Nibletz Staff
Building up a brand is difficult to do in most businesses, but as a clothing brand, the unique style and design of your clothes take on more of a risk. This is because consumers wear your brand and display your logo, making it a more in-your-face kind of marketing. It’s important to realise that maintaining your brand requires constant innovation and a fortitude not to follow what everyone else is doing. Creating an identity is your unique selling proposition because it’s what separates you from all the other clothing lines in the world. Designs that are remotely similar are sometimes labelled in the same group subconsciously. This has been the struggle that Pepsi and Coca Cola have been trying to shrug off for years, and it’s the same for clothing brands. It’s imperative that your style and designs are truly their own if you want to compete successfully with the major brands who have already cemented their position in consumers’ minds.
Cultivating ranges
Your boutique clothing brand needs direction so one day it can become a franchise. It’s very easy to make random designs because you have so many different ideas which you want to fulfill. However, this is bad for business as there’s no real brand being cultivated. Ranges in clothing lines are a way to position yourself as a sustainable brand. Certain designs that share a pattern, however subtle it might be, should be grouped together as part of a range customers can by. This may be to attract a certain customer e.g. straight jeans vs. skinny jeans; they’re still jeans, but your products can now be categorized and different variations, can be split even further into a finite design narrative. It doesn’t make sense to have one design of something, then five or ten different variations of something similar and selling them as one-off designs
Maintain independence of design
Many entrepreneurs in the clothing and fashion industry, spend hours and hours, printing their designs by themselves to save a lot of money. They stay after hours and make sure they have enough products for sale for the following day or week. This means extensive use of such equipment, and eventually, the wear and tear will creep up on you. Update and maintain your manufacturing ability by employing services for Screen Printing Equipment Repair. The constant use of UV printers requires you to replace or strengthen the vacuum system, or replace the LED lights that transfer the heat to the emollient.
By now you should have your own methods, technology and equipment to give you the ability to create and test your designs before they go to market. As a small business, you should try to be as self-sufficient as you possibly can. Outsourcing can be expensive and hiring freelancers is a great alternative to working with large companies that charge top-end fees. Maintain a certain level of independence when you’re creating and implementing new designs by sketching the art and intended graphics yourself. You don’t need to be an artist, but you save time and money, putting your imagination down on paper, before taking it to a professional freelancer.
Part of the joy of running a boutique clothing shop is the fact you get to sell products that are utterly unique. It’s your imagination, artwork and style that people buy and wear. However, preserve your independence and be able to do this without interference, requires constant maintenance of methods and equipment.
