Meet AIU Students and Alumni
Meet Fredrickus Williford
B.F.A. in Fashion Marketing and Design
Sharing His Hard-Earned Knowledge and Experience With Thousands...and Thousands and Thousands
Former American InterContinental University Fashion Design & Marketing student Fredrickus Williford knew next to nothing about the business side of fashion when he launched his first clothing line. Still, his rhinestone-encrusted hats were popular with Atlanta-area stores. After a few orders however, they proved to be too expensive to manufacture for the business to be profitable. Fredrickus was forced to close up shop.
He didn't give up though.
Rather than get disheartened, Fredrickus dove into learning about business plans, manufacturing, financing, marketing and the hundreds of other things big and small necessary to start a fashion line. It was a lot of work, to say the least.
More important than acquiring this knowledge however, is that Fredrickus used it. His second fashion business, Scout Union Apparel, launched in November 2005 and now has t-shirts and hats in 15 to 20 stores across the country. Scout Union Apparel sells alongside designers such as Kimora Lee Simmons and Diddy. Scout, which stands for Superior Clothing Original Urban Taste, is also sold internationally through the Internet.
Start talking fashion with Fredrickus and Scout Union Apparel isn't what he is most excited about however. Scout comes second to the fashion industry web page he started last year, www.dobizo.com. In early October, just fifteen months after its launch, dobizo.com officially became the web's most visited site about how to get started in the fashion industry. September saw the site experience 121-percent growth with an average of between 200 and 350 visitors per hour.
Fredrickus, who is only 22, first got the idea to launch dobizo.com when he received dozens of phone calls after a South Carolina newspaper did an article about the success of Scout Union Apparel.
"After that article came out, I had so many people calling my cell phone asking for help in getting their own clothing lines started." It seems Fredrickus wasn't the only one who had hit some roadblocks when first getting started in fashion.
While Fredrickus was happy to share advice with callers, he decided there was a better way for him to help. "Why help one person when you can help thousands using the Internet?"
And that's exactly what dobizo.com is now doing every single day...helping thousands learn what they need to about nearly every aspect of the fashion industry.
Fredrickus says the 14 to 16 hours a day he spends on dobizo.com isn't hard. "I don't have to put as much time and energy into it as I do, but I love it." Fredrickus updates dobizo.com between six and 10 times a day.
While Fredrickus started out planning for dobizo.com to be mostly about starting a fashion business, it has morphed into a clearinghouse for all information fashion-related. It covers footwear, fashion and textiles as well as basics like industry terminology and fashion history. There are designer profiles and audio interviews with CEOs of various fashion-related companies (the most recent one is with Darin Hager, owner of Heyday and a former footwear designer for Puma and Sperry).
Every day dobizo.com showcases a different company or product for its innovation. There are Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials, news from different sectors of the industry and information about internships. Blogs cover topics as varied as how to deal with criticism and how to avoid common mistakes. Fredrickus has also assembled an impressive masthead of contributors who are each experts in different areas within fashion. Several of these expert contributors are former instructors of Fredrickus' from AIU Buckhead.
"The information I share on dobizo.com is invaluable and found nowhere else on the Net for free. I do this because I like to see people succeed and prosper in life. I like to watch people build more businesses with substance and help create jobs for their communities."
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