Building a Lifestyle Apparel Brand Through Crowdfunding

For this episode of Art of the Kickstart, we caught up with Miguel Madrid, the founder and Chief of Everything at Perk, a lifestyle apparel brand creating high-quality products like The All-Day Chinos. Tune in to learn more about how Madrid approached the development process for a revolutionary apparel product and created a company ethos, as well as the importance of understanding what it truly takes to become an entrepreneur. Topics Discussed and Key Crowdfunding Takeaways Finding the right partner for the development process for an apparel product The differences between your run-of-the-mill apparel product release, made-to-order strategies and crowdfunding, as they pertain to apparel Sourcing the right materials for an apparel product Developing a company ethos Finding the right software tools that fit your needs How to manage your time and money when growing a business Strategic ways to gain customer feedback and iterate on those results Links The All-Day Chino on Indiegogo InDemand Myth of the Entrepreneur Sponsors Art of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by The Gadget Flow, a product discovery platform that helps you discover, save, and buy awesome products. The Gadget Flow is the ultimate buyer's guide for cool luxury gadgets and creative gifts. Click here to learn more and list your product - use coupon code ATOKK16 for 20% off! Transcript View this episode's transcript Roy Morejon: Welcome to Art of the Kickstart, your source for crowdfunding campaign success, I’m your host Roy Morejon president of Inventis Partners the top full service turnkey product development and crowd funding marketing agency in the world. We have helped startups raise over a hundred million dollars for our clients since 2010. Each week I’ll interview a crowdfunding success story, an inspirational entrepreneur or a business expert, in order to help you take your startup to the next level with crowdfunding. Art of the Kickstart is honored to be sponsored by BackerKit and The Gadget Flow. BackerKit makes software that crowdfunding creators use to survey backers, organize data and manage orders for fulfillment by automating your operations and helping you print and ship faster. The Gadget Flow is a product discovery platform that helps you discover, save and buy awesome products. It is the ultimate buyers guide for luxury gadgets and creative gifts. Now let’s get on with the show. Welcome to another edition of Art of the Kickstart, today I am joined with Miguel Madrid founder and chief of everything officer at Perks, excuse me. Miguel, thank you so much for joining us today. Miguel Madrid: Thank you for having me, man. Roy Morejon: So your campaign just launched today, I’m really excited about the launch of it. I love the tagline of, you don’t need another pair of pants, you need a better one. So, I really like the idea and the innovation of this lifestyle apparel brand that you’ve built. So I’m really interested to hear for our audience of where this idea started, and what inspired you to create Perks. Miguel Madrid: Thank you for having me, again, and yeah happy to go into this. What you see right now on the campaign is the culmination of two years of work. It’s been agonizing, it’s been stressful, I might’ve cried a couple of times, but things are different now. Now we’re live, everything is running and everything is operational, I can breather easy now. It’s sort of like getting engaged, you pop the question and it’s over, right? Anyways so the idea behind Perk came after my previous brand, I used to own an underwear brand called Bensly and it was about three years worth of e-commerce work and three Kickstarters behind it and as any good other business would tell you, we took feedback quite well. We took feedback as aggressively as possible and as honestly as possible, and of course some of that feedback was negative but we took it as a learning lesson to improve on our products.