Explore Zachary Moore's journey in the Fashion Design Industry

Yeah. I think of it in a literal sense in terms of planting your roots in a certain location.  For me, being rootless is having the freedom to travel, to pursue a dream, it means that you’re not cemented in one spot. I think part of that is literal and financial perhaps, with mortgages, car notes, children, things of that nature and part of it is a mentality about being flexible and adaptable and being willing to move, relocate and pursue something that you’re interested in and passionate about. – Zachary Moore

So my roots are in Washington DC, born there, raised there in the city until college. That’s kind of where the adventure started off. – Zachary Moore

Marketing. – Zachary Moore

It certainly didn’t happen overnight. There were a lot of internships. That’s the nature of the sports industry around here. I spent years figuring out what I liked, what I didn’t like, gaining experience and networking and leaving a good impression during those experiences. So coming out of school, I landed my first job based on a previous internship I had made a good impression with. The timing of an opening worked out when I was graduating. So, I ended up moving down to North Carolina to work for a sports marketing agency right out of school. – Zachary Moore

It was very exciting. I mean, when you grow up passionate about a sport such as soccer, for me, you are constantly researching products that brands are releasing and following teams that brands are sponsoring. Then, you suddenly start to get to work with those brands and those properties and teams and it’s kind of a dream fulfilled to some extent. – Zachary Moore

I maybe had an 8 to 6 routine with some days coming in a little bit earlier or some days staying a little bit later. The position I held was ‘Business Development Manager’. I worked closely with our partners at the agency on recruiting new business. So that was very exciting to be involved in conversations and be creating pitches for different partners. Obviously not what I had planned out, but it was just a good experience to start being in those rooms when conversations are had about how brands work with agencies and how brands work with teams and players and things of that nature. After that opportunity, I actually partnered up with someone I met through that agency who was looking to build an agency dedicated to cultivating soccer in the black community and creating a space for people who are already interested in soccer to just come together. There’s been a few positions since then. It was a great opportunity, I learned a ton. This was someone who had had some successful projects running things by himself, a business of one. So, I was kind of employee number two. We were able to do some really exciting things together to create some good content; landed a good partnership with an European team to promote them here in the US but ultimately there are sacrifices you have to make in a startup environment. – Zachary Moore

I think going into a startup, not all startups are the same and you have to weigh the financial compensation and the benefits that you’re getting in a job with the things that you’re learning and the experience that you’re gaining and the connections that you’re making. At that time, I weighed the experience and the networking and the skills more heavily than some of the compensation. I just kind of was getting enough to get by but I unfortunately had an accident playing soccer that required some surgery on my knee and that kind of tipped the scales where I needed to then focus on myself and my well-being, getting healthy and paying for some medical bills. That’s just kind of the grind of a startup in an agency. Sometimes your revenue isn’t consistent and you can go through lulls and then that affects you on a personal level. – Zachary Moore

I think I was in D.C. while I was working remotely for this agency, this startup based in Oakland, California and there was a moment when the founder was flying across the country to New York. I was taking a drive from D.C. to New York in order to close our first major deal with a European club who believed in what our vision was for them to come here and engage with soccer fans and grow their audience in the US with new, bold ideas. – Zachary Moore

I think what I had to learn along the way, that got me to where I am now, is that every business has objectives, every business has needs. It’s about being able to recognize what they are and help them achieve those objectives and be able to deliver value. So it took me a while to get to the point where I’m at, where I can start delivering that on my own independently, outside of a different organization but I’ve started there and I’m looking to grow that. So for me personally, that happens to be design, production strategy and promotion of different software projects. So I’ve learned to sow and I have my own equipment to put things together. I’ve learned how to dye clothing. I’ve learned how to work with different vendors to sort materials to customize jerseys. That’s all part of how I’m creating value for a brand new partner in bringing a new idea to life. – Zachary Moore

I mean, it’s a full package. I think the creative service industry is pretty wide and not everyone necessarily has to have all of those skills or any of those skills per se, you know, because there’s so many other things. There’s graphic design, there’s illustration, there’s photography, videography but, again, it’s about finding that niche that makes you special that no one else can necessarily copy. For me, it was kind of combining those things into a one stop shop for different people and brands. – Zachary Moore

So, the company I work for is ‘Founder Sport Group’ and they are a B2B manufacturer of on field and off field sports apparel for clubs, teams, schools and corporate businesses. On a day to day basis, I help all of our partners across the country. We have north of 20,000 different accounts and these will be local sporting goods stores, decorators who buy our product, apply logos to it for their customers, screenprint, embroider it and sell it on to a school. My day to day focus is making sure they have all of the assets they need digitally and have the tools to promote and sell their products. – Zachary Moore

Yes. I guess you would label it ‘Creative Director’ because it’s pretty all encompassing being a team of one. It is a business but it’s also kind of like art in the sense that there’s things that I create because I want to create them and they’re not attached to a brand and I want to put that idea out there because it’s something that I’ve been thinking over and producing. Those things also in turn kind of attract eyeballs for me to have conversations about what I can design for brands. – Zachary Moore

I would really say hone in on a skill, being a Swiss Army knife and being well rounded is certainly helpful at all times to be able to take on different responsibilities on a team. A team is generally composed of people who have complementary skills and are specialized in a specific area. So I would say, look at something specific that you know or want to know and grow that skill to a point where it becomes an asset to an organization that they would want to bring you in. – Zachary Moore

Yeah, I think sports in general, are always looking for interns, be that teams, agencies, brands. It can be highly competitive because it is an attractive industry with benefits such as attending games or events hosted by brands and teams but they’re always out there. I think it’s about understanding where those opportunities are, putting yourself out there and making yourself competitive with good experience on your resume. It’s kind of a catch that you need internships to get internships but I think for a lot of young people who are looking to crack in, sometimes, especially in this age of social media, you don’t need to have an internship nowadays. You can have your own Instagram account, Twitter account where you are showcasing your skills in a platform that represents what you can do for a brand. If you’re consistent in building that outlet, it doesn’t need to have the most followers, but if you have consistency over time, they can see your work. – Zachary Moore

Absolutely. I think identifying what it is specifically that you want to learn or need to learn is key. Then, being able to identify how you go about acquiring that skill follows. So for me for example, I knew that there were concepts I wanted to create that required sewing and sending those pieces to a tailor to do it on my behalf was just too expensive because of the time that goes into it and what they’re charging per hour or per project. So, I needed to learn that skill myself in order to bring these ideas to life. So I started Googling different kinds of sewing classes in my area and attended one. I was the youngest person there by maybe 40 years and I know it’s a little uncomfortable being in a setting where I was struggling to do the most basic of things, not understanding how to use a sewing machine but you learn enough from a class like that or whatever class you might be taking for the skill that you want to learn to kind of get you going and kickstart you. From there, I would say YouTube is honestly the biggest resource that people can leverage. It’s free education, you know. So, every time there was a skill along the way that I didn’t know that I could use, I needed to take that next step. It’s a resource I could turn to and figure it out piece by piece until those skills became second nature and routine for me to apply to my work. – Zachary Moore

I think referring to this time and how the day is structured or how much I’ve come up, I think the past 18 months have been a really unique time for anyone professionally, be it people who kept their jobs in their field and how they had to adapt within. There are people that lost jobs within the field. For me, the sports industry was hit really hard during COVID when kids of all ages and adults were not playing sports. So no one was buying sports apparel or sports products and that kind of put a freeze on everything. So, I ended up on a furlough, which was one of the most difficult periods of my life, but also a blessing in disguise because I had this time away from work where I really could kind of hone in on my craft and my passion and dedicate myself full time to what I wanted to do to build out this portfolio so that when things returned back to some sense of normalcy, I was ready to engage people in conversations with a portfolio of what I could do for them and create different pitches. – Zachary Moore

I think the initial idea of a design can be anywhere from five to 10 to 15. It really depends on the design and how many components there are to it. Is it one jersey that’s unique? Is it a series of multiples that are the same or different? I think they’re all factors that count and then there’s actual production and prep for that and that can be anywhere from 5 to 20 hours per jersey. It really depends. There’s also the marketing promotion of a piece, which is kind of on the shorter end of things, maybe like 5 hours in terms of just packaging everything neatly, being able to distribute it in a clean email that articulates what’s the concept behind the design, if any promotion of fundraisers is part of it. In terms of the full project, it’s definitely a full circle process So, on top of a 40 hour workweek, or 40 hour plus, it’s squeezing in a couple hours every night, a few more on the weekend or sometimes, you might just be exhausted during the week and not be able to squeeze some hours in there and then take a Saturday and Sunday and work a full day on your own startup. You can exhaust a lot of time and the potential client might decline and I think for a lot of people that can be discouraging. However, being persistent, being able to overcome the obstacles and those rejections is essential to make it. You never know when a ‘no’ is a know or if it’s just kind of a ‘maybe’. One of my biggest successes so far resulted from a ‘no’. Last July, as I was just starting out, I proposed a project to someone and reached out and we had three or four emails. They ultimately passed on the project and I didn’t hear from them for six, seven months, and all of a sudden they hit me up with an email saying they’d love to work with me. That happened because I took the time to do the work the right way to really invest in that and then it kind of came back later on. – Zachary Moore

I think you need to be able to evaluate yourself honestly on the quality of your work and constantly strive to keep improving it. No one’s work is ever perfect. There’s always room for growth. So regardless of whether you’re having successes or failures, I think it’s essential to strive to get better. I also think part of it is always your network, your friends and family, whether they’re encouraging you, supporting you and taking a long term perspective on it. If you are in the creative service industry and you have a creative skill, I think artists are a good frame of reference for this kind of success. The biggest artists in the world are generally not overnight successes. It takes days, weeks, months, years, decades for them to keep working at something, to potentially see success and have that become a fruitful career, even monetarily, or just recognized. Some people never see their work recognized while they live it. No one wants to hear that but it doesn’t mean that if you’re not recognized at any given moment, your work isn’t valid or worth it. So it’s just about being consistent, being able to keep going and grow. – Zachary Moore

For me personally, I’ve structured my business strictly online as a way to manage overhead and at this point in time, I don’t physically have an abundance of products for people to walk in and buy because it’s so customized. That’s because it takes a lot of time and has such a high price tag with the labor that’s gone into it that it’s more suited for brands for an all encompassing project where those kinds of higher ticket items can be purchased. I think given that it’s all online, how you represent yourself visually is key for people to engage and have a sense of emotion about your product. So that’s actually something I don’t do myself. I don’t do any of the photography, but I’m lucky to to work with and collaborate with good friends and people I’ve met online who help bring those to life visually. – Zachary Moore

I think it really just boils down to the brand that you are building and what you want it to be, what vision you have for it. If it is a traditional apparel brand, where you have seasonal releases or drops of different apparel and you are building your brand name, it’s more of a collaboration where it’s kind of equal weight to both brands and you want to have some characteristics of your brand come through as well. Personally, I like to take a backseat to other brands and take a bit more of a selfless approach to it and just focus myself in their brand and bring something to life for their fans or their consumers. I think you still have to be cognizant of building your brand and your name. So for me, what that looks like is a small tag on any jersey where it’s not in your face that I’ve made it. However, if you’re looking closely, it has that mark for you to know where it came from. – Zachary Moore

I think at times it can be a misconception that people might steal your ideas in a creative space, even in a sports space but for me personally, I have a really good network of friends who also work in the industry that can be a sounding board. If I’m working on an idea, I can present some of the raw design mockups of what I’m looking to go for, and they’ll provide me some honest feedback on things I might want to consider taking with or changing. Above that, I think for anyone entering this, it’s okay to be part of a team. You don’t necessarily have to do everything yourself. For me, part of that was realizing that photography was never going to be my strength so I should partner with people who are also trying to make it in the industry. You want to build a name for yourself and then collaborate. I let them help me as I help them through these projects. – Zachary Moore

I think a lot of the good pitches that I’ve been able to present started with me initiating the conversation. So, I think that for anyone getting into creative services or sports, a resource like LinkedIn is incredible where you can reach out to people, start a conversation. Instagram is another one. A lot of people have their positions and titles in their bios and are kind enough to accept invites. Just feel free to just send someone a LinkedIn message or an Instagram to you. You never know what’s going to come from it. When you see people’s work and it’s good work, let them know, leave a comment and start building that relationship. If the time is right, if you have an idea for them, sometimes they’re willing to hear it if you have that initial connection. That’s worked well for me so far. I wouldn’t say I can do things better than other people who are already doing that. but I think for me personally, as it relates to soccer, a lot of teams are trapped in the confined structure of their brand partnerships. So, if a major sporting brand such as Nike or Adidas under our PUMA sponsors a club or a youth club, depending on the specifics, you have a home jersey, an away jersey, a third jersey, and that’s it. That’s all they’ll produce for you. So how do you get outside of that box? That’s where I’d like to kind of come in and help people. – Zachary Moore

I have engaged in sending free products to brands or influencers, people in media, but it’s something I don’t do heavily when it comes to a pitch because these concepts are so labor intensive to really dive into creating one. It also depends if you’re an illustrator and you think that someone’s social media account could really benefit from some of your creative cool drawings, make a few for a team, send it to let them give you feedback. Make one personally for their social media manager. It doesn’t necessarily have to be for the brand team or organization that he/she works for, but if it’s about something he/she is passionate about, that’s a way to showcase your skill to them and when an opportunity arises, they may look back and think of you for that opportunity. – Zachary Moore

I think to get started, you need to really determine what your business model is going to be. If you’re a brand producing apparel, jerseys, shirts, etc. are you B2C, a business to consumer where anyone across the country can buy things and it’s based on the number of units you can sell of a particular design or not, depending on what the price tag is going to be? Obviously, if there’s less of them, the price tag has to be much higher. If you’re making a lot of them, the price tag can be lower. Are you a B2B and you sell a package, something that really helps their brand stand out in the marketplace and the ROI is on what they can in turn sell to their fans? Maybe there’s a cause or a charity that they are really invested in as a brand, and this will help them raise funds because their fans have never seen something like what you’re creating and they’re going to want that and they’re willing to donate or they’re willing to provide information in the form of some type of questionnaire or form that the brand is interested in gaining information on about their fans and it just kind of creates that unique selling point for them. I think that, if you’re B2C, you need a website that can handle e-commerce for you to be able to put up product shots. If you’re B2B, it’s about being able to properly articulate your ideas if you can hone in on your pitch decks on your own, then you’re set. If you need a little bit of help there, that’s going to be a road that’s going to make your money or not. Then, obviously you need to be able to have some type of QuickBooks service, that’s perhaps going to handle invoicing for you as opposed to something that’s not e-commerce. – Zachary Moore

Youth clubs are particularly difficult, I would say. The quantity of pieces that they tend to need given the landscape now is in the several hundreds or thousands for any particular club and the benefits that they get from working with a major retail partner are kind of immense in terms of product and discounts on the jerseys themselves. So, there are a few key players that handle most of that industry. There are always going to be smaller clubs that need help, that want that personal relationship. They want to have someone they can connect with on the phone in person that they can reach out to in a bind that is going to give them a standard turn times of their orders made two or three months in advance. So there are other opportunities, but it’s about being resourceful and finding those, if that’s what you’re looking for. – Zachary Moore

The mentality that I have is simply: “Why not me?” I have a natural persistence and determination and if there’s something I’m set on, I won’t give up until I’ve achieved that. So I think it’s a double edged sword with social media because you can see opportunities that other people are landing and in turn, you can  visualize yourself getting there. So it’s motivational, but if you have some roadblocks, some stumbles along the way, it can make it hit twice as hard. Nonetheless, I think that’s where you need to have the determination to not give up, to believe that you can do it. Just keep persisting, keep persisting. You never know when that break can come through. – Zachary Moore

I would say the biggest mistake I’ve made, which I would advise people on, is properly sorting out your business and finances. So for me, this was an interest which turned into a hobby, which turned into a skill which gained some traction and started to pick up some revenue and projects along the way. I probably didn’t separate my personal finances and business finances early enough in terms of opening a separate bank account with a different credit card that I use in managing my expenses and being able to track things in that manner. – Zachary Moore

For the company that I work for, I would say it is bringing to life some of our new baseball and football products with a lifestyle photoshoot. So I was able to work with a photographer, recruit some high school models who play on varsity and JV teams, get them out in a field, get them wearing our brand’s product, get them hitting balls, catching footballs, fielding fly balls, that kind of thing. It looked super natural and made our product really attractive and created some assets that we can put in our emails, catalogs, and social media, distribute across our clients to really get them excited about our product and wanting to steer their customers in our direction. For me personally, with my startup “Participation Trophy Studio”, I would say it’s working with black players for change in Major League Soccer for Black History Month. As someone who is black and as a soccer fan growing up idolizing Major League Soccer and seeing what the players are doing at this moment in time, coming together, creating change, rallying around voting access to soccer, different initiatives it’s just really impressive and am proud to see and be able to work with them. It was a dream come true. – Zachary Moore

I think the sports landscape and the soccer landscape has been really disrupted over the last 12, 16 months and it’s starting to finally heal. I’m really looking forward to seeing fans back in stadiums. You know, businesses are starting to kind of heal and there is an opportunity next summer to have some of Europe’s biggest clubs and the world’s biggest players come to the U.S. again for another summer tournament. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to work with teams and educate them on the U.S. landscape, on the U.S. sports fan and what makes them different from someone who’s followed the game since they were five in England or Italy or France or Spain. There are different things that are part of our culture here that they might not know residing in a foreign country. There is the International Champions Cup, which is a major tournament that attracts the likes of Barcelona and Real Madrid and Chelsea and Arsenal. You could name so many different teams, Manchester United, etc but, they have a three or four tour stop at any given summer. Sometimes they go to the U.S, sometimes they go to Asia. If you are from Manchester, England, or if you’re from Turin, Italy, how are you supposed to know the difference between San Francisco and Kansas City and Orlando? How do you maximize your time there? Who are the teams, players, brands, businesses that you interact with while you’re there, how do you maximize your experience? I think there’s room for me to pitch teams on that and we’ll see if anything lands. – Zachary Moore

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t get too high on anything for one given day. Don’t get too low on anything. Just try and track your progress over time. Anyone can do it. I mean, if you have the determination, if you put the hours in, there’s no reason why you can’t gain a skill. I think another big part of that would be to focus on the skill. Don’t chase the money, but if you look to try and see where you can find a quick dollar and what you need to do for that, that can be fleeting. You can fall into some traps or some fads, but if you focus on developing a craft and you work on that over time, you’ll become an expert at that craft and the money will always follow at a certain point. – Zachary Moore