Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Briana Lopez and Kristin Alaniz. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Briana, appreciate you joining us today. Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?

Briana was the first one to venture into the KPop World when she attended PTDLA Day 3 in December of 2022 after hearing about BTS from friends and family.

Shortly after Kristin was encouraged by Briana and their group of friends to listen to BTS. After seeing PTDSeoul Live Kristin also became an army.

Together we both attended PTDLV in April of 2022, with a group of friends and after coming back home realized that we wanted to share the joy that we experienced from the concert.

We then decided to create our brand Seoul Threads Co.

The first thing we did was decide what products would sell the best. We started thinking of the stuff we had purchased and the things we liked and how we could make them more affordable for the K-pop community.

We had to figure out how these products were going to get made. Were we going to make them ourselves, we’re we going to outsource, because we had no idea how to do anything for this type of business.

Briana took over the designing for products as well as managing our social media pages and website and Kristin took over learning how to work our embroidery machine which is beneficial for most of the products in our shop.

We started off with simple things like coasters, keychains, wallets, tote bags, simple sweatshirts and t shirts.

Once we started being vendors at different events we started to realize what people liked and started focusing more on that.

Over the span of a few months we also experimented what would be the most productive way to make products and get them out to our clients faster and what quality of items would keep our customers happy and have them continue to shop with us.

Eventually we started expanding our designs to other K-pop groups that we enjoyed as well as the ones that were suggested by our customers and that’s what has been helping us the most.

We now have a lovely team of 5 brand ambassadors that you may see throughout our page and they’re ideas and constructive criticism has definitely helped our business grow.

We have been able to gain clients not only in Texas but as well as, Illinois, New York, and Seoul, South Korea.

Although we are still new to this, we are so excited for this journey!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Kristin and Briana came into the K-pop small business industry by simply just being fans first. A shop was never in the plan for either one of us it just kind of happened.

We create products that we would buy if we were a client shopping with Seoul Threads Co. We don’t want to be a business that puts out poor quality products or products that are going to cost our clients an arm and a leg. We want our products to be the best that they can be at the most affordable price.

The biggest problem we’ve had to over come is figuring out how are we going to pay for these products to get made without having to charge our customers an insane amount of money but also enough to make ourselves a decent profit.

We don’t believe that we are better or more successful than anyone else in the industry but what we do believe sets us apart from others is that we really take into consideration what our customers want by continually asking for their opinions.

Something that we are most proud of is seeing people actually enjoying our products. Nothing makes us happier than seeing someone at an event wearing our stuff. It allows us to see that our hard work is paying off.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Our audience on our social media is not where we want it to be however it is growing daily! Something that has helped us for sure is engaging with our followers! We make sure that we’re are constantly asking for opinions, creating polls, and sharing possible designs on our stories for our followers to let us know what they think.

Something else that we have been doing is giveaways for our followers. We want to show our followers that we appreciate them and we do this by giving our customers a chance to win some of our products and other goodies we think they may like! This gives them a chance to win something but also allows us to get our name out there more.

One thing that we try to do is show real people on our social media. We like to share our clients showing off the products they buy.

Our advice for anyone trying to gain a following on social media is just be as engaging as you can possibly be.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

The most effective strategy for growing our clientele is engaging with our current clients and building a relationship. We always make sure to engage in conversations with our clients in person and online. We want to show our appreciation as much as we possibly can. This helps us because our clients can see that we truly are genuine about the business they give us. By doing this it also allows current clients to recommend us to new potential clients.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.seoulthreadsco.com
• Instagram: @seoulthreadsco
• Other: Tik Tok: @seoulthreadsco

Image Credits
@brimariephotographySA