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Why Fashion Brand Success is Hard
What makes a fashion brand successful?
If you're growing a clothing or accessory business from the ground up, this is going to be perfect for you.
In this video, I'll share the common reasons that clothing brands fail and what to do about it.
Whether you're a mini fashion brand, launching a streetwear label, or doing private label, these tips will help you increase your chances of success.
I want you to use this guide to build a successful clothing brand.
The reason brands often fail is probably not what you think. I'm not going to talk about spreadsheets and revenue, profit and loss today, but there are subtle yet important nuances that a lot of businesses miss, that can impact your overall success.
So, let's dive in.
The first question to think about is are you really a brand?
Having clothes on a website is fine to start, putting a logo on a hat or a sweatshirt as you're starting out, is just fine.
But having products on a website with a few logos does not make you a fully formed brand.
Why Clothing Brands Fail: No Brand DNA
You need to build out your brand's DNA.
For clients and small businesses that I work with, I recommend building out a brand mood board. Often designers and creatives do this for their actual product, but I like to back up one more step and build out the brand mood board for your business.
This would have all the things that inspire you in your brand's DNA
Whether that's colors, logos, type that you might use, what your website's style is, but also breaking it down and getting into product styles.
You can use swipes or images from the marketplace, from other brands that you be inspired by, that you're going to gather together and create a unique vision for your business. Plus your customer’s profile.
I’ve talked about this in other blog posts, about ideal customer, but this is a great way to bring that customer to life and get the vision out of your head and down onto a board or onto a digital mood board, where you can think about that customer's lifestyle, what they wear, where they like to go, their wardrobe needs, but also think about fabrics, colors, price points as well and some of the core pieces that they might want in their wardrobe, in their accessory collection.
Get inside the customer's head and build out this kind of vision for your business.
In the video, I share a great example of a brand that does this well.
You can check that brand out HERE.
Even the model looks like the founder, and the wardrobe looks like one cohesive collection, and it looks like one girl's wardrobe.
So everything sits together. The price points are consistent, the color palette is consistent, the style mood is very consistent and you can, if you had to sum up this sort of French girl meets LA style, everything that happens in this brand fits that DNA.
Think about how you can create something like this, something iconic and recognizable and it's going to be unique for your own clothing or accessory business.
Why Clothing Brands Fail: Too much Logo
Sometimes I see brands instead of creating their brand DNA simply over-brand and over-logo all of their product and everything they do in their business.
This can look like overuse of logos, using logos that are too big, and too colorful all the time and on all the products, does not create an identifiable brand.
This detracts from your brand. It can look a little cheap, it can look a little unsophisticated even if you're a bold and poppy brand and logo is your thing, there needs to be some measured restraint. In the fashion industry, this is often a conversation that requires a lot of back and forth with designers and design teams.
And as a merchandiser, someone whose job was always to make sure the product was positioned to sell out in the market at certain price tiers, using logo with restraint was very, very important.
It's always a critical choice. Even brands like Ralph Lauren that lead with logo, use the logo in a restrained way and they're very thoughtful and careful even when it's the giant polo pony. It's used with a lot of thought and they don't put the giant polo pony on everything all the time.
It shows up on certain items, it shows up in certain colorways and it's meant to signify certain moments within the collection. And the brand is part of your brand story.
Your logo is not your entire brand. And if you keep that in mind, you will successfully navigate the logo space
Why Clothing Brands Fail: Not Having Essentials
Another thing that can cause brands to fail is that they don't have essential pieces in their collection.
And it does not matter if you are a high-end brand like Gucci or an opening price point brand like an h and m or Uniqlo. Having essential pieces within your assortment, within your collection on your website, and having more pieces on offer to your audience, however you reach your audience, is key to ensuring that you're setting your business up for success.
I think of this sort of like bread and butter when we were in the industry, we called it the bread and butter of your business.
These are the basics. Basics look different for every brand.
You might think of a capsule wardrobe or Gap brand. Basics at the Gap are T-shirts, at Ralph Lauren, a basic is a polo shirt. At Tory Birch, a basic is the little skimmer with the logo tab on the front.
A basic or essential can look different for every brand, so don't feel pigeonholed into something specific, but it's important that you figure out what is going to be an essential or basic piece in your business.
Something that is an appetizing price point for your consumer.
Often an entry price point, an easy purchase for your consumer, something that they're going to come back to again and again season after season. You are going to ensure your repeat purchases going to be at a very specific price point within your business.
An essential doesn't have to be cheap or inexpensive, but it does need to sit on the lower end of your price range to make it an easy purchase basics in every category.
If you are a streetwear brand, you might have a basic sneaker or a basic T-shirt. You might have a basic or essential hoodie.
For a womenswear brand, you might have an essential tank dress or an essential ankle pant.
So the categories don't matter. But once you've got that customer DNA, you're going to know what the wardrobe requires, what your customer wears. Think about what would be the essentials in that mix.
It’s a good idea to go back to your mood board and find visual examples of your ideal customer and pinpoint some of those essentials right on your DNA board.
Why Clothing Brands Fail: Overusing Brand Colors
Brand colors are another reason that brands can run into trouble.
Using brand colors everywhere as backgrounds, logos, t-shirts, fonts, all the things can be overwhelming. It's not a subtle way to get your brand message across.
Think about all of the pieces that go into expressing your full brand DNA. You don't have to be heavy-handed with your use of color. Keep it subtle. Less is usually more and it's safest to use your colors against a white background or black background, if that's more along the lines of your kind of vibe of your brand, just to use them sparingly.
Think the same way as you use logo, in a restrained and sparing way. Think about using color that way too.
Why Clothing Brands Fail: No Brand Deck
Create a Brand Deck for your business. This is a more formal version of the mood board.
So, all of those elements that we spoke about, are the logo, colors, fonts, examples of the mood and voice of your brand, and the tone that your marketing and communications.
Is it sort of like girl-boss tone or does it have a more hard-hitting edge? Is it formal? Is it casual? What's the vibe of the language that you want to use in your brand? Find examples of that style and descriptions and add them to your brand deck.
Multimillion-dollar clothing brands do this all the time.
Major corporations and public fashion companies use a brand deck as one of the core foundations of their business. Brand decks are shared throughout the company. Marketing teams, sales teams, and licensing teams use the brand deck to share those messages with the licensed partners.
When I worked for Perry Ellis, we did this as well. The design and merchandising team worked with the licensing team to make sure those brand messages and the brand DNA were crystal clear and easy to communicate across all channels.
You've created your brand deck, it's going to become your north star.
It's going to become this guidepost that you can feel comfortable referring back to, not only when you're designing products, but also when you're speaking about your business with everyone that you come in contact with, whether that's your customer, your virtual assistant who’s helping you with content creation that you do should track back to your brand deck.
And once you've created a brand deck, even if you're a small business and you're just starting out, this will be a live document that you can have live with you in your office, put it on your wall, keep it close by, put it on your iPad digital notes, and refer back to it as often as you can.
It will help you build out this cohesive message that is irresistible to your ideal customer
Why Clothing Brands Fail: Losing Track of Product
It’s easy to lose focus when planning your collection. This is often one of the missing pieces that gets brands into trouble. It's easy to have lots of ideas and want to launch lots of great things, but if you're not planning your collection in a strategic way, it can be very easy to get off track in terms of that brand messaging, size of collection, the key styles that you need for the season, the styles that are going to be important to your customers and all of the other things that reflect your brand DNA.
Sometimes in new businesses, it's easy to chase trends. One thing I've learned from working in the corporate fashion industry is that a little bit of trend goes a long way!
In the industry, we talk trends up in a big way, but that's just part of the fashion business.
The truth is: that trend plays a very small part in the mix in overall product planning and execution.
An example of this might be, there might be trending colors that you would apply to your bestselling essential pieces that we talked about a little bit earlier.
If you've got a tried and true, proven track record on something that's selling and your customer likes it and it's essential to your business, then adding a little trend or color on top of that, is a win.
You don't have to launch everything at once. Plan out your products in small drops.
Don't try and flood your audience with lots of things and then think that that's going to generate lots of sales.
Launching large collections will overwhelm your audience unless your business is at a pretty giant scale. Better to plan and launch small capsules, 3 - 4 pieces that have a cohesiveness, that don't duplicate each other, or that might be able to be worn together.
Like a small capsule, perhaps once a month, maybe it's once every two months, has a little story in a message that's simple and cohesive to talk about to your customers. That's going to allow you to message everything that you do simply, and easily and get that message across so you can focus on messaging and marketing of these small capsules consistently.
I guarantee you, that once you get the steps right, you get them dialed in for your brand, you're going to have the roadmap to create success every time you launch.
Launching small capsules and planning out your collection in this way is going to enable you to read and react to the launch. You will hear your customer's feedback. You will be able to launch a few styles and figure out where there's a good response, learn from that, and go forward with those recommendations.
Why Clothing Brands Fail: Bad Brand Photography
One of the toughest things to tackle as a small business is brand photography. This is an area that can often trip up new businesses you don't have a lot of money to spend on photography.
If you are starting it's okay to use a point-and-shoot camera or even an iPhone. The main thing is you think about the result and what that shot is.
You want nice clean backgrounds for your product, you want to make sure that things look crisp, steamed, and clean, so to get a professional-level photo, and the actual shots need to make sense.
Keep your choices simple. Don’t shoot swimwear in a kid's daycare, or evening wear on the beach.
Big brands can get away with this, but there is a lot of money and polish that goes into creating those brand shoots and when big brands take these kinds of risks with their photography, there's a lot of context already and brand DNA that comes with the choices that they're making and often it's editorial, um, as well as sort of like iconic seasonal photography.
Small businesses have a tough time getting away with some of these tricks. My recommendation would be to keep your photography simple.
Along those lines, I see often or using friends and family in their photography.
My recommendation is to use professional models as soon as you're able to, something that the tone of getting this right, we can't see it ourselves, but when the audience sees it, when your customer sees it, it doesn't always hit home the same way. It doesn't always resonate.
Choosing professional models should also fit your brand DNA.
You might think about adding some model types to your mood board or Brand deck.
Pick professional models who inspire you from swipe or screenshots. Maybe they're not attainable to use right now, but use professional models as soon as you can.
It’s essential for apparel companies, clothing companies, and accessory companies.
Why Clothing Brands Fail: Bad marketing
One thing that can hurt your business and increase your risk of not succeeding is to have bad marketing. Bad marketing means that you have not thought through what your campaign looks like.
You've done all the work with your DNA, your products, and your photography, but you're not putting your product out there in a very consistent manner.
It's important to plan a campaign, write it out, or type out what you're going do at every specific point in your launch or marketing campaign, or sales campaign process.
Think through all of the places you want to show up as a brand, how going to message the product, the important marketing messages around each piece, and what's unique, and different.
Is there any promotion? Are there any discounts, or sales? Buy one, get one free? Whatever that is, write it down, get it out of your head, put it on paper, make sure it all makes sense and matches, and assign a timeline to it.
Sometimes it looks like a lot of marketing is organic and it just happens and flows. I guarantee you this is a tightly orchestrated strategy and process in the corporate world. Every part of a launch and product promotion is mapped out to the nth degree.
In the fashion industry, we'd work at least a year out on any launch, putting in place all of the pieces: marketing campaign, messaging, price points, any sale prices, etc. So when the product hits the store shelves or the website, the marketing is going out at the right time, in the right way.
Make sure you can put that in place for your own business and it's going to increase your chances of success.
Why Clothing Brands Fail: Bad Social Media
I often have people reaching out to me on social media asking me, as a product expert and a merchandiser, to look at their feed and give them product feedback.
Often the thing that I see is that small brands push a lot of products directly at the customer.
Naturally, you want to show everything because you don't want potential customers to miss anything.
You spent all this great time and energy developing your product and you want to get it out there. My recommendation is to take a shot of your own Instagram and put it next to the brand deck or mood board that you've created and try to look at it with a critical eye, as a customer would.
Are you seeing and hearing the full brand, DNA, the full brand story?
If you're looking at a wall of reels and posts that is all product, you're probably not sharing a full brand story. There needs to be some backstory, some behind-the-scenes, Fit guides, style guides, and a richer brand experience.
Think about this from the customer's perspective. This is why it's so important to use that brand deck and come back to it on an ongoing basis.
Create a mix that keeps your customers coming back to you as a trusted resource for style guides, brand, DNA, behind-the-scenes stories, and anything that can share the message to your customers and give them a lot of value.
CONCLUSION
What are my key takeaways before I share that most requested resource? Do your research and focus on your brand stories.
Focus on the details and your ideal customer and make sure you're thinking about him or her, they or them in a complete way. But make sure you stay creative and trust your instinct as a brand owner.
Want my most requested resource to help you develop the vision for your clothing and accessory business? I'm going to leave a link below and you can grab that now.
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.
