A little update from us
2020 + 2021 has been rough on many of us. Selling T-shirts online hase’t been either easy nor a priority during this pandemic. We saw a lot of gyms close, and people staying home, so for a good while, we chose to ramp down business and focus on other projects for a while.
Let’s be clear - Lowbrow Apparel is side hustle, and from experience, side hustles need to be fun and creative. We (or rather I), know there are a lot of people setting up a passiv income stream by creating shit designs for a low price through other vendors, streamlining every aspect of the business. This has never been the priority with Lowbrow. LB is meant to be an outlet for creativity, fun, and a way to gather people around some fun ideas.
Here are a few key points and thoughts from the last couple of years:
First of all, we set up a print on demand service through Printful. This worked good enough - the products come out good - all of it is printed with DTG technology, and we were able to test a bit rougher and less vetted design ideas. The problem working this way, is that it creates a lot of extra work on the management side of things, although it removes a bit of the hassle with postage. We’re removing this option from july 1st, since the EU rules for VAT and export taxes is simply too much of an headache with the products being produced in Spain in Latvia and being sent to other countries (and sold from Norway).
We did a collab with a band, Phantom Fire, for a print on demand-shirt. This was also a fun project - we’re open to ideas like this, but in the future it might be a better idea to simply print and send the Apparel from our own store.
The print on demand venture gave us a few good lessons on what kind of products people are craving - it’s the core product, the shirts. That’s where we’ll keep our focus in the nearby future.
Future plans are as follows:
Keep it simple, printing our own shirt designs, and sticking to t-shirts.
Quality before quantity - focus on high quality garment.
Pre-orders of shirts, as we did in the past.