What I Wish I Knew Before Starting My Brand

When I first started my brand, I thought passion and good taste would carry me through most things.

They did help. Passion gave me the courage to begin, and taste helped me make decisions when I had very little experience. But after building products, running a store, working with suppliers, and selling to real customers for years, I realised that a brand cannot survive on instinct alone.

If I could start again, I would not only prepare myself to become a better founder. I would learn earlier how to think like a product developer.

A product is not just an idea that looks good. It has to be sampled, costed, produced, priced, explained, sold, and used by real customers. The earlier you understand that full journey, the clearer your decisions become.

These are the three things I wish I understood before starting my brand.

1. Understand the business behind each product

In the beginning, I cared most about the design.

I focused on how the product looked, how the material felt, whether the colour was right, and whether the overall feeling matched the brand I wanted to build. Those things are important, but they are only one side of product development.

Every product also carries business decisions behind it.

The sample cost, material cost, minimum order quantity, production timeline, packaging, shipping, retail margin, selling price, and inventory risk all affect whether a product can actually work as part of a business.

When I first started, I did not always think deeply enough about these details before developing a product. Sometimes I was too focused on whether the idea felt exciting, without fully understanding how much cash, stock, time, and effort it would require later.

That is one of the biggest lessons I learned.

A product can be beautiful, but if the cost structure is wrong, the price becomes difficult. If the minimum order quantity is too high, the stock risk becomes heavy. If the product is too complicated to produce, the sampling process becomes longer and more expensive than expected.

For new designers, this is something I would pay attention to as early as possible.

Before making a sample, understand what kind of product you are really building. Think about the target price, expected margin, production quantity, material choice, and whether the design makes sense for your current stage.

Good product development is not only about creativity. It is also about making decisions that the business can support.

2. Do not design only from instinct

Instinct is important, especially when you are building something personal.

There were many times when my instinct helped me make decisions before I had enough experience or data. It helped me develop my own taste, build a visual direction, and trust certain ideas when they were still new.

But I also learned that instinct should not be the only reference.

When you spend a long time with your own design, it is easy to believe that everything makes sense because you understand the story behind it. You know why the shape is like that, why the size is chosen, why the material is special, and why the colour feels right.

Customers do not begin with that background.

They see the product for the first time and decide very quickly whether it feels relevant to them. They may think about when they would use it, what it matches with, whether the size is practical, whether the price feels reasonable, and whether they understand why this product is different.

That is why market awareness matters.

It does not mean copying trends or losing your own point of view. It means looking carefully at how people live, buy, dress, travel, work, and make decisions. It also means paying attention to what customers ask, what they hesitate about, what they return to, and what they actually use after purchase.

For fashion, accessories, and lifestyle products, small details can change the whole customer response. A handle length, inner compartment, colour tone, product weight, material finish, or even the way a product is photographed can affect how people understand it.

If I could start again, I would still trust my instinct, but I would test it against real customer behaviour much earlier.

A strong product needs both: a clear creative direction and a grounded understanding of the market.

3. Learn how to explain the value of your product

For a long time, I was quite passive about sharing my work.

People would invite me to speak, share my experience, or talk about the brand, but I often hesitated. I worried that speaking too much might sound like showing off. I was also afraid of saying something imperfect or making people feel that I thought I knew more than I did.

Later, I realised that explaining your work is not the same as being arrogant.

For a founder, it is part of the job.

A product does not automatically sell just because it is well designed. Customers need to understand why it exists, what problem it solves, what makes the material different, how it can be used, and why the price makes sense.

If the founder cannot explain the value clearly, it becomes much harder for customers to see it.

This is especially true for small brands. You may not have the awareness of a large company, so your product needs stronger storytelling, clearer product pages, better photos, and more thoughtful content to help people understand what they are buying.

Learning to share my work brought more than visibility. It helped people understand the story and decisions behind O.N.E. It also opened more conversations with students, customers, collaborators, and people from different industries.

If I could start again, I would practise explaining my product earlier — not in a loud or exaggerated way, but in a clear and honest way.

A good product still needs to be introduced properly.