on-hand to bring inventory into the country. Projected Revenue: This is my favorite part. Seeing the potential profits of your line in dollars and cents really brings it all together. From here, you can subtract your cost from your revenue and know just how much you’ll benefit from selling your line. And there you go! If you can work through those ten items and put your plan on paper, you will know what is possible for your apparel business. From here, you can add, remove, refine and update the plan until you have solid numbers in place. Starting with target costs can evolve into evaluations against true costs and then you’re really getting somewhere! Contact me when and if you need any help.

Have you ever thought about how your favorite shirt evolved into its current state? I promise you that it didn’t originally start as perfectly fitted as it is today. It probably arrived at an apparel company’s office as a prototype needing some love. In the apparel industry, we have to run a fitting, or a series of fittings, for every single garment. Unlike many other products in the world, each garment is unique due to its extremely specific fabrication, its end use, and its intended customer. Working with fabrics, there is an understanding that every roll of material has some level of variance. Now, imagine that you just purchased a new shirt and it has quickly become your favorite. You want to copy it so you can fill your closet with your favorite shirt in different colors, but you have no idea where the fabric itself came from or where it was made. So you cut a swatch of the shirt and start sourcing your own fabric to come as closely as possible to a match. At the same time, you cut apart the garment to create a “like” pattern for yourself. This is how a lot of apparel ideas and designs will start. In a perfect world, using your inspiration garment as a template for fabric and pattern might yield you an identical shirt. Voila! But I guarantee you that the fabric you find will have some form of differentiation from the original, and your pattern will also vary, at least slightly. These are just a couple of the reasons why every garment made and sold has to go through a rigorous process of development and fitting. Each prototype garment is sewn and then tried onto a fit model to check for circumferences around the body, puckering, gaping, balance and length. And each company might want that garment to fit differently. Company A might think that the circumferences on the prototype are much too tight, and you have to let the shirt out a bit. Company B might want the shirt to fit even tighter, and then you’re involving creative pattern techniques to make that shirt look painted onto the body. Understanding what the garments are “saying to you” in a fitting is extremely tricky. Not only because some problems look and feel unsolvable at first, but also because a truly gifted fit technician will understand exactly how their pins and markings during that fitting will then relate back to the flat pattern file. Putting a pin in a shirt to make it fit closer to a body will make that prototype look better, but it’s a completely different skill to know how to translate that into words and pattern revisions for the factory to improve on the next prototype. Apparel Developers, Pattern Engineers and Fit Technicians are hiding behind every single garment that has ever been made. From the shirt you’re wearing, to the extravagant garments that walk down runways all over the world. We are privileged to be a part of your lives every day, even though you may not know much about us or how we’ve contributed to your daily comfort or discomfort. I must say that I love what I do, especially in how it can improve others’ days or even lives by wearing a garment that fits them just perfectly. Bringing that knowing smile to someone’s face when they try on a new, amazing dress in the store or when they put their favorite shirt on in the morning is such a lovely and rewarding career. I hope one of us was able to put that smile on your face today.

If you search for “Inspiration” today, hundreds of results will come up. There are extremely talented professionals out there who can help others to think creatively, motivate them, and find exactly what inspires them. But what do you do after you’ve been inspired? You have this exciting idea that brings butterflies to your stomach and makes your heart race. You know this is your calling to create and build what inspires you, but you don’t know where to start… The ironic response to that question is usually: backwards. In apparel line planning at Unmarked Street, the document that we start with first is our overall revenue line plan. I’m guessing that a lot of other companies might get to this step as one of the last items on their list, after they’ve designed and developed their amazing products. However, I contest that there might not be a product line to design and build if you can’t make the numbers work in the first place. For example, let’s say you want to sell t-shirts with your company’s logo on them. You’re excited to work on the design of the graphic and start talking with a screen printing partner or a t-shirt blanks supplier, so you jump into those tasks right away. Then, you start looking at your budget and realize that you don’t have the funds to purchase the blanks that you need or pay for the screen printer. You’ve just wasted hours or maybe days on something that you can’t proceed with for lack of funds. Moving backward from your ultimate goal, making sure you have the crucial pieces in place first, and then getting started on your design is how I recommend starting. What do you hope to accomplish by selling t-shirts? Do you want to increase your sales? Do you want more brand recognition by having your fans wear your logo on their chests? Or do you simply want to learn how to execute on a project like this, so you can expand on a bigger project next time? Responses to each of these questions will then force you to ask yourself how you’re going to get there. What kind of money will you need to provide up front to make a profit? Who is going to help you with the project, and how much are their fees? How many t-shirts can you afford as your first purchase with the cash you have in hand? Eventually, working backward from your ultimate goal will bring you all the way back to step one, and you’ll know how to get started. All of a sudden, the path that you’ve laid for yourself is marked with many signs, pointing you to the next task. And at the end of that road, you’ll arrive at your destination. This is what I like to call the Unmarked Street. It is that unlaid path that’s full of promise and hope, leading somewhere that will bring an idea to life. Marking that path with street signs and guideposts will keep you moving in the right direction, and will make any seemingly impossible task feel easier every day.

Starting my own contracting business in the Apparel industry has prompted more than a few people to ask me, “Well, why should I hire you?” My journey of experiences, learning and growing is a long one. When I was five years old, I told my parents that I wanted to be an Artist when I grew up. From that day forward, they channeled all of their own artistic energy into me and encouraged my every aspiration. My dad built my sister and me a painting easel, my mom taught me how to sew, and we all learned new ways of crafting together. I’ve been sewing since I was seven years old, crafting and woodworking since I was ten, cutting up and creating my own outfits since I was in high school, and when it came time to choose a college major, it felt inevitable for me to go into Fashion Design. Needless to say, my heart has been in this industry for as long as I can remember. But let’s fast forward a bit to my very first “real” job. That’s what everyone is really asking about, right? I was lucky to be coming into my first full-time role from an amazing internship with ANF the year before. The University of Cincinnati goes above and beyond in training its students to be prepared for the real working world when they graduate. Because of this, I already had 18 months of work experience under my belt, and knew that I wanted to be a Technical Designer. My entire Tech Design internship was spent taking notes during fittings, creating technical sketches in Adobe Illustrator and learning, learning, learning. I was absorbing every little bit of information that I could find within those walls, and I was beyond lucky to have Karen Steidle as my manager. I guarantee you have never met someone as patient, kind and talented as she was with me during those first years together. She pushed me to learn new ways of looking at garments, patterns and people that would shape me for the rest of my career. I was not always the easiest Assistant to work with, but she took every day in stride, and for that, I owe her a debt of gratitude I could never repay. In the processes of Technical Design for Apparel, there are numerous tasks to mention, but the biggest ones I wanted to immediately master were running fittings and communicating with overseas vendors. What was so brilliant about Karen’s managing process, and one of the reasons that I am able to tout my current level of expertise in this field today, was that she encouraged me to wait, watch, and learn these skills before I really owned a significant portion of a brand’s work. I took notes in fittings for an entire year before I ever picked up a safety pin. I typed out comments, made diagrams, and marked up fit photos for proofing, editing, and re-typing before I ever emailed a vendor. I mastered the art of email, digital patterns, and in-office meetings before I boarded any airplane to visit a factory in person. I came off as a polished, intelligent, organized and talented Technical Designer to everyone around me. And then I actually became a polished, intelligent, organized and talented Technical Designer. Practice became habit, and habit turned into a way of life. I have no idea what kind of professional I would be today if Karen had just thrown me into the deep end of the pool at ANF. I’ve been a part of so many other companies that overwhelm young employees, and we do them a genuine disservice by not guiding them in the right direction. It was this time in my career that answers the question, “Why should you hire me?” Patience, curiosity and understanding are now the cornerstones of my practices with Apparel. In George Leonard’s inspiring book, Mastery, he defines the five essential keys to mastery as: 1) Instruction, 2) Practice, 3) Surrender, 4) Intentionality and 5) The Edge. After twenty years as a professional in the Apparel Industry with a lifetime of love for the craft, it is The Edge that I have reached that makes me a unique and special person to hire for any company. I know the rules and the guidelines of designing, pattern-making, producing and planning an Apparel line so well, that it’s time for me to break those rules and make them my own. If you’ve ever been told that traditional Apparel manufacturing will take 9-12 months to complete, from beginning to end, I am happy to sit with you to figure out how to throw that rule out the window. If you’re concerned about not having enough up-front cash to purchase your first inventory for your brand, let’s talk through the numbers together and make the cash you have in-hand work for you. And my favorite: If you’re convinced that the garment you want to make will fit poorly or suffer in quality because of unique parameters you want to put into your brand, then I am the creative thinker to help you overcome those obstacles and bring your garment to life. Hiring a contractor can be scary, and starting your own Apparel brand can be daunting. There are so many steps and processes involved, but nothing is ever impossible. It would be my honor and pleasure to work with anybody who has an Apparel idea in their heart, and just needs some help in bringing it into the world. So if this message resonates with you or with an idea you’ve been playing around with, let me know! I’m only a short note away. www.unmarkedstreet.com

Today, I am so pleased to announce the official launch of my new company, Unmarked Street. After a couple of years holding this idea in my heart, today is the day that it goes LIVE! At Unmarked Street, we believe that properly fitting apparel creates fans. How apparel fits on your consumer is one of the biggest reflections of your brand, and I can help give companies, brands and individuals the tools to create confidence and brand loyalty through fit methods. If you or anyone you know is looking to build an enthusiastic customer base, who will continue to come back to your brand for their favorite pieces of apparel over and over again, contact me. Not only can I help build an ideal fit for your apparel line, but I can also give you and your team the tools and knowledge to continue building and improving your fit for many more years to come. As a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with twenty years of experience in Apparel Manufacturing, knowing all the aspects of this industry in detail is my greatest asset. My love and passion live in the area of fitting garments, but I have held many different roles in this industry, and can lend a hand in almost any area of need. From Project, Production and Product Line Management to Technical and Creative Design and Pattern Engineering, I can even provide a full end-to-end package. For those of you who have been a part of my journey creating this company, and for those who have already found out about this news, I want to thank you all for showing an overwhelming amount of support and advice. There are so many possibilities and so many unknowns of where this journey will lead me in the coming years, but I could not be more excited to begin. And now a quote from the wonderful Dr. Seuss, who inspired the name for my company in this line from Oh, the Places You’ll Go! “You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?” I’m daring to go in… will you join me?

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