The Brand Strategy That The Massing Group Says Nobody Talks About Enough
Do you have a brand strategy?
True brand loyalty fell 5% between 2024 and 2025.
In the same period, 63% of consumers said they want brands to be truthful and transparent about their environmental credentials.
You’re in the Kitchen, Not the Dining Room
When goods are produced overseas, a founder receives a finished product. They know the price and the delivery date. What they often don’t know is why the fabric behaves the way it does, why a particular construction holds up better over time, or where the specific decisions in the making of the garment came from. That knowledge stays on the factory floor, somewhere else.
Producing domestically puts brands inside that process.
“When you do things domestically, you’re in the kitchen,” says Benjamin Massing, who has run The Massing Group, a Los Angeles-based manufacturing and development operation, for years. “You’re not just sitting at the table getting served the food.”
A founder who understands why a seam is constructed a certain way can explain it to a customer. A customer who understands it has a reason to care about the product that goes beyond how it looks on a rack.
Brand Strategy: Pricing Low Early is Buying Attention
The most common pricing mistake among early-stage clothing brands has nothing to do with manufacturing costs. It’s the assumption that a strong margin percentage from day one proves the business is working.
Benjamin Massing sees this regularly. Founders arrive with a number in their heads, often lifted from social media, and treat it as a minimum rather than a target. The result is a product priced for the relationship they want eventually, not the one they’re actually in.
His argument runs the other way. Take a lower margin at the start. Make the product accessible enough that people actually buy it. “Get in with the customer, gain the trust, let them feel the goods, let them understand there’s quality there, and now you have someone paying attention to you.”
“Real estate in a customer’s wardrobe is the asset. Once a brand earns that, it has proximity.”
The chance to communicate directly, educate consistently, and build the kind of familiarity that makes someone return.
A Brand Without a Point of View Is Just Product, and There is Already Enough Product in the Market
A line built around domestic production, genuine quality standards, and real craft knowledge has content at every level: the fabric sourcing, the construction choices, the people making it. Each of those elements is something worth explaining.
Brands that skip this step tend to compete on price, trend, and visibility. Those are expensive races to run, and they don’t produce customers who stay. They produce transactions. The difference matters enormously over time, because a customer who understands why they bought something is far more likely to come back than one who bought it because it was in front of them.
A clothing line without a point of view is a collection of garments. There is a difference, and in an oversaturated market, it’s the one that compounds.
Fast Fashion Won’t Age Well
Somewhere in the last few decades, vintage fashion began to thin out. Not because people stopped buying clothes, but because the clothes being made stopped being worth keeping.
Brands that invest in making things properly, and in teaching their customers what that means, are building something fast fashion structurally cannot.
“The more that we can educate the customer, the more they’ll be willing to pay for that, and the more they’ll shy away from fast fashion,” says Benjamin Massing.