How to start a clothing brand on a budget

December 26, 2016

Starting a new clothing brand is never easy. It entails spending substantial amounts of time, energy, and most importantly, money.

If you’re a designer with a tight budget, kick starting your own brand can be a daunting process.

But, with some savings and planning, you can launch your first collection. Here are some tips that can help you invest your money wisely:

Pick Versatile Fabrics

Your main fabrics are ones that will help establish your brand. They are extremely vital to your first collection. Pick ones that can work across styles and even seasons to maximize your budget.

Use Social Media for Research or Marketing

Social media is an economical and effective way for designers to research or promote their products. It establishes brand awareness and identity and facilitates communication with target customers.

Whether you’re on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, social media monitoring will help you gather intelligence about your product, brand, competitors and the fashion industry.

Use social media to gather customer feedback about your product. Engage directly with your customers. Not only will this help you build meaningful relationships with them, but will also give you insight into the type of products they want.

Ask important questions and then use their answers to produce your future products. Keep an eye on your main competitors too. Check out their social media networks to view their latest product offerings.

Before you start promoting your products, develop a clear social media marketing plan. Establish monthly social media goals and stick to them. If you’re seeking to increase brand awareness, build followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Put up engaging, unique content on social media, relevant to your product. Images are a powerful tool to attract online traffic. Hire a professional photographer so that you can upload high resolution images on your social media network.

Use E-Commerce

Fashion e-ecommerce websites require less capital investment than setting up business premises. It’s a fast and cost-effective way for new fashion designers to launch their collection.  

An e-commerce business also reduces standard business operational costs, such as rent, utilities, etc.

From the customer’s perspective, online fashion stores offer convenience and speed to buy products over the Internet.

Use a One-Stop Factory

When you’re searching for a clothing production company LA, go for a full package, one-stop shop. This is the pragmatic solution to saving money and ensuring your collection is prepared before its launch date.

A one-stop factory can provide everything you need, includes apparel design, development and production. All the services will be included and can sometimes be offered at package prices. This eliminates hidden costs.

More importantly, you won’t have to spend endless amounts of time searching for reliable vendors and trying to get them to pay attention to you. You can hire a full package factory instead.

When mistakes happen, you won’t have to run from one vendor to another. You can avoid the common problem of vendors blaming one another so that nobody takes responsibility for mistakes.

If you want to launch your collection efficiently and within your budget, consider hiring a one-stop shop, full package factory.

Lefty Production Co. is a leading domestic apparel manufacturer LA. We offer a complete package to new and established clothing designers, which includes sketching and design, fabric and trim sourcing, labels and branding, pattern and sample making, duplicates, fittings, pattern revisions, marking and grading, cutting, production and packing. Contact us today for a consultation.

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