What I write here are my opinions on how to build a brand. Building a brand for your merchandise is not an impossible mission, but it is far from an easy task.

So where to start?

The first question you should ask yourself is why you want to build your own brand and or merchandise. You will be ready to start when you are able to answer this question that seems simple but is much more deeper than it seems. Remember there is no correct answer to why and there is no wrong answer either, there are only different reasons to why someone wants to do it and they are all just as good. Your answer to the why question will build the foundation of your brand and will take it towards what it will be in the future, so it’s really important that you are honest to yourself with the why question because being honest now will help you build a brand based on true believes and in the long run will help you win your competition, just by being a true and authentic brand.

Now you have figured out the why part, and you might have thought that it gets easier after that, well I got news for you, it won’t and the more success your brand has the more challenging it will get.

A lot of todays companies and brand make merchandise according to studie what people want and what the trends are, in other words the research what sells and what doesn’t. There is nothing wrong with that, but I believe that if you go down that road you will never be a true brand. Yes you might get a lot of money and the brand might get huge, even in a global perspective, but is it real? Well the money is real, but is the brand real? I say no, it’s not. Because the brand was built on reasearch what the trends are and what will sell.

So how to proceed to make a true brand? Well first of all this comes down to that you have to truly believe in what you are doing. That way you will do your best to build the best possible merchandise you can. Lets say your merchandise is a t-shirt and you are trying to decide on the color of it. Now you have two ways to proceed. You can do it the easy way and do a reasearch and see what colors are trending and selling at the moment, but if you do so you will go back to just making money and not really building a true brand.

Or you can do it the challenging way and use a color you believe will look good and a color that might have a story behind it. Doing it this way you are taking steps of creating something true.

So you have now figured out that why you are building a brand, you have figured out that your merchandise or product will be a t-shirt and you have the color for the t-shirts and now you need to take the next stop of letting it grow towards you goal, creating a true brand.

The next step, or one could say the next goal is getting people to believe in your brand the same way you believe in it.

While waiting for the next part of how to start your own brand, figure out the question why and check out my text about how to inspire people as it has a lot of similarities to building a brand.