Latest / Glovisor Podcast / Ep. 27: How to Build a Million Dollar Clothing Brand | Fred Sanders Reveals the Formula

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Ep. 27: How to Build a Million Dollar Clothing Brand | Fred Sanders Reveals the Formula · Glovisor Podcast

• Joe: What if the real reason that your brand isn't scaling isn't about the ads? It has everything to do with your offer, your funnel, and the way that your customers experience your product. Welcome to Globisor Podcast, where we explore business growth, communication, and personal development through real conversations with people that make an impact. Our guests help clothing brands create clearer paths to more traffic, better conversions, and consistent sales. His system diagnoses bottlenecks, optimizes customer journeys, and builds scalable ad frameworks that turn unpredictable revenue into control growth. Globiser welcomes Fred Sanders. Fred Sanders: Dude, excited to be here. Happy to be here. Joe: Welcome. I'm looking forward to the conversation. So, Fred, let's start off with what is it that you do? Fred Sanders: our company that we founded is called Sanders Consulting. We specifically help clothing brands who are looking to kind of start. They're on that first starting off. They don't have a super huge brand and they're looking to start and get their kind of brand built out. And we help them with everything as regards to the marketing side, which is our bread and butter website, and the other little small things that come in between. They'll specifically help out clothing brands Joe: what was the defining moment that made you get into this type of career? Fred Sanders: It's been a while, dude. It's been a journey. I've been doing e-commerce myself for about a decade. So I believe it or not, I've been doing this since about fourteen. So I'm I'm pretty young. I know I look young, but I feel like I know this stuff like more than thirty or forty year olds that are out there. And e commerce is definitely a young person's game because it's technology, things are always changing. But I just had a really good knack for when I was, you know, fourteen, had a really good brand that did really well. By the time I was 15 or 16, we were doing like a six figure brand already. and this wasn't in the clothing space, but it was in the e-commerce space. And then, you know, we just slowly kept going. Started another couple of brands, slowly started dibbling and dabbling in the clothing space. And then one really interesting story about the first person I ever helped, his name was Noah. He was the first person to actually help serve and kind of get a clothing brand going. And I'll talk more about his story a little bit later, but his story was so impactful and just so powerful to me. Because I realized like this isn't something that's just unique to me. Like I don't have to just keep this to myself. I can give this to other people. And I've given it to this person and it just completely changed his life. I mean, he was a college kid who was in debt, who wanted and had a dream to be able to start and, you know, scale his own clothing brand. And we worked together, you know, and then he didn't pay me or anything. Like I said, super informal client, first client. But after, you know, when he he learned a lot from me and he launched his first brand, I just saw how how much better he did than when I first started. And it was just at that moment that I was like, yeah, this is something that we can do. We can make this a business. And obviously we charge it's a business, right? But more importantly than the money, we can actually help people and get people where they're where they're trying to go. And that's what makes me tick is being able to help people. You know, obviously we have our own clothing brands that, you know, makes the money side, but this is if we can help people along the way and have an impact people's lives and help them get to their dreams, it's all the better. Joe: All right, so let's go back ten years because I mean this is huge, right? You're here you are fourteen years old. Most kids are fourteen, basketball or thinking about football, whatever, sports and having fun. And you were building an e commerce business. How did that happen? Fred Sanders: Yeah. Yes. So ironically enough, I was always just like a a technology kid. I was always trying to be against the grain. You know, when I was ten years old, I was that kid, you could find me selling lemonade for seventy five cents a cup because a dollar was too much, but fifty cents wasn't wasn't enough. But no one keeps exact change, so they're gonna tip the kid a dollar anyway and give us the extra twenty five cents. So I was always against the grain when I was around I think I think eleven or twelve, I started a YouTube channel and I was doing YouTube and I was always the kid in class that was the YouTube guy. And it was just always in my in my nature and my blood. You know, I I come from a long family of entrepreneurs to just go kinda against the grain and and and do things that are outside of the box. But yeah, I mean I I grew up like a normal kid, you know, great parents, still played football, still played basketball, but most of my majority of my time wasn't spent in school. You know, I did the bare minimum I could just to pass my classes and keep my parents happy, right? And and be able to get accepted into college. But most of the free time I would say was wasn't on the homework. It was spent doing building stores, staying up to one, two AM, waking up to school late, arguing with my dad 'cause I'm, you know, doing all this customer service the night before. Now I'm late for school. So it was it was definitely some challenging moments, but it was it was defining. It was it was pivotal and it was defining and I loved it. I w it never felt like a something that I had to do. It just felt like something that was a calling, you know? Almost like a a soul fulfillment. If I wasn't doing this, I don't know where I'd be, you know. Joe: What was the first product that you started selling? Fred Sanders: It was actually a toy. So we had a brand called Epic Staff. He would like push it and it would pop out and like a it was like a magic wand staff. Crazy enough, the brand, believe it or not, it was a cheap gimmicky toy we were selling for like nineteen or twenty bucks. And we were marketing on TikTok at the time when it was first like starting to be a thing. That brand did six figures. Like profit. Net. So it was ridiculous. And I'm like a sixteen, fifteen year old kid at the time. I remember My dad never knew that I actually was doing anything online. He just thought I was in there playing a game or doing computer games or just locked in my room, right? The day he found out, and this doesn't this sounds so so braggadocious, but very humbly, the day he found out, I walked into his room 'cause the brand was doing really good for a couple of months. And I remember I just dropped like just like fat stacks of cash on his bed. I think it like thirty grand at the time. And I was like, Dad I'm on my way. And his this look on his face, I wish he was here. And if you know anything about me, I love my dad. He's he's the main reason why I do this. But the look on his face was priceless because it just it let me know that I was going in the right direction. He had absolutely no idea what I was doing. And I had to spend like another 30 minutes trying to convince him that I wasn't scamming people or selling drugs or doing something like, you know, illegal. but no, he's he's always been super proud of me and he's always been, like I said, an entrepreneur, so he's always been supportive. Especially when I decided to drop out of college and pursue this full time. He never second guessed my judgment. He always was super super helpful in that. Joe: So at sixteen y you knew this is the path that you were gonna go Fred Sanders: it was the path and we we kept going. and then I started my next brand, which which is a brand that maybe some of you guys have seen but may not know that I started it. It was a brand called Muscle Max. It's actually responsible for that little plaque thing right back there. marketing on TikTok and we had I think at the when we stopped around like a one point one million followers and like five hundred K subscribers on YouTube. We were marketing organically on TikTok selling like a push up board. So I would literally go around. And the funny part to start in this brand, I I started it because since I was at home locked in on a computer all day, I would I wasn't as good as talking to people as I would want to. Like I didn't feel like my social skills and network skills were there. So I started a brand that forced me to get out of my comfort zone and make money. And how I worked was is I would have a phone and I would record a TikTok and I would go up to people and say, hey Do you wanna try this push-up board challenge for two hundred dollars? If you beat it, you get two hundred dollars. And it was basically just like a little cheap, you know, we were making them at the time for about five or six bucks push-up board where you would do 10 push-ups and you could switch the handles all across the board. And it just that thing just blew up. Like I said, we got 1.1 million followers on TikTok, another five hundred thousand on YouTube, and we were just selling. Again, that brand did humbly, very humbly, it was my first fitness brand. We had a whole assortment of products, supplements, and apparel. it it did seven figures and it was my second really big hit. So it was it was fun. It was a great time. Joe: around the age of sixteen when this happened? Fred Sanders: Yes, this was I started this fifteen sixteen was the the little gimmicky toy and then I was it was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I ran that brand for around three years. It was the muscle knex. Joe: Okay, so let's go back because this is very interesting. here you are having these very successful brands. I think most of us are thinking, how were you able to pick these and say, these are the ones we're gonna go all in on? this is hard for a lot of us, right? to decide which investment strategy we're gonna take and what we're gonna sell. How did you do that? Fred Sanders: Here's here's one thing I didn't mention. You know, I I'm talking about the great highlight moments. There was failures along the way. All right. There was brands that I started for a week or two during that time between the toy and the fitness brand that just didn't have any traction. So I'm definitely picking the highlight moments. But once you start seeing a good reaction, that's when I was able to like dig my feet in the ground and go towards it and just really push. Funny enough, you say that though. The hardest thing about starting any kind of e-commerce brand, particularly clothing, is making sure that the product is a market fit. So one process that we go through in Sanders Consulting just kind of helps you test out the market and see if it is a fit. We call it product validation. And essentially what you do is you go out, you you show the product to run traffic ads, you show the product to thousands of people and you basically see how they're interacting with it. If you're running an ad and people are clicking on that ad, That's the first sign that people are interested in that product, right? If when they click on the ad, they land on the website, they start adding it to cart, that's the next sign that they're interested in this product and they start buying it, et cetera. We can start tracking all these. We do that for all the products that you're gonna run, and we can start seeing which products are more often clicked on, more often added to cart. And just with those first few signs, we're able to say, hey, look, before you really go out and do a full-fledged marketing campaign or put it. Joe: Mm. Fred Sanders: a ton of time, energy, and money or spend a bunch of money on photo shoots. How about we do a product validation test, see which products have potential again based on that click through rate and add to cart rate. Once we get that data, now we can, you know, go out and start running with these products. And and I mentioned that I have my own clothing brands. One really super specific hard thing and people who walk who are watching this podcast know Joe: Yeah. Fred Sanders: a clothing brand buying inventory and just sitting on the inventory because it's not selling or not getting consistent sales is like the worst thing that can happen to a clothing brand. I mean imagine spending five ten thousand dollars on inventory and it's just not selling. It's a lot of your liquid capital just tied up into that. Before I recommend any any of our clothing brand owners do anything like that, product validation, which is I would say that we we kind of if if we didn't purposely found it, we keyed it for our program. product validation just stops all that because now you know that the product's gonna sell well because you have actual data and metrics to be able to look at. So before you buy inventory, you know that it's gonna sell. And I mentioned that I have my own clothing brands. This is how we were able to drop 11 times and sell out 11 unique times. We drop pretty consistently. We drop, if not every single month, every other month. And our last 11 collections have sold out every single time because We did product validation before. So our competitors, it just looks like we're on a super lucky streak. Only we know that we're actually gathering data. We're understanding how these products are performing beforehand before we drop it to the market, before we spend all these marketing dollars and inventory dollars to make it a real thing. We're gathering this data. So when we do drop the product, it's like we're two, three, four, five steps ahead of our competitors and we only drop winning products. Does that make sense? Joe: Sure. So what you do is you try the market before you drop the product. how long is that timeline? Fred Sanders: So it's really cool. that that timeline can be it can vary. You know, it can vary from a couple of weeks to about a month or two, depending on, you know, how product validation is going. If you do a full collection of products and nothing's hitting, and you gotta go back and redesign. So it can take a little bit of time depending on how good your products are. And if they're if you're getting pro products in the very beginning that are, you know, validating per se. But I would say, you know, before you go out there and and spend a bunch of money, we've in our program leverage AI nowadays to do what we call like pre-order drops. Okay. So I feel like the next natural question that happens in your head is like, well, how do you validate a product that you don't have? Like how can you test a product that you don't buy inventory for? Isn't that like putting a cart before the horse? We leverage AI and dude, I I I kid you not, it's so ridiculous. People wouldn't believe me. People would think it's so gimmicky and AI nowadays, it's photos. I guarantee 60%, 70% of the things you see on social media nowadays with brands or AI. You have no idea. It's so ridiculous. But we've we've used and we leverage AI to be able to get mock-ups of these products and basically do like photo shoots or get what the product looks like before we spend inventory on even a sample. Before we even have the product in our hand, we're running ads to a product leveraging AI. understanding how well that's gonna work, then once we gather that data, now we go out and order the sample. Now we go out and order the inventory. And it's literally putting the cart before the horse, but doing so it it it stops us from spending thousands of dollars in inventory or wasting a ton of time. You mentioned you know you know someone who's you know developing a shoe. Imagine how long it takes to develop a shoe or imagine how long it takes to make the perfect shirt. Not even talking about the designing phase, the manufacturing phase, you're talking to manufacturers. If you order from a manufacturer, it's gonna take them 30 days to get it done. Another seven or fourteen days, depending on what country it's coming from, to get it to you. And then from there you have to go ahead and take photography shoots, right? If you're if you're not a photographer yourself, you have to go out and pay a photographer. That's a couple hundred bucks. Get that edited and stuff, then go out there and spend marketing and go through the same process where a company like ours and our clients, they can think of a design and that day they're running ads. So you're 45 days ahead, a couple hundred bucks ahead, every single product, not just one product or one collection. This is for every single product that they're saving those time savings and money savings and why we're just so so far ahead. one thing about business and I heard it, I'm stealing this from someone, but business I I find is speed. Like if you if you have speed and if you have Joe: Yeah, right. Fred Sanders: velocity you're able to stay ahead of your competitors when you think of like a plane this is the part that I'm still in when you think of a plane a big metal bird that somehow just breaks the rules of physics and is able to fly how is a you know several ton metal bird in the sky able to fly it's because it's going fast enough same thing with business it doesn't matter a lot of things a lot of rules can be disproven if you go fast enough if you're efficient enough and if you do things the proper way fast enough You can you can break a lot of rules that other people in most cases wouldn't be able to. Joe: Absolutely. And I totally agree with you that speed is is a huge, huge help to any business person. Because if it's successful, you can break some of the rules that you mentioned. But if it's not going to be successful, we can drop that and move on to the next product. And we can move on. Because imagine investing all of that money, getting it delivered to only find out that that's going to be a dud. It's not going to work. Now you have all this inventory for no reason. So I totally agree with you. if one of the listeners is interested in finding out more about this process, can you walk us through the process of working with you in in your business? Fred Sanders: Yeah, if one of the listeners is here and they're like, this guy understands his stuff. He knows what he's talking about, first and foremost, realize that this is all I do. If you ask me anything in any other field, I don't know. I I'm 100% specialized in clothing and e-commerce, that's it. Not the best basketball player, definitely not the best social person. We talked about that. I have many, many other flaws, but I'm a nerd in this field because I just love it. It works, right? But if someone's listening and they want to Schedule a one-on-one call. I'm I'm really open about that. Most times when you schedule a call with our company, there should be a link somewhere or go to sandersconsultingco.com. Most times when you schedule a a call with our company, it's me on the phone. It's not me bringing you one of our closers or you know, one of the other things that most companies would do. It's me because I just love the business. I want to know and be in the in the weeds, rolling up my sleeves, seeing exactly what small businesses nowadays are still struggling with. So we can take that information and put it back into our program and make it even better. So if they wanted to to reach out and have a one-on-one conversation, it's completely free. You would go to Sanders Consulting Co.com slash book. All right. Schedule a call where we just break down and audit your business to see exactly what's going on, what the problem is. Maybe you're not doing product validation. Maybe you already, maybe you didn't make the mistake, but maybe you already bought the inventory. It's fine. A lot of clients come to me and they already I tell them about product validation, they're like, dude, I should have done that before I spent all this money. And I'm like, don't freak out, do it next time, but I still have a solution for you. and we go through other things like for instance marketing. If you're having marketing issues, we can help you set up what we call the ads pixel. A lot of people are familiar with an ads pixel, but how we leverage and key it again is a lot different from most agencies or most people would do. just a quick refresh if you don't know what an ads pixel is. Like, Joe. I mean, have you ever searched up like dog food on your phone and then you went to Instagram or Facebook and now you're seeing ads for dog food specifically? Right? People wonder why is social media free? Why don't they charge everything else is we're in a a capitalist society. They charge money for everything. You can't look at anything in your room right now that isn't that doesn't have a dollar figure attached to it. So why does social media just break that rule? It's because you're not paying for it up front, you're paying for it with your information. Joe: Everywhere. Yes. Fred Sanders: The ads pixel collects information from you and understands your name, your height, weight, the zip code, all these things about you, right? What websites you visit, and it sells that data to advertisers. Okay? So your social media is free because the advertisers are buying your data so they can sell you products and they exchange, give the social media platforms dollars for that process, right? So all day, every day, the ads pixels working on you. It shows you the exact ads that things that you're most likely to buy, right? The terms of service that nobody reads. It shows all this stuff in it. We just accept and skip past you really quick. But the ads pixel all day, it's it's leveraging and it's we're using it, but we're not leveraging it for our businesses. Right? We're not leveraging it, we're not being the advertiser who goes out there and pays Facebook for the information. We're the consumer. So our process is just kind of flipping that and making sure that you're using that that database that knows so much about you specifically and your clients and customers to be able to when you're when you're running ads, you're showing to the right people, you're getting in front of the right person, you're not wasting ad dollars and ad stuff. But there's so many other ways that you can make a clothing brand successful, whether you have the wrong products, just doing better marketing, making sure you have a solid website funnel. there's it's a business, it's not a one-size-fits-all. Key cutter strategy. In reality, you're going to need to have a sit-down conversation with a custom person that can custom tailor, audit your business, and diagnose the problem that's specifically wrong with your brand. It's like a snowflake or a car. You gotta go to a mechanic. You gotta see what's specifically wrong with your car and your situation. You can't go to a YouTube video and just search up, I'm not making sales and hope to fix it. Because there's so many issues of what it could be. and that's and that's what we offered. Get on a free call, book out a free call. We won't charge you for it. We'd have a thirty minute, sixty minute conversation for absolutely free. And if it's in alignment, then we talk about what pricing would look like. Of course, we're a business, so we're gonna charge. It's not completely free, but no matter what, you'd walk off that call, even if you weren't a fit, let's say you couldn't afford it, whatever. it just it we weren't the right people to help you, you'd walk off that call having a little bit more information and more insight into your problem because you'd probably talk to a nerd like me or Maybe one of my team what if we hire they're a nerd as well and they know what's going on. You talk to someone who's specifically specialized in that industry and can give you a few pointers and lead you in the right direction. Joe: Yeah. Yeah, now I I can see the value here if I'm gonna, roll out a specific clothing product that I want to sell. But how about if I just have an idea? Can I call you and just say, listen, I I'm thinking that I have this idea for a belt. And I think it's gonna be the best belt on earth, but I I haven't made it yet. Can I make that call and and chat with you and find out what my options are available? Fred Sanders: Yeah, Joe, I would say you're better off starting and calling us when you have an idea than being already done because it's a lot more efficient. We can catch you at ground level. Actuality, majority of our clients, I'd say sixty percent, are just starting off. They're in that exact situation that you talked about. Right. Again, so we can go through processes like product validation and make sure that you turn that idea into something that's actually gonna sell. So it it's a little bit more efficient, I would say, to to to call us in the very beginning. So that way you're not building an entire building on a shaky foundation. Right. We can help you make sure that foundation's concrete, it's solid, and then start building up with you. But no matter what, I would say we help a pretty broad variety of brands and stages, depending on where you're at. We help people who are already doing, you know, 10, 30, 40 K a month and they're trying to figure out how to scale up to that $100,000 month. Right? We work with some pretty big brands, but I'd say our bread and butter are you know those working class people who want another stream of income they're super creative they know that clothing they have a call in for some sort of creativity or they love designing or they they want to see people in their shirts whatever it is you know Christian clothing brands whatever it is and they have an idea where the people you know we can kind of help you conceptualize the idea not only help you design the idea but make sure you're not building a building the wrong way and you're headed in the right direction. Joe: shaky ground, sure. Now how about taking a step further? I have the idea for the belts, but I don't even know where to get it produced. I don't even know how to design this. Is is that something that you can guide someone to the right direction of what the next steps would be for that? Fred Sanders: if you don't have your products produced, you know we have in house manufacturers. I've been in the business obviously a long time. So I have a great list of connects and contacts with you know manufacturers from all over the world, America, Pakistan, China, you name it, atta Italy. we have a really good contact list of manufacturers that even better our clients have been through. So you know you can trust them. You know they have good quality if we refer you to them. And we can also help you present your idea properly to a manufacturer. before you here's a little bit of clothing brand, like insight, before you go to a manufacturer, you need what they call a tech pack. Okay. So the tech pack is like the blueprint to a building. If you're an architect, it's the same thing before the manufacturer. So most manufacturers, you just need to find one you can trust. Most manufacturers can build just about anything if they have a detailed enough blueprint, right? If you give an architect the exact instructions on how to build a building, it's super detailed. Most architects can get that building done if they're worth their wait, you know? And mo nine times out of ten, if they're an architect by trade, it's a full time job. You know, they're worth their wait. Some are better than others, but if you have a really good tech back, you're able to get good consistent results. And of course finding a manufacturer you can trust is the most important thing it would be an absolute nightmare you spend in hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands, to some sketchy guy on Alibaba from China and they run away with your money and you never see him again. That stuff happens. So as long as you can trust him, you're just make sure you find someone you can trust, have a really good tech back and you should be on your way. Joe: so can you share with us a client success story? Fred Sanders: Yeah, I could name many. If you go to Fred Sanders dot com forward slash thank you as well, we have a testimonial page of hundreds of clients. Or you just go to Fred Sanders dot com or Sanders Consulting Co dot com and see many testimonials on there as well. the one I'm gonna touch on is my very first client, because that's the only one that's super, super different. and still, like I said, the reason why we started it. His name was Noah. And he's actually a really close friend of mine. He he's I would call him a brother. and it's he's the one who made me believe in mentorship. I did all this by myself. I didn't have mentors. I didn't have someone that taught me this process, which is why it took me a little bit longer. Again, I talk about all the highlight stories, but there was thousands of dollars and the hundreds of hours that I wasted myself building the dud, you know. I I learned all these things through through trial and error. When I look at Noah's situation, he was working with me on that muscle max brand, the fitness brand that I was telling you about. As an intern. He was an unpaid intern, college kid. Now, of course, I still gave him some money because he's college. He he needs money and stuff. But he was working as an unpaid intern, and I look at his results and look at his journey. His absolute first try, first brand. The kid did 60k, his first drop. It sounds so ridiculous to even say. Like $60,000 in a weekend in three-day period, his first absolute drop at a brand, first run online. And beforehand, the only experience he had was working with me on the fitness company and just, you know, looking behind the scenes on how I built businesses and how I ran that company and how we did our marketing. And he did that fair enough for about a year. But to do to go for your to go from a year to making sixty thousand dollars in three days without any failure, I look at that kid's results and I look at how it looked for me or how it looked for many other people, many other Americans, and I'm like, dude. This is why we're in business. This is why we do what we do. Because his was just straight up. He got to skip over all the potholes, all the trials and errors that I went through and all the the bad things that happened to me. Because I told him and I gave him the he had the experience from my side. And I said, Hey, look, dude, watch out for this here. Or when you're at this stage right here, you're gonna wanna worry about this. All right. So we had a navigation system. So that that testimonial rang really true to me because it was the it was the one that really made me believe in mentorship and really say, hey, look, you know, not only do I get mentorship for my, you know, own brands and get into the next level nowadays, you know, nowadays, but being that mentor and helping people out as well is super invaluable. It it it's costly for sure, but super invaluable if you're really dedicated to building a clothing brand, you're really dedicated about doing something and you're going to do it anyways. You might as well save the not only money, but the time. That's the most important time. The time and the failures by having someone who's an expert in your seat that can guide you and make sure Joe: Time is the only commodity we cannot replace. That's for sure. If listeners remember only one thing from your episode, what would you want that to be? Fred Sanders: Mm-hmm. I think that the process is is super important. Before you build a clothing brand, let's say you just watch this episode and you you're gonna do it anyways and you don't have a mentor, you don't have any of these things. I would say the one most important thing that I would I would stick through is make sure you don't treat a clothing brand like a passion product and you treat it like the business it actually is. Okay. Art as we all know is subjective. Some people love the Mona Lisa, other people hate it. The same thing's gonna happen for your clothes. You wanna make sure you understand what the market is saying about your product before you spend all that time and energy on a product. Because I know how long it can take to find manufacturers and do the whole thing that is required to bring it to market. Just make sure you treat it like an actual business. Get some data and metrics before you bring it to that to those stages. It's gonna save you a lot of time and energy and money. Trust me. Joe: Well, Fred, thank you so much for joining us today and for all these insights. We really appreciate your time. Fred Sanders: Dude, I love it. This is I would do this anyways. I appreciate just being on your platform and talking and and I hope that this video is able to help someone at all. So as long as that was true, then I feel like I did my job and that's what I'm doing. Joe: Thank you. Thank you everyone for listening. If this episode inspired you, share it with someone who needs it. And don't forget to follow the Globizer podcast for more conversations that make an impact. Till the next time.