The 5 Foundations for Building a Solid Fashion Business
Sometimes success doesn’t happen as a fully developed plan. It can be a singular idea that is introduced on social media that takes off like wildfire. Suddenly everyone wants your product and life is good! This product reaches a level of success that allows you to grow your business based on it. You now have a website, perhaps employees and customers asking for more options. But this is the tipping point for most brands my friend. Either you figure out how to grow or fade into the background because you failed to plan for growth.
When most people talk about business growth, it’s generally related to funds and investors. Yes, that’s critical, but that’s not the topic that we need to cover. You need to always be thinking about your own infrastructure, policies and relationships from the very beginning. Even if you are thinking that you are so far away from this, it’s a non- issue. But even successful brands can fail to plan for the growth I’m talking about today.
The truth is, viral visibility does not last. It’s always important to be thinking what your next steps are to make sure you are playing the long game for fashion success.
1 Signature Styles
Most fashion designers' successes are based on a singular item. For you, maybe it’s your viral hit. Take Diane Von Furstenberg and the iconic wrap dress. Then there’s the Birkin Bag. But it’s not just about designing an iconic product. It’s finding one that works. As I write this, Anthropologie has a pant silhouette that was launched maybe a little over a year ago. Apparently it sold really well because now the same pants are available in practically every fabrication you can imagine and placed all around the store in different iterations and styling. You see this frequently with a lot of mass retailers, especially during tough business times. They always go back to proven winners and relaunch and reinvent them until they stop selling. These products are guaranteed wins that can support the business.
We tend to be sold the idea that fashion is changing and evolving every moment. It’s all about the new. But new is not what success is built upon. Success is built upon styles that sell. I once worked for a manufacturer that lived for and loved any re-orders of the styles she produced. I didn’t get it at first. Afterall, why wouldn’t you want to make something new and exciting? But I learned that these re-orders (multiple production runs) were easy because all the development work in the fit and sizing was done. The fabric was already on hand. The factory knew how to make it. All the details that go into product development were bypassed and lead time was cut down considerably.
Signature styles, re-orders, and perhaps viral successes are important because these are your core pieces that you can always count on to sell. When you are planning your collections, always keep an eye out for that hero piece. The one that you can build your business on and guarantee cash flow.
2 Building relationships
With so many factories, service providers, fabric and trim suppliers, it’s easy to feel like your options are endless. Some days it feels like a buffet of options. You didn’t like the production results from a factory in Pakistan, so you move it to Vietnam, and then try India the next year. Or you work with a factory pattern maker, but then you aren’t happy with the results so you go to a private contract pattern maker only to find they are more expensive so then you go back to using the pattern development services but with the India factory. I’m dizzy just thinking about this and knowing that and your fit is officially out of whack!
Shifting around and finding your footing is ok when you are first getting started. Sometimes you don’t know what’s going to work until you get a good flow going. However, this continued rate of change makes your production very volatile and doesn’t endear people to you. Manufacturing is based on repeat customers and orders.
Treating supporting services as though they are disposable does not bode well for the long game. Even in US domestic production it’s a small enough arena where many people know each other…and we talk. But aside from gossip, you really need to have solid professional relationships backing you. No one is going to bend over backwards to help someone that hasn’t proven to be a loyal customer. Trust me, there will be many times that you need favors or support, so don’t burn bridges.
3 Suppliers
Suppliers can be fabric resources, label makers, elastic producers…etc… It’s important to consider where they are located in relation to your production and warehouse. Shipping is extremely costly these days so it wouldn’t make sense to really fall in love with a fabric that is made in Canada, but your factory is in Pakistan and your warehouse is in Pennsylvania. That’s just a crazy amount of shipping costs alone. It’s important to consider the big picture and how everything will relate and can work out financially for you.
Another important consideration in choosing suppliers is understanding what they always have in stock. Let’s say that you find a vendor for your 1 ¼” olive green elastic. You have a family friend in the elastic business and they specially make this elastic for you. But you went to a trade show and found that you can get this elastic for half the price and it’s always available. Even though you may have people you love to work with, it may be worthwhile considering suppliers that always have this item in stock so it’s always ready to ship to you instead of waiting weeks for this one component to be ready.
Cost is always a consideration, but I also urge you to think about maybe taking a slight step down from your ideal in order to save a little. For example, you are launching your first product and everything has to be perfect. You find the most amazing labels but they are $.50 a piece. It may not seem like much, but if your launch is a success then you’ll end up repeating the same just in larger quantities. For example, 1000 pieces that’s $500 just on labels. For 50,000 pieces that’s 25K. The point is, the larger your quantities the more overhead you may need to allocate elsewhere. This additional 25K could help to pay for new offices. It would be smart to consider cheaper options as you go, but do you really have time to do that if your business is growing at this rate?
4 Shipping
Let me share a story with you about my exceptional dumbness. When I first started my home sewing pattern line I offered printed patterns in addition to digital downloads. This was back in the early days of ecommerce websites where you had to hire a WordPress designer. I hired, what turned out to be, the worst web designers possible. They didn’t build a good checkout system for me that included calculated shipping costs. For hard copy pattern orders I ended up printing every single order (that was my model at the time) and absorbing the shipping costs on my end without adjusting prices. I just said “Oh well, business expense” and dealt with it. But then orders increased and I had a lot of shipments to the UK which, at the time, cost about $20 each. This was just not reasonable and I had to rethink my entire plan. To fix this I had to completely rebuild a website on my own, using Shopify that was brand new then, that thankfully factored in shipping. It was a massive undertaking for a massive oversight on my part.
It may be easy for you to package and ship your own orders one by one right now. But my wish is for you that there will come a day where the volume of orders will make this part of your operations obsolete. Dealing with shipping is definitely not the fun part of being in business. However, it’s still something that needs a little strategy behind it.
Factoring in shipping is even more important when you are dealing with overseas manufacturing. Air shipments are expensive when you are considering large orders. This is why so many US based retailers rely on cargo shipping to transport their goods. It takes considerably longer, but is significantly cheaper. Also, I’m hardly an expert in logistics, but I do know that if you are working with quantities that are too costly to ship, but too small for your own shipping crate, you will need to work with freight forwarding companies or consolidators to bring in your goods by sharing containers. I don’t think this is something that you want to figure out on the fly.
5 Determining your hard No's
As a small business some months may be good and others may leave you without sleep, fretting over financial worries. In times of famine it’s easy to say you’ll do whatever it takes to secure a customer's purchase. Let’s say a customer reaches out to you about a dress that you sell and they are asking if you can make it 4” shorter for them. This sounds doable, but you really need to ask yourself what kind of precedent does this set? Are this persons friends going to come to your store and ask you to customize an order for each of them? These small yeses along the way can dramatically affect your workflow.
I’ll share my own story with you: I only work remotely with clients. This is my hard policy now: no studio visits. It’s not that I don’t enjoy collaborating with designers. In fact, I enjoy it too much to the point where if I have someone around the ideas start flying, there’s lots of chatting and what I need to do for them doesn’t get documented properly because I’m distracted. Sometimes visits could take 3 hours, not counting the time spent tidying my studio and securing projects. It also takes a bit of time to come down from these meetings where I can focus on work again. Bottom line, studio visits were just too disruptive to my workflow. The work I do for my clients is very focus driven and detailed so it’s imperative to create this space so every project gets the attention it deserves.
I’m sure within your own business you’ve run across similar situations where you’ve bent a little further than you really should. It’s important to figure out what your hard no’s are because if you are spending too much time outside your ideal workflow what other opportunities are you missing. Boundaries are ok, even when you need the money.