We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ryan Yere a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Ryan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.
Growing up as a kid from South Oxnard came with many different forms of adversity. Lower income housing, broken families, and a lack of quality education. This environment wasn’t ideal for progression of success. It harbored a survival mentality; parents struggling from paycheck to paycheck, late utility bill notices hanging from door knobs, some kids requiring that free school lunch program to make sure they don’t go hungry for the day. All this hardship either built character, or turned you into another product of the environment. One of our biggest ethos’s as a brand is “The Southside’s for Lovers”, a saying we came up with to represent the positives of our neighborhood. Although it is the least loved side of town, finding love in the richness of culture here is what makes us shine. From street vendors, small hole in the wall restaurants, and the drive to play the cards you were dealt all encompasses what this saying means.
I felt it was really important to represent our community because no one else was telling our story. I structure our collections always on that ideology, fueling that hustlers mentality where if you didn’t have it, you had to find away to get it any way possible. I felt a void in this market where other clothing brands weren’t filling. The narrative was never to make luxury clothing, but to tell a story through the product. I want our product to always be raw and true to where we come from. I’ll never make clothing flaunting wealth because we didn’t come from that. The intent is to show the interpretation can live in the hood and bridge the gap to high fashion. This allows our story to be told without binding us from achieving what we want out of life just because this is where we come from.
Ryan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My name is Ryan Yere, co-owner and creative director for Retour Co. and Dated N Faded Night Market. I’m an entrepreneur and clothing designer based out of South Oxnard California. I specialize in graphic design, pattern making, vintage curation, and event planning. I currently run two businesses with my partners Byron Bucao and Stevie Rivera. I first got into the clothing industry through thrifting and my love for vintage clothing. Before the boom of vintage, I would go to the thrift store out of necessity with my mom. She couldn’t afford to get us new clothes so we had to make do with what we could find at the thrift. I would find some really cool stuff but when people would ask me where i got it I would feel embarrassed to say I got it second hand. As I got older and I began to realize that getting something really cool for a fraction of the price was nothing to be ashamed of but was actually a flex. As thrifting gained popularity, I started making it a hobby to frequently go thrifting and enjoyed collecting pieces even if they weren’t my size. Thats how I partnered with Byron and Steve because they shared the same passion in clothes as me.
We started Retour as a collective of vintage resellers housing all the clothes we found at the thrift and made a website for us to put them up for sale. We started to venture into branding ourselves and that’s where my interest in graphic design came. I was so curious about how screen printing worked and how you make graphics print ready. I had to learn the hard way that there was more to the game than just slapping something on a t-shirt. That curiosity grew into pattern making. I wanted Retour to be more than just a streetwear brand that prints on blanks. I wanted to learn the ins and outs of garment production down to what fabric to use, the different dying processes, and building unique patterns that fit exactly how I want them to. I think that’s what really sets our brand apart because I’m a huge nerd about the little nuances that make a high quality garment. At the time of starting the business back in 2018, there wasn’t as many resources we have today to get into the clothing business. Through trial and error and close to 100 bad samples and hundreds of dollars wasted, I dialed in my skills to understand what it took, and I’m continually learning and honing my skills everyday.
I’m proud of the fact that we get to tell my story through a platform that we created from the ground up. I applaud anyone who has the confidence to make something out of nothing because entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things someone can do in life. There’s no one telling you what to work on, and no guide book to get you to success. You have to get up and move the needle forward yourself and that’s one of the most unforgiving things because a mistake can be life changing in either direction. Building this platform with some of my life long friends has allowed us to make a big impact in our community. We wouldn’t have been able to start a night market if it wasn’t for the people supporting our brand from the beginning. Dated N Faded is a night market that not only hosts clothing and vintage brands but also creatives in the music space such as DJ’s, artists, dance performers, and live bands. We now get to help bring awareness to other local creatives who fall under the same umbrella and give them a home to showcase their talents to a supportive community who trusts our curation. The community we bring together is currently the thing I’m most proud of. Without their support, I wouldn’t be able to doing what I love most, and for that I’m forever humbled and grateful.
How did you build your audience on social media?
I believe we built our audience by telling a story that was authentic to us. It was important for me and my team to make sure we weren’t just making product, but that the product stood for something. If you’re able to have an ethos based on true story telling through the lens of an amazing product, then the support will come organically. I made sure the creative was more than just “cool”, it had to represent where we come from and what our day-to-day looked like growing up. You can’t tell a story more compelling than your own so we always recommend anyone who is trying to build an audience to make sure to pull inspiration from your life not by mirroring someone else’s. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t be inspired, but it’s how you use those inspirations and mold it into something that’s unique to you. A true following comes from people who have a definitive connection to what you’re saying, whether they’re from the same city, grew up similarly, or have an emotional attachment to your art. It’s imperative that you find that common ground with your audience to build that trust.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
As many may know, entrepreneurship is never a linear journey. I’ve always loved clothes pretty much my whole life but it wasn’t till i found my passion of manufacturing garments later in life in the middle of my college career in getting my bachelors degree in civil engineering. I was already a junior in college when I became fixated on making clothes. It was my relief for a while coming from very corporate industry and transitioning into a more creative space. I was torn between finishing college or diving into business full time. Engineering was my first passion, I was that kid with legos building bridges and towers and that’s what made me fall in love with civil engineering. Both civil engineering and clothing are design, but on completely different spectrums of the word. I found comfort in the freeing aspect of clothing design because it was a good switch up from the very structured and technical side of engineering. I ultimately decided that I was too far along in my college career to quit. I figured that I’d be doing myself a disservice by not getting my degree. Even though I chose a path I still stuck to making clothes but at a slower scale because of how demanding college was. I sometimes wonder if I lost out on precious time in clothing because I decided to play it safe but at the end of the day I feel like I made the right choice.
When I got my degree I decided to take 2 years off from engineering to fully pursue my itch for clothing manufacturing. Circling back to the non-linear aspect of business, while the brand was healthy and growing, so did our overhead cost. To scale and grow your business I knew that I had to keep investing more to keep the momentum, which gave me less money to pay for everyday life. No matter how you cut the cake, rent is due on the first of the month haha so I came to realize that to give myself that safety net, I needed a day job as an engineer to fuel my business. For so long I was avoiding this step because it made me feel like I was failing because business wasn’t my full time responsibility anymore. I had to rewire my thinking to understand that this was a stepping stone for a stronger financial foundation which overall will help me long term. I now get to revisit my old passion for engineering while fueling the business and I have my younger self to thank for not quitting back then when I felt like I needed to. Real full circle moment with the shift/duality in careers. This has really built my resilience in truly understanding time management for what I need to get done everyday. Having two responsibilities now really pushes you to use your time wisely and I needed to remind myself that this wasn’t a step back but a step forward in securing the future I wanted to live.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.retourco.com
- Instagram: @retourco, @ryan_yere
- Other: tiktok: @retourco, @ryan_yere