From ready made tees to the eyeopening Canton Fair in Guangzhou to sourcing from local factories. This is our journey.
Back in early 2018, Woofpacks.co was still a small brand, or more of a side hobby. We were producing very small amount of shirts from ready made tees, selling mostly to friends & families. But the truth is it's not enough to make it into something, something that can send messages to more people, or even to make a living. How do you continue to do what you love if you can't even feed yourself right?
Later that year, the team decided to give it a try, to change Woofpacks.co into a proper brand, a real business. In the results of that, we visited the eyeopening Canton Fair in Guangzhou to source for suppliers as well as new ideas for the upcoming collection. Now, probably every fashion brand owner have visited Guangzhou and most of them have been to the Canton Fair, but words cannot explain the scale of the fair as compared to any fair we have in Malaysia. It's hall after hall and rows after rows of suppliers offering the same product, all with similar prices. The downside? Due to the differences in scale of business, their MOQ is way higher than what we were looking for to start an apparel brand in Malaysia.
After spending weeks in Guangzhou, we came back with a list of suppliers and bags full of sample to go through. But the real issue is money. We were all young adults and not ready to start off our first release with thousands of shirts in stock. So even though we have a list of suppliers, we continued hunting for local factories with lower MOQ to kick off the new era for Woofpacks.co.
It's fair to say that fate was on our side because we met our first supplier when casually drinking coffee at a cafe we goes to regularly and that's how we got started. In November 2018, we launched our first collection featuring 6 different designs in 2 different colors at the first ever Artbox Malaysia.