Retailer vs clothing brand?

kdawn said:

Hey guys. So, I've been having a hard time deciding whether to have our clothing manufactured or bought via wholesale, because of this question that I'm sure a lot of you have thought of.

If we bought wholesale shirts like this for example from LA Showroom, meaning, we did not have any of our own shirts made ourselves (no spec sheets, prototypes... etc), and put our own tags on those shirts, would we be considered a clothing BRAND or a RETAILER?

Also, is this illegal? What separates a clothing brand from a clothing retailer?

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Being a retailer just means that you sell to the general public. You can retail your own brand that you make with wholesale blanks. Or you can retail someone else's brand.

Yes, it's legal to put your own tags in wholesale shirts that you purchase, and you'd still be a clothing brand. What makes you a brand is that you are putting your "brand" on those wholesale shirts.

Do some reading and research in this section of the forums:
T-Shirt Tag Relabeling and Finishing - T-Shirt Forums

There's lots of good info there on what you asked about and more.

I thought about going the custom made route a while back myself. In the end, I figured it just wasn't worth it (time and money) to get the kind of quality that I could already get in a wholesale blank.

Thanks for replying! But what if these are a little more than just standard blanks? Like this? Can we still put our own tag/label on it? Would that still make us our own brand?

Well, technically, that's not a blank.

But in general, it doesn't matter the style (ragland, tank, etc.), you can relabel as your own.

The question you'd have to ask yourself is can you get it cheap enough (true wholesale) in order to make a profit from it once you brand it as yours. Also, if it's already printed like this, what would be the point of you selling it as your brand when it's already embellished?

Someone can just go and get the exact same thing from somewhere else. Why buy it from you? It would seem at that point that it goes back to your original question about being a retailer. If you're going to sell something that other people can get, and only change the label on the inside, then at that point you would just be a retailer.

Yeah that's the thing I'm asking myself, because we do screenprint our shirts, but we also want fashionable non-printed ones as well. The thing is, we have a very simple, youthful, trendy style. So what would be the point in having a manufacturer make something that could look like another company made it (because of the simplicity)? Why not just buy the shirts we want as non-printed from wholesale vs manufacturer?

But we would 100% be a brand then, if we decided top buy wholesale "fashionable" shirts and put our own label on them?