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5 tips for creating a successful brand, according to Virgil Abloh

The fashion designer drops some knowledge

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Arguably one of fashion’s most talked about designers, Virgil Abloh, recently dropped some insightful answers in an interview with The Coveteur. The head of high-fashion label Off-White and Yeezy’s creative director obviously has some good advice for any inspiring fashion designer, so we collated the best five answers for you below.

01. How Off-White begun

“I started on this path by essentially printing t-shirts and giving them to friends; and then believing in them so hard and trying to make them relevant enough so that people liked them.”

02. Conveying concepts through clothes

“It’s more about design. It’s not just clothes. Clothes are whatever—you can buy clothes at Target, too. But what I’m doing is loading in a lot of ideas and concepts that manifest themselves in a way that’s very direct. I love that style of messaging.”

03. You can do it

“I think that I’m like high off of doing what I think that I want to do. But everyone can do that! There’s no magic. I use opportunities to tell people, ‘You can literally do it.’ I used to be the one at the bar talking about, ‘Oh, I’m going to do this!’ Or brunch with my friends, [saying], ‘Yo, I have an idea for swimsuits’—which I do! So any opportunity where someone is like, ‘Hey, do you want to start a new line?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, I want to do swimsuits.’ One thing that leads to another.”

04. Vision is important

“When I started it was more about ‘I don’t have time for all that. I just have time to put my identity on top of it.’ So that’s what the whole concept was—I embraced the fact that I didn’t have those means, but I still had a vision, which I think was very in response to the times and in response to streetwear. It was very modern.”

05. The best piece of advice

“If you do what I’m about to say right now, it’ll work. I’ve figured it out! I’ve done all this running around the world to give this one piece of advice. If you want to do this, if you want to be a designer, be Karl Lagerfeld or be Steve Jobs, you just have to do this one thing: do it. I found this myself: this is all literally based on one idea to make one t-shirt. I never would have thought it would amount to this, but if I hadn’t done that one, it wouldn’t have led into the third or the fifth or whatever.”