What it takes to start your own clothing brand

By Brielle Williams | July 20, 2021

Clothing is a vehicle of expression and an extension of your personality. Venturing into clothing design is an adventure that will allow you to unleash your imagination and get your message to hundreds, thousands, or perhaps millions of people. Entering the fashion industry will allow you to pursue your passion and achieve your financial goals simultaneously.

To start your own clothing brand, it’s not enough to have talent, generate unique designs, and understand trends. You need to source suppliers, set prices, come up with a name, brand identity, and invest. For this, you need capital. An excellent option to get the money is to get ahead and apply for small business financing. Click here to learn more about the options available.

What do you need to create your clothing brand?

Here are some tips for you to develop your own clothing brand. Remember that starting a business is not an easy task, it requires a lot of time, effort, patience, and learning, but at the end of the road, an unimaginable reward awaits you.

Generate brand identity

The first subject when creating a clothing brand is to establish the philosophy, values, mission, vision, and identity. The combination of all these aspects will allow your target audience to get identified with your products, thus differentiating you from your competition and generating a loving relationship with your buyers.

Take into account that in this section, you will establish your contribution to the fashion world, what experiences you will provide and how you will impact individually the people who wear your garments.

Develop your business model 

The development of a business plan will be the compass that will guide your path during the creation of your brand. In this document, you should include aspects such as garment production costs, final pricing, resources needed for sales and operation, marketing strategies, and everything necessary to achieve ideal entrepreneurship. 

To clarify your ideas and outline your strategies, resort to the Business Model Canvas, a format that is easy to use and easy to follow when taking action.

Having a business plan will help you access small business financing in any financial institution. This way, lenders will be certain of the seriousness of your business and, above all, of the real possibilities you have to pay a debt.

Find your target audience

This assignment is the first task before starting. While everyone wears clothing, we don’t all consume the same products. There is a lot of difference between the clothes your grandmother buys and the clothes that adults, teens, and children choose. 

And within each age range, there are different styles. Analyze how you want your customers to feel when they wear your clothes: sophisticated, comfortable, environmentally responsible? Remember that customers are your walking catalog, and also, the clothes you sell will be the presentation card of many people to the world. 

An alternative to achieve better results at the time of establishing your target audience is to hire agencies specialized in this process. In case you do not have the budget for this important task, you can get small business financing to achieve it.

Validate your product

After going through this process, the next step is to validate your product. This process seeks to demonstrate that there are customers who are interested in buying your brand. When you start with these tests, you may receive positive or negative feedback. Unless a catastrophe occurs, it is usually just a matter of rethinking some aspects and getting back on the horse to continue in the race.

A suggestion to validate the acceptance of your product in the market without investing too much is the Minimum Product Viable (MVP). This involves generating versions and prototypes of the product to receive feedback so that the result formally launched to the market is as close as possible to the needs of your potential audience.

 Although it does not require a millionaire investment, the MVP also requires capital. Turn to small business financing to obtain these resources that, in the long run, will save you more money than you would be investing without validation.

Being an entrepreneur in the fashion industry will be an adventure full of challenges, obstacles, and many joys. Remember that when you start your own brand, the income you generate will be proportional to the amount of work you do. You will not have a boss behind you to complete your tasks. 

The final decisions will be your responsibility, and your mistakes or successes will impact the lives of many people.