Sunday: Bridging the Gap Between Brands & Communities with Sustainable Merchandise
When it comes to people, planet, and purpose, Sunday has it down to a Tee with their T-shirts and sustainable, company fashion solutions.
In this interview, Niels Vandecasteele, the Co-founder & CEO opens the closet doors to let us in on the behind-the-scenes making of the brand.
Sewing Sunday’s Story Together
Niels Vandecasteele stitched his background in graphic design, video design, and web development with Steve Callen's background in DJing and community building, and together they created a sustainable fashion company called Sunday.
At its very fiber, Sunday creates high-quality, meaningful, brand-aligned products for some of the biggest names in pop culture.
How did the idea weave together in the beginning?
Ironically, they were both near actual stages when the stage for their future business was set.
Niels’ fandom of Avicii Tim Berg led him on a hunt for a short-sleeve T-shirt to wear to his concert and he came up short. It didn’t exist. Around the same time, Steve Callen was DJing, and he had varying-colored T-shirts made that helped his fans stand out in the crowd. They both realized that they could be the needle that sews the fashion and entertainment worlds together.
Now, Sunday’s brand stands out in the industry crowd especially when it comes to user experience, quality, and design!
More importantly, Sunday has created the perfect runway for brands who want to model their values via everyday people turned brand ambassador models. And, if you want to learn about the business model he used to do this, then continue to read the interview with Niels below.
The Interview: Changing the Clothing Industry & Lives
Be Helpful:
You mentioned that company fashion was looked down upon in Europe when you first started. What was it that made you push against that culture to create your business anyway?
Niels Vandecasteele:
Yes. My co-founder Steve Callens and I started in artists’ merchandise, and more specifically for DJs. We had the whole boom of the nightlife scene and festivals. We noticed that every metal band and every rock band had their own merchandise table and some people working there, but when we went to nightlife, and to DJs, there was nobody doing this. You couldn't buy it. We did research in the DJ Mag Top 100 and I think only 30 of the hundreds of millions of followers did merchandise in any way, which was often very, very poor quality.
So, this was the original business idea and we started making some snapbacks and T-shirts for these DJs.
We immediately saw that their expectations were a lot higher than the regular oversized Fruit of the Loom band shirts.
These DJs were a bit of fashion and a bit of a lifestyle. We had these festivals like Tomorrowland where people would work on fitness all year to look good there and they wanted their outfits to be top-notch too. This segment in the market immediately pushed us to go above and beyond in quality.
“People wanted good quality, good prints, nice designs, and good service-not an experience from the 80’s where you filled in a form, and you got a response three weeks later. These were things that weren’t revolutionary for us, but it was for the industry!”
One of the examples I always give is that we always make a visual representation- a mockup- of how the clothing is going to look, which seems very normal to do. But, when we started, we were the only ones who did it. Often, you just sent your logo to a screen printer and said put it in the middle somewhere around eight centimeters and it was never twice the same. So, this is an example of these very random things that were accepted in the markets, which were not logical at all to us because we didn't come from that market. We just saw, incrementally, that we needed to upgrade all these things.
That evolved to us now having a five-head fashion design team, designing in 3D for example, or designing from patterns that could match to H&M or Zara. This is now the level of design that the team is offering.
“This was a whole journey! We didn't start with, ‘We want to start a fashion company.’ My co-founder and I are not fashion gurus.”
But we learned the tools available for the fashion market to create nice designs, fabrics, colors, and cooler, oversized, urban fittings. If you went to the promotional market, it was just, ‘This is the plain T-shirt, and you can have it in 155 GSM or 175 GSM. Here are the seven colors you can choose from. You can put a print on the front and a print on the back.’
That was it, those were the only choices and that could serve about 80% of the market.
We decided that we wanted to go for that 20%. We want the companies who are building their own brands so carefully and intentionally. We want to give them these advanced opportunities in fashion to translate their brand into physical clothing that their ambassador stakeholders can wear.
Be Helpful:
It seems like you noticed a problem and saw an opportunity. What were the first conversations like with you and Steve about a business model and what was that first action?
Niels Vandecasteele:
Yes, we had a solution. We had the market. We put it together.
We met at a bar on a Monday evening here in our hometown and I said, ‘Okay, I did the math. We can do this!’
However, the business model was still different then because we approached it as pure merchandise. We were going to design the items, take stock, sell it online, and the artist was going to get a commission. But, after a couple of months, we immediately saw that it would be way too expensive to grow like that because we had all the risk and the earnings for the artists weren't big enough in this commission model. The problem was that they were paid 1000 Euros or dollars for a gig, but they would have to sell 400-500 T-shirts to get the same amount of money, which wasn't going to happen with these smaller DJs.
“We tried to have everything calculated for growth, we put it into reality, and then we saw it didn’t work and flipped it.”
We decided we are going to become a service supply for artists who are going to do it themselves. We are going to offer design and we can even offer the E-commerce webshop and logistics, but they're going to offer production because we are never going to take the stock risk.
This was the key moment that the business model flipped, and we started growing fast.
Be Helpful:
Talk a little bit about your growth as a company and your transition into a people manager. What was it like to be learning a new industry, figuring things out as you went, and then suddenly managing people?
Niels Vandecasteele:
We started as two entrepreneurs doing everything ourselves. That is one of the biggest challenges we’ve been working through- how do we become serving managers?
“Not telling people, ‘Just do it because we did it and now you have to figure it out.’ But more like, ‘Okay, these are the targets. This is the goal. These are the resources you have: one person on your team and this amount of money. We want to see reporting on this basis and if you need anything from us, we are doing to support you.’ And that’s like the Holy Grail, I would say, in management. And we are moving towards that, with a lot of humps and bumps and mistakes of course!"
When everything is going well, it’s easy to manage people. But, if things are going bad and there are challenges or you get disappointing numbers for example, how do you keep yourself from taking over the project, or jumping over a manager, or diving two levels lower? How do you stop yourself from saying, ‘Okay, I'm going to help you write this newsletter’ when there are two people doing that already?
So, that's another personal challenge because you come from a place of wanting to see things move fast but you don't want to create a political organization or too strict of levels.
“On the other hand, if you're going to do everything yourself, you don't need an organization!”
You need to leverage the strengths of these people and invest in them and help them be the best version of themselves.
Wearing Our Hearts on Our Sleeve
We all know that fashion is subjective and there is no one-size-fits-all. But what never goes out of style is a company that wears its heart on its metaphorical sleeve.
Sunday is not just about creating aesthetically pleasing clothes (that sometimes do have a heart on the sleeve, literally.)
They care deeply for the world and the people in it and are using dress to address our need to thread deeper meaning into our everyday lives.
In other words, you are what you wear. Don’t wait for someday to start wearing what you believe in. It’s time for Sunday to help you bring your brand and the brands you love to the closets and hearts of your community.
Don’t leave them hanging. Support Sunday by leaving a heart emoji in the comments below!
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