The Journey of Creating a Brand From Scratch entrepreneur how earn by blogging blog

Originally posted on Medium, where there are also pictures to emphasize different sections.

I am Călin, a 21-year-old designer based in Bucharest, Romania and I have always wanted to build my own business and be my own boss. It was around fall 2017 when it all started and, looking back now, I can clearly see how much I’ve evolved and how my way of seeing things has changed.

This is a short story on the process.

The Idea

I did not want to do this alone, so I got my childhood friend and classmate Alex on the line. We grew up together and we’re very good friends. We both love design and we both did freelance work in the past — logo design for the most. So, why not work together?

We wanted to materialize our concepts into something that people could wear. That was the base of brodr, our original apparel store that now takes most of our time and is basically our full-time job.

We use Shopify to host our store. We took a free theme and customized it to look just the way we wanted it. It took us many sleepless nights, mistakes and coffee to build our website(and there’ll be many more). I wish we kept a list of all the changes we’ve made throughout, but I’m afraid it would have been way too long.

We plan to keep it all in-house for as long as possible. That means no extra people to do our work. Everything from branding, advertising, content, copyright, designs and so on is done by us alone. It is a philosophy we are trying to hold on to simply because we want to grow and learn as much as possible.

Concept

‘brodr’ is our way of saying ‘brother’. Why did we choose this name? Because we strive to build a passionate community of people who share the same ideas as us. #beabrodr represents our whole concept in one hashtag — be a brother.

Our main goal is customer satisfaction because, the way we see it, building strong relationships with your clients is one of the most important aspects of a brand.

We also believe that you should never deceive your customers because it’s simply not cool. Let’s put it this way: people are giving you, a complete stranger on another continent, money and expect you to send them something they have probably never seen or touched. You need to prove them that you’re trustworthy and we try to do that by constantly thinking of new methods to show people what brodr really is about.

The Designs

We’re not fashion designers and I don’t think we’ll ever be. But we do believe that there are people out there that like the same stuff that we do. When we started building our t-shirt designs, we had one main thought in our heads — make something that we would wear.

We use print-on-demand(POD) to put our models into the wild and we will always prefer quality over quantity, no matter what. We also like to give our items a touch of humor in their description. We check our designs down to the most little detail to be sure that everything’s in order, hence why there’s not a huge number of models on the website. Slow and steady.

And thus [our launch collection](brodrshop.com/collections/geometrik) was created — GEOMETRIK. We only used red, white and black squares and then arranged them in different geometrical patterns, hence the name. We had the idea of printing these for ourselves for a long time, but we never thought of sharing them with the world until now. The model above was the first to make it in the collection.

We don’t have a standard design process. Whenever one of us has an idea, we write it down and try to make something out of it. We’re in a permanent creative state and we’re constantly updating our content.

We have several unused designs right now because we try to put everything down, even if we don’t include it in a collection. We do this because we believe that one small spark of creativity can lead to a great final design. This principle strongly applies to our latest collection, COSMOS, launched on February 25th. The designs featured in this collection were all conceived starting from just one idea. You can take a look at the collection [here](brodrshop.com/collections/cosmos).

The Future

Even though it is hard to build a reputable brand these days, we both are really excited about what’s to come. We’re very proud of what we have achieved.

What you just read is just the tip of the iceberg we’re now climbing. I’ve tried to keep it very straightforward because it would have been way too much to put it all here. There’s still very much uncharted territory in our journey and we’re eager to learn and evolve.

If you want to start a business, here’s my two cents of what I learnt in the past few months: dedicate yourself, put your heart and soul into it, be honest and most importantly — don’t give up! Always remember why you started.

Conclusion

If you got to this point, you’re totally awesome and we thank you! Be sure to follow us on Instagram @brodr.shop, like us on [Facebook](facebook.com/brodrshop/) and [visit our website](www.brodrshop.com)

Feel free to comment below about anything! We’re always looking for feedback. #beabrodr

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