It seems that everyone on the internet has a clothing brand. Merch shops, streetwear labels, and even most corporations have a clothing line now.
In 2018 I started my own streetwear brand and transitioned into clothing manufacturing for other brands and corporations, and finally transitioned again into consulting and for other brands in the industry. What I learned as a brand owner along the way set me up for success in the business riddled with extreme competition and small profit margins.
Many people want to follow the hype train and create their own brand
(mostly so they can just take one of those pics of themselves laying down on all their orders) so I wrote a breakdown of every step of the process to go from 0-100 for new startups.
The Foundations of an Apparel Company
The foundations of a private label are the first points of contact that anyone will make with your brand. The main points of contact are:
1. Your website. Your website does not have to be fancy but it has to be functional, informative, easy to navigate, and reflect your brand image. Don't focus too much on the tools used to build the sites because I will let you in on a secret: They all do the same thing with relative quality. Choose between Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, ect. They all make powerful functional e-commerce websites. Shopify is popular because it is simple and offers an array of analytics tools. I personally used Webflow ecommerce because it offers full customization, unlike standard e-commerce tools. But most of you aren't developers so don't worry about that.
2. Social Media Pages. These have to be on point, eye-catching and retaining, and riddled with social proof. Instagram and TikTok should be the main focus of your efforts, all other platforms come second. For most (not all depending on your niche) startups, this is where your main target audience is.
3. Your Brand image. Logo, piece designs, and overall presentation. As a base, you should have some knowledge in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to create a logo, brand colour scheme, typefaces, and other branding mediums.
Attention spans are shorter than ever in 2024 so you have to make your impression within 30 seconds or less. These things generally have little to do with apparel, but for many streetwear startups, it will mostly be just you in the beginning which means you will have to wear many hats.
1. Clothing Piece Designs
This is the pivotal step. And the barrier to entry in the clothing game. Always remember, your designs cant suck. It doesn't matter how popular your brand is, if you create crap, it will be treated as such. Do not create generic “2016 ASSC vibe” pieces. This is such a common mistake with new startups. I even see stuff like this posted in this sub till this day. Create something unique that can be niched down to a subset of clothing enthusiasts, then target them hard.
Goth look? Think Vetements, prototypes, and Jadded London.
Hip hop fashion? Think KOZY, Yulovesk, or OVO
Contemporary? Think Uniqlo, frank & oak, and COS
Most startups cannot create successful brands that are able to target an extremely wide demographic of people so it is leaps and bounds better to just niche down.
COPY COPY COPY. You ever heard the quote: “ Good brands copy, but great brands steal?” This could not be more true. When you are first starting off, I repeat do not create something 100% from scratch because 90% of the time, it will look terrible. Instead, get inspiration from a piece you love and then put your own twist on it.
The brand OFF WHITE is famous for this, they constantly took inspiration from other brands and artists and made it their own to become the hottest streetwear brand of the 2010s. However, now they have divulged into creating pieces that look like they should be on the clearance rack at Forever 21. Just goes to show you you can't stay hot forever.
No matter how good a piece you create looks, within 6 months, you will look down on it, because in the fashion game, what's fresh changes almost monthly, so you must constantly be evolving and pulling ideas from everywhere in your life to innovate on what is already out there.
Ready To Create Your Own Garments?
See for yourself how we can help you design and manufacture
your own pieces to take your brand/business to the next level.
2. Assistance Items
Mailers, poly bags, and boxes: Don't be that guy who ships out their products in a blank box. The marketing on the box is part of the unboxing experience. Get a good manufacturer to make these and give them a custom design. Ask your clothing supplier if they can make these as well, a lot of suppliers do these as a secondary business.
Custom labels and tags: A lot of the time you will have to order these separately and in bulk.
Factor in shipping costs per region: Calculate an average shipping cost per region and have this reflected on your checkout page. This way you won't be surprised when you have to pay $30.00 to ship your t-shirt overseas.
3. Clothing Manufacturing
Designing a product is one thing but bringing those ideas to life is another. The more unique the designs, the more thorough your manufacturer will have to be. Everyone always turns to Alibaba first for finding manufacturers and I would agree this is the best place to start. You will find a wide variety of manufacturers who can make a wide variety of products. You don't even have to look for streetwear dedicated manufacturers to create your products. There have been many factories where I have built relationships with, that specialized in other areas of apparel and still make great products.
The most important thing when looking for manufacturers is vetting them and building relationships. Order samples, test delivery time, inquire about dropshipping options, test the quality, and even discuss payment terms that you are comfortable with. The benefit of working directly on the Alibaba platform is that they have trade assurance for all orders. You can use that as an extra layer of protection when making trade deals.
Make sure you are as detailed as possible and provide as much information in your tech packs as possible to get the perfect product in your vision.
As you create your products and brands you can look into finding domestic manufacturers, or factories located in various countries. China is great at what they do, but countries like Pakistan, Honduras, and Taiwan all have growing clothing manufacturing industries.
You are not limited to using one manufacturer, many brands use multiple factories if they find one that is better at making a different product.
MOQs are generally not a huge deal, there are many suppliers with low MOQ for (50+)
4. Currating Your Sales Funnel
MOQs Yes, I know you are not a salesman/woman. However, having a basic understanding of your customer's journey is imperative for a successful apparel line. Like any other business, you must make it as easy as possible for your customers to hit that “buy” button.
The basic funnel should look like this:
- Marketing Ad / organic point of contact
- Social media page/website
- Product page
- Purchase
If the customer makes it to the product page but has NOT bought yet, you can also add techniques to encourage them to finish their journey in the funnel:
- Website pop up reminders
- Retargeting ads
- Email reminders about items in their cart
- Slight discount codes (limited time based)
There is a way to do all these without seeming spammy, and that is what you should be going for here if you decide to do retargeting efforts.
Creating your customer profile
You got to put yourselves in the shoes of the customer. Are you proud of your product? It does not matter. Because the market determines if you have a good product, not you. Feedback is crucial, engage with your audience and work based on their feedback.
Is your website hard to use? Is the order process streamlined? How fast do you respond to inquiries? All these matter when creating the perfect customer experience.
5. Marketing Channels That WORK
The advice I always hear regarding marketing is “Try everything until you find what works for you”. This is correct to a degree. Statistically, for apparel startups, you will get the most ROI on two main channels: Social ads and Influencer marketing. That's because most of your target market hang out here. (Im leaving out contact marketing because you are at the mercy of the algorithm until you gain traction)
Tier List of effective marketing channels
The tier list for effective marketing channels for startup apparel brands are as follows:
- Content marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Social media ads
- Collaborations
- SEO
- Everything else
When discovering a new brand you usually see a piece from a social media channel or an influencer wearing it (also usually on a social media channel.) Which means this is your bread and butter in terms of marketing:
Micro and Major influencer marketing: Using micro influencers is a great way to get your product out there for low cost because 85% of the time you will just need to pay the price of shipping to get the influencer to wear the product. The ROI here can even be just as effective because the micro influencers following can even be more engaged than a major influencer audience. (percentage wise) Reach out to influencers by email as your primary method of contact, and if that is not available, use the Direct message function as a secondary option. DMs can get lost, and go straight to hidden, but if you have a reputable email address that is not spam listed and are using an aged email or ESP, it will always go directly to their primary inbox.
Social Ads: Micro and Major influencer marketing Social media ads are effective, but in 2024 and beyond, they have to be HOT. After over a decade of seeing Instagram and TikTok ads, the majority of people are programmed to skip these subconsciously. Do you know why that is? Because most social media ads SUCK. They don't match the users feed, and they are lame. So an easy fix to this is to create an ad that blends in with the client's feed as much as possible. I always say, when it comes to social media don't be ad-focused, be content-focused and take a strong performing piece of content that can be turned into an ad. These are the only memorable ads that stick out in my mind really.
And before you tell me I'm missing email marketing, don't bother, because we are only talking about cold marketing efforts for people who do not know your brand yet.
After you develop your specific strategy, it's just a matter of doing it over and over and optimizing it based on your feedback and analytics.
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6. Customer Retention
A lot of people don't know that the clothing brand business model SUCKS. This is because you are at the mercy of factors like trends, a very fickle customer base, and low profit margins. So to truly be successful, you have to really cater to your customer base until you have that cult-like audience that will buy whatever you put out (mostly) because they just love your brand so much.
Email Marketing: This is the most personal social channel on EARTH. More than Instagram, more than any other social media, and that's why you need to take advantage of it to stay in the minds of your customers. Getting a proper ESP is imperative to success, chose one you like, Sendinblue, klavio, or whatever, they are all good in a basic sense. (Mailchimp is kind of trashy though) The important thing is you need to stick to a schedule that keeps your customers engaged but not to the point where you are spamming them. My sweet spot is 1-2 times per week MAX. Here you can send them news, updates, events, feedback requests, etc. Just create a schedule you can maintain and stick to it.
Getting out of the Probationary Period: Take a simple Vetements hoodie for example. It did not have anything on it but the logo and that's it, but when I wore it I felt like THAT GUY. Because of the brand ideology, the brand status, the exclusivity of having that piece, and the thought of wearing something that resonates with my beliefs. That is the power of apparel. That is where all startups should strive to get in the minds of their consumers. There are a ton of brands that put out crap but chumps still buy it because they are out of the probationary phase. They now can tell YOU what to wear instead of the customer telling you what you should make for them. That's why 2016 merch with Japanese phrases in quotes won't get you to that place.
Retargeting : If you are using more traditional ad platforms like facebook ads and google ads, you can also look into retargeting your customers so the ad will show up on other websites at a later date. Use this sparingly because if the customer really doesn't want to buy, then you will just end up using more ad spend for no reason.
7. Pre-order strategy vs Holding inventory
If you build up a little buzz, you can use that to your advantage. The traditional business model for apparel brands is buying inventory beforehand and selling as orders come in. This has its benefits as you can ship items immediately and maintain a real time view of your inventory control and quality. But for many brands, you run the risk of sitting on inventory.
The pre-order strategy is a tactic that many brands use who have a strong audience. By collecting orders and payment beforehand, you can use this data to gauge the exact number of orders you will need from your supplier and you can use the revenue to fund the orders while keeping the profit. There are benefits to both but these are typical of the two main business models most brands use.
8. Attention Economy vs Quality Products
In this business, attention is (almost) the end all be all. It just takes one influencer or one viral video to jumpstart your career. While quality and sustainability are very important, the eyeballs that you have on your brand carry more weight. Every brand (for the most part) has good quality and good designs. It's the tertiary factors that determine success in the business these days since the primary factors are all mostly expected at this point.
Understand that most people do not care about what you release indefinitely. Tell me one brand NOT backed by investor funds that has managed to stay relevant for more than 10 years. That's right, not many.
VLONE, Bianca Chandon, Adder Error, SICKO BFP, ASSC, OVO, these brands all had their day.
While still maintaining a core audience who still buys from them today, they have not managed to maintain sustainability in their market position. Either something they have done, or the market just overall losing interest in your product.
All of this has been personal knowledge I learned over 6 years of running my own brand and It has helped me transition into what I do now which is consulting and collaborating with other brands in the industry.
All the best with your startups.
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