How I Started A Clothing Brand With $0 Using AI

KINGSLEY ABBEY

9 May, 2024

INTRODUCTION

I managed to create and start selling shirts for $0 using only AI, and the best part is that I didn't have to spend thousands of dollars buying bulk inventory and risk going broke. No, I can work directly with a print-on-demand supplier who will print and ship my products to my customers for me, and this means to start this clothing brand, there's virtually zero risk for me. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you the blueprint for exactly how I was able to do this and how you can do it too.

DECIDE ON YOUR BRAND

Now, before you start using AI to come up with designs for your clothing brand, the first thing you'll need to do is decide which you'll sell and where you'll sell it. So, I would actually recommend that you go and open up an online shop on an existing e-commerce platform. Places like Etsy, Amazon, and Redbubble get hundreds of millions of visitors every single day, and you can easily tap into this traffic and start getting sales from day one by using the blueprint that I'm going to share with you in this tutorial.

DECIDE ON THE PLATFORM YOU WANT TO SELL

But on top of deciding where you'll sell your products, you also have to decide what you'll sell. Because the goal is to start a clothing brand with 0, I think it's going to be important that you try and sell products that don't require any upfront capital. For example, graphic-related clothing is extremely popular. Things like graphic t-shirts, or sweaters, tote bags these things are timeless, plus there's a huge and ever-growing market for them.

WHAT SHOULD YOU BE SELLING?

But even with that, the next question is what types of graphic t-shirts and things should you be selling? Because what you don't want to do is start selling stuff in a niche that is highly saturated and competitive, unless you're willing to pay for ads to get your new listings in front of customers. You'll never be able to break through these competitive niches, especially at the very beginning. And so, we're actually going to use a free tool called E-Rank to find the best niches to start a clothing brand in.

From E-Rank,just search for the word "shirt." And when I do that, you can see that it will shows us some of the statistics of this keyword. But the trick here is to actually scroll down to this list of keyword ideas and then sort the keywords by Etsy competition. And then, simply look for shirt ideas that don't have a ton of competition but still get a lot of monthly searches.

For example, if we just keep scrolling down this list, you'll see that vintage shirts are extremely popular on Etsy. Even if we were to search this keyword on Amazon, you can see that it's also very popular on Amazon. This keyword is also being searched for a lot on Google. But the problem here is that there is a lot of competition for this product. And so, for your clothing brand, it wouldn't really make a lot of sense to start off making clothing in this saturated and crowded niche.

Instead, what you would want to do is try and find a niche that still gets a lot of traffic but is not as competitive. And we can find this by just continuing to scroll down this huge list until we find some keywords that are not as competitive but still get a lot of traffic.

For example, mushroom shirts are not that competitive, but the keyword "mushroom shirts" still gets a lot of search traffic when I checked. And this presents a massive opportunity. And if we head into Etsy and search for mushroom shirts, you can see that this is definitely a valid niche. But even within this niche, like mushroom shirts, how would you even know what types of designs to sell?

Well, if we head back into E-Rank and then click on this tab right here that says "top listings," you'll be able to see a list of the top-selling designs for this specific keyword. And the two most important things to pay attention to here are the listing age and the estimated sales.

For example, you might look at a shirt and think, "Wow, 225 sales. That's a lot of sales. Maybe I should start selling a shirt that's similar on my Etsy shop." Well, not so fast. Because if we look at the listing age, you will see that the shirt or any product you’ll find has been selling for well over 1,000 days. This is a little bit over 3 years, okay? And so, in that context, product actually is not selling that well. And so, instead, what you would want to do is search for designs that haven't been listed for a long time but have still gotten a good amount of sales.

And if we keep scrolling on the list on E-Rank, you'll start to see some good examples. Some shirt has been listed for less than a year and has already gotten way more sales and made way more money than this shirt, which has been listed for three times as long. And based on that, we know that this is a valid idea. And from this point, we can head into Etsy, search for the term "mushroom shirt," and then kind of just keep scrolling through the designs to find more inspiration that's similar to this design that we know sells.

We can also try searching for different types of clothing. For example, instead of mushroom shirts, perhaps we can try looking up mushroom sweaters. And you'll begin to see that there are a lot of valid ideas here.

And so now that we found a good product to start selling for the clothing brand, it's time to actually start coming up with the designs. And thanks to AI, coming up with high-quality original designs is going to be a walk in the park. Now, I gave you an idea of my clothing brand that I created using AI, and with the steps I'm going to show you now, you'll be able to create similar results.

And so the first thing you'll want to do is head into this tool that I found called KD. This tool will basically do everything for us. We can use its built-in AI tools to come up with unique designs, or we can search through their massive library of pre-made templates and use those. We can then make further changes or improvements to the designs using their built-in editing tools. And then use their mockup tool to create the product images.

And then finally, once the designs are finished, we can export them and then import them into a print-on-demand tool like Printify, who will automatically fulfill the orders for you. Now, all of that might sound a little bit overwhelming, okay? But I can promise you this, with just a very small amount of effort, all of this is very doable for anyone.

But once you're signed in, you'll simply click on t-shirts, and then search for the word "mushroom." And when we do that, you can see all of these different high-quality templates that are already available for you to use.

Now, I will show you how to use KD's AI tools to make completely unique designs from scratch, but I also want to show you how you can easily get started with these pre-made templates. Listen, I tell you guys this all the time, okay? You don't have to try and reinvent the wheel. KD has already done all of the heavy lifting for you by giving you pre-made templates that are based on designs that sell best. Many of the top t-shirt and clothing brands on Etsy are simply taking pre-made templates from other sites, making very small changes to those templates, and then they're selling them online for a massive profit. And so, it is completely acceptable to use the pre-made design templates that KD offers.
And if you wanted to use one of these pre-made templates, all you would need to do is export it as a PNG and then import that design into Printify. But we'll talk more about this in a little bit.

But another route that you could go is actually just using KD's design tool to create designs from scratch. And so back in KD now, and to get started with your first design, you're going to click on "new project" and then select "pod presets" and then scroll down to "printify t-shirt" option.
And this template will work for t-shirts, sweaters, hoodies, basically any type of clothing. But what I'm going to do is locate and click on "elements" and then type in "mushrooms." I can then expand this panel so that I can see more of the mushrooms at once.

Now, for this design, I think that I'm going to go with more of a vintage look. Okay, and so I'm just going to keep searching for mushrooms that kind of fit that look that I'm going for and just add them to the canvas. And what I'm trying to do is design something that looks similar to one of the better-selling designs in this niche.

And so, for this example, a row of mushrooms and leaves. And so, I'll simply line up the mushrooms and leaves, and just like that, we've got our design. And if I wanted to, I could add some text and then come up here to the typefaces. And what's really cool is if I start typing in the word "psychedelic," you will see that we get some really cool, like psychedelic-looking fonts that we can use for this t-shirt.

Okay, and so perhaps I wanted to put some text underneath it that says, "Keep on growing" or something. Or if I wanted to, I could actually just sell this as a different design, perhaps have the text by itself and make it a little bit bigger and maybe have the mushrooms kind of popping up around the text.

And if we wanted to, we can click up on "mockups" to see exactly what this design would look like on different styles of clothing. Okay, t-shirts, sweaters, etc. Now, it is important to mention that you will need at least the KD Pro Plan to use the mockup feature, but this is literally only $10 per month, which is a very small price to pay.

With the Pro Plan, you'll get access to way more elements and other things to really help make your designs stand out. And so, we've talked about how to come up with designs using KD's pre-made templates. I just showed you exactly how to use KD's design tools to create kind of unique designs from scratch. But now it's time to show you how to come up with designs using KD's AI tools.

WHAT IS A PROMPT?

From KD, you'll simply go up to "tools" and then select "AI image generator" and then click on "start creating with KD AI." Now, there is box where you'll enter in your prompt. Now, if you're not familiar with AI, then you probably don't know what a prompt is. A prompt is simply a way to communicate with AI to generate a desired result.

And so, going along with our mushroom-themed clothing brand, let's say that I wanted the AI to create a mushroom-themed sweater that was similar to this one right here. Well, what I would do is simply type my description of this image into this box right here. And so, I'll say, "A cluster of vintage-inspired hand-drawn mushrooms that are different shapes, sizes, and colors. Make the background transparent.

"And you will notice that within seconds, the AI will generate this completely original design for you. Now, AI hasn't gotten to the point right now where it can generate images with truly transparent backgrounds, but what we can do is actually just use KD's AI background remover to remove the background for us so that we're just left with the mushrooms.

And once again, we can test out this design using the mockup feature to see how it would look on different styles of clothing. And I personally think that all your designs will look good.

Now, remember, okay? Once your designs are finished, that's basically all you have to do. Because from this point, you're simply going to export your designs from KD as PNGs and then import them into a print-on-demand service such as Printify. And then from there, you can automatically connect Printify to Etsy, Amazon, and Redbubble to start selling your clothing on as many platforms as possible.

And so now let's walk through the process of exactly how to do that. So let’s say we've got the PNGs that we exported from KD. And so the first thing you'll do is head into Printify. And once you've created a free account, you'll simply go up to "catalog" and then select whatever product you want to make first. For me, I'm going to go with sweatshirts. And then I'll select unisex heavy blend crew neck sweatshirt.
Now, once you're on this page, you'll need to scroll down to select the printing provider. And basically, what you're looking for here is a printing provider that offers the cheapest price per product as well as the shipping, while also having a low production time.

And so, for example, this provider I found during my research towards this tutorial, Awkward Styles, probably isn't the best supplier for these sweatshirts because I saw not only is the product price and shipping cost one of the highest of the providers, but the average production time is also one of the highest at about 2 days.

And the production time is the amount of time that the print-on-demand service will take to actually print the design on your clothing. And this doesn't even include the shipping time, which will likely take anywhere from 3 to 5 business days. And so you want to try and keep the production time as low as possible so that your customer isn't waiting a long time before they can receive their product.

And so, I actually scrolled back up to some of the earlier providers. And that this provider right here, SwiftPod, has a pretty low product cost, and the shipping is also one of the cheapest of the providers. They've also got a production time of just 1 day, which is the fastest of the providers. And on top of all of that, it looks like they've got the most color options as well.

And so we'll simply click on "start designing" and use this provider to print and ship the sweatshirts. You'll then land on a new page and from this point, you can start uploading the PNGs that you exported from KD earlier and add them to the sweatshirt. Once you've uploaded your design, you'll be able to adjust its size, position, and orientation to ensure it looks perfect on the garment.

After finalizing the design placement, you can review all the product details, including pricing and estimated profit margins. It's essential to set competitive prices that cover your expenses and leave room for profit while remaining attractive to customers.

Once you're satisfied with the design and pricing, you'll proceed to publish the product to your online store. If you're using a platform like Etsy, Amazon, or Redbubble, you can easily integrate Printify with these platforms to sync your products and manage orders seamlessly.

With your products live on your chosen e-commerce platforms, you can start promoting them to attract potential customers. Utilize social media, email marketing, influencer collaborations, and other strategies to drive traffic to your store and generate sales.

As orders come in, Printify will automatically fulfill them, printing your designs on-demand and shipping them directly to your customers. This means you won't have to worry about inventory management or order fulfillment, allowing you to focus on growing your clothing brand and expanding your product line.

CONCLUSION

By leveraging AI, print-on-demand services, and strategic marketing tactics, you can build a successful clothing brand with minimal upfront investment and risk. With dedication, creativity, and the right tools, you can turn your passion for design into a profitable business venture.