HYER CLOTHING
I was a founder, graphic designer, and visual designer of my own streetwear clothing line, HYER.
It was a one person business that I 100% operated.
My responsibilities included, but were not limited to, branding, graphic print design, visual design(tags, stickers, posters), and other business operations including, communicating with manufacturers, marketing via social media, contacting vendors, uploading products on vendor websites, and taking photographs.
Branding
I wanted the brand to reflect my style. Just like designers who use their full name. But targeting the streetwear industry I wanted to give it a little bit of twist and I liked the idea that my name was pronounced like the word “high”. Wanting the brand to have a positive vibe, I named the brand, HYER.
In order to set the brand image and feel to the audience, I made sure to have a consistent feel with the images that I uploaded on my instagram. I also thought it was important to start everything at once and make sure to make it seem like it was growing. I started my instagram account while continuing to upload
Logo
I wanted the brand to seem ordinary, but with a stylish twist to it. I designed the logo to have a surrounding box to represent ordinary but slanted the words and box with some opening to give it more motion and energy. I wanted to logo to represent stylish, bold, clean, modern, and cool, to represent the style of my products.
Products
Having an interest in streetwear fashion, I analyzed the market and noticed most of streetwear brands had wild and tough brand images. I decided to differentiate my brand from other streetwear lines and positioned it to be a stylish, bold, clean, modern, and cool streetwear brand that also holds a positive feeling that reflects my love of life, and culture. Based on my research, many of the men's streetwear brands were also worn by many women, and therefore, positioned my brand to be a unisex brand. Also to keep the designs fresh and to lead the trends at the time, I incorporated "scotch" printing, which glows when reflected with light. My line was one of the few brands to incorporate "scotch" printing.
What I learned
As a result, the business was not the most successful. However, I learned and am more confident that it has formed a more solid background for me when it comes to selling products.
Streetwear lines have to run larger especially since it was a unisex line and was geared for men as well
Everything is about details. There were a lot more details I had to pay attention to and invest time into which required a lot more work than I had expected (For example, taking pictures required a lot of details such as photoshop-ing, putting a clean background to it, lighting, etc. Also, it wasn't just the studio photos I needed, other images were important and were constantly in need to upload on social media or to use as brand images. Expect things to take more time than expected.
Even if you have the right products, marketing is probably one of the most important things in a business. If no one knows it, no one's gonna buy them.