Shifting Your Fashion Business from Craft to Career

I think it’s safe to say that most fashion businesses start from a place of “let’s see if this idea works”, which generally involves working evenings and weekends while still maintaining a day job. It’s a total trial and error phase, quite literally! You may have zero idea how to bring your idea to life, but gosh darn it, you will figure it out. This leads to many many failures along the way, but each time you fall, you pick yourself up again and try again a different way until you figure out what works for you. 

At this stage in your business you are working from the foundations of craft- where you do everything by your own skillful little hands and take pride in all the individual pieces you make yourself, one by one. You’ve developed your own systems and they work the way that makes sense to you and how you need them to. 

Craft is a perfectly reasonable and admirable stage. Rest assured, I do not want to diminish the value of craft. It’s what sets your products apart from the masses. But the problem with craft is that it can be challenging to scale. Making things yourself and working within your own systems is a safe space. But if you ever want to quit that day job to start your own fashion brand, then you need to shift your mindset to more of a production workflow.

I’m putting together a pretty simple and actionable plan for you to shift your mindset from craft to a career path. If you are like “Whoa, Betsy, I’m totally not up for looking for investors and overseas factories, and warehouses!” Don’t worry! We aren’t going that far. Instead, I want you to take small steps for planning for growth so you are ready for it.

Ensure business foundations are in place

Email: Any communication to do with your side hustle/burgeoning business should flow through an email address that is dedicated to your business only. People you will be communicating with want to know they are dealing with a valid business and this is often signaled by a proper email address. 

I get it, you don’t have time to figure that out. It feels overwhelming. I’ve done this multiple times through gmail and it’s easier than you think to get a dedicated email address for “hello@yourbusiness.com” . Sometimes even your website hosting may offer this service and walk you through the necessary steps. I would plan to dedicate an hour to figure this out and you should be good to go!

Bank accounts: 

You could be a sole proprietor and totally fine with that. All the money you make will be taxed on your personal income. But when you are growing you will want to monitor the cash flow of your business. To do this requires a separate bank account. It’s super simple to open a basic account at your local bank for your business. You could probably just set up a second personal checking account that doesn’t require an EIN just to keep funds separate as a starting point, but check with your bank and accountant to be sure. I’m talking baby steps here peeps…

Structure

You’ve probably heard Sole proprietorship, LLC, SCorp, Partnership, etc as formation options. The purposes of these entities are for taxes and legal protection. For instance, if you are making specialized medical wear as a sole proprietorship, this means that your own personal finances are at risk if someone sues you. With an LLC only the business can be sued and held liable. 

Now this is absolutely not my area of expertise. I only bring up business structure because it’s important for your fashion brands growth and I want you to look into it. Talk to a lawyer and an accountant about these topics and what would be the best plan for your business going forward. Yes, it’s going to take some time and money, but it’s best to protect yourself early on.

Plan for growth before you need it

The goal is for one of your products to go viral, right? Or perhaps a retailer contacts you and wants to place a large order. What will you do when that happens? It will be a lot of work on your shoulders and you may not be able to finish everything you need to on time. Orders and confidence can be lost. 

Even if you don’t have the resources at your disposal to hire out the work, it’s never too early to start looking and finding people that can be good matches for getting you the help that you need. For instance, finding the right factory partner can take a lot of time and trial. You can start talking and discussing minimums and requirements. Perhaps even pay for a sample to be made so you can review the work and see who you would like to work with going forward. 

Maybe you are fine on your own for the time being, but you know there will come a day when you need an assistant to help with the daily tasks. Start making lists and thinking of how you would want to teach someone new to join your team. Getting started on the right foot is essential so if you have employee guidelines in place, workflows charted out, and repeatable tasks documented on how to do them, it will help make the transition easier. 

I also encourage you to attend trade shows and networking events to discover how things can be done better and more efficiently for your brand.

Find new resources that align with your growth plan

If you are buying the fabric that you need for your products at the local Hobby Lobby then you gotta stop that! It’s going to be entirely too expensive and unreliable for your growing business. Instead, let me introduce you to something that you are going to love: Welcome to the world of wholesale! 

Wholesale is for buyers who purchase in large enough quantities to warrant a substantial discount. Wholesale exists for all aspects of sourcing what you need to make your clothing. You can find wholesale fabric, zippers, buttons, shipping materials, etc. Anything that you need in bulk can be purchased at a wholesale price.

To purchase at wholesale prices you will typically need a business license or resale certificate which allows you to buy goods tax free for resale. Wholesale purchasing is primarily used for businesses that plan to resell the clothing that they make to customers. Individuals are not eligible. 

I get it, it can feel scary to purchase a roll of fabric that is maybe 100 yards. Will you sell enough to warrant that? Hopefully. It’s always a gamble, but once you get enough growth momentum behind you that 100 yard roll will be nothing. 

With wholesale you will frequently find that there are minimums in place. Maybe your zipper supplier says the minimum purchase amount is 100 pcs or your labels are a minimum of 500. Sometimes you have to suck it up and just do it. But there are plenty of resources that specialize in low minimum order quantities, especially when it comes to fabric purchases. 

Prepare to shift your methods to what the apparel industry does

You’ve spent a lot of time and trial and error figuring out what works for your business and your customers. No one will ever understand the depths that you do. But you need to hire out help otherwise you will drown. You need someone good and someone who can help you achieve exactly what you need. 

However, the biggest learning curve that I’ve seen fashion entrepreneurs struggle through is shifting their mindset to doing things differently. Now, I’m not saying that you have to change everything dramatically. Nope, not at all. However, if you are hiring professionals for your projects, such as pattern makers, sample makers and technical designers, there will be certain unspoken rules that they and the industry in general, follow for bringing your clothing to life. 

A simple and frequent misconception I see is that designers assume that factories will cut their garments on the fold of a fabric, similar to how a home sewing pattern would direct cutting to happen. However, a full piece is actually needed because the factory will cut single garments on the entire width of the fabric that is spread over multiple layers to thus cut many garments at once. This is a relatively simple and straightforward mindset shift, but you will come across other workflows in place that service providers will ask you to adhere to so you will have to shift your mindset. 

Create a product calendar

Even if you are still working a day job, you already know how much time you have available to produce the garments you need. When you get a rush of orders it’s no doubt a moment of elation followed quickly by panic and convincing yourself that you can do this. So you toil late into the night to make your own deadlines. 

The biggest and cheapest change you can make for your business is to plan ahead. This allows you to: have enough inventory on hand, plan your photoshoots way in advance, source new materials and have time to test them out. Heck, by planning ahead you can build in a buffer so maybe you can actually take a vacation this year.

Once you reach this growth point the pivot happens where you realize that your product development and product timelines need to be more predictable so you can distribute the workload evenly throughout the months or year. Preventing burnout is key y’all and when you have a plan in place you are not only more organized, but you have a goal in mind that you want to hit.