Do you love fashion and have an eye for color and design? Then maybe starting up your own business creating your own fashionable clothes is the way forward for your next career move.
But maybe you have been put off due to not knowing where to even start. Well, fear not, below are some helpful tips and hints to get you started in your new adventure.
Decide On Your Clothing Line Niche
The first place you will want to start is deciding on the type of clothing and style you want to create. It could be a t-shirt business, a hat business, a children’s range or whatever you desire. But it’s always best to decide on this before starting anything else.
You may want to have a wide ranging clothing line with different pieces and styles, but as you start up try to concentrate on just one thing to begin with. You can always expand your range and styles as your business starts to grow.
Alongside deciding what kind of clothing pieces you want to make, for example t-shirts, you should also decide on the style they will be created in. This should reflect your personality as you will find it easier to create clothing in a style that you enjoy and know.
Create Your Designs
Next up you should start thinking about creating your designs. Again let’s use t-shirts as an example, so you will need to start thinking about colors, logos and designs. These should match what style and niche you are targeting.
Don’t forget all those extra personal touches such as accessories like buttons or the sewing label, as this will really help your product to stand out and look very professional.
You should try and create your designs on paper before attempting to create them on the clothing products themselves.
This way you can make mistakes and re-create to your heart’s content to get your final design exactly how you want it to look.
Once you are happy with how your designs look it’s time to create it for real. Take your time when doing this, and don’t get disheartened should you make mistakes. Practice makes perfect so the first few that you create should be practice efforts to get your final product just right.
Branding
Branding is so important for any type of business. Your brand is a reflection of your business and needs to match up with what you are trying to create. If they do not match then your branding can become confusing to the consumer and will negatively affect your business and sales.
Spend time working on your branding, trying to stand out against competition and match up with your desired clients and consumers.
If you struggle with this side of the business, maybe reach out to friends to help you, or hire a company that can take care of the branding side of things for you.
Branding will need to be on point before you try and launch any products to the market, so try and do some market research with your branding ideas, to get feedback from other people on what they think and ways to improve.
Start The Manufacturing Process
Once you have your designs ready, have tried them out on the clothing pieces and have worked on a branding for your business it’s time to take it to the next level with the manufacturing process.
Depending on what type of clothing you have decided to create you may be able to manufacture all of the items in house. This will be a cheaper option but will obviously be a longer process to create a high volume of items.
If not then you may need to look to outsource the process, in which case you should do some research online first to find the most suitable company for what you are looking for.
Search on google or your favorite search engine to try and find your best options locally to you, and don’t decide to use the first company you come across. Take your time, research and read up reviews and find the best pricing and quality before committing to any company.
Also make sure to ask for samples of work before placing any kind of large order, as you will want to see how your final product looks before committing large sums of money to the process.
Time To Test Your Product And Sell
Once your stock has been created it’s time to test out your creations before taking it to market. As well as testing out the quality of your clothing line yourself, ask friends and relatives to try them on, wear them, wash them and just generally test them out for you.
Get as much feedback from as many different people as possible as the more information you can get the better feedback you will receive.
Once you are happy it’s time to take the product to the selling public. You may decide to sell your clothing line from your own website and social media pages.
As well as doing this you should look at selling them in local shops to where you live alongside online shops that match up to your brand and style.
The more places you try and sell your products the more sales you should generate, so don’t be afraid to spread your wings and take your clothing line to all sorts of different market spaces.
To Sum Up
Although it may seem daunting to begin with when starting up a new fashion business, with a little hard work, dedication and planning there is no reason that you can’t create a successful clothing line and business in no time at all.
Always start off doing the smaller things first before planning on the larger and complicated ideas. Plan carefully and always look to seek advice from people and businesses that have similar ideas.
Follow the above steps to help get you started and good luck!
