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Improve Your Clothing Brand | 14-Day Challenge| Business Ideas & Tips for a Better Fashion Brand
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge | Improve Your Clothing Brand Fast
The truth is, you can have a great product and a great brand, but if you're not growing your sales and you're not growing your audience, then your business won't grow.
If you're frustrated with where your business currently is at, or you just know that it could be better, you're in the right place. Sometimes when things aren't working, it's hard to step back and figure out what business tips to use to try to improve so you can see the results that you're looking for.
In today's video, I'm going to share the 14-Day Challenge that I've created to help you create a better fashion brand so that you can start to shift the results in your business.
I've created a new tool that you can use to go step by step through this process. It's the 14 day, to create a better brand challenge sheet, and I'll share a link to that at the end of the video.
Think of this like having a workout plan or a meal plan to take you step by step through some shifts in your business, and you can take this step by step, go one day off to another, or take it at your own pace. Whatever works for you. These are the key business ideas to look at in the 14-Day Challenge.
If things aren't working right in your business or you just get a sense that they could be better, sometimes it's hard to know exactly what to start to change and where to begin so it can feel a little overwhelming. You don't want to start changing lots of things in the hopes that something will work.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day One: Brand Audit.
To conduct a brand audit, you want to look at exactly what are your best sellers and your worst sellers, what's actually creating customers and revenue in your business, and potentially anything that you're doing, any activity that doesn't seem to be getting you results or measurable results. You'll start to see patterns and opportunities when you conduct an audit like this. And also you'll create some benchmarks so that when you review in the future, you have somewhere to start from.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Two: Identify Your Strengths.
Along with a comprehensive brand audit, you want to make sure you understand where your brand and your business sit within the marketplace. This is so you can see from the customer's perspective how your brand might be showing up.
You want to spend some time taking stock of your strengths and weaknesses is going to let you find some areas where you have real opportunities to discover online business ideas, and create change and growth in your business.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Three: Get Customer Feedback
Whether you're a new business or you're a seasoned business, you are building a reputation for your brand every day.
Gathering customer feedback is going to let you hear the good and the bad, and you want to hear it all and start to understand what is working from the customer's perspective in your business. You can engage with your customers through surveys, social media, through email, and you want to start to gather that information and keep a record and start to gather customer testimonials that you can use across all of your platforms as well as your website.
Clothing Brand 14 - Challenge - Day Four: Gather insights on customer preferences
You've probably heard or seen this quote before.
“A well-satisfied customer will bring in repeat sales that count.“
These are the sales that are easier to create and the more reliable ones. Now that you've engaged with your ideal customers and you're gathering feedback, it's time to take it a step further, knowing that they are satisfied or what they're dissatisfied with is only half the story.
Make sure to dig deeper and ask why, how, and what all of the questions are going to let you understand what the customer experience is and how you might improve your clothing brand.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Five: Do Competitor Analysis
You've spent time looking inside your business at what's working, and what's not working.
You've looked at the customer experience and how they might be reacting to what you're doing. That's just part of the story. Now we want to look at what sits around your business
To look at the competitive landscape, make a list of three to five brands or businesses that sit around your business.
These are your competition, and don't think this of this in a negative way. Look for inspiration. You want to think of brands that are either aesthetically like yours, might be like your brand for price point or style, or maybe they're in your special niche. Who sits around your brand?
Think of them as your competition, and you want to analyze what they're doing and how they're showing up. Analyze your competition with a critical eye. You're not looking for negatives here.
What you're looking for is areas of opportunity, how they're showing up, how they're advertising, marketing, showing up on social media, and what kinds of products do they offer. How do they bundle their products?
There's going to be a lot of opportunity and insights there that you might down the road use in your own business. Look for the positives that might serve as inspiration and motivation to help you achieve the goals in your fashion business.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Six: Where your brand can differentiate itself
From your competitive analysis, you probably have lots of ideas and notes that you want to put into action, but this isn't about finding things to copy from other brands. This is really about finding the white space or the area of opportunity.
Sometimes we call it blue-sky opportunity.
It's wide open for your clothing brand to slip into. Identify business ideas and areas of opportunity where your brand can differentiate itself in the marketplace. That may be something that's unique. What you sell is unique. How you position your brand in terms of your customer service, or the products that you sell or something that's special about your products.
You can talk about and celebrate finding what's unique in your business.
That area of white space or opportunity is your brand's superpower!
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Seven: Do a Sustainability Audit
You don't have to be an eco-friendly or environmentally friendly green brand to think about being economical, and creating savings, and being sustainable with your business. Creating savings and efficiencies in your business can boost your bottom line.
These are where the pennies come into play, but they add up over time. Evaluate your brands, sustainable practices from sourcing to packaging to shipping materials, and everything that you do in your business. Identify any opportunities where you can create some eco-friendly efficiencies.
It doesn't matter if this is just financially driven, you want to save money by using repackaged materials or cut down on shipping materials because you care for the environment. It all counts.
In the corporate world, it all counts for sure, and some brands aren't sustainably led like Patagonia, but they are big corporate entities and want to make sure they have a positive impact or not a negative impact on the environment.
Whatever is leading your sustainable mission, it does matter. See if you can find something in your business where you can carve this out, decide what's most important to you and your business, and make sure to share that with your audience.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Eight: Conduct a Social Media Review
And talking about sharing how you share, particularly if you're a clothing or accessory business, is a hundred percent of what conveys your brand DNA and the brand experience to your customer. Particularly if you're just trading in the online space and you have no in real-life store experience.
How you share with your audience is going to mean everything to your business. Review and optimize across all your social media platforms to make sure everything that you're putting out aligns with your brand message and your DNA and posting shot after shot of pure product is not going to convey a complete brand message to your customers.
Particularly if you're a clothing accessory business, it looks great on the feed, but it doesn't share the full brand story. Make sure you're posting and sharing a mix of nurturing content behind the scenes as well as product and promo content so you can give your customers a full expression of your business and keep them engaged.
Nurturing content might be style guides behind the scenes, as I mentioned, you might do fabric tutorials or how to care for products, styling, or anything that starts to share the story of what your brand is all about and the mission.
And don't forget to think about sharing on your blog post as well.
Your blog sits on your website right next to your product pages and is often overlooked in the world of social media in terms of how you can connect with your customers.
Having a blog on your website gives you evergreen content. It just lives on. So unlike the Instagram feed, which we love, it is very temporary and it scrolls by fast and no one can search it. So there's no SEO on Instagram. A blog post has all of that and can continue to bring traffic to your website.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Nine: Develop a content calendar with a mix of engaging and promotional posts.
How do you make sure you build those moments on social media as well as your blog? Build out a content calendar so you can plot out what you're going to do within the month and sometimes even throughout the year.
You can cycle through seasons and these promotional moments. But then in between you can share great behind the scenes and nurturing content with your audience and have fun with it, and that's how they're going to respond. You don't have to be a writer to create a successful blog.
When I say successful, that just means that it's on your website and continues to bring in traffic to your business. I've created a failproof way to create consistent blog posts for your brand with the creative content bank, with over 75 blog post prompts, specifically written for clothing and accessory brands. It's the easiest way to create engaging blog posts that bring traffic to your website every single day.
Click this link so you can take a look at that.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Ten: Brand Collaborations
So far, we've talked about all the things that you can do for your brand, but if you're a solopreneur or you just have a few people working in your business, you don't have to do this alone. Now let's think about how others can help you grow your business.
This is not about asking for favors or freebies, this is about building real relationships with other entrepreneurs, brands, or businesses that can help support your growth and identify potential collaborators, influencers, and other brands for partnerships.
Think about brands that are adjacent to yours. So you're not looking at the competition. If you sell swimwear, for example, you might look to collaborate or reach out to a brand that sells sunhats or sunscreen or a brand that sells flip-flops.
Find a business that's adjacent to yours. They could be in a similar niche but they don't compete. Try to find brands that align with your brand mission and your brand DNA.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Eleven: Reach out to initiate conversations
You are not going to come right out of the gate and start asking for favors or collaborations before you've built a real relationship.
You are going to have a better chance of success if you start genuine conversations with the brands that you've identified and build that trust over time. Reach out and initiate conversations with those brands that align with your ethos and your values and start a real conversation.
Find out more about their customers, their products, and what their mission is so you can figure out if that's a good fit and what might work as a collaboration in the future. Think of this as a mutually beneficial relationship and one that you're going to grow over time. This is not a one-and-done kind of fast and furious.
This is really about building that relationship.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day twelve: Revamp your Website
With all of the energy that we've just spent over the last several days looking outside of your business, it's time to now think about your home base, your website, what happens when the customer lands there for the first time, and what that experience is like.
It's time to review and update your website, ensuring a seamless and user-friendly experience, optimize your product pages, your visuals, and your descriptions, and make sure everything is a compelling and seamless experience for your customers.
You can make a note of things that you want to change in the future. You don't have to try and do it all at once.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Thirteen: Show Some Appreciation
If you've been in business just a little while, you've probably made just a few sales, but if you've been in business longer, you have made more sales and have more customers. And you might have heard this before, I'm pretty sure you have.
It's easier to sell to customers that have already purchased than it is to create new customers.
Now's the time to show the existing customers you have, even if there are just a few, show them a little bit more love and launch a customer appreciation strategy. Launch special offers, and promos, and invite them to special events.
Find ways to nurture the customer base that you already have. This could be to your email list, but more importantly, if you can identify on the backend of your website, that people have already purchased, this is going to be gold to you.
You can upsell them, down-sell them, and just really give them more offers and a more nurturing experience. It's going to build that bond over time.
Build relationships, and you will build repeat purchases.
Clothing Brand 14-Day Challenge - Day Fourteen: Make a Future Plan
You've probably gathered a lot of notes and a lot of ideas and things that you want to get into action right away. The best way to do this is to make sure you plan for the future.
Develop short-term and long-term goals for all of the insights, thoughts, and actions that came up during the challenge and set that up for yourself in the next 3, 6, 9, and 12 months In a great plan.
If you need help with goal setting and making a plan for your clothing business, I created a video recently, which I'll leave a link here! You can go ahead and take a look. It'll give you some great goal-setting tips and tools so that you can create an effective plan for your brand.
CONCLUSION Here are my key takeaways from a 14-day challenge to a better clothing brand:
The key to a successful challenge is to take it step by step and not try and rush the process.
It's a 14-Day Challenge, but if you need to separate the days so you do them, you know, one or two days apart, that's fine. Just keep going in the order and you'll start to see the results.
The ultimate goal is not just to overcome the challenges, but it's to improve your business.
This means building a strong reputation, improving brand awareness, and engaging with your customers in a real way.
I created a 14-Day follow-along cheat sheet, and I'm going to leave a link here so you can download that cheat sheet, and put it on your office wall by your laptop so you can follow along at your own pace.
I'm excited to see what you do with your business in the next 14 days.
WORK WITH ME 👇🏼
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.
