Simplistic Apparel: From inception to conclusion

“We were really passionate about it at the time. At the time, we didn’t have any plans. We were just dreamers,” says junior Brian Huang, who co-founded the clothing startup Simplistic Apparel in 2012. He and his partner Brandon Leow, an Aragon alumnus, dreamed of creating their own company that sold original clothing they designed.

Their business was rooted in their mutual interest in street fashion. Huang says, “We were already best friends with the same interests. When one of us barely mentioned the idea, we were both thinking the exact same thing.” Though neither knew anything about running a company, making clothes themselves, or even the first steps to beginning a business, they decided to try it anyway. To get started they looked at designs first.

But that was the easiest part. After they came up with designs, they realized they had no way of ordering a first round of clothing without capital. “We had this one design. It was a super simple design because printing a simple design was cheaper. We just begged our friends to buy … We used that to gain capital before we could make more,” explains Huang. Once they got to this point, they had enough money to branch out with designs and techniques.

There are two different methods for making designs into physical clothing. Screen printing is done by sending a design off to a printing company. Conversely, “cut and sew” is done by actually hand-crafting the garment yourself. Huang says, “It was purely experimentation. We would go to Jo-Ann’s and find fabrics we liked. We would buy cheap hoodies and cut off the pockets to sew our own designs in,” says Huang.

Once Huang and Leow had enough funds to purchase more merchandise, they wanted to sell to a bigger audience and expand their company. They started to market not just to friends and Aragon students, but to strangers around the world. They used social media like Facebook and Tumblr to connect with prospective customers.

Huang saw the huge responses on Simplistic Apparel’s social media platform. He says, “We amassed almost 1,200 likes on Facebook. We also had a huge, huge audience on Tumblr. We were getting thousands of reposts. We sold to mostly U.S. [clients], but also [to people in] Canada and Australia. The reason why was because the social media platforms we use are similar.”

As Huang and Leow watched their company expand, they experienced an amazing feeling. “Seeing people on the street with our clothes or our pins was so cool. I saw it on a complete stranger and I was blown away. It was the most amazing thing ever,” remarks Huang. However, Huang and Leow found that creating a start-up becomes much more than the actual product. “It’s not easy to make your own start-up. You have to immerse yourself. You have to pay attention to what you’re doing and what everyone else is doing. We spent hours Googling things like business licenses, printing, other companies—anything we needed to know,” says Huang.

Eventually the time commitment and effort it took to maintain their business conflicted with other activities. Huang says, “If we worked hard enough, we could have done it, but we kept our priorities straight, our academics. The likes and reblogs were amazing to me, but in the grand scheme of things, they weren’t that important. Real companies have gone way past what we did.” Even though Huang loved seeing the company’s success, he accepted the reality that their business was not sustainable at the time. They eventually stopped manufacturing and let the remaining stock sell.

Even though the company faded out of existence, Huang has no regrets. He was able to watch designs of his own creation grow to reach people on an international level. He especially enjoyed seeing the company mature over time. “We totally hated our first designs. They were cool at the time, but we realized now how cliché they were. Over time, our art design became more elegant. We tried to steer ourselves towards high-class companies,” explains Huang.

Huang and Leow are able to say something that not many high schoolers can say. They invested their hard work and time into a company that made their dreams a reality.

Junior Jessica Moe, a model for Simplistic Apparel’s “Be Free” campaign, says, “I think that Brian and Brandon are very adventurous and determined for starting their own line in high school. They’ve created quite a distinct look that has expressed their style while appealing to many of their peers. It’s so cool how they’re able to say this clothing line was entirely their idea and how they’ve been able to experience it being put into action.”

Although their company never grew to a huge scale, it not only left its mark on the Aragon community but gave them a taste of what they could achieve.