A clothing business, if successful, is an emotionally fulfilling and financially rewarding business venture.
The most fulfilling aspect of a clothing business is seeing your creations celebrated and won by people around the world. In addition to this, the monetary incentive for a successful clothing business can be pretty significant.
That said, creating a clothing business from scratch is not going to be easy. The world of fashion, and especially the clothing segment is choke full of competition and new clothing lines emerge every day.
Still, the world is big enough for a determined and business-savvy individual to crack this particular nutshell. And here’s me hoping that that business-savvy individual is you, here are 7 things you need to start a clothing business.
1. A Niche
The world’s population as of January 2023 is approximately 8 billion people. To have a successful clothing business, you need to realize you can’t serve all these people. No one can.
The solution is to carve out for your clothing business a small, and in time hopefully, loyal demographic. Finding a demographic for your clothing business is the most important step you can take as everything else will follow and take direction from this choice.
Your clothing business’s demographic will be dependent on such things as the target age of your customers, their gender, their incomes, their interests and their shopping patterns.
The goal in successfully defining the demographic for your clothing business is finding an area within the clothing industry that is underserved and that presents an opportunity for high demand.
Once you define the demographic for your business, you want to narrow it down until you have a small enough subset that still gives you the opportunity to be profitable in your business venture.
Say for example the demographic for your clothing business is young working women, aged between 25 and 30. What kind of clothing do you want to create for them? Athletic wear for when they exercise, Lounge wear to use when unwinding from work, lingerie, formal wear for work?
Answer the demographic question and your clothing brand is well on its way to success.
2. A Business Plan
The best business plans are straightforward documents that spell out the who, what, where, why, and how much.
Paula Nelson
A good business plan does not guarantee success, but it sure makes your work easier planning the route. I just thought of that, genius right? Use it and quote me, don’t be shy.
In setting up your clothing business, a good practice to have is to develop a business plan. Like any other plan, a business plan is just a plan for a business.
It is that simple, forget about the complex, multi-page documents you see on the internet.
The most important factor you want to take into consideration is the cost of setting up your business, and you will have a few choices to make in this regard.
You can choose to rent an official business premise or be entirely virtual in the beginning.
Another important factor to think about is registering your clothing line. Most people choose to ignore this step but it is just as important as any other.
Look at it from this perspective, if you have a social media presence, and the name of your brand is out there, what’s to stop any Tom, Dick or Harry from registering that brand name as theirs as your business gains traction?
The only way you can protect your brand is by registering it early on. That way, no one can lay claim to something you worked so hard to create.
Another important element to include in the business plan of your clothing business is a marketing plan; Once you set up your clothing business and develop your first design. How will the world find out about it?
While there is no problem with organically growing your brand on social media, you may need to invest money into marketing efforts to push the brand out in its early days past your circle of friends and family.
A good practice when starting your clothing brand is to avoid telling your family and friends about it in the early days. They are biased and may spare you harsh criticism. Strangers will not. And that is a good thing for the continued success of your clothing business.
3. Social Media Presence
Social media has become a necessary encumbrance for any business starter. And if done right, it can become the biggest driver of leads and sales.
A clothing business is a visual enterprise, as such, you want to get your designs in front of as many eyeballs as you can.
Something to remember in establishing a social media presence for your clothing business is that not all social media platforms are the same.
Twitter will not do well for a clothing business like Pinterest. Instagram will work better than Facebook. And Youtube will work better than Snapchat.
Pinterest is a visual search engine, when people visit Pinterest, they do so to see visual representations of the thing they looking for. Pinterest calls these images pins. A clothing business would do well to focus its efforts on Pinterest and share pins of its most visually appealing creations.
Having Instagram and Youtube as backup social media platforms for your clothing business is social media enough in my opinion.
4. Inventory
The most important thing after demographic is inventory. Without an inventory, there is no business, right?
Once you’ve identified your target demographic, you should start by creating the designs you want to push out for your clothing business.
Do you have a degree in fashion design? Are you naturally gifted in designing clothing? Do you have a unique idea you want to try out? Well and good, find your motivation and start creating.
The best thing about the times we are living in is that there are many tools you can use to speed up your clothing design efforts. You can even use some of these tools to learn fashion design.
Useful Tools For Designing Clothing
| Tool | Description | Price |
| 1. Adobe Illustrator | Adobe Illustrator is a graphics design tool that can be used to create graphics, images, lines, text, logos and icons. | USD 24.14 Per Month |
| 2. Blue Cherry | A Fashion, Apparel, and Footwear Software for Businesses. (Enterprise Resource Planning, Product Lifecycle Management, B2B eCommerce, Omnichannel Merchandise Planning) | Custom Quotes |
| 3. Browzwear | A trusted partner of more than 1,000 fashion and apparel companies worldwide, Browzwear is a 3D fashion design software for clothing development. It also offers training for newbies | Application based |
| 4. Printful | Design and sell custom apparel online with print-on-demand dropshipping. They handle the printing and fulfilment of your apparel | A small % of your sales |
5. A Unique Brand Name And Logo
Think about all the successful clothing brands you know. We can list a few, Zara, H&M, Zalando, Hermes, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Armani, Fendi, Prada, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana. The list goes on and on.
Ask yourself, what do they all have in common? Their names roll off the tongue, don’t they? Except for H&M that is, (that name doesn’t roll off anything)
The point is, a brand name that is easy to remember and evokes some emotionality is one of the biggest selling points in business.
If you can pair that good brand name with a good logo, you are off to the races a step ahead of the competition.
In the beginning, it is my opinion not to worry too much about the logo, you can use your brand name, worked in some epic font, as a logo. However, take your time to come up with a truly remarkable and memorable brand name.
Like any name out there, including your personal name, it is an identity that stays with you forever.
And even though it is possible to change a name, the brand’s presence in the material world and in the minds of your customers may never recover.
Don’t get me started on the legal ramifications of changing a brand name.
6. A Unique Style
It goes without saying that to succeed in a crowded market, your offering must in some way, be different from what’s already on offer.
It doesn’t make much sense to sell oranges in a market full of oranges. You will drown. However, if you sold red oranges in a market full of orange oranges, you’d be onto something.
While I appreciate that the chances of you coming up with a brand new offering in an established business environment like the clothing business segment is minuscule. You can offer what exists and tweak it so it is unique to your business.
Do you get my drift? Nice.
7. Courage and Determination
Last but not least, you will need a humongous helping of courage and determination.
The clothing market is crowded, but that should not stop you, a crowded market presents a ready market for them that offer new and unique goods.
Don’t let anyone tell you it cannot be done, instead take positive criticism, consult widely, read and research and keep on creating.
Who knows, in a few years, yours could be the H&Ms and the Zalandos we talk about.
Summary
Creating a clothing business from scratch is a challenging but possible enterprise. The savvy business person aiming to do just that must define their demographic, develop a good business plan, have a lively and engaging social media presence, create a unique offering and have lots of courage and determination.
If you enjoyed this post you might like:
- The Main Types Of Fashion Design
- The 4 Levels of the fashion industry
- The best fashion designers in the world
- 12 fashion styles Everyone should know
- The Story of the top fashion brands in the World
Thanks for reading.
