Imagine you have $10,0000 to start a clothing brand (like me)...
what are your options?  Obviously, you can't just spend all $10k on
manufacturing your clothes.  You have to get the word out and spend on
marketing.  But putting $5k towards marketing won't get you very far. 
So, here is what we did...

1. Put $3,000 into manufacturing our own clothing.
2. Put $5,000 into starting a retail ecommerce site
3. Put $2,000 into building and marketing ecommerce site

At
this point, you're lost.  Let me explain.  Internet marketing is cheap
(tip: learn about "search engine optimization"), but we knew that an
unknown brand wouldn't attract many buyers.  So, we decided to build a
retail ecommerce site with known brands that were similar to ours, then
we mixed our brand into the site! 

This strategy gave us a few advantages...

1. Easier to market known, popular brands (save money on marketing)
2. Put our brand next to popular brands (save money on marketing)
3. We
   could make a few bucks on retail sales while we slowly built our brand
   (slow steady growth of a brand is best if you don't have much money)
4. Slowly
   build popular retail website that put our brand in the spotlight (we
   rank #1 on Google now for "punk clothing"...save
   money on marketing!)

When your broke, keep your costs low.  This strategy worked for us, hopefully it can help
another young, broke clothing designer! 

p.s. Here is our retail Punk Clothing Store and now we also have a wholesale website for our Alternative Clothing Brand.