Too Specific Is Kind of the Point

There is already enough clothing in the world designed to offend absolutely nobody, confuse absolutely nobody, and appeal vaguely to everybody.

We are not particularly interested in adding more of it.

Hustle City Clothing has always worked better when an idea is a little too specific. A graphic T-shirt built around a joke that only the right person immediately understands. A bag labeled with exactly the things somebody actually carries. Queer streetwear that does not sand off the queer part to make it easier to merchandise. Underwear with options specific enough that a normal size dropdown stops being useful.

Sometimes the reaction we want is not, “That’s nice.”

It is, “Wait. Who made this?”

That distinction matters.

Niche Clothing Is Still Clothing

“Too niche” gets treated like a warning in fashion and ecommerce. Make the product broader. Make the joke safer. Make the design more universal. Make sure everybody can imagine buying it.

But everybody is not the customer for every product.

The person who instantly understands a weird graphic tee, a queer inside joke, an aggressively specific accessory, or a custom jockstrap is often much more interested than somebody who merely thinks a product is pleasant.

That is one reason we make alternative streetwear, graphic T-shirts, queer clothing, custom underwear and accessories that are allowed to have an actual point of view.

Specificity gives a product context. It gives somebody a reason to remember it.

And sometimes it gives them the deeply important experience of pointing at their phone and saying, “Oh my God, this is literally for me.”

The Product Usually Starts With a Problem

Some of our strangest products exist because the normal version did not quite do what we wanted.

That has been especially obvious with our men’s underwear and queer fashion.

Standard sizing assumes a lot. Standard underwear construction assumes a lot. Even the usual categories—brief, jockstrap, thong—can start feeling oddly restrictive when somebody wants the front of one style, the back of another, a particular waistband, a different pouch size, a zipper, custom text or a fabric nobody else is offering.

So we build around the actual request instead.

That thinking eventually led us to things like our custom jockstrap builder and our briefstrap: products that exist because “pick one of these three standard choices” was not always a satisfying answer.

It is also why we do custom clothing at all.

Sometimes somebody has an idea so specific that a mass retailer would never bother making it.

That is precisely when it gets interesting.

Weird Does Not Automatically Mean Good

There is an important distinction here.

Making something unusual does not automatically make it brilliant.

We have made products we loved that customers basically looked at and said, in the most economically devastating way possible, absolutely nothing.

That is useful information.

A memorable concept still has to become a product somebody wants badly enough to buy. There is a difference between an idea being clever, a design being visually strong and an item actually earning a place in somebody’s closet.

We pay attention to that difference.

Some designs disappear quietly. Others unexpectedly become best sellers. Sometimes one version of an idea works while another version of the exact same concept goes nowhere.

That is part of making things.

The goal is not to declare every weird idea secretly genius. The goal is to give good weird ideas enough room to prove themselves.

Made to Order Makes Experimentation Possible

Our made-to-order clothing model helps.

Traditional apparel businesses often have to make a fairly large bet before they know whether an idea works. That can mean boxes of unsold shirts, unwanted sizes and perfectly usable products eventually becoming clearance inventory or waste.

We normally make the product after somebody orders it.

That lets us offer more unusual graphic tees, queer apparel and niche designs without pretending we already know exactly how many people will want them.

It also means a design does not necessarily need mass-market demand to deserve to exist.

If twelve people absolutely love something bizarre, we would rather make twelve of them than manufacture 500 and hope for the best.

Less guessing. Less waste. More strange little ideas surviving in the world.

That works for us.

Search Engines Like Specificity Too

There is another advantage to making highly specific products: people search specifically.

Someone is rarely sitting at Google typing only “shirt.”

They are searching for a particular graphic T-shirt, a custom jockstrap, queer streetwear, a funny gay shirt, an unusual backpack, alternative clothing, a specific phrase, a particular aesthetic or something they saw once and cannot quite describe.

Specific products naturally create specific language.

And specific language helps search engines understand what a page is actually about.

That does not mean stuffing fifty awkward keywords into a product description until it reads like it was written by a malfunctioning catalog robot.

It means accurately describing what we actually made.

If something is a custom jockstrap, we call it a custom jockstrap.

If it is queer streetwear, gay apparel, an alternative graphic tee or made-to-order clothing, we are not particularly interested in inventing vague luxury language to avoid saying so.

Customers should understand what they found.

Google should too.

Being Memorable Beats Being Generic

The internet gives small brands access to an enormous audience.

It also puts them next to an enormous amount of incredibly forgettable stuff.

We cannot out-manufacture the biggest clothing companies. We cannot produce 14,000 styles and put them in warehouses around the country. We have no interest in trying.

What we can do is make something they probably would not.

Something too specific.

Something slightly inappropriate.

Something built around a joke, identity, problem, reference or request that somebody in a corporate product meeting would immediately try to broaden until there was nothing interesting left.

We would rather keep the interesting part.

Hustle City Clothing makes graphic streetwear, queer clothing, custom underwear and accessories in St. Louis with a fairly simple philosophy:

If a product feels like it was made for absolutely everybody, there is a decent chance it was really made for nobody in particular.

We like particular.

Too specific is kind of the point.