The University of Nevada, Reno’s very own clothing entrepreneur
Jacob Kostuchowski reports on a young entrepreneur based in Reno, Nevada, who sells anime based clothing designs. And what it is like being a student running their own business.
Any university campus is going to have a plethora of different people with different experiences and wants in life. They might even have people who are looking to be their own bosses, looking to be entrepreneurs. Francisco Moreno, 20, is one of those people.
Moreno is a business student at the University of Nevada, Reno and last year at the age of 19 he decided that he was going to start his own clothing brand. He decided he wanted to focus on anime, Japanese cartoons, inspired designs. More specifically he wanted to focus on a show called JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
“So the whole idea that started it was I really liked this show called JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. And I really wanted clothes for it. But when I went online to look for clothes, I wouldn’t wear any of it because it’s all super flashy, super out there,” Moreno said. “So I decided I don’t think it’d be too hard to make simple designs. So I just made simple designs and they blew up.”
His brand is called Anime Galore and the focus is on minimal anime clothing designs. The brand’s slogan is “We don’t yell anime, we whisper it.” And his initial success started on social media where he had an Instagram and Tik Tok page where his content started to blow up. His Instagram has amassed 14.4k followers while his Tik Tok has nearly 50k followers respectively.
“TikTok is the best way to market your stuff right now. You just need one video to get like 100,000 views, which is not that much. It goes viral so fast,” Moreno said.
Because he runs his own social media pages the overhead costs for him are pretty minimal. He has even found that paying for promotion has been worse for him compared to just running things himself. Outside of any actual production costs he is only spending about $100 a month on his Shopify site and his Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
Moreno pretty candidly began to talk about how much money he has made and his profit margins. He did so because he feels that by being open about that type of information it shows that it is possible to become an entrepreneur.
“Then the second drop I made. That was like my biggest one. I think I made 65 [thousand] and then I pocketed around 30 to $32,000 but I always reinvest into the into the company.” Moreno continued to say, “But last year last year I made around $200,000 in revenue, but I only actually like I don’t know how much it was like pure profit because I kind of spent a lot of money last year just like reinvesting a lot of money back into it. I think 80 to 100. So yes, my profit margins are like 40 to 50%.”
This might seem like a lot for a person to balance being a student along with running their own brand. But Moreno does not seem to be phased by it. He actually finds it to be freeing because he does not have to answer to anyone but himself.
He finds time to balance both by working on a schedule that works for him. And it seems that his fans do not mind this at all.
“So, I mean, it’s just the flexibility of it really makes it. It’s like water. You know, it just kind of flows with whatever is actually solid around it being like school. So it just flows around that easily. There’s never really any friction between them,” Moreno said.
Moreno is actually planning on branching out and beginning another line of clothing called Ought. This time around he is planning on theming these items around philosophy, which has been a long time passion of his. He is planning on taking things slowly to really put his all into this next project of his.
He wants people who are planning on starting their own business to take the risk, because he believes that if you put the work in then you will see positive end results.
“Like, corny stuff is very, it’s corny, but it’s so true. It’s like, there could be someone who’s just naturally good at stuff, versus someone who’s not naturally good at stuff.” Moreno continued, “But if the person who’s not good at things just puts in more time and effort into it, they’re gonna surpass the one who has that natural talent.”
