ImagesMagUK_August_2021

IS DECORATOR PROFILE www.images-magazine.com 34 images AUGUST 2021 A nthony Mellor had never seen an embroidery or screen print machine before he set up White2Label Manufacturing in 2018, but he was sure he had spotted A disruptive influence Anthony Mellor talks to Mark Ludmon about how he has set out to “disrupt an outdated industry” with his custom fashion apparel business White2Label Manufacturing The company’s current base in Basingstoke a gap in the market. At 18, he had founded his own sportswear fashion brand, Absolute Fitness Apparel, but was frustrated by the supply chain. “I could never find a decent supplier who would give you the time of day if you were ordering lower quantities,” he explains. “It was difficult to find suppliers who were transparent and reliable. I thought there must be an easier way of doing this.” He created White2Label as a manufacturing agency to supply retailers with customised garments in the fashion and sportswear sector, aiming to “disrupt an outdated industry”. Spurning ‘fast fashion’, he remains committed to providing high-quality clothing, decorating the company’s own blanks or creating unique bespoke garments from scratch. “We aim to tackle the smaller end of the fashion manufacturing sector where lots of start-ups sit, where they can’t commit to the high minimum orders imposed by overseas suppliers. They’re looking for a UK- based solution that has low minimums, fast turnaround times and allows them to test and find what works for their brand. It also allows larger businesses to be really, really agile.” Testing the model Anthony started out working from home and in coffee shops, outsourcing customisation to third parties, before investing in his first equipment in December last year. “I would bring in a client, source the product, send it to the printer, send the artwork, get the visual back, approve it and send it on,” he recalls. “It was a great model at the time, but the margins weren’t very good. It was a test to make sure that this concept worked. I knew I needed it, but I didn’t know if the market needed it. I realised very quickly it would work, but I didn’t realise the scale of it until summer of last year, when I realised how big this company could be.” In December, Anthony took on a factory unit in Basingstoke in Hampshire and bought his first kit – mostly secondhand. Covering 600 square feet, it houses a manual six- station six-colour Pegasus screen printing carousel and a four-head Inbro embroidery machine, plus a conveyor dryer from Wicked Printing Stuff and three heat presses. He also bought a new Roland Camm-1 GS-24 vinyl cutter because of its compatibility with Apple Mac computers. White2Label continues to run an office in Old Street in London and Anthony plans to relocate to a much bigger factory, probably around 2,000 square feet, when he has a break in the Basingstoke lease next year. At that point he plans to invest in more embroidery machines and possibly an automatic screen printer. “If we do this right, this can be an eight-figure business in 10 years, but we need to build the foundations of it from the ground up and implement our own processes and systems and hire good talent.” Anthony admits that, while he always loved fashion, he knew nothing about the practicalities of decorating when he started. As most of the equipment came secondhand, he was unable to draw on distributors’ support. While he quickly learned how to use the equipment, he Customised garments for SBX Train