Inside Musterbrand: How One Company Crafts High-End Clothing for Gamers

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The Road Behind

When Musterbrand started in partnership with Hermes Otto International New York, it was a different company than it is now. Bergel and his team used their expertise to tap into the network of the Otto Group, connecting game companies with a larger machine. Bergel's time in the industry helped him know who to pitch the idea of Musterbrand to. The original talks didn't pan out, but the team learned, and the second round produced results.

"We approached companies with some designs and concepts and tested their feedback," says Bergel. "Coincidentally, in the next round of talks with studios in Tokyo - with Kojima, Sony's Gran Turismo team, and the Resident Evil people - we had to explore how you can bring those kinds of items to life. That was the major hurdle for us."

The very first collection that Musterbrand released was based on Gran Turismo in February 2011. According to Bergel, that line "completely failed due to various reasons." The second collection for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, launched in August 2011, which showed "a very nice demand." The third line was for Square Enix' Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the impending collection was teased in a New York Times article on Musterbrand in April 2011. That's when the Musterbrand concept began to take off.

"The third collection was Deus Ex and that sold within ten days," says Bergel. "We manufactured like 12,000 coats and they were late, but people pre-paid. That kept on selling. I was completely surprised in a positive way with the initial Deus Ex line."

The NYT article brought Musterbrand "into the mind of all the Western publishers." The company established relationships with Ubisoft. When their Kojima Productions contact moved over to Blizzard Entertainment, that door opened as well. They signed Valve as well, producing Half-Life and Counter-Strike collections.

Despite the success of certain collections, things weren't perfect within Musterbrand. Most of it was growing pains, establishing a new company and concept from scratch.

"We failed ourselves in the way we designed and how things should be designed. Everything was new," admitted Bergel. "We had to test what really appealed to the audience. During that process, we got on a path which didn't work out. For some items, we were way too subtle. It wasn't appealing to the hardcore fan. Very often, the studio would say, 'Oh, we want you to do a fashion line with a tiny hint to the franchise.' It was a trying era. We more or less fixed that. From the consumer perspective, they now know what to expect from us and we know what to deliver."

Part of that fix involved Bergel and his management team buying up all of Musterbrand's assets from Hermes Otto International New York in 2012. After that, the company essentially "started from scratch." Without a larger company to draw on, Musterbrand has become a smaller, leaner operation.

Rebooting Musterbrand

Musterbrand is currently 25 people in total, which comprises the company's core operations: design, engineering, customer service, and finance. Then there's additional merchandisers and production experts in places where the clothes are actually manufactured, like Bangkok, Thailand. Musterbrand's current growth plan involves growing the core staff to 40 people over the next 18 months, mostly to increase their overall output. Bergel would also like to bring certain facets of the operation back in-house, but he doesn't think Musterbrand requires a huge staff.

"We don't think this business requires 500 staff," he says. "We're almost completely vertical. We do not have our own factory... yet. We have rented production lines in a manufacturing plant where we more or less lease their production capacities to make sure we stick to the same quality throughout all our collections."

"We had to come up with a very dedicated way to design and manufacture clothing," says Bergel about the process of rebooting Musterbrand. "We had to find new factories and suppliers. We've developed a unique supply chain, which those big companies don't have. If you're a startup and you want to participate in that, you're lost. It was a technical thing. We way we work is different than the Macy's of this world or a traditional textile brand operates."

"We don't have any regular textile or fashion designer in our structure. We've chopped the way we develop things."

The lean operation means that Musterbrand is also missing things you'd expect at a traditional clothing company, like fashion designers.

"We don't have any regular textile or fashion designer in our structure. We've chopped the way we develop things," Bergel explains. "We create, more or less similar to the character designs, the basic look of the items and then we pass that over to textile engineers. They convert what we've done into something manufacturable, which is then sent out to our production facilities. We do not start at, "Oh, here's a fashion designer," but rather we work very closely with a studio."

Bergel tells me the process of shipping a collection requires a year to a year and a half. That's from the brainstorming stage until the product is in the hands of consumers.

"Before you start signing a contract, we've already started our process internally to brainstorm what kind of items or unique things we want to do for the collection. Then we present that to the studio," says Bergel. "Sometimes we're in the design stage making mockups or just giving them the general direction we'd like to go in. They share their assets with us and we start picking things. It's an iterative process to get to a line that we think makes commercial sense and fits the franchise."

Once a concept is agreed upon, Musterbrand starts incurring costs. See, the stock risk of any collection is completely on the company because they're producing the clothes on a license from the publisher.

"It's our stock risk," Bergel admits. "If you want to make sure that you hit the release date with your items, you've got to start manufacturing seven or eight months in advance. It's all us. We make a reasonable quantity in order to avoid that stock risk and to be frank, we've never really had any issues."

Buttons are collected and any labels required for the collection begin to be printed. At three months in, Musterbrand's engineers are creating tech packs for the clothes to send to manufacturers, who make the prototypes. The prototypes are then checked by Musterbrand and the studios. If they check out, four months in Musterbrand takes its second big risk and begins to order the fabrics needed. Six months in, manufacturing begins and Musterbrand receives its first pre-production samples. These go to the licensor for final approval. Once approved, final production begins and then the collection is shipped by boat to wherever it needs to go.

"It's a unique process we built in order to adapt to the licensors," says Bergel. "It's around a six to seven month production process, and the rest is doing samples, prototypes, and making sure the fitting's right. There are obviously other categories like knitwear, where the lead time is shorter, but if you want to do more sophisticated items like jackets and coats, every component is manufactured on order."

Of course, the licensors are making games, which can be a tumultuous process. Musterbrand takes on the stock risk when it makes a collection, but it also has to roll with a developer deciding to delay a game.

"Unfortunately, in video gaming, things get delayed," says Bergel. "Metal Gear Solid V was delayed and we had almost all our stock ready for November of last year. The game didn't release until September of this year."

"[Deus Ex: Mankind Divided] just got pushed back until August 2016 and we're all ready to go. It's something you have to deal with. On the other hand, when you work with AAA franchises, there's a certain history and they've always got their fan communities, so you're not selling nothing. In the change to the digital age, with all the DLC and online games, there's always some attention and traffic."