We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Conrad Cloy a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Conrad, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

The definition of “successful” is subjective because some people view success differently. I personally feel like if someone sets and achieves certain goals for themself then that can be viewed as successful, but some people compare themselves to others (or what society deems as a successful person) and won’t be content with their path until that image is obtained. I believe you have to be highly motivated to accomplish the goals you create for yourself in order to feel successful, and you’ll receive self gratification once those goals are obtained.

I’m a goal oriented person, and setting goals for myself at the beginning of each year allows me to feel some type of success at the end of each year after going over the things that I accomplished in that year. I don’t always accomplish every goal that I set for myself, but I do have a discussion with myself about what happened that prevented me from achieving that goal and carry that goal into the next year.

Conrad, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I began my journey as an entrepreneur after thinking of a way for me to convey my thoughts as a Black man on to apparel, and figuring out how I could create apparel that does the speaking for people that look like me. All of my designs promote Black Empowerment in some way (Love Black Women, Love Black Men, Black by Nature, Black Culture…..just to name a few), or they promote mental health (Unbothered, Protecting my Peace, and others), and those are things I feel are important to me which makes it easy for me to create designs geared towards those topics. Conrad’s Apparel creates apparel (t-shirts, hoodies, and sweatshirts) that promotes Black Empowerment, and can be worn by anyone that agrees with the messaging on the apparel.

One of my goals is to become one of the most recognized Black owned brands in the world (not just in the U.S.), and to help support other Black owned brands on their endeavors along the way. I believe that we as people are here to serve others in some way, and one of the ways I’m choosing to serve others is by providing quality apparel that will do the speaking for them.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

I create all of my designs, and I use different vendors to create the final products. It took a while for me to research different vendors, compare price points, their turnaround times, materials offered, etc; and that was probably the most time consuming part of getting started. I’m the type of person that needs to know the ins and outs of everything, so I made sure to receive sample products from each vendor before finalizing any plans with doing business with them.

It’s important to choose 2-3 vendors that do the same thing just in case one of the vendors isn’t able to delivery your product. For example, there were a lot of products that weren’t available during 2020-2021 which forced a lot of business owners to partner with other vendors that had their product available. The old saying goes “never put all of your eggs in one basket”. I primarily use the same vendor to create my designs, but I have several clothing vendors I use for several reasons (pricing, turnaround time, availability, etc). Something I always tell myself is to “Control what you can control and be ready to pivot when necessary”.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

I sell the majority of my products using a website created through Shopify (leading ecommerce platform). I chose Shopify because I felt their platform was intuitive, globally recognized, came with a ton of apps that you could build into your website, Shopify recognizes Black brands through their Build Black initiative, and several other reasons. A pro with using Shopify is that you can integrate an owned domain (website) into their platform; unlike other platforms such as Etsy (where you’re confined to Etsy’s platform which is a marketplace instead). For example, my website’s address is www.conradsapparel.com because I own it, but if I used Etsy it would be something like www.etsy.com/conradsapparel because my store would be apart of Etsy’s community.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.conradsapparel.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conradsapparel/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/conradsapparel