2. Decide on a name. Dont over think it. Check its unique by googling it and check socials that its not taken so you dont waste your time
3. Come up with a great logo.
4. Regisiter a business name and do your due diligence on registrations and accounting with ABN and trading details.
5. Buy a good quality laptop with enough disk space and an EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE and a large thumb drive for your keys. Store your most important files on here.
6. Buy a cheap fire proof safe from your hardware store.
7. Set up a google drive and a drop box.
8. Set up all your socials. Join every facebook discussion group you can.
9. Set up a password manager account as you WILL forget all your logins and passwords guaranteed.
10. Buy some quality stock images to do your mockups on. Now design design design and SAVE SAVE SAVE
11. Setup a shopify account.
12. Register for Paypal and Shopify payments or Stripe to take payments.
13. List on gumtree/ebay/facebook marketplace - anywhere you can list for low or no cost.
14. Link your listings to your personal socials and ask your friends to share your listings.
15. Ask your friends to wear your shirts in exchange for a review and a free shirt.
16. Do not hope stores will stock your shirts in your infancy and without social proof.
17. Be fast with shipping, with follow up and with customer service.
18. Interact with your audience and engage with others in your industry.
19. Create content on every platform
20. Create a blog , a youtube, a podcast - even if no one ever watches
21. Listen to every podcast you can, go to every free course, watch every youtube you can on your niche - NO knowledge is ever wasted.
22. Join networking groups, go to coffee groups. Be a guest blogger or guest podcaster. Get out there
23. Be generouse and sponsor! Always give back !
24. Dont show off - it looks desperate and fake. Stay humble and grow at your own pace.
25. Attend trade shows and expos
26. As you get bigger offer Afterpay Sezzle and Laybuy. You will not be able to do this when you first open until trading reaches $x turnover.
27. Read profit first by Mike Mikalowitz and other business books. You must pay yourself first, and invest outside the business or you will never make money. Always keep aside money to pay taxes first, then yourself then the rest.
28. Pay your staff WELL and always take care of them at christmas .
29. Be UN like any other in your field.
30. Download all the apps on your phone so you can work anywhere and dont need the laptop, most importantly so you can hear the cha-chings!
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Double Down on DENIM - We are about to tell you alllll about it!
Denim Collared Streetwear Button Down Shirts are now available at Chaotic in time for winter. In short and long sleeve in regular and plus KING size 3xl and 5xl - Its a very flattering style can be worn buttoned up or open over a tshirt for a casual vibe ! Available in dark and light denim and hot black denim!!!
Detail embroidered pocket designs sure to get attention on the streets ! Don’t listen to what other people say. The Canadian tuxedo aka double denim is totally cool.
The trick to making double denim work is correct contrast and shades of denim. Ideally you want different shades of denim on top and bottom. That means black jeans and dark blue denim shirt, white jeans and a light blue denim shirt (for Summer) or dark denim below and a washed shade up top. Tuck or no tuck.
Add a belt and some suede boots or just stick with sneakers. When it comes to dressing your denim shirt up for a smart casual occasion then you can beat adding a blazer to your look. Combined with jeans or chinos will enable you to add a classic cotton or linen blazer to spruce up your denim shirt. For the colder months you can add layers with a cardigan or knit, or a coat if required. For summer months go for a light coloured linen blazer with your denim shirt.
Denim may have gotten its start as workwear, but that doesn’t mean you can’t dress it up on occasion. A foolproof option is to pair it with chinos, and tricks it out with carefully thought-out accessories: a watch on one wrist, bright beaded bracelets on the other, a classic pair of aviators, and an understated scarf around the neck.
Even the shirt itself has interesting details, like the grain of the fabric and the seams up the front. If you really want to push the envelope, consider incorporating denim into your formal attire. We’re not saying you should wear a denim suit to your best friend’s wedding (if it didn’t work for Justin Timberlake, it definitely isn’t going to work for you lol), but if you’re feeling ballsy why not wear your denim shirt with a suit jacket and a tie? Just make sure it’s a slim-fit shirt (with cutaway collar), so it isn’t bulky under the jacket.
When Summer hits or you’re dashing away for that Winter vacation, you’ll want to pack your shorts and a denim shirt. The denim shirt is actually one of our favourite pieces for fashionable air travel, so there’s no reason not to pack one. Pair your denim shirt with chinos shorts, camo shorts or even dress shorts. Should you tuck it in?
We would go for a half tuck or no tuck on the denim shirt and shorts combination. Boom!
You can find the full rang of hot denim shirts in light and dark blue and black in plain and embroidered or a custom design by shooting us an email at [email protected] or search denim at www.tamirediyorum.com. Prices start at just aud$75 what a bargain!
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Almost as important as one of those "ah ha" moments.
And its the "omg ...when we make it big - we HAVE to do that" moments" .
And it came on a long drive up the coast listening to a "How i built this" podcast by Guy Raz on the rise and rise of Fubu. An amazing podcast by the way, that we highly recommend.
And in this podcast, it mentions this trade show in Vegas that we idolised - Agenda - and we both just looked at each other - poor as two mice - and simulltaneously said - when we make it one day - we are flying to Vegas - staying in a 5 star hotel - packing as much of our street wear in a suitcase we could fit in and spending a shit tonne of money to go to this Agenda trade show to hustle our brand we dont care how much it cost - and we shook on it.
Well, fast forward 4 years we finally did it and man it was a trip - our eyeballs were as big as saucers.. we walked for at least 20 kilometers over 3 days, partied like rockstars, met fellow streetwear startups, started collabs, found US retailers that agreed to stock us pinching ourselves at our luck and strolled among halls and halls of convention centres between the MAGIC and AGENDA shows ...
We couldnt stop the brainstorming between us - talking a mile a minute about what we could do when we got home... it was an a truly insane business trip and we stopped in Hawaii on the way home to shop and cheers the future.
Seriously.... If you EVER get the chance - go to Agenda. If you ever get the chance to exhibit - go to AGENDA - you wont regret it. An Unreal experience!!!!!!!
Anyway here is a great article reposted from Cole Louison from 2018 about how a graffiti kid called Adam Levant got into streetwear and started this, the biggest trade show in the industry!
Following the music, people enter the soaring grandness of Las Vegas’s Expo, pass the lobby signs, then walk towards the huge lit jeep-sized letters that spell AGENDA. DJs, MCs, buyers, designers, company-owners, skaters pro and am, and the industry’s most VI-VIPs enter the convention center and spread across its massive floor.
Agenda is the biggest, brightest, most competitive, most progressive, most I-saw-this-famous-person-there trade show in streetwear. (A trade show is a gathering of the sellers and big buyers in one industry.) And while people argue about what exactly “streetwear” is—mainly hats, hoodies, sneakers, and especially t-shirts—fewer argue about the sales: around $80 billion EUR, almost one-third the value of America’s $250 billion fashion industry. This is why the scene here is so over the top.
Few notice Aaron Levant, who moves within a pack of employees wearing what he’s wearing: a black t-shirt and cargo shorts clipped with a big, screeching radio. The guy who guy started all this 15 years ago—who has done as much as anyone else to turn streetwear into the convention center-filling behemoth it’s become—is indistinguishable from his crew.
And now, at 34, he is stepping away.
Until Agenda ends, though, Aaron is very, very busy. On this February day in Vegas, he has to introduce Jaden Smith, host approximately three dinners, and shake hands with too many of the 3,000 people in attendance. He moves with the dark pack, nodding at industry people while telling his crew what to do, and, sometimes, often talking on his phone and radio at once. Tonight he’ll don pants and a jacket, but keep the shirt (which also says AGENDA).
Things have changed since Agenda’s extraordinarily humble beginnings in 2003, when Aaron was still a teenage graffiti nerd, living at home and prowling other trade shows to poach customers, trying to lure them to his own shuttle bus outside.
But some things haven’t changed. His guerilla marketing tactics have come full-circle. Recently at the Long Beach convention center, staff caught a kid on the floor, promoting his own indie trade show, framing Agenda as corporate, and, Aaron says, “using my sales pitch against me.”
Aaron tracked the kid down on Instagram and eventually hired him.
“If someone has the gall to go out and do what I did, then that person’s valuable,” he says. “There’s a lot of people on my team who have a side hustle. And I like that.”
This blend of gritty hustle and corporate solidarity is Agenda’s signature vibe, and what’s kept it desirable—and, frankly, interesting—all these years. That this is also the core of streetwear’s vast appeal is no accident. From the beginning, both Aaron and Agenda had hustle, and still do. Throughout the years, the growth, the celebrities, the partnerships, and the not-profitable-stuff-becoming-extraordinarily-profitable, Aaron has always found ways to undermine his operation at just enough to keep it interesting and to keep buyers lining up.
Levant grew up on the outer reaches of Los Angeles, with a fashion-savvy mom, a dad who wrote for Happy Days, and two sisters who followed all the rules. He was what he calls “oppositionally defiant” since kindergarten. He was also dyslexic and changed schools often—“weird,” private, granola-y schools, one of which had no grades. He lasted a week in 10th grade, spent three months at a Tahoe boarding school, then was shipped north to one of those wilderness academies. He ran away and called a taxi.
This ended his formal education and began another.
By seventh grade, Aaron was into graffiti heavy. You might know it as “the culture”: tagging, hip-hop, skateboarding, and, to his parents’ displeasure, smoking weed and ditching school. It informed everything else he did.
“My molecular structure of business started with the atom of graffiti,” he says. “It’s guerilla marketing. No one was getting any money then, so these guys were risking their lives to get their name out into the subculture. And this is a really good mental exercise for a marketer, the idea that someone would go that far to get recognition.”
In graffiti, young Aaron found a love for lettering, graphic design, and the idea of art created in and on the public domain, and how the domain’s size and shape influenced the work. He collected anything related to graffiti—books, videos, party fliers—and then started a ‘zine and website, then made t-shirts, which he sold. Eventually he stopped tagging altogether.
A graffiti friend named Tal Cooperman introduced Aaron to Luis Antonio, who ran GAT (aka Gypsies and Thieves), a seminal streetwear brand that surfaced circa 1990 alongside other labels like Fuct, Freshjive, and X-Large. Aaron calls these “OG brands.” Others call them “first-generation.” The companies were all young, LA-based, and hired graffiti artists as graphic designers.
Aaron began a shadowy, ongoing, definitely unpaid internship with GAT and Luis, carrying boxes and archiving the sort of flyers that used to cover tables in shops around Melrose. One flier advertised Agenda, a warehouse party with DJs and artists. He went to his first trade show in “the late 90s,” something called Action Sports Retailer, the industry’s biggest at the time. Manning various booths? Some of his favorite graffiti writers.
The seed was planted. By 2002, Aaron knew the party-style warehouse show he wanted throw, but had one problem. “ I didn’t know anything” he says. “I didn’t even know it could be scary. That was the beautiful thing that made it work.”
Work it did. With some $5,000 he’d saved living at home, he printed postcards and rented a shuttle bus and a Thai restaurant across the street from ASR, the better to poach customers. Only 30 brands and around 250 buyers came, but some were big buyers. Bloomingdale’s was there. So was Fred Segal. Some were from Japan. And after a while, so was the Long Beach fire marshal.
Agenda grew every year after that, and so did Levant’s knowledge, investor network, and power within what had become an exploding industry. In 2006, one accounting firm assessed “urban apparel” sales at $58 billion. One year Agenda's revenue grew by 1000 percent; a version opened in Japan. ASR shuttered in 2009, though by then Agenda had little competition. Aaron made sure the DJs were good and the food stayed local. Big brands weren’t guaranteed entry, but those with cred, no matter how obscure, were given prime real estate, often next to the biggest-money people. (Some were let in for comic relief, like JNCO and their gigantic jeans.)
This created an experience true to the culture that show-goers still feel today: Agenda is where hustlers rubbed elbows with the industry’s elite.
Soon Nike SB had a booth. So did Leica. But last year at Long Beach, so did The Droors—a preposterously obscure '90s brand that preceded DC Shoes and flowed riders on XYZ, the wildest team in the whole history of skateboarding.
Agenda became bigger, better, and even more of a no-holds barred enterprising tornado. You might run into skate legend Rodney Mullen at the Patagonia exhibit, or a Persian rapper named Josephine at the press table, or Lil Wayne around the taco trucks, or a young entrepreneur in the parking lot with a hockey bag and GAYKK blasted across on his fingers.
None of this is by accident. Aaron wants stars, aspiring-stars, and pure riffraff in the same loud room with garage ops and billion-dollar corporations. It creates contrast, which creates the artistically gritty vibe that makes streetwear (and hip-hop, grafitti, skateboarding) so magnetic, and made Agenda famous. It’s still the draw today.
The music became its own festival. Celebrity chefs did the catering with camera crews in tow. Luda and Tyler played Long Beach; after a recent NYC show, Aaron hosted a dinner with horse ribs that Matty Matheson smuggled in from Canada. (That’s me in the tie, trying to cut horsemeat.)
Agenda became a meeting place for the most important money and minds in the industry, and in 2013 Aaron partnered with Reed Exhibitions, the world’s largest trade show organizer. Four years later another partnership yielded ComplexCon (yes, that Complex).
The keynote at Agenda this year was Jaden Smith. He got in the way everyone else did: He impressed the boss, showing up one day at Aaron’s office with a notebook and asking him industry questions for two hours. “Jaden could probably hire whoever he wanted, but he came in like a genuine student of the game,” says the boss. “From that point on, I kept my eye on him.”
After Agenda closed, Aaron went to Napa with his wife, then worked another event. Nike’s Ron Walden is taking over Agenda’s ventures and Aaron remains involved, sort of like how crusty old academics or corporate guys never quite leave where they work.
Except that he’s 34. And stepping away from an empire built with two decades of hustling and a very different outlook of the world around him. An agenda that began with a headstrong kid who didn’t like what everyone else was doing.
“At a certain point all these things—skating, graffiti, streetwear, hip-hop—they were considered taboo. They were not show-up-to-school-and-look-like-the-other-kids-things. These things were done by free-spirited people who wanted to rebel. It’s a small group of people with a different perspective on the world. It was punk rock. Not necessarily the music, but that attitude. It’s different today, but that’s when I started.”
He won’t say what’s next. Whatever it is, expect bright colors, record sales, and genre-shifting results. Expect a show, with a signature vibe: one of old newness, formal disorder, and turning what’s uncool against what’s cool to somehow make it...cool. And profitable.
Agenda lives on, minus the JNCO booth.
“That was a mistake,” says the founder. “Maybe.”
To shop the hottest in Chaotic Streetwear labels for regular and plus "KING SIZE" ranges go to www.tamirediyorum.com
