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10 Biggest Mistakes To Avoid In Your Clothing Brand- Tips To Start A Clothing Line!
Clothing Brand Mistakes when growing a clothing line | Top 10 Start-Up Mistakes
One thing I've noticed is just how many mistakes first-time clothing brand owners can make in their business that can easily be overlooked. In today's video, I'll cover the top mistakes that I see clothing brands make. You might only be making a few of these, but if you can address them, then it's really going to help impact your business.
I'm going to share what those mistakes are and exactly what you can do about them.
Whether you're a fully funded startup or you're doing everything yourself, it's easy to make these mistakes no matter how seasoned you are in your business.
Stick around to the end, I'm going to share the most overlooked thing that trips up creators, makers, and designers, and stalls them in their business.
So here are the top 10 mistakes that I see small clothing brands make and what you can do about them.
Avoiding these mistakes will help you grow your clothing Brand.
Clothing Brand Mistakes - Number One: Waiting too long to launch your brand.
I see this show up so often. I call it sort of chasing perfection. You want to make everything perfect from your sketches to your line sheets, to your logos, your graphics, your brand colors, your website, and a lot of new business owners tinker and play around with all of these things endlessly.
It can look really authentic and obviously, we want to do the best possible job that we can. And in the creative field, of course, all of these things matter.
I can tell you from experience, from myself launching a business, but also from working with other entrepreneurs and helping them launch and grow their businesses, that no matter what you do, how much preparation you put into your launch and your first website and your first collection, you are going to want to change a lot of things.
You will grow and learn as you go forward. It only makes sense to kind of check the box and say, okay, I've done a good job. I feel really good about that.
Stop second-guessing and launch and move forward.
The other benefit of taking imperfect action is that you will get your product out into the marketplace quickly and you will get real-time customer feedback and you'll be able to read and react and use that information as you move forward in your business rather than taking another three months, another six months to actually get something launched and live.
You're not going to have feedback and be able to put any learnings into practice in your business. Make sure you get into action and get going as soon as you can.
Clothing Brand Mistakes - Number Two: Trying to design for everyone.
If you're not focused on your ideal customer, then you're really just thinking too broadly. It's impossible to deliver exactly what's going to work for your business if you're trying to please everybody.
Here's an opportunity to focus again on your ideal customer, what they want to wear, what's important to them in terms of quality, price, fabrication, fit and overall style, and mood, and get very specific on where you're focusing your design and aesthetics and it will benefit your brand.
If you miss out on this, you're going to be really throwing a lot of things out there that aren't going to resonate and ultimately won't sell. Don't be too broad when it comes to designing and trying to create products for a wide audience.
Clothing Brand Mistakes - Number Three: Underestimating exactly what's involved in actually launching a clothing business.
From not just the sizing, the specifications, the actual fit and fabrication, but choosing all of the designs, getting those designs, prototyped, fit, tested into samples production, and then into your first batch of actual live production can take 3, 6, 9 months or more even for seasoned brands.
if you're using off-the-shelf products or private-label white-label products this timeline can actually be shorter, but it doesn't remove all of the important steps in getting your product into your hands ready to sell through to customers.
Then the other half of the job is actually getting your product into your customer's hands. So marketing, promotion, photography, website, product descriptions, packaging, and shipping are the final pieces of that. And customer feedback and testimonials.
Those are all of the pieces that are involved in creating a successful clothing and accessory business.
If you're interested in grabbing my custom product development roadmap, it's a comprehensive checklist that you can use for any category that you create, I'll leave a link below and you can grab it there.
Clothing Brand Mistakes - Number Four: Spending all your valuable time creating line sheets and style sheets, a lot of the design visuals on the backend of your business that don't actually impact sales.
This can happen to the best of creatives, it doesn't help your brand, and ultimately it doesn't help your sales.
Instead, think about creating a roadmap of the actions that you really need to take in your business on a day-to-day and week, week-to-week basis. That will actually get your product into your customer's hands.
Create a roadmap that you can replicate month after month so that you don't get stuck in the minutiae behind the scenes.
Just keep in mind if you're selling directly to customers online or you're selling in a boutique, some of these steps are going to look different depending on what your business is.
Clothing Brand Mistakes - Number Five: Focusing too much on making money.
Instead of building a relationship and nurturing your customers, and the overall customer experience. Of course, we all want to grow revenue, grow sales, but if you're just focusing on selling all the time, it's going to sound a bit stale and off-putting to your customers, even if you've initially had a great little boost when you launched or launched a new product.
It's important to balance selling with nurturing your customers so that you can build a long-term relationship and have them coming back for more.
This will also ensure that your customers are ready and willing to shop. When you finally do turn up and ask for the sale, do any of these mistakes sound familiar?
Clothing Brand Mistakes - Number Six: Over-investing in too much inventory right out of the gate.
It's a delicate balance between being well stocked and prepared for stales and over-inventoried or having too much stock on hand and spending all your money on your inventory, particularly when you're starting out and you don't have a lot of proof or evidence or sales data on how much you could expect to sell on a launch every week.
However, when you're measuring your sales period, it's much better to approach your inventory with a test-and-learn, read, and react mindset so that you have some stock on hand. You decide what your first quantities might be, which might be 10 pieces, a small sample order, or it might be 50 pieces depending on what your category is. Then put that for sale, offer it to your customers, and see what the response is, seeing how long it takes you to sell through before you overinvest or invest again in more inventory.
This way you'll be able to read and react and then also not have your valuable dollars tied up in your inventory if a new opportunity comes through or one of your styles starts to sell better than the others, and you can put your dollars into that bestselling style. So think about balancing your inventory very carefully.
It's always better to sell out, sell through your inventory, and then sell out rather than have inventory piled high and your money stuck in that inventory.
Clothing Brand Mistakes - Number Seven: using the same strategies over and over again even if they're not working.
This can be tough to catch. And you'll have to catch yourself.
This again is going to be a balance between trying a strategy, and then picking a period of time where you've decided you're going to evaluate your results and then decide if you will make changes or not.
When it comes to creating strategy, whether that's product strategy, marketing strategy, pricing, or strategy, I like to think in round quarters, so three months at a time, six months at a time, nine months a year for example.
When most people are starting out, it's great to experiment with different ideas right out of the gate, to find your way, and to find what you might like to do. If you want to show up on social media, or how you'd like to show up if you want to create videos or fit tutorials for your product, whatever that is?
It's fine to experiment in the beginning, but at some point early on, you'll need to create a strategy that you will then implement on a consistent basis, then pick a time at some point in the future, three months, let's say when you're going to sit down, analyze your results, whether that's your sales, your likes, new subscribers, whatever the metrics are, and use the data, not the emotions.
Use the data to figure out if your strategy is working and what changes or small shifts you might want to make. Rather than throwing out a complete strategy, I like to keep most things the same and change one small piece of the strategy and then use another measurable time period to see when you're going to evaluate again.
Don't feel like you have to stay with the same strategy once you pick it or the same approach or tactics, but you do want to make sure that you set in place a system, even if it's one you're creating yourself, where you measure your results and change strategy in a mindful way.
Clothing Brand Mistakes - Number Eight: Not building out an authentic brand DNA.
And not showing up with an authentic personality in your business.
Even if you don't want to be the face of your brand it's important if you're new to try and show up in some way. I can't tell you how many small businesses I encounter and come across and entrepreneurs that I coach who don't want to show up as the brand, the face of their brand, and that's fine.
But if you're a small business, showing up lends authenticity. It's easier to buy from someone you can see, that sounds and feels familiar than it is just a story that's written out on the page.
Big brands and global brands can easily get away with not having a face to their business. I'm thinking of a brand like Everlane for example, that doesn't have an iconic face or person personality in their business, but brands that are able to do this have already invested a lot of money and effort into their DNA.
It's far easier to tell a brand story if you're telling it from a personal perspective and it adds a lot of weight to that conversation.
So, if you can do it you can find a way to be comfortable with doing it, show up for your brand, and speak in an authentic way and your customers will thank you and they'll buy from you.
Clothing Brand Mistakes - Number Nine: Partnering with someone who doesn't bring equal value into your business.
So often we have friends and family and friends of friends who have different expertise and want to be a partner in your business.
Partnerships can be tricky even for seasoned business veterans. And when you're starting out, it's very easy to accept help into your business and have people want to show up as partners in your overall endeavor. But oftentimes the partnership doesn't feel like it's equal. It's not a two-way street. You might have people who are giving you lots of advice and “shoulds” and “coulds” for your business but they're actually not doing the heavy lifting.
They're not helping you pack and ship, they're not helping you do some of the tougher pieces in your business. Be wary of partnerships and make sure if anything, you have something laid out in writing, even if it's not a legal contract, but everyone has clarity on what they're bringing to the table in terms of a partnership.
Clothing Brand Mistakes - Number Ten: Giving up too quickly on your business.
The idea of too soon can be rather a relative term. Often when people are facing struggles to grow their business or they've plateaued, they're usually on just the near side of making major leaps in their business and starting to really see the results of all the hard work they've put in. Make sure you're not quitting your business too soon before you start to see those results.
CONCLUSION:
Okay, let’s recap before I get to the bonus tip.
The top 10 mistakes I see new brands and some seasoned brands make when it comes to growing their business.
Number one: Waiting too long to launch their clothing brand.
Number two: Trying to design for everyone being too broad and not focusing on the ideal customer mistake.
Number three: Underestimating how much work actually goes into starting a clothing business.
Number four: Spending your time creating style sheets and sketches, all those behind-the-scenes things that don't bring value to your business.
Number five: Focusing too much on money and not the best customer experience.
Number six: Over-investing in inventory before you have proof or evidence of what's gonna work in your clothing brand.
Number seven: Using the same strategies when they aren't working and using them over and over again.
Number eight: Holding back from creating with personality and your authentic brand. DNA
Number nine: Partnering with someone who doesn't bring equal value into your business.
Number 10: Giving up way too soon on your clothing brand.
BONUS TIP: So what's one of the biggest things that trips up creatives, makers, and designers on a daily basis when they're just starting out?
It's creativity itself.
This actually can impact even the most seasoned designers. When you have lots of great ideas and you live in a creative world and you have a business where you can put all that creative energy, it's easy to continue to develop, imagine, conceptualize new products, new launches, new ideas, and have a constant flow of newness coming into your business.
But this can trip you up from actually executing on the things and the projects and the launches that you have in hand and slow you down so it'll slow down your growth.
One of the best practices that you can adopt is to find a way to capture all of those great ideas, all that creativity, whether that's in a notebook, a digital notebook or planner, or a mood board that you keep. Maybe it's a physical board that you have in your office that you pin swatches to and swipes and pictures.
Gather all of that creativity and save it, and you can keep it visual, but don't let it distract you from the tasks at hand. The tasks of growing your business and selling your product that you already have in the pipeline, there will always be newness that is coming through always new trends. You don't have to have a knee-jerk reaction and implement each thing as it comes through. You're not going to miss anything.
I can tell you as someone who has worked in corporate fashion, and in many of my roles actually led the trend and product innovation team trends evolved slowly over time it takes many seasons, often years for a trend to come into the mainstream, for it to peak and then for it to tail off within that time.
There is plenty of opportunity to find ways to bring trends and newness into your business.
You're not going to miss anything. So figure out a way where you can capture, save, and enjoy all that creativity or those ideas, but not let it derail you from the business at hand. Learn when to say, great, that project is complete. Put a bow on it and send it on its way.
Your brain will thank you, but your business will also thrive.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Trudi Roach specializes in helping small and emerging fashion and accessory brands scale successfully - even without any prior business or fashion industry experience.
A former fashion executive and merchandiser (aka the real Business of Fashion) she led product development for multi-million-dollar fashion brands, crafting a strategy with the Marketing, Sales, and Finance teams. Trudi learned how to run a business, from top to bottom the hard way, through hands-on experience creating products, working with vendors, and launching products, from test quantities to million-dollar programs … every month!
As a fashion brand consultant, Trudi can help you get there too.
