We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Nickolas Melbourne. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Nickolas below.
Nickolas, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Initially, I came up with this brand idea after I lost a good friend to gun violence and my little brother lost his best friend in a car accident.
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?
My Brand “The Guys” started as a vinyl print clothing brand dedicated to friends, family and close associates that have passed away. It’s always a thing in the “urban” community to put a loved one on a tshirt for remembrance but who ever said that the memory had to be basic? I started the brand with two of my closest partners being my older brother Deante Patterson (blood brother) and my younger brother Leyland baggot (family friend) . At the time none of us had any idea as to what we would need or even how we would start to even make a tshirt from scratch but everyday that past since I had the idea I would spend hours on hours searching things on YouTube “how to make tshirt from scratch” “how to get pictures on a shirt at home” etc. It took us about 8 months to figure what route we would take initially to get customers and awareness to grow but In our time of growth we went from vinyl cuts on the circuit machine to dtf prints from “PerfectPrint” to finding “Superline”, a wholesale clothing store, that basically gave us every tool to succeed without ever asking for anything in return. As with any starting business we had our high and low months but that never discouraged or turned us away from the initial goal of just wanting to be there for people who have lost someone but in a fashionable way. As we started to grow into year 3 I noticed that our initial customer reach was expanding from grieving families into Atlanta streetwear culture. One thing I always hated about fashion at the time was that the pieces we all reach for are never within reasonable pricing and always held to such a standard that’ll make the regular average joe shy away or uncomfortable. By this time we have been well versed in every way to make clothing and we were looking for a different avenue/route to target our brand towards and from there our “For The Guys, By The Guys” slogan was born. We rebranded into making affordable high fashion custom streetwear pieces for the everyday, middle class worker/family to not only be able to look just as amazing and luxurious as some of the bigger name brands but also be able to afford something 1 of 1 that is affordable to be purchased over and over. Now, we focus solely on making 1 of 1 pieces that unless the customer asks, won’t ever be made again so not only do they get a design tailored to their liking but now also have a fashion piece that is affordably EXCLUSIVE!! Anythingg from Hoodies with hidden pockets, Shirts with messages that only show in specific weather to Tailored jeans fully studded hand placed gems! With “The Guys” we created a clothing brand to make EVERYONE a winner. We are a brand that aims to remove the high priced gatekeeping and spread the joy and smiles that some of our fallen brothers left behind through our creativity in our clothing pieces
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
No we do not manufacture our products. Funny thing is We actually tried to use manufacturing in the beginning/startup but being that none of us really had funds to spend and just “hope” our products came back proper, we initially were creating all our pieces in my brother leylands garage. To start we only had one circuit machine and we didn’t even have a heat press so we were pressing everything with a regular iron. Now days we no longer work with vinyl and are creating everything out of our coworking space in Gwinnett with a brother sewing/embroidery machine and a heat press that was gifted to us. All fabrics we use are either thrifted or given to us by Goodwill and Michael’s fabric store.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
My advice would be to treat everyone on the team as equals. Everyone on our team can do each role required on their own and I recognize that even when things look otherwise. Belittling your team only weakens the machine and it only takes one loose screw for the whole operation to start messing up.
Only employ those who see the vision and the same future you see. At the end of the day, the day has to end and before it does we all gotta be excited about what we know is coming to us
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/th3guyss
