We had the good fortune of connecting with Tyler Wright and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Tyler, what is the most important factor behind your success?
Tenacity, patience, access, depth and huge amount of self awareness. Success is relative but the answer here is super clear to me. Keep at this even when it doesn’t make sense to. Building a business is hard, building a brand is even harder. A lot of people could do exactly what I’m doing, they just quit too soon. I needed to recognize super early that this business wasn’t going to be a casino or a lottery where I would win big all at once. It’s a long term investment that has been built mostly on losses.  Being accessible in meaningful ways to my audience has played a much more major roll in this than I expected. Just talking to the people who support Nothing Serious on a regular basis is huge. I try to respond to every DM, email or comment myself and I speak very candidly with everyone. I get as many questions about my day as I do questions about orders. I’ve talked on the phone at 3am with supporters who got stood up on a date just because they wanted to. I’m not a extroverted person but I care a lot about these people and being available to them provides depth with the brand that they’re not going to get with most any other brand. It’s gotten progressively more overwhelming to try and communicate in significant ways to everyone and recently I stumble more and more trying to keep up. There are so many things that fall on you as a business owner; but it’s a balance I value. The depth of the relationship I have with long term supporters is important and those people are the foundation to everything. It’s also important to be self aware; it’s easy to get caught up in looking a certain way to the public and play the “fake it until you make it” game. And we certainly did at first. Everything needed to be perfect; the content needed to look “professional”, whatever that actually means. Wanting to look like something we were not to people who had never even bought an item from us, which was silly. Wanting to appear successful right off the bat can rob potential customers from being part of the journey; people like to be a part of something. They want to be a part of the come up story and to feel like a part of the brands growth and success. A mistake that, without proper attention and self awareness, could of killed off the brand before it even got started.
Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
The first ever NS product was a single color white screen printed t-shirt that is still available on nothingseriousclothing.com today, the goon mask tee. We showed up at a sneaker convention, couldn’t afford a booth so we waited in line, entered as regular attendees and basically pretended to be a vendor. While selling shirts out of a box with sharpie and cardboard price tags. I went around to large booths at the show asking for supplies saying: “Hey they forgot to give us enough chairs. Can I grab one of yours?” or asking for coat hangers from clothing booths. Actually made some long term connections by doing that. We spent the rest of the trip taking edgy photos around Atlanta and getting flamed on Reddit for how corny they were. But off the back of raw sales talent and a dope design we sold enough shirts to go to another show and even got our own dinky booth. We spent two to three years traveling the country, going to live events meeting people, selling shirts and making no money. Hundreds of internal arguments, thousands of miles driven and flown. Multiple cars crashed or destroyed. Run ins with con-artists, scammers and thieves. Sleeping on floors, sharing hotels all of this made for countless lessons and connections, and getting to learn the industry in intimate ways. Nothing Serious is easily the fastest growing brand in it’s sector today I’m not even sure if 2nd place is close. There is still a ton to do before this story is over but it’s already been the most ridiculous singular endeavor of my life.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
You know I’m not sure. Particularly with COVID at the moment and the circumstances surrounding the fragile health of my imediate family there are not a lot of options for a week long trip. I’m an introvert, not the most social dude. I’d probably hit little 5 to find some vintage clothes, lace them in that and my own clothes for some fun candid photos. Then hit east Atlanta village for some cool food, more photos. Truth be told, we would probably just work.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Who wouldn’t I shout out? So many people have helped NS. The friends who have posed in photos for no money. Done make up work for video shoots just because they want to help. There are specific people I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to pay back for the love and support they’ve shown me. At more formal levels, my friends at beercanboards and ghost boards for helping when they didn’t have to. Joel and Russ have had impacts on the brand and me personally to a degree they probably don’t even realize. My family for being supportive when they could. Most importantly the brand supporters, the guys and girls on Instagram or in our group chats that I talk to regularly. Even the people I’ve never spoken with or have never spent a dollar with NS that consume my content on a regular basis, that’s huge to me. I could spend alot of time answering this question and name a ton of people specifically. I’m a huge proponent of help. But I dont want to Dox anyone and the people I referenced know that I’m talking to them. This journey would of been much harder and much less pleasant without all of them.

Website: Nothingseriousclothing.com

Instagram: Instagram.com/nothingseriousclothing

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nothingserious-tyler

Image Credits
Stephen Bradford Conner Ellis Michael Shuman Rachel Kepley Chase Dance Shihab Algawad

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