Ask HN: I want to start a clothing company.

This is the kind of post that makes HN awesome. A person can ask for help and get a response from someone experienced in that area.

Do you want clothes manufactured, or just printed on?

That is, when you say 'design clothes' do you mean material, cut, and construction, or jut a picture on any old t-shirt or tank?

What contributes to an item of clothing being 'well made', in your eyes?

I once started a t-shirt business in Italy with some friends. It was hard and by the time we were done we made only a little profit. We were doing t-shirts and sweaters, based on some 70' italian b-movie. You could go to some local distributor for t-shirts, starting from brands like Hanes, and then take it to a company who can do the printing and tagging. Basically print or stitch your graphics on the clothes and then replace the original tag with your own ones (that of course you need to get printed somewhere else).

This thread (and especially this post) are interesting to me because I have considered -- on and off since I was a teen -- designing/making my own clothes (to meet my special needs) and, recently, toyed with the idea of doing something like that as a business (and all but dismissed the idea out of hand as just too much trouble).

Any thoughts on finding/making cotton-silk blend knits (for women)? I rarely can find this but it is awesome when I can. Silks are too expensive and too fragile for my lifestyle and rarely come in knits. They shrink horribly when washed and just don't stand up to my lifestyle (which is rooted in keeping everything clean enough to stay well in spite of my medical condition, and dry-cleaning is not acceptable as I react badly to the chemicals). Most knits are cotton-polyester, not acceptable in my book. I don't wear polyester....etc...etc.

I have gone so far as to look over a few websites that I felt had good online shopping interfaces for clothing. Most of them suck big time. I tend to prefer to shop in person for clothes, in part because most online clothes shopping is so bad.

So I have played with the idea a bit. I looked up a site called "French Rags" because I know they do mass customization and they sell knits. But it turns out they use a yarn blend I don't want (IIRC: cotton-acrylic). Good quality affordable clothes is really tough to find. Nylon and some spandex is also acceptable for me. But polyester is absolutely unacceptable, most other synthetics are not really very acceptable, and 100% cotton wrinkles so bad and therefore is too high maintenance. Most of the clothes I buy is 95% cotton, 5% spandex or 90% nylon and 10% spandex. I don't own an iron but can't afford to show up at work all wrinkled -- it's a violation of the dress code. Knits with a little spandex generally avoids that issue altogether.

So, I have thought about a DIY approach to solve my problem and also thought that the amount of work involved, well, it might make sense to do it as a business rather than jump through all these hoops to dress one person.

There's also recently-launched Garmz, which lets users vote on designs before commissioning production. http://garmz.com/ (disclosure: I personally know one of the founders)