I built a fashion brand with $200 and a debit card

Every business I have ever built started the same way: I noticed something that annoyed me, I convinced myself I could fix it, and I massively underestimated how long the fixing would take. Roses On Roses was the first time I ran that loop all the way through⁠—from a $200 seed to five-figure revenue to a real pitch deck with real projections⁠—and it is still the venture I learned the most from, even though it is not the one I talk about on YouTube.

This post condenses every public interview I did about the brand⁠—Voyage LA, Thrive Global, Disrupt Magazine, Wink, TheQuirkyDrama, a MarketerMedia press release, plus numbers I have never shared publicly⁠—into the version I wish someone had written for me before I started.

The thesis is simple: the thing that teaches you to build is almost never the thing you end up building.

I started coding my freshman year of high school in Saratoga, California. By junior year I could build websites, but I had no product to put on one. What I did have was a frustration with mainstream fashion⁠—the same prints recycled across the same fast-fashion racks, priced like they were special, falling apart after three washes. I was buying $30 shirts and replacing them every semester. The quality math did not work.

There was a rose bush in my backyard. Massive thing. Roses stacked on roses, all blooming from the same batch of roots. I liked the image⁠—interconnected, rooted, growing outward from one source. That became the brand name, the logo, and eventually the philosophy: True To Our Roots.¹

I was seventeen. I had $200 and a debit card. I had no employees, no warehouse, no idea what a wholesale margin was supposed to look like. So I did the only thing that made sense: I started anyway.

Here is the part nobody tells you when you launch a clothing brand in your garage.

A blank hoodie costs me $18 wholesale. Manufacturing⁠—screen printing or embroidery, depending on the design⁠—brings that to $25. I sell it for $70 retail. That is a 64% gross margin on paper, which sounds incredible until you subtract the things that are not on paper: shipping materials, fulfillment labor, returns, Facebook ads that convert at 2.3% on a good day, and the influencer packages you send out hoping for a Story post that may or may not come.

T-shirts are tighter. $9 wholesale, $13 manufactured, $35 retail. The margin percentage is similar but the absolute dollars are smaller, which means your ad spend has to be proportionally more efficient or you lose money on every shirt you sell through paid channels.²

"The first rule of pricing: your margin is not your margin until you subtract everything you forgot to subtract." — someone, probably, but I learned it from a spreadsheet

In the last twelve months of active operation, Roses On Roses moved 805 units for $30,800 in revenue. Lifetime sales hit $71,689. Those are real numbers from a real business run by a college student with no debt, no outside funding, and a fulfillment partner in Syracuse, New York who shipped everything within fourteen business days. I am not embarrassed by those numbers; I am proud of them. They are also small enough to teach you things that larger numbers hide.

Between 2017 and 2020, I did six press features. Voyage LA, Thrive Global, Disrupt Magazine, Wink, TheQuirkyDrama, and a MarketerMedia press release for our Heartbreak Collection. Reading them back now is like reading someone else's diary. The kid in those interviews was confident, optimistic, and wrong about several things⁠—but right about the ones that mattered.

The Voyage LA interview was the most honest. I told them: "Ideas are plentiful and without the correct execution, they are worth nothing." I also told them not to partner with friends. Both of those statements have aged well. The interviewer asked about setbacks. I talked about time management⁠—choosing the brand over social obligations, learning to say no to things that felt urgent but were not important. My father had taught me to file my own business taxes. That sounds minor. It is not minor. Understanding where your money goes is the difference between a business and a hobby.³

The Thrive Global piece focused on stress management. I was running a brand with 40,000 followers across platforms while enrolled full-time studying Computer Engineering. My system was simple: meditate first thing in the morning instead of checking my phone, journal before bed, read one book per month. The books I recommended then⁠—The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Outliers, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The 4-Hour Workweek, The Power of Habit⁠—are the same books every twenty-year-old entrepreneur recommends, because they work.

Disrupt Magazine wrote about our influencer partnerships. Mike Majlak, Nessa Barrett, Gianni & Kyle. The strategy was care packages: ship them a box of merchandise, give them a personalized discount code for their audience, and hope the economics work out. Sometimes they did. Sometimes a $300 package produced zero trackable sales. The lesson: influencer marketing is a portfolio bet, not a sure thing; you need volume to find the ones who actually convert.⁠⁴

Wink Magazine quoted me saying "clothing is a blank canvas for my mind to paint." I still believe that, though I would phrase it differently now. What I meant was that the designs came from my own experiences⁠—not from trend forecasting, not from copying what was selling on other Shopify stores. I would sketch a mockup, send it to several outsourced international artists, and whichever result aligned with my taste got screen printed or embroidered onto the fabric. The aesthetic was dystopian, futuristic, Rose-inspired. Our target audience was sixteen to twenty-one. We priced between $30 and $75.

TheQuirkyDrama captured something I had not articulated well anywhere else: "My vision for the brand is that it should grow with me as I grow and progress through life." That turned out to be prophetic⁠—just not in the direction I expected. The brand grew with me right into a different industry.

In 2020, I put together a fundraising plan for a $50,000 investment. Here was the allocation:

Marketing (35%): Influencer care packages and personalized discount codes. The playbook that was already working, scaled up.

Advertisements (25%): Facebook and Google ads. Retargeting customers who initiated checkout but bounced, prospecting lookalike audiences. This was the lever with the most measurable ROI.

Promo materials (10%): Stickers, flags, flyers, and a professional promo video for the Winter collection filmed on location with an influencer. Brand-building spend that does not convert directly but makes everything else convert better.

Inventory (10%): Fund the Winter collection production and design work. You cannot sell what you have not manufactured, and manufacturing has a lead time that punishes you for being late.

Popup shop (20%): One week in California, carrying the new Winter drop and best sellers. A majority of our U.S. customers were in California; meeting them in person was overdue.

The projected revenue was $45,000 for 2020 and $125,000 for 2021. The key assumptions were an improving post-Covid economy, timely collection launches, increased web traffic, and⁠—this was the ambitious one⁠—placement in top apparel retailers like Pacsun.

I never raised that $50,000. Not because the plan was bad, but because I had started building something else.

Every single feature described Roses On Roses as the destination. The brand I was going to scale, the company I was going to run for the next decade. Disrupt Magazine mentioned plans for brick-and-mortar stores in San Francisco and LA, a swimwear line, a loungewear expansion. TheQuirkyDrama framed me as a fashion founder, full stop.

None of them captured what was actually happening underneath. I was studying Computer Engineering at USC. I was building websites. I was learning to think in systems⁠—inputs, transformations, outputs, feedback loops. The clothing brand was teaching me operations, marketing, supply chain, customer psychology, and cash flow management. It was not preparing me to be a fashion mogul. It was preparing me to be an automation builder.

My thesis is that the pattern here is the next insight: the skills transfer, the product does not. Every interesting thing I do now⁠—deploying AI agents for plumbing companies, building voice bots for med spas, running an automation consulting practice⁠—uses muscles I first developed packing hoodies into mailers in my parents' garage. Understanding unit economics. Running Facebook ads with a budget that punishes waste. Managing international contractors. Shipping on a deadline. Reading a spreadsheet and knowing which numbers are real and which are aspirational.

Here is what the rose bush in my backyard actually taught me, reframed as a framework for anyone building their first business:

1. Roots before roses. The bush blooms because the root system is massive and healthy. You do not see the roots. Nobody writes press features about your roots. But the roots are: your understanding of your margins, your relationship with your manufacturer, your ability to read a P&L, your willingness to file your own taxes. Get the roots right and the roses take care of themselves.

2. Seasons are real. Roses On Roses sold different products in different seasons⁠—t-shirts and crop tops in summer, hoodies and beanies in winter. Every business has seasonality; the mistake is pretending it does not exist. Plan your cash flow around the cycles, not against them.

3. Pruning is not failure. I stopped actively running the brand. The website says "Coming Soon." Some people would call that a failure. I call it pruning. You cut back the branches that are not producing so the energy flows to the ones that are. The energy that used to go into Roses On Roses now goes into Kingstone Systems, Ciela AI, my YouTube channel, and consulting. The roots are the same roots.

4. Every rose grows from the same batch of roots. That was the original brand philosophy⁠—interconnectedness, community, shared origin. It applies to careers too. My fashion brand, my e-commerce experience, my six-figure scale-up, my pivot to AI⁠—they look like different roses. They are the same root system.⁠⁵

You are right that ideas are worthless without execution. You are wrong about the timeline. You think this brand is the execution. It is the training ground for the execution. The execution has not started yet.

You are right to avoid partnering with friends. You are wrong about why. It is not because friends are unreliable; it is because the hardest conversations in business are about money and direction, and friendship makes those conversations harder to have honestly.

You are right to meditate before checking your phone. You will still be doing that in 2026. The books you are recommending are fine. You will read better ones.⁠⁶

You are right that clothing is a blank canvas. You will eventually realize that automation workflows are also a blank canvas, and the designs you sketch for agents will feel exactly like the mockups you send to your artists⁠—a vision that needs to be translated by someone (or something) with different skills than yours.

Keep packing the hoodies. The margins matter more than you think.

¹ The brand donated a percentage of every order to the American Rose Society. That was a real commitment, not a marketing line. Charitable giving when you are running on $200 of startup capital is a character decision.

² Over fifty products were available at peak. T-shirts, hoodies, crop tops, shorts, hats, long sleeves, jackets, socks, beanies. All manufactured and packaged by a fulfillment partner in Syracuse. Every piece handcrafted using what I genuinely believe was the industry's softest cotton. I am biased.

³ His exact words were not "file your own taxes." His exact lesson was: understand every dollar that comes in and every dollar that goes out. The tax filing was just the forcing function.

⁴ The ambassador strategy we described to MarketerMedia in November 2017 as "innovative" was, in retrospect, the same strategy every DTC brand was running. What made ours work when it worked was taste⁠—we picked people whose audience actually overlapped with our sixteen-to-twenty-one demographic, not just people with large follower counts.

⁵ I scaled an e-commerce brand to six figures before I ever touched an API. If someone tells you their AI automation work came out of nowhere, they are either lying or they do not understand their own backstory.

⁶ The 4-Hour Workweek will age the worst. The meditation habit will age the best.