I must receive 2-3 calls a week for custom sports apparel requests. What does that mean? To most people it might be t-shirt design, but in my world I work on very technical custom clothing. or cut and sew in layman's terms.
Where to begin: I listen to the clients needs, in some cases they are working on a patent or a new design for retail sales. Then I create a sketch of the design or pattern. This takes the longest of the whole process. To be able to pull the ideas out of my client's heads is challenging, but that's what we are good at.
Where to produce: We have many relationships with local, national and; dare I say, global manufacturers. We do a bid and selection process (this is a little more time consuming and expensive part of the process) and then find the best manufacturer to produce the prototype. This means sourcing the fabric, decide if we are going to print our own design on the fabric and then pick the details of collar and sleeve trim. Sometimes we model after an existing piece or we make our own patterns.
At this point, I'm either designing the graphics that goes on the apparel as well as the logo for the brand. Both are my favorite things to do and probably my niche at Auer Agency.
What about labels? As you've seen in Target or other clothing, they are tagless. This means we can print directly on the inside of the shirt your "tag" and clothing info.
So really custom apparel has come a long way in the past few years. What started out as a t-shirt design and has turned into more fashion driven creations and we are having fun doing it!
As my "tagline" (I couldn't resist) says on my website www.aueragency.com Addicted to Possibilities and we seem to meet that challenge everyday head on with continued success.
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