Q- What inspired you to start your streetwear brand?
A- It started from a meme page. This was from like year nine, maybe GCSE. Cause me and my boy met in art well, not met, but like we knew each other. But we got closer in art, made the meme page, started making a bit of money from that. And then we were like, What? 16? And we've already made a bit of money from social media.
So naturally, the next step is just to keep on going. Maybe that's trying to make a clothing brand or something. Like we said as a joke and then thought of a name, it took us literally 12 hours on the phone to just come up with the simple name Solitaire.
Q- What sets it apart from others in the industry?
A- So what really sets us apart is the fact that we've got a theme. It could be a bit tacky or corny, but you don't really see brands with a theme that they can play off. I don't want to throw people under the bus or like give an example, but a lot of brands are to do with grinding or trapping or making money when you've got a solid base like Solitaire that anyone can buy from anyone could really associate with.
I feel like you just have way more avenues to go into. Even right now, we still have so many ideas that we can play off, like playing on words, different games, different essences of gambling, the Vegas lifestyle. You know what I mean, like, there's just a lot more that we can do. Literally just simply with the name, and I feel like such a strong starting point because we need a name a lot of people can resonate with.
Q- What does Solitaire London mean? Where did the name and logo come from, and how do they reflect the brand's identity?
A- When people ask ‘what does Solitaire London mean?’, we just sat down and were thinking, we need a name. But as I said before, we needed a name that we can do a lot with, not a name that we're kind of boxed into one thing. A name that we can branch out, do whatever we want. Play on this theme and play on that theme and make things for girls, guys, and branch out to accessories if we want to.
So we had that in mind, and we started brainstorming. I genuinely don't know where Solitaire came from, but I think I said it, and it was going to be longer, it was going to be like Solitaire diamonds or some shit, but we were like nah, let's not take the piss. We tried to do like ‘Solitaire Diamante’ to make it sound foreign, make it sound a bit more luxury, but we said nah let's just stick to our roots, Solitaire London because obviously we're from London and we've already got Solitaire, which sounds nice. It just sounded nice when I said it. We were like, Yeah, that might be the one. And then that's how it started.
For the logo. I think when we had Solitaire, the first logo that popped into both of our heads, it was literally the spade emoji. Then I turned it upside down and was like we should go with this. And it just hit straight away. We went to a designer on Fiver and got a proper logo. That's the one that you'll see on our Instagram. It's just an upside-down spade. We got it made literally like five or six years ago, and we haven't really changed it since. It's not even really our logo, but it's our brand identity. That's what people know us from. They see that little spade in the corner, we put on the back of t-shirts just so that it's recognisable. So it's just little things like that. Just trying to build your brand up from just that one symbol. I feel like that's the best way to grow because I want it to be like when people see spades or suits or like any clothing to do with cards or that theme, they’ll think cool, that has to be Solitaire, no one else is doing that.
Q- What’s your creative process? What inspires you, and how do your inspirations turn into tangible designs that resonate with your audience?
A- Our creative process is weird. It's very weird because what inspires us is literally what we see. I'll see a design, and I’ll be saying I like this; I want to recreate it. And a lot of the stuff just stays in the archives cause we don't really want to put it out to the world. But we'll see some stuff like, yeah, we like this. How can we twist it? How can we put the Solitaire twist on it?
It's hard to explain the process, but for example. If you see something, and you're like, yes, I can put my twist on this. Once you do that successfully, then it's either ready to go to the world, or we can send it to our friends to see if they're feeling it and understand the concept behind it. For example, we have a race car t-shirt. What do races have to do with Solitaire? But then we bring it back to Solitaire, and you look at the t-shirts, you’ll see it has chess pieces in the back, the top is called Racing Kings, which is a type of chess that you play where you race each other’s kings to the end of the board. People won't really pick up on that stuff, but that's what goes into the design just to make it fit the theme.
That's why I feel getting a theme was important because you can take anything and recreate it, but make it yours. If we had a brand like TrapStar what more can you really do with that? Like, there's not much. How far can trapping go? Like, let's be real. So that's why we can literally draw inspiration from nine out of ten things that exist. Just twist it and find a way to make it Solitaire rather than just slapping the name on the front and putting in a design or graphic. We really want it to be that high-end fashion to a point. That's where it’s gonna get to eventually.
Q- Do you have any plans to collaborate with other brands in the future?
A- We have plans to collaborate with my boy; obviously, you've worked with Yakuza, Ryan. I really want to work with him eventually. I don't know how it's going to work, but I know it's going to work eventually, and I want to do stuff with Unknown UK, Trapstar obviously thats the goal. Corteiz is a bit tricky because they're so underground, but there are a lot of upcoming UK brands I would love to work with.
I've wanna work with a few more designers, I want to work with way more photographers. We don't do enough content, which is the most important part of having a brand, but obviously, uni, work, and life just get in the way sometimes, so it's not as easy as you think to just say yeah, we want to collab with you man, let's get this together, cause then now we need to think, how are we going to combine the fan bases so that they're invested into both of us? Because you can collab for one piece, but you really want to take their followers and make them yours and vice versa. So you need to find someone or find a brand that you can connect with or that you have matching values. You have matching identity's kind of thing because it's all well and good collabing with anyone, but if your themes don't match or if there's really no common ground to where a design can meet in the middle, I don't think a collab would work.
Q- Building a brand in the competitive streetwear market can be challenging. What strategies have you employed to grow your brand's presence and connect with your target audience, both online and offline?
A- Building the brand is the hardest part because, obviously, we started in sixth form in 2017, went to uni in 2018. No, it's been five years actually. Sorry, we started sixth form in 2018, and started Solitaire in 2019. So then we went to uni in 2020 and then that blew it all up. We went to different uni’s, there was no real motion in first year. Obviously you're still getting used to uni or making friends, but in the second year, we did a drop with tracksuits, the game over tracksuits, and we used TikTok. That was our first step into TikTok, and it blew up. When I tell you, that was the start of like thinking, okay, there's a future with this. Like not even just an immediate future that there's a genuine future, like this can start paying bills if we do this right.
So I think second year, when we started taking it a bit more seriously, we just started trying out different marketing techniques; TikTok was a good start that really got eyes on us. Then we moved back to Instagram because Instagram is really the main one. We started using Instagram ads, started putting way more money into ads, then I think we must have done one ad set and we just started seeing a lot more verified people liking our posts, engaging with our posts. Then Loski hit us up. That was the first real big celeb that tapped in, he was all like, I'm really feeling this. I want to buy something, but obviously, I'm not gonna let him buy it. So I just said, yeah bro, I’ll link up with you, take some pictures, get some content and then obviously give you the clothes. He was like, yeah, that's calm. So I linked him and did all that. That then took us to another high because you've got that social proof, that social backing. When celebs that people fuck with, fuck with you, people are more likely to buy because, literally people really only buy stuff that they see other people wearing they'll say they don't, but people don't start trends themselves. People like following trends. That's how trends work.
So the aim now is just to get the biggest people we can involved. Whether it's an influencer or a rapper. Just literally anyone with any form of motion, try and get them in the clothes and then other people will just think, this is cool. That's how the world works. That's mainly my aim for marketing. Connecting with the target audience, I literally just talk on the story. I don't do it as much anymore because we're tryna keep it mysterious like are they dropping, are they not dropping, what's going on? Is Solitaire still about? I like the air of mystery, and it feeds into the Solitaire name as well. You don't really wanna be to talky with your fans. Obviously, in the DMs we’re talking. We're going to try to email marketing a bit more, we haven’t really tapped into that one properly. Gonna try doing a few more Google ads. I want to do a pop-up, but I don't think we're big enough for one yet. I know for a fact it's going to be at least 500 people here. So at this stage, I'll say no to a pop-up, but there are so many ways you can grow your brand.
TikTok is your best friend, Insta is your best friend. Paying for ads could be your best friend, but we've been scammed in the past, so I'll say do it yourself. Don't go through another person. That's yeah, that's what I learned the hard way. But when you do it by yourself, you learn so much about ads, there are so many skills I've picked up literally like no one forced me to do a clothing brand. I don't even know how I fell into it. Like I'm not a fashion enthusiast. I just like creating stuff. So naturally, I just got an iPad, I started learning Photoshop, designing skills, photo editing and I’m trying some video editing. So now, if I'm really ready to take that step I can quit work and concentrate on the brand. I'm going to focus fully on Solitaire. I'm fully ready now. Yeah, I feel like that five years was kind of my learning process to just understanding how this business stuff works.
