Are you just starting a clothing brand? Maybe you launched it a couple of months or a year ago. Regardless of where you’re at, knowing what to focus on is incredibly important. There isn’t a roadmap or a step-by-step process that one can follow when building a brand. That makes it tricky since you could potentially be spending a lot of time on things that won’t get you anywhere.
In this blog, we’ve put together the three key areas that make or break a clothing brand.
BRANDING
It’s probably not shocking to any of you that branding is incredibly important to a clothing brand. It’s literally in the name! The thing is, branding goes far beyond just sticking your logo everywhere you can, but rather it envelops every aspect of your business.
As always, the devil’s in the details, and we cannot stress enough how much every little detail matters to your overall brand. Executing proper branding really boils down to two words, and that’s creativity and consistency.
Having a creative way to brand each of your garments that make them immediately identifiable will also make your garments more memorable, which is what you want. And if it’s something you can keep consistent throughout your whole range of designs, even better!
This could be a creative label that’s on every sleeve of each of your garments, a well designed and memorable inside-neck print, hem labels or any number of different things! At the end of the day, the more branded your garments are the more memorable and premium they will be.
The same concept applies to your website, or if you have a stall you set up at markets or even a retail space. Your branding needs to be consistent, recognisable, and everywhere! It’s important to take the time to sit and really figure out the essence of your brand and then think of creative ways to express that in everything you do.
People want to be able to talk about the brand they’re wearing since the clothes we wear are an extension of our personalities. Therefore, the more little details you can add to express your brand and give people talking points, the better.
SCALE
Knowing when and how to scale your brand can seriously be the difference between great success, and very expensive failure. Therefore it’s a really good idea to have a rough plan of how and when you want to scale from the get go.
Scaling isn’t just about the amount of designs you have or how many items you want to sell, it’s more about your supply chain and the way in which you handle your stock. There are a couple of different ways you can do this when you’re starting out, and it all depends on where you’ll be selling most of your items.
For example, if you’re a band, you’ll probably be selling most of your shirts at shows, which means you’ll need to carry at least a small amount of stock. This is made a lot easier with DTG printing since your MOQ’s are very low. On the other hand, if you’re a clothing brand starting out you’ll likely be selling online. If this is the case then using a Print On Demand service like In.It Dropship is the best route since you don’t pay for stock up-front and you don’t have any risk in terms of inventory.
From there, if your brand is consistently selling, say, 500 shirts in a month, it’s a good idea to scale up and start buying bulk stock. Buying your stock in bulk increases the margins you can make since you’ll have far better economies of scale, but if you’re just starting out buying bulk is risky since you have no guarantees if it will sell.
So knowing when and how to scale will definitely be a deciding factor in the success of your brand.
MARKETING
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, no one’s going to buy something that they don’t know exists. Having a solid marketing strategy is absolutely imperative to the success of any business, not just a clothing brand.
Marketing used to be a very expensive and hit-or-miss deal, but luckily, that has absolutely changed in modern times. Gone are the days of printing out flyers, renting out expensive ad space on billboards or tv, now you can literally make something on your cell phone and reach thousands of people without paying a cent.
The best way to build a following for your brand is to have an online community attached to it that offers people value beyond just trying to sell them your garments. If you have a successful TikTok page or YouTube channel that’s a great place to start. The important thing to remember is that you aren’t trying to sell something to every single person, but rather build a large community of like-minded people, and then make your products easily available to those that wish to buy them.
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