Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to John Le. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

John, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

At the end of November I decided to take the biggest risk of my life. I quit my full time job to pursue custom apparel. With the small success I found over the summer of 2021 I found myself overwhelmed with all types of work. I started taking a few days off every week to try to tackle the backlog of orders I had from my business. I was working for my uncle at the time. He was very understanding and understood that my new business would require more of my time and attention. As time grew on I completely stopped working for my uncle and started diving head first into the industry.

There were many challenges. One of the biggest ones we are still trying to overcome is getting new people to discover us. At the beginning just word of mouth was so strong and was able to bring together a small community that believed in us and what we are doing. This was not enough however. Over the summer months of 2022 I started to plan out what we needed to do to grow. My strategy was to do collaborations with other brands that also aligned with what we believe in. With this plan we were able to grow over the past year a little bit.

John, 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?

Lavish Media Designs as a whole is a custom apparel company. We specialize in creating custom embroidery clothing. We mainly create clothing and uniforms for other companies, small businesses, and individuals. We strive on having no minimal requirements for ordering. We noticed that a lot of businesses similar to us around us seem to be charging a premium for embroidery and we want to be able to provide the service at a lower cost.

Our secondary goal is anime inspired clothing. For a while I have seen so many pages all over the internet from TikTok to Instagram charging an arm and a leg for an anime character on a hoodie. I wanted to be able to bring the same energy as those pages while creating unique designs for an affordable price.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

We didn’t always have a successful start. When we were starting out we had another shop location in Jenison, Michigan. While that shop was fun we did not know what we were doing. Business was not on our mind but more so having fun and creating new products. While we did learn a lot from that experience I did come with a price.

We had signed the lease for that shop with a few other people. By month 8 of the lease a lot of these people decided to drop the lease putting the entire amount on us to pay. At the time we were not ready to take this on so we basically lost the shop. It was honestly the best place we could have found and if we were able to keep it to today it would be the perfect setup for us.

However that did not stop us. We moved back to my mom’s basement and continued on. After more than a year of working out of that basement we were presented with an opportunity to move out to a new shop location with the help with a new business partner.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

One thing that sets us apart from a lot of anime brands out there is the fact that we manufacture our products ourselves. We take pride in the high quality embroidery that we can do in house. We started with a small single needle single head machine and we slowly upgraded over time. We now have up to 4 heads running embroidery at all times.

The learning process was slow. I was watching videos 3-5 hours a day every day for months. The first few stitches I did were not perfect by any means but I never stopped learning. I kept watching others do embroidery and that motivated me to continue learning new things.

Contact Info:

• Website: lavishmediastore.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lavishmediadesigns/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lavishmediadesigns/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQVq8UQgjEXLjzs6eo4jqig

Image Credits
my photos