Art School Royalty – Threadless meets future YBAs
Art School Royalty is a fledgling brand still trying to work out how to announce itself to the world.
Brainchild of Christos (who had travelled all the way from Manchester!), Art School Royalty presents a unique concept by fusing the world of student art and commercial retail together through a talent led initiative.
Basically, Christos wants to offer hungry young design students a public outlet by printing their work on unique, high-end t-shirts. The business model is not unlike the social graphics tees co www.threadless.com but with the alluring twist of only featuring designs from art school students/alumni. Tee by the future Tracy Emin anyone?
However, Christos was caught at a ‘chicken-or-egg’ moment. He needed work from designers to produce the t-shirts, but he had no examples to convince them it was a great project.
We recommended he organise talks at Manchester’s best design schools (by getting to know the professors and college heads) to pitch his idea to the students directly. As a club promoter, he also had access to a ready made brand building tool – Art School Royalty could sponsor the best nights in Manchester, thus aligning itself with the right cultural hotspots (and potential customers)! Also, with access to many of the latest bands, he should try and rope in lead singers and musicians as brand ambassadors to wear his t-shirts and effortlessly (and cheaply) communicate his brand values to his customers.
He already had a good idea to initially create an online forum to display his products with minimum expense but the long term goal is to get them into boutiques across the UK.
Ultimately, we stressed that it would be down to him to engage with the students effectively as they really hold the keys to ASR’s success.
Good Luck Christos, we look forward to wearing your merchandise soon!
Post by Hugo Bennett
Tags: engagement, fashion, Idea Shop Brixton
February 15th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Christos, just a thought, could you tap into the end of year exhibitions art and design students hold? You offer to print up students’ work on tees prior to the exhibition. You could even create a sort of exhibition catalogue on a t-shirt – might be worth looking at using a QR code on the label to link to online content about the exhibition. Or you could simply use the exhibitions as an opportunity to scout for talent.
Also, someone made the point in an earlier write up, universities are always looking for live briefs for their students. A brief to create a t-shirt design could be just what they are looking for, especially if you make it a bit more challenging by giving them a specific theme to explore.