In early 2023, basketball outlet SLAM Magazine ventured out into the mountains of rural Utah to report on Thrifthood, a small sports thrift store selling vintage apparel. On the outside, the facility looks like nothing more than a one-room shack with a single panel of wood hammered into its front wall serving as its greeting sign to customers. It’s run by a collection of high school and college friends that, five years prior in 2018, reunited to try and turn a fashion hobby into a tangible lifelong commitment. The outward appearance of the place doesn’t infer much of a success story, but one basketball’s biggest news publications inside interviewing its owners tells an entirely different story.

It turns out this rusted shack has been visited by an array of NBA players, including reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Utah Jazz players are regulars and commit sizable portions of their multi-million dollar professional contracts to the apparel this team is able to produce. 

“Thrifthood actually all happened by mistake,” Krysten “Sissy” McDade told SLAM. “[…] it literally was just supposed to be for fun, and suddenly we’re like, Let’s just sell and see if we can make money to shoot ourselves a new pair of shoes, to whatever we wanted, really. And literally since that day in 2018 when we started, we never stopped.” 

There’s an old saying: If it can be done in Utah, it can be done anywhere.

One of the fun parts when you first learn about graphic design is coming to the realization that you have a specialized and specific skill. Both in the classroom and in the workplace, you possess a single, straightforward objective: make things look pretty, and make them user-friendly. There are other parts of the team; the developers, the managers, and whoever else, that are then responsible for other aspects of the project. 

What I found dipping my toe into the world of apparel design was that this procedure doesn’t translate into this realm. It does to an extent, but successful apparel design demands from its designer an extensive understanding of the printing, advertising, and selling process. You become a businessman as much as you become a designer. Gone are the days of identifying as a specialist. It can be a lot of work, but that work can be rewarding.

Building an At-Home Workshop

First comes tackling the printing process. An apparel design is only finished after its been turned into something that can be physically touched, held, and worn. One approach that can be pursued is doing everything in-house. This will bring one down a path of a collection of significant early financial hits that are necessary in establishing an at-home printing studio, but in the long-term will remove a middle man that may reduce efficiency and eventually end up as pricey. 

Building an at-home studio: Must-haves

• Shirts (in bulk)

• Sublimation Printer

• Sublimation Paper

• Heat Press

• Teflon Sheets

Out of these necessities, sublimation paper and the teflon sheets needed to complete the heat press process are the only constant repeating purchases one must make. The ink in a sublimation printer is fairly long-lasting and shirts can be bought in bulk for reasonable prices. Many complications can be experienced in the pursuit of building an at-home workshop like this, and isn’t a realistic first step into the apparel-making business. Grow familiar with the ins and outs of the industry and get in a consistent routine working with outside experts before committing to such a project.

Utilizing Print-On-Demand Services

Utilizing a service of this nature greatly reduces complications and keeps you the designer focussed on your specialized creative skills while leaving the non-design work necessary in establishing apparel products up to a party more well-versed in this part of the process. While the constant repeating financial hit can be frustrating, you come to recognize it more as a mental roadblock than one that is hurting the pockets any less than any other alternate avenue would’ve. 

A print-on-demand site I’ve personally had positive experiences with is Gelato. The site offers designers previews of their work across a variety of canvasses, including shirts, posters, hats, mugs, calendars, and several other options. The service features a pricing calculator that displays your profit margins that can help one determine where their price point should be for a product. In my experience, I’ve been satisfied with their reliability and the quality of their prints. While I haven’t used the platform to sell apparel, there is also an option to sell directly through Gelto’s site as opposed to common alternatives such as Shopify. 

That said, if Gelato doesn’t personally speak to you after you’ve taken the time to browse their website for yourself, there are plenty of other alternative services that specialize in similar work.  

Conclusion

As designers, we may feel a desire to stay in our bubble and focus specifically perfecting our designs. But especially when starting out, we may find ourselves as our sole advocates, and with that comes a pile of additional necessary responsibilities. While managing the printing process is a complication relatively solely concerning those going into apparel design, all of us must outline marketing strategies and outline a budget for our creative pursuits. Before developing any associations with companies or brands, a vast majority of us will build our reputations and resumes via freelance work, and traversing into that realm requires having a basic understanding of business management. These skills are essential in finding a place and platform for your work.