I asked a group of students at a business school recently, “How do you start an apparel brand?”
Silence.
I tried to make it easier.
I picked a guy in the front row wearing a golf shirt. I pointed at the shirt and said “I want to sell shirts that look like this. Where do we start?”
Quiet mumbles. A cough. A few looks at their professor.
“This is not a graded test. There is no wrong answer, I’m not trying to trick you into anything. Tell me what we should do first.”
These are not first year students who haven’t worked beyond an hourly ice cream job. This is a group made up of the top business students, part of an organization that works with regional businesses on paid projects.
Maybe talk to a store to see where they buy shirts?
Me at the front of the classroom trying to will an answer into someone’s head. “If I asked you a question via email and you didn’t know the answer, what would you do first?”
Ask ChatGPT.
FINALLY.
It’s not which tool you use. It’s that you start looking for something to keep moving.
When I founded an apparel brand, I had no background in apparel and clearly no fashion sense. But I did have Google. Which told me I needed a clothing designer. So I searched for those. Emailed the first ten. Got two responses, one of which was our design lead for the entire time we ran the company.
I reached a lot of dead ends learning how to make apparel. But every time I hit one, I hit a search engine or made a phone call to keep some momentum.
“I don’t know” can’t be the period. It has to be followed by a comma and your next step.