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Launching a Fashion Business from Planning to Brand Success

Launching a Fashion Business from Planning to Brand Success

The fashion retail industry is one of the most vibrant industries around the world, it is also one of the most competitive industries. This paper aims at providing a strategic map that prospective entrepreneurs must follow when planning to launch a clothing firm or existing players that need to enhance their operations. Fashion line business needs much more than ideas; it needs calculated strategies, effective supply chain management, and excellent customer experience.

An effective business strategy for garments is laid down in a business proposal that outlines issues such as positioning, pricing, and stock control. When seeking to establish a fashion brand or when formulating an apparel business plan, guidance from experts can go along way to clearing issues and linking strategies to the right markets. Whether the business is starting a new luxury segment or asking how to create an online clothing business, using the retail industry consulting guarantees businesses thrive in this competitive environment.

Fashion businesses must seek a retail management consultant for operational improvement, consolidate differentiated image, and ensure customer satisfaction, which are the key factors for sustainable success.

Challenges in the fashion retail industry

Information technology has become a critical success factor in the fashion retail industry in the present era.

Challenges of the fashion retail industry are therefore some of the most complex to overcome in any business environment. Starting a clothing company or fashion brand requires an excellent understanding of customers’ dynamic needs and preferences – a game that is changing as fast as fashion trends. Today’s customer is not only interested in buying fashionable clothes but also quality clothes at reasonable price and most importantly clothes that are made sustainably.

Further, effective managing of supply chain and inventory is another big challenge. A lack of a proper business plan for garments means that some businesses are likely to make losses due to overstocking or else, customer complaints due to understocking. The competitiveness of the industry enhances the pressure since both domestic and global companies are competing for market share.

The problems for those individuals who want to create an online store and who are interested in knowing how to start a clothing business online are the following: the need for a powerful web presence and the need for customer trust in a highly competitive market. Likewise, if an individual decides to enter the high end market to commence a clothing line that only consists of luxury wears, he or she has to create high end goods and services that are also backed up by high end experiences that justify the high prices that consumers are willing to pay.

These challenges demonstrate the strong evidence for the necessity of a fashion line business plan and drawing on consulting from the retail industry to overcome difficulties and discover opportunities.

Importance of a Business Plan for Fashion Retail

A good fashion line business plan is the foundation for any new clothing line business. It serves as the company’s strategic compass by influencing decisions about branding and operation. Any person who wishes to know how to start a clothing company needs to come up with a business plan to help in setting goals, target market as well as the financial capability.

Key components of an effective business plan for garments include:

  • Market Research: Cognitive understanding of consumer preferences and the competitors.
  • Product Strategy: Choosing between casual wear, luxury or sustainable apparels.
  • Financial Planning: Enumerating cost, price and revenue models of production.
  • Marketing Approach: Tactics of website, social media, and brick-and-mortar stores.

For those aspiring to start a fashion brand, the business plan also helps in ensuring that the brand is presented in a similar way across all the communication interfaces, design included. When many people nowadays start wondering how to start a clothing business online, they should consider the importance of using e-commerce solutions and omnichannel approaches.

Here, retail consulting firms have a very important role to play. By providing knowledge on the current market trends, consultants assist to improve business strategies to meet emerging trends and customer preferences, thus enabling organisations to have a competitive advantage. In luxury clothing start-ups, consulting can help in the right placement strategies of the brand and how all touch points right from design, display to customers reinforce the idea of luxury.

A practical and adaptable strategic clothing business plan not only serves as protection but also provides a good starting point for development, whether starting from scratch or increasing the existing company.

Building a Successful Fashion Brand

To establish fashion brands in the current world, it is not enough to design good clothes or products on the market. A good example of the importance of a good brand image that supports a good story and message is important in building a good army of customers. Whether the vision is to create a simple casual wear brand or know how to start a luxury fashion brand, branding is the initial step towards a sustainable business.

It begins with the determination of your market focus and the consumers interested in your product. What do you have; green consumers, the wealthy class, the latest trend conscious or the youths? Knowledge of the audience will determine what to include in the design, the amount to charge for the product, and the market to target. For example, brands with a sustainable focus, have to work towards an ethical sourcing and production approach that is relevant to consumers.

Applying digital strategies is equally important too. As more people with business ideas ask me how to start a clothing business online, it is crucial to have a solid and optimized e-commerce site as well as active social media profiles. Apply to Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok to present your collections and gather people around your brand.

Further, through the development of relationship with retail consultants, entry into the market is effectively facilitated. As a strategic business solution, retail industry consulting offers clients valuable information about customer behavior as well as solutions for creating omnichannel retailing strategies that turn creative visions into practical realities. Retail consultants also help business owners with matters such as supply chain and inventory management, store planning – factors central to creating a successful fashion brand.

Thus, the only way to achieve the goal is to apply creativity and use necessary data and an expert’s help. If businesses have a right vision and the appropriate resources they can build a firm which can not only sustain a fashion brand but also can create a difference.

Starting a Clothing Company: The Role of Consultants

When aspiring business people ask themselves how to begin a clothing business, the process may seem daunting when one lacks the necessary professional advice. From defining the opportunities to explore to coordinating the processes to launch and continue the business, consultants are of huge importance.

The management of the journey starts with the formulation of a strategic plan. Retail consultants help in creating a clear written business plan, covering all the phases of apparel business. This includes:

  • Product Development: Picking of material, fixing of design and identification of the number of products to be manufactured.
  • Supply Chain Optimization: Sourcing and manufacturing services partnership that guarantees reliability.
  • Pricing and Positioning: This involves questions like how does one set proper pricing and yet be able to achieve that which is market competitive, yet sustain the firm.

Consultants can also help those who aspire to begin their business online with tips on how to start a clothing business online successfully. They assist companies in creating easy to use online stores, implement secure payment systems and design effective online marketing strategies. Consultants also tend to develop omnichannel concepts where online and offline activities serve as one entity.

Just like starting a high end fashion company, it is a process that needs proper planning. From learning how to launch a luxury clothing line to helping organizations navigate the best ways to approach luxury products and customers, consultants provide insight on how to maintain a level of exclusivity and improve the overall feel and perception of a brand.

However, compliance is a key aspect that retail consultants cover besides operational guidance. From issues to do with the local legal systems, taxation, and labor laws, consultants ensure companies are ready to take off without legal issues.

Finally, the knowledge of a retail management consultant provides the missing link between aspiration and implementation, helping the entrepreneur to solve problems and create sustainable clothing enterprise.

About YRC

We’re a retail & e-commerce management consulting firm. With 12+ years in business, we’ve helped 500+ clients in 12 countries across 20+ Retail Verticals. Our services include SOPs (BPMN 2.0), Market Research, Business Model Validation, Franchise Consulting, and Process Automation. If you’re looking to boost efficiency or scale your brand, let’s connect for a discovery session!

FAQs

What do I need to do to start a clothing company?
You have to draft a business plan that covers target audience, product niche, sourcing, and marketing strategy. Consider brand identity, budget, and possible e-commerce solutions. Retail consultants can walk you through operating and legal matters.
What must be done in a fashion line business plan?
Market research, target audience, product designs, pricing strategy, and marketing tactics are essential features in a fashion line business plan. Production and supply chain must also be covered so that your business can scale, and financial forecasting to sustain profitability in a competitive industry.
How do I build a fashion brand?
A fashion brand should consider finding its niche, developing unique products, and coming up with a great brand story. Watch and learn from what is happening online when it comes to launching and marketing, develop loyalty with the consumer, and work with consultants in what it takes to be more focused on operations with a proper market differentiation.
An apparel business plan typically covers what?
An apparel business plan covers product selection, manufacturing processes, inventory management, financial forecasting, and marketing strategies. It makes sure that all aspects-from the idea conception to actual selling-are aligned with market demands and executive needs for continuous growth.

Author Bio

Rupal Agarwal

Rupal Agarwal

Chief Strategy Officer

Dr. Rupal’s “Everything is possible” attitude helps achieve the impossible. Dr. Rupal Agarwal has worked with 300+ retail e-commerce brands and companies from various sectors, since 2012, to define their growth strategy, push their limits and improve performance efficiency. Rupal and her team have remarkable success stories of helping brands achieve 10X growth.

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    PROCESS AUTOMATION

    The idea of having Ecommerce Consultants on-board from the beginning itself points towards reducing the involvement of the promoters in daily operations. Ecommerce Businesses willing to be a brand reaping profits & sustaining the competition must ensure that most of their processes should be automated. The more the manual intervention, the more would be the errors.

    In Ecommerce business, you get only 1 chance to impress the customer & if you mess up there, you lose the customer for long.

    Process automation in respect to all the activities pertaining to customers from order receiving to order fulfilment is a must for a seamless experience for the customers.

    Task Management is another grey area where most deadlines fail as 90% of the tasks are assigned manually & are forgotten, unheard, misunderstood or mistaken.

    YRC Team of Ecommerce Management Consultants helps to make maximum of the processes system-driven to ensure minimalistic manual intervention.

    VIDEOGRAPHY & PHOTOGRAPHY

    No matter how good your product is, the customer would know only if it looks good.

    Photography includes the following steps:

    • Cataloguing your products
    • Cataloguing your images
    • Backup your images (A few cloud storage solutions include Dropbox, Google Drive, Bitcasa, Apple’s Cloud Storage etc.)
    • Choose the right camera & lens (You may also outsource the photography to a third party agency)

    DIGITAL MARKETING

    Digital Marketing includes SEO & SMM. SEO i.e. Search Engine Optimization includes activities like back-linking, meta tags, blog-writing etc. to ensure your website ranks on the 1st page on Google Search.

    Next comes SMM i.e. “Social Media Marketing” which as the name suggests including promoting your products on all the social media sites, email marketing, influencer marketing & several other BTL activities.

    These activities are going to be recurring & would decide the traffic on the website, the conversions, whether the right target market is tapped, the likes, the views, the orders, the reviews & much more. YRCs Ecommerce Consultants create a budget for digital marketing right from pre-launch to launch & for each month thereafter.

    Building digital marketing strategies in coordination with the agency, selecting them to signing them off would be the role of YRC.

    This ensures seamless coordination, detailed interactions & desired execution as it is always advisable to work with a single agency than multiple of them.

    IT INTEGRATION

    Selection of the right software for smooth functioning of back-end operations right from production to webstore display would be suggested and integrated by YRC Team.

    YRC’s Team defines SOPs of Product Movement, maps it with the locations & people. They then create a blueprint of all the features required in the software & help in shortlisting & selection.

    IT Integration involves connecting your offline inventories with real-time online webstore so when a sale occurs, inventories get deducted real time across offline as well as online platforms.

    This helps in accurate inventory management, maintaining the MOQs, re-order levels & achieving the optimum inventory levels.

    Some popular software include unicommerce, viniculum for your front-end website management & Genisys for your entire back-end Purchase, Production, Accounting, Invoicing etc. management.

    WAREHOUSE & LOGISTICS PLANNING

    • How many cities or countries you wish to sell in?
    • Where should your Warehouse be located?
    • Should you have one warehouse in each country or city?
    • Should you be having your own delivery team in your base city?
    • Would the 3rd party vendors be reliable? What happens when they lose or misplace your product during delivery?
    • How should I manage the logistics if my goods are coming from different countries?
    • How should the goods be stored and barcoded?
    • How much space do I require for warehouse?
    • I am sure several such questions must be haunting you while you think of starting your own fashion ecommerce brand.

     

    At YRC, our warehousing and logistics experts can help you devise a strategy for all of the above mentioned queries and much more.

    We design the layout of the Warehouse considering the inward, goods processing, software entry, barcoding, outward, goods return, scrap storage, goods stacking & much more.

    Logistics route plan is devised considering the manufacturer to your warehouse and from there to last mile delivery locations.

    UI & UX DESIGNING

    This Step involves 03 distinct parts:

    Part 1: Choosing the right Platform:

    From several platforms available in the market right from Shopify to magento, woocommerce, prestoshop, wordpress etc. you must choose the one that fits best for your business

    Part 2: UX Designing:

    “UX” denotes User Experience, which if put in simple language is building the functional requirements of the website.

    UX Designing includes designing the features required in the website, customer journey map, website features, the browsing features, navigation features, ecommerce order management process flow, checkout cart features, catalogue management, ecommerce payment system, cross selling features & much more.

    “As per statistics, 68% of the customers abandon the carts before payment”

    An interesting UX ensures the customer sticks on to the website for a longer time.

    Part 3: UI Designing:

    UI stands for User Interface, which means designing the look and feel of the website. UI includes using the right colours, elements and the entire aesthetics of the website.

    A good User Interface ensures the user completes the task that he has come for. It navigates the user through the journey of the brand in the simplest but most effective way.

    The UX designer maps out the bare bones of the user journey; the UI designer then fills it in with visual and interactive elements.

    If User experience is the bare bone, user interface wraps it up with an attractive cape.

    At YRC, our team if experts can help you develop the entire User Journey to ensure it is engaging!

    SAMPLING & PRODUCTION

    This step follows the “Designing” Phase, whether you have an in-house design team, freelance designers or an outsourced design company. It is one of the most exciting phases, as here you see your designs turning into products & your ideas turning into reality.

    In most start-up cases, production is outsourced i.e. brands tie-up with the established manufacturers/ job-workers to get their products manufactured.

    Sampling involves multiple 04 Stages, Fit-Sample, Prototype Sample, Pre-Production Sample & the Production Sample.

    Prototype Sample is the first sample provided to the buyer. It can be in any fabric/ colour. This sample is just to understand whether the product design looks equally great in reality.

    Fit Sample, as the name suggests is prepared to check the fit of the garment i.e. the various sizes, length, width etc.

    Pre-production is made by the actual production line. Here the stitching quality and other aspects related to manufacturing are checked. This is the last stage where rejection can be accepted.

    Production Sample is made before the production which is the replica of what is going to be finally produced.

    Once you are through with all this, you are good to go ahead & get your goods manufactured.

    PRODUCT DESIGNING / SOURCING

    Product Designing or Sourcing is the heart of the Ecommerce Fashion Brand.

    Product Designing / Sourcing can be done in several ways, as follows:

    • In-house Design Team
    • Freelance Designers
    • Outsourced Design Team
    • Ready Product Sourcing (From Manufacturer or Wholesaler)

    At YRC, we evaluate your business strategy & business model to arrive at the decision, which of the above ways would be best-fit for your business. In certain cases, product sourcing may be a combination of the above.

    These are the people who are going to build your brand! Whether they are the designers or merchandiser, your brand look is going to be in their hands.

    If you are designing each garment from the scratch, the sourcing would play crucial role in developing design identity of your brand.

    Sourcing includes fabric, trims, lining & all the raw material required to build the garment.

    BRANDING

    Branding is the “Look of the Brand”, right from logo to tagline, the colours used, the brand story, the brand communications on social media, the packaging & all the other aspects which speak directly or indirectly to the customers. Branding constitutes the look & feel of the brand & hence must be thoughtfully planned to match with the product that we are selling.

    Branding must appeal to our target audience. Example : A golden colour logo depicting finesse, art, richness, premium, however beautiful it may be individually cannot go with a brand selling affordable kids wear products. So, your logo must be in-line with your brand positioning, whether you are an expensive brand or a luxury brand or a value for money brand, it must be depicted from your “Branding”.

    It is an integral part to attract the target audience.

    ORGANOGRAMS & SOP’s

    Organogram is the “HR Blueprint” of the business which is created at the onset, to map out the team required across each function at various stages of the business. At the launch, only key people need to be got on board to ensure the project gets started & at this stage, all of them need to multi-task. Similarly, certain financial as well as operational goals are set for addition of the further team. Example, for the operations team, we hire 1 operations manager during the pre-launch phase & we add 1 more only when the business kicks-off & we reach a volume of selling more than 1000 pcs/ month or a turnover of more than 0.1 million USD.

    SOPs are Standard Operating Procedures, a bible to run the entire organization right from Sales, Purchase, HR, Order receiving to Order fulfilment, Inventory Management, Accounts, Warehouse, Logistics, Supply Chain, Production & all the other relevant functions for the business. Business must be organized from its first day of operations; only then the tasks can be delegated.

    At YRC, we design the organization structure, the processes, and approximate time taken to execute each process, job profile of every member within the organization, their KRAs, KPIs & the Reporting Structure.

    CRITICAL PATHWAY

    Critical Pathway Analysis (CPA), is a project management technique which cannot be overlooked while launching an ecommerce fashion brand. Brand launch process is cumbersome with multiple inter-dependent & time-bound tasks involved, which need to be tracked to ensure the project remains on track.

    CPA outlines key tasks across the project, their turnaround time (TAT) & the dependencies of tasks upon each other. It identifies the sequence of tasks, their interdependent steps from inception to completion, their criticalities, and their dates of onset, target dates of completion along with the key responsible person for the respective activities. Critical Pathway helps in understanding the unimportant & not urgent tasks which may jeopardize the execution of the project because of an unexpected snag! It also maps out the potential bottlenecks which might be posed because of the dependencies of tasks upon each other & cases where the next task cannot be commenced before the completion of the previous one.

    CPA detects the minimum & the maximum time involvement of a particular individual or team to execute the task, thereby arriving at the overall deadlines associated with the project.

    At Your Retail Coach, we design the Critical Pathway & review it periodically to ensure the project is on track & the progress is measurable.

    BUSINESS STRATEGY & BUSINESS PLAN

    Business Strategy includes the vision, mission, goals, business model, business plan & strategy for all the functions within the organization.

    Business Strategy is a well-defined plan that outlines who, what, where, why, how & when for the company; for example, who would be the target market, how to attract the target audience, when to launch new products, where to operate from, how to handle competitors, what would be the USP, what would be long term goal of the organization & several other answers to the 5Ws of Strategy.

    Business Strategy aligns the organization towards a common goal. Business SWOT helps company to identify & overcome their weaknesses & focus to sharpen the strengths. Business strategy forecasts future risks and helps business in building skillsets to overcome the potential threats.

    YRC’s Business Plan focuses on creating a “Blueprint” of the business, thereby deriving the feasibility of the concept & gauge whether the opportunity is lucrative to invest time, energy & effort. Business Plan creates cash flow understanding i.e. building inflow & outflow cash projections from Week zero to week 60 i.e. 05 year projection. Business Plan calculates the capital investment, operating costs, one-time costs, recurring costs & all the other numbers relevant to obtain the breakeven sales, return on investment, return on capital, internal rate of return & several other ratios. Business Plan is also one of the important requirements if you are targeting the “Investor Route”. Fund raising becomes extremely transparent & channelized. With business plan panned out clearly, the business will know until what point must it be stretched & where to stop, which reduces the probability of unplanned investments.

    MARKET RESEARCH

    Starting the concept of Ecommerce Fashion brand with Market Research ensures we get detailed understanding of the industry & this research report also acts as a social confirmation for your concept. Market Research helps in understanding the target locations, their population, potential online buyers for your product, competitors for each category, and top selling products of the competitors, competitors’ price range, offers & their responses & much more. Market Research helps in thorough understanding of your brand position as compared to our competitors. It helps in identifying gaps in the market, in your category along with the scope of the said product in the desired market. This will help in validation of your concept & prevents you from making the same mistakes as your fellow brands, eventually saving your time, energy & efforts. This phase is also a make or a break phase, as the market research study may at-times come up with some eye-popping numbers & statistics which might compel you to re-think on your product or category that you are planning to sell or alter your entire concept itself!! Market Research Reports analyse the competitors’ webstore for their traffic, conversion & sales. This is extremely valuable information to derive our inventory budgets & projections, which takes us to our next phase.