Easter Weeks

This week I had to go home but i kept in contact with Keira and Abby and kept in touch by texting/ email what they'd done and sending me pictures of what they've done. They went and did some laser cutting which i was gutted i missed as I really want to learn how to laser Cut but they managed to do a few samples with that and with the brand name, WKW.
I was really pleased with the laser cutting samples they did, This again is another look we can add to our t-shirts to make them abit different to every other t-shirt.
I enjoy doing this company and I feel I am learning alot this way, with some independance aswell.
Next we hope to get some t-shirts done so we can do a photoshoot with them, see how that goes and look into more ways of printing.

Naming the Brand.

As a group we decided to name our brand as WKW. These are the initials of our surnames and it sounds nice put together. Now we thought about still being called WKW but calling our t shirt line orbit inc. This is so in the future we can do other stuff with the name WKW and we’re not trapped with what we can do. As individuals we are all interested in doing other stuff but corporate it with the name.

So we checked if orbit inc was available for copyright and it was, even though we saw something with the name orbit inc on a social network site so we’ll have to double check this out again, in case we have missed this on copyright. We like the name orbit Inc as well cause it goes with our theme for the prints we wanted to use for our t-shirts which is space.

So our t-shirt range will be called orbit Inc and we will use the names of some planets for our womenswear/menswear and will also use the logos that the planet represents. Our chosen planets we want to use are: venus, mars, Uranus and Earth.

Womenswear will be venus.

Menswear will be mars

Unisex will be Uranus

And accessories will be Earth.

I think this all gives the company abit more of an effect and something abit different aswell to other companies.

Printing symbols

Today we wanted to print our chosen symbols onto our t shirts. We went down to the printin seeds to start printing, we got the screen ready but then unfortunately we was unable to print as the technician wouldn't allow us to print as we hadn't given her a brief or what we wante to do in writing.
This is what we done so far...

 These are the two symbols we wanted to print on our t-shirts. Neptune and Earth.

T Shirts

We decided to start looking for t-shirts to order for us to print them. I started looking on the Internet, on some t shirt websites. We wanted quality t shirts but at also at a good price. I found some batches of 50 to 200 t shirts. To begin with we wanted to go for a batch of 50, to see how we get on.
We found some t-shirts on plaint-shirts.co.uk. A batch of 200 white t-shirts for £261.05. This is heavy weight material and then it's an £8 delivery. We thought this was way too expensive for us to start out with so we carried on looking on other websites.
We also found some other t-shirts based on a batch of 20 for £1.13 each so the total would be £22.60. This seamed more realistic to us and was happy with this price.
We also found a pack of ten t-shirts, which cost £1.10 per t-shirt for a total of £22.00 with a delivery charge of £8.00 which the total gave us £30.00. This again we was happy with but not the cheapest we found some t-shirts for. We'll carry on looking around, see if we can find something abit cheaper.

Illustrated Designs.

I did some designs on illustrator and photoshop. I did this because I want to improve on my skills and also I think they look neater.
I played around with the different styles of t-shirts we want to use aswel as the different styles/colours/prints.

Screen Printing.

Today we experimented with some screen print. I only ever done this once, and that was in my first year, so i was excited to do it again and excited for the outcome.
We decided to use an image of space, as this is the sort of thing we want to go for in our t-shirts.

This is what the fabric that we experimented on looked like afterwards. We used different techniques, by using different strokes and was interested to see the different outcomes. 

This is a sample we did on some jersey fabric that is similar to our t-shirts. We were really happy with the outcome.

Designs/Print

I did i moodboard of some recent prints I thought was suitable for our t-shirts.
We like the idea of the planets and the solar system. This is something we havnt really seen much of in the shops.
I drew up some designs of different styles of tee's. We thought about doing the bottom of a tee like an upside down tee, with arm holes for a different style. This was something that made the tee unique. This we thought could be one of our unique selling points.

I really like the idea we are going for and hope to achieve. I find it quite edgy and on trend, and this is what we want and want to keep creating, clothes that are on trend.

Bank Meeting.

We thought we should open an business account so the money we use to spend all comes from one account instead of doing bits of money from each of our own personal accounts. So we set one up with HSBC. We had our meeting with a man called Simon who 21 questioned us about what we wanted to do with our business, how much money we plan on spending, what our turn over will be in a year. Too begin with we found it abit intimidating but it was good that he was asking us these questions otherwise we wouldn't have a clue. He really helped us with the monet side of it aswel. He asked for another meeting in 3 weeks time to finish off opening the account and thats when we'll get our personal debit cards and thats when the account will be activated.

Experimenting.

We thought it'll be a good idea to experiment with the printing of the t-shirts with  materials such as spray paint, transfer print, mono print and ink. We did this because this is what we had in mind doing with our t-shirts.
This was fun and things like spray paint i'd never used before so it was fun and interesting to experiment. I spraypainted a few shapes onto the fabric before going onto some words and then trying out different effects such as blowing onto the spraypaint which makes it fade out a little bit. I also tried this effect with the ink, this worked out well. I also tried splattering the ink around the fabric, this also made an interesting effect and i was pleased with this outcome.
We experiemented these on some jersey fabric, similar to the t-shirts. Some turned out better than others, we experimented with shapes and patterns and some small words. 
We wanted to test these materials out in the washing machine, see which ones fade/crack/dispear/run and see which design quality stays the same and which ones doesnt.

Our First Meeting.

We had our first meeting with Claudia, and showed her a presentation on which we were wanthing to do over the next couple of weeks and a plan.
We created a couple of moodboards, including some design ideas, print ideas, ideas on some logo's and some phrases to go on the t-shirts. We looked at the different cost of buying t-shirts in bulk aswel as the price of printing them.
We also looked at our target audience and our unique selling point.
We want our target audience to be at students that enjoy Art, Photography, Fashion and socialising, as we want our tshirts to be something fresh and completely different.
Claudia asked us what would make our t-shirts stand out. I think this is something we're gonna keep changing our mind on and have to experiment with until we do something and we all think yes this is what we was looking for.

After this meeting we went to apply for the entrapenours course the uni has, Claudia gave us this idea so we went to have a talk with someone, see what we had to do to apply and get some more information on it. We applied for it and we just are waiting on an email. This course helps us with the costs of things, which would be a great help and I think the experience of this aswell would come in use and be help us alot.

Introduction

For one of our modules we have to a work placement. As I'm interested in PR work I sent some emails to some PR companys. Me and two of my friends were also interested in setting up our own clothing label. So we discussed this between ourselves, drew up a little buisness plan and then presented it to Claudia. We asked if we could set this up as part of our work placement and we could.
We did a moodboard of different styles of t shirts we wanted to produce, aswell as looking at different prints and logo's we could use to go on the t shirts. We were inspired by design labels such as BOY london and Illustrated people.
We want something that is abit different to the t-shirts you see in the stores now and also which is bang on trend at the moment. We want to start selling t-shirts online, and make them all ourselves so they're all one of a kind.