How to start your own clothing line: A complete guide
Apparel industry is most competitive yet profitable in terms of revenues. We see emerging clothing businesses quite often. If we see the history, we learn that every successful business today was once started with a small startup, then gradually they started to grow and now earning incredible profits plus reputation. If you are interested to start your own clothing line and you are pondering from where to start, then take a sigh of relief as good news for new startups is that internet and eCommerce has made it easy to do a business without extra expenses, like you can save hassle of renting physical store or hiring of a sales team initially by keeping your stock at home and start selling them with eCommerce website.
You can do clothing business in two ways, 1) as a designer and 2) as clothing entrepreneur. In either way clothing business is not just about designing clothes or buying stock for sale, if you are doing business just do it like a business as you need a proper planning before actually stepping into market.
Clothing need sampling, manufacturing, packaging, relationship building, master marketing, retailing, eCommerce presence and a lot more.
Identify the need in market
You are ready to work on your own brand so you need to have a niche to hit your target with. Tip is to define your niche is to find your area of interest. Once you decided your target market then you need to do research for specific niche, for example, you are interested in manufacturing product for youth, you need to do research on likes and dislikes of youth related to clothing. If there are any gaps that youth want to wear and clothing lines have not already manufacturing, you have got your lucky charm and you can proceed with idea but remember market research in right direction is must.
It is always beneficial if you document all your ideas and outline of work on a sheet of paper at start of venture. It helps you in road mapping your journey. But it does not mean that you will strictly follow your initial plan. Your plan must be flexible and able to adopt changes during evolution of your journey. Because future is unseen and apparel industry changes trends so fast so you never know if demand of market changes and deviates your way. So always make an adjustable, flexible and a strong foundation business plan in terms of investment and adopting new influences.
Once you have defined the need in market, now next step is to understand market trends. This needs quite a lot of study and research you need to focus on two aspects.
For customer behavior, you will keenly observe the customer actions like their way of spending, trendy fabric choices, your budget management in production and sourcing etc. for competitor’s behavior you need to study your competitors’ to-be dealing with their customers. How they are adding value to their customers shopping? What branding and marketing strategies they are using? Etc. don’t worry about how you will get insight in your competitor’s strategies, social media and internet has made it quite easy. All you need is to do research from social media profiles of other companies in market, magazines, competitors’ websites etc. and you will get enough information for your cause.
At this stage you know the market requirements, your audience, you have designed initial map to start your journey. Now is the time to bring your business into notice of state to avoid any future problems cause by legal formalities. So at this step you need to officially register your business with state.
To register your clothing line you need to follow below mentioned steps.
Congratulations! You have completed initial steps successfully. Now you need to focus on your designs and sourcing cost and this might be proved trickiest part for you especially if you are novice in clothing industry. Because “first impression is the last” so you need to be careful about first call in market and at the same time you need to focus on cost effective sourcing according to your resources as well.
Here are some main points you need to worry about during production and sourcing phase of your products.
If you are designer yourself and you want to cut, sew them you may not need manufacturer at start but you will need fabric supplier. In other case, if you want to be entrepreneur and do not know cutting and sewing yourself then you need to hire a manufacturer for your products. If you belong to an industrial area and can find local manufacturer it may be convenient for you, you can go and see product samples and design and then order stock according to your need. But if you are not able to find any nearby manufacturer, still you don’t need to worry, we have covered you up here, as this is reign of internet and eCommerce, you can find manufacturers in other countries who are specialized in manufacturing through different platforms. For example, you can find manufacturers through www.alibaba.com and you can place your order there.
1: Define your product pricing according to your budget
Once you have found manufacturers list either online or nearby, you can start making list of manufacturers who are offering production cost according to your budget line. For online searching you will find minimum order quantity (MOQ) and prices of each supplier at website and can be further negotiated after doing detailed conversation with supplier’s representative. But for local suppliers you need to so R&D manually.
2: Finding the right material
At this point you should have information about qualities and types of fabrics that you are going to use to manufacture your brand’s clothing. For this purpose you can study relevant materials, watch tutorials, find a friends who is already working in field, buy their time to have conversation sessions with them over dinner or Hi-tea, they can connect you with relevant people. Or you can buy your desired manufactured products from your competitors and check the material yourself, then order sample from your desired manufacture and compare the quality. Remember quality matters most in any business launch, if you cut cost by compromising on quality, there are higher chances that you will lose the battle and customer will not trust your label to shop again. So conclusion is, you should keep room in your budget for high quality production, even in start if you are not making much profit or you are working on break even point or might facing a little loss, still you need to focus on quality and once you win in impressing your consumer, it will ultimately lead to higher prices and profits in future.
