How I started my successful clothing business?

How I started my successful clothing business?

It was always a goal for me to start my own clothing brand one day. This has only been a dream almost for 15 years and recently I decided that I should start this soon. I have been speaking to my designer friends about my idea and most of them encouraged me to do it and they offered to assist me by designing outfits but every time I plan to work on it, something blocks it or i get busy with my other work.

A year back I started working on it, and before starting a new venture, I always do my research about the product, market and timing, and I worked with a upcoming clothing brand to gain more knowledge and insights about the business and the industry. I would advice if you want to venture into something, its always helpful if you work in the relevant industry at-least for an year to obtain the basic knowledge of the business and it will be very useful when start your own. 

With my gained knowledge and experience in the clothing industry, and also with my knowledge about the sales and marketing, I decided to start with readymade clothing which I planned to sell online via the website and social media platforms. My advice to any startups is that keep your capital expenses as low as possible and invest only on the most required items to operate. Many startups invest heavily on office building rents, furnitures & fittings, excess staff and many other unwanted expenses. The high capital expenses will restrict them to allocate funds for most important things such as marketing, promotions, product development etc and this is one of the reason the startups fail quick. therefore for my clothing business i wanted to keep the startup cost as low as possible. 

I decided to sell readymade fast moving clothing in my website and promote via social media. When ever i decided to this in the past, something comes up and then i get demotivated and doesn't get to accomplish my goal. Last time when i started to do it again, my fiance motivated me, and she lives in another country but still she helped me in everything from showing me the flaws in my website, assisting me in designing artworks for social media campaigns and running campaigns for me, handling customer inquires, finding influencers to promote the social media accounts and also handling the social media to create a community and lot me, this she was the main reason for the success which we have achieved so far. 

The sales on websites and social media increases more than we expected due to collaborations with populars social media influencers, also we use all social media platforms to promote the items and the brand. During a 6 months time we studied our customer base and their choices, and based on that we planned on launching our own brand. We decided to start with the fast moving 3 items and once those items has a steady sales then we can launch another 3 to 5 items based on the requirement, as expected we got the own brand and we were happy with the sales volumes and we were very careful about the quality of our own brand items so these products were manufactured by a reputed factory which does export items. 

In a clothing business, you have to evolve fast since the fashion keeps changing and we need to be ready to embrace an latest trends. We always benchmark ourselves with leading local and international brands to see what we can do better and what we should avoid.

Marketing and promotions are a major part of a business and specially in apparel industry. We use trending influencers to work with us by reviewing our products and promote it among their followers. The best way to retain customers is best offer and high quality products, but sometimes when you buy readymade garments sometimes the quality in not very good or the quality differs between stocks lots, we also had to face these issues and some customers have complained to us that quality is not good or there is a damage, and we have to make the customers happy so we offer high discounts, replacements or refunds for those items, this is one reason why decided to have our own brand faster. We were growing faster than we expected due to the variety of items, the best prices we offered to our customer and faster delivery, and sometimes these quality issues may damage the reputation of our brand so we wanted to launch our own products. 

Therefore if you are planning to start any business, always do your research to see the market conditions, timing, investment, products, competition and your marketing strategy, these are the important things which will help to launch your business, long term sustainability and growth.