 So, you’re starting a fashion brand. There are a lot of factors that contribute to the success of your brand so it’s important to know where to start and where to focus your energy, because it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Here are 5 proven hacks for building a successful fashion brand: 1 | Get Your Startup Money but Skip the Debt It’s expensive to start a fashion brand... like $20,000 expensive. So you may be wondering, where does everyone gain the capital needed to really get their business off the ground? If you don’t have access to personal wealth, crowdfunding is the way to go. To run a successful crowdfunding campaign, you want to be ready with the proper strategy. Crowdfunding done right will gain exposure for your business, build your network and ultimately help you finance your new brand. Our crowdfunding course will help you determine the right platform for your campaign, complete an action calendar, and use the communication techniques that are proven to convert your idea into cash money. 2 | Power Your Production You can have the best intentions to create an ethical sustainable product, but at the end of the day if your product quality is poor or inconsistent, your brand will fail. Period. Production is a major component of any fashion brand, and should take priority from the very start. However, finding the right factories and mills, especially when searching for ethical and sustainable partners, is overwhelming at best. Ethical factory standards and certifications must be reviewed. Minimum order quantities and cost will limit your choices. And failing to ask the right questions could leave you with the wrong product and out lots of money. Navigating production without training is an incredibly difficult and stressful job, full of costly mistakes and should not be tackled alone. Our extensive Production Pro course guides you on where to find the proper factories and mills, what to send them for RFQs (request for quotation), and gives you a stocked resource pack of templates for all the components you need to go into production (tech packs, cost sheet and purchase orders while also walking you through the entire production process. It’s a fashion brand’s dream. 3 | Gain Press Exposure For a new brand, exposure is everything. You want consumers to know who you are, what you do and how your product can enhance their lives. To do this, you’ll need to find the right journalist to clearly communicate and promote your brand. Once the connection is established, you’ll need to know when to pitch and what to pitch [NOTE: not everything you do is news]. Our pitch press course guides you through the process, giving you the ingredients for a perfect press kit, and techniques on building relationships with journalists and securing press coverage. 4 | Grow Your Stockists Getting your product in front of the right retailers will also build your brand by getting your products in front of more customers. As a new business, you may have noticed that simply launching a website doesn’t equal sales. It takes quite a lot of work and money to build a strong D2C (direct to consumer) eCommerce business. Strong wholesale connections will help grow your business and consumer audience. But growing wholesale is a journey, and is even trickier now thanks to COVID, so you will need to know where to find the right retailers and what to show them. Our wholesale course teaches you how to organize your outreach, grab retailers attention and negotiate proper wholesale terms to build your stockists. Your outreach will become organized and routine, and you will begin to attract buyers. 5 | Build Your Cult Following You’ve raised capital, you’ve built connections but now to really grow your brand you need mega fans. A strong branding and marketing plan is key to growth, but identifying the correct strategies can be confusing. Your brand’s message needs to be crystal clear, compelling and aimed at the right audience. To do this, you need to ask yourself, which marketing channels are right for you? How to make content that drives web traffic? Or how to curate emails that generate sales? Our Marketing Made Easy course gives you the foundation you need for clear brand guidelines and demystifies the process of building a sales focused multi-channel marketing funnel. Boom. Want even more expert advice on how to build an ethical sustainable fashion brand? Attend any of our events during Ethical NYFW and learn from founders of cult brands, how they set up their supply chain, honed in their customers, and built a successful brand for people, planet, AND profit.  Comments are closed.
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