We recently connected with Jena La-Clarkson Josephine Wai Lin and have shared our conversation below.

Jena La-Clarkson, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

Jena and I (Jo) have been BFFs for almost 30 years now, since the 7th grade. Back then, we dreamt of owning a “Petitque” – a boutique for petites like us. Then in 2018, we were in Italy trying to shoot content for Jena’s first daughter, Penelope, dreaming of how we could travel more on company dime and eventually retire our husbands. We decided to launch a kid’s clothing brand, YOUTHS – with tees intended to empower young bbs like Penelope.

We knew we wanted to work with female artists to create the shirts, so we started by DMing all of our fave illustrators on IG. We invited them to come on with a royalty per shirt and an annual % donation to a charity of their choice. We worked with them to design the concept of their tees over the course of a few months.

Meanwhile, we set up the business infrastructure. In our LLC partnership agreement, we put a special BFF amendment. Hearing horror stories about businesses breaking up friendships and knowing nothing was more important than our relationship, we put in a clause that said we could not do an Owner’s Draw or sell the company if we weren’t still friends. After all the hardcore legal stuff, we worked with a dear friend on our brand, set up our site on Shopify, figured out sourcing/tee productin, and planned our IG content.

When we launched our site, we did everything as “pre-order.” That way, we didn’t have to print inventory if a shirt didn’t sell. Surprisingly, 3-4 of our favorite designs didn’t get any orders, while some others flew off the shelves. We were relieved to save money by letting the demand speak for itself.

This whole process took about 3 months.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Jena La-Clarkson was a retail fashion buyer before she started her own kids company, The New Class, and Josephine Wai Lin was a creative director for advertising/tech companies and author of kid’s book “Whoever You Are: A Book about Love & Gender.” Both of us have kids that need cuter, bolder clothes than the market had to offer.

Our brand, YOUTHS, is all about talented badass women inspiring a new generation of bb badasses. We’re here to empower a new generation of girls. We aim to surround them with positive messages to ensure they grow up in a world where they can be ANYTHING and ANYONE they want to be. No judgment, only love and support.

We collaborate with incredible female creatives to design tees that empower feminist youths. Each shirt supports the artist as well as a nonprofit they care about. This cycle of women supporting women of all ages is our mission and why we love this project so much.

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

We work with a printer to create our tees, and we had no idea how much work went into quality control and the delicate dance between having a premium brand/using quality products/paying a fair wage while also ensuring a healthy margin and making cost effective decisions.

This is where we went back and forth the most on our business decisions: Jena is great at driving down costs – can we do this more economically – do we have to use this handwoven label for the teel? Jo is great at brand building, but that comes with expensive taste – yes, for our audience this label is an important detail because craftsmanship and quality matter.

We’d also negotiate the number of screens between each other: we can’t let every size have a custom screen because that’s too expensive, but we can’t only have two size steps without the 6m or 6yo shirt looking really off. And then there were simple things, like reducing colors or shifting to a new CYMK color from the digital print.

Managing the printing remotely was also challenging. We’d recommend working with a local printer if you want to be as hands-on as we were.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We sell on Shopify and have also done fairs like Renegade/Unique Mart but have found most of our sales through Faire. Pros: We love that we can reach boutiques around the globe. Cons: They are super competitive and there are a ton of fees. We have to choose 60 days of payment in order to incur the least amount of fees, which makes it tough on working capital for a small business like us.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://youth-s.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/y_o_u_t_h_s

Image Credits
Marketing images by Nate Fong