Starting a clothing brand is an exhilarating venture filled with creativity, challenges, and opportunities. The global fashion industry, valued at over $2.5 trillion, offers immense potential for entrepreneurs ready to make their mark. It’s also volatile and fiercely competitive.
Breaking into the fashion market requires careful planning, strategic branding, and a unique value proposition. Below, we’ll share key steps in developing your brand and lessons from some of our best fashion clients.
Learn the Industry and Your Market
As with any new business, first-hand experience in the industry is an asset. Working in the clothing business provides valuable insights into how the business works, from design and production to audience development and profit margins.
That said, we have worked with entrepreneurs to build highly successful fashion brands with little first-hand experience in the industry. The founder of Howler Bros wasn’t a fashion designer—he was an architect when he began working on planning his business. Tecovas founder Paul Hedrick worked in finance. In these cases, education, research, and a strong business plan play a huge role in setting up your brand for success.
Educate Yourself on the Clothing Industry
Understanding the industry is vital to build your business plan, sales strategy, and marketing strategies. A number of educational institutions offer fashion design and small business programs in varying structures and timelines. Schools like Parsons in New York and Central Saint Martins in London are world-renowned for their fashion programs.
There are also a growing number of online courses for fashion business hopefuls. Local community colleges often offer virtual or part-time courses, and platforms like MasterClass and Maker’s Row Academy are a great way to begin learning about the clothing business before you build your brand.
Conduct Market Research
Understanding the market landscape in fashion is critical. Tools like Google Trends and Statista can provide baseline insights into fashion trends and consumer behavior. Commissioning research can offer deeper, more targeted insights and may allow you to identify gaps in the market or growing trends to leverage in building your brand.
Everlane is an excellent example of a brand that capitalized on a trend: the growing demand for transparent pricing and ethical production. Outside Voices disrupted activewear by targeting fitness influencers and creating a community-driven brand. Identifying ways your brand can address unmet needs or innovate within an existing category can be your fashion brand’s first step to success.
Define Your Audience
Everyone wears clothing, so who exactly is your brand going to serve? What type of clothing items do they frequently purchase? Do they prefer to shop in a retail store, or do they like the convenience of an ecommerce website? Do they make purchases using social media to shop?
Genuinely understanding the mindset and desires of your target customers empowers your team to create a fashion brand that resonates deeply with them. Gather insights into their target audience’s aspirations, preferences, and behaviors.
Armed with this knowledge, fashion brands can tailor their business plan, clothing lines, branding, and marketing campaigns to speak directly to their targets, crafting messaging and visuals that resonate and connect on an emotional level. Insight into your audience’s desired emotional and social benefits— how a brand makes them feel about themselves and what it says about them to others—is equally valuable. Define who you want to reach and what you can offer them that impacts their lives.
Choose Your Business Model
Starting a clothing line requires many of the same considerations as starting any other successful business. How much does it cost to start? When and where should you pursue capital? What outside help will you need to navigate legal, financial, production, and distribution aspects of the business? Where and how will you produce your products? What are your sales channels? Choosing a business model involves myriad factors, but here’s a quick rundown of a few things to consider.
Hand Production: This small clothing business model is based on handmade garments produced by individuals and sold through local retailers and online clothing sites like Etsy. The barrier to entry is low with this model, and startup costs are minimal. Though you will need to evolve to another model to scale the business, hand production can be a useful first step in developing your clothing line and learning how shoppers react to your clothing designs.
Manufacturing Partners: This business plan targets larger-run collections produced by outsourced clothing manufacturers. The model requires a more substantial initial investment but also allows you to develop relationships and processes that will be valuable as you scale the business. However, it takes research and trial and error to find a clothing manufacturer that’s the right fit.
Print-on-Demand: The easiest and most inexpensive way to start a business and launch a clothing line is print-on-demand. With each garment produced upon purchase, the overhead, inventory, and time invested to start selling is minimal. Following their step-by-step guide, you can link POD platforms to an online store and dial in pricing to make a profit, making it easy to sell online. Though growing, the range of products offered by POD vendors is limited, and they don’t allow for the level of customization you may want for your brand.
Traditional Retail & Wholesale vs Direct-to-Consumer: Tackling the traditional retail “brick and mortar” model requires a substantial investment, involves increased loss, and means long lag times for payments from wholesale and retail partners. Manufacturing, inventory volume, and cash flow management are key. The online clothing business model bypasses these factors, allowing you to sell your clothing line directly to customers. While overhead is lower, you may need to invest more heavily in marketing to build a brand and drive shoppers to your clothing business online.
Develop Your Concept, Clothing Line & Unique Selling Proposition
What is the vision for your clothing brand? Is it athleisure, high fashion, or functional basics? Will your line focus on premium materials, sustainability, or ethical production? Is there a philanthropic component to the business? Will the garments be geared around function or fashion?
A clearly defined concept is key to developing your clothing brand. To find inspiration for your idea, dive into fashion publications, follow style influencers, and subscribe to industry newsletters and podcasts to stay inspired and catch trends before they emerge. While watching trends is extremely important, it’s equally important to maintain focus, hone your strengths, and be true to your defining design sensibilities.
An ideal fashion brand is recognized immediately by your target market, with little effort. Your clothing line should have seasonal consistency—the style and design choices should be unmistakably yours. In watching trends in fashion, the key is adapting those trends to your brand, personalizing them, and making them work for your customers.
A unique selling proposition is a powerful differentiator in the fiercely competitive apparel industry. Offering something new and innovative or uniquely ownable gives brands a big advantage over the competition. A great example is our client partner, Tecovas. They offer premium quality handmade boots and western wear without the overhead and upcharge of a traditional retail brand. Like other industry leaders, the boots are crafted by artisans with decades of experience in León, Mexico. Tecovas’ difference is the price—for a fraction of what shoppers would pay for the big, established heritage brands, Tecovas delivers top-quality boots right to your doorstep.
Consider finding niches or meeting emerging market demand in the crowded fashion world, like our client partner Howler Bros. Howler Bros deftly modernizes traditional outdoor apparel with a twist to create original, elevated clothing that embodies the soul and passion of coastal life. They also embrace idiosyncrasy, like putting pearl-snap buttons on relaxed polos and Gaucho shirts. Their seasonal releases vary wildly in theme and graphics, but always feature certain design elements like these that define the brand. Their USP is fun, expressive outdoor apparel with exceptional functionality.
As a brand, you can’t categorize Howler Bros, but you can absolutely recognize them. Their design-driven clothing focused on quality, signature details, and smart functionality struck a chord—and the brand’s popularity exploded. Just ask their legions of customers and the collectors who snap up every product they release, including Matthew McConaughey, who has been known to see an item in marketing and just show up at the offices to get one—even if it’s not yet for sale.
Another approach is innovation—taking an existing clothing category and doing it better. Poncho Outdoors is a prime example of success with this approach. They reimagined and redesigned baggy, boxy fishing shirts to fit better, last longer, and function better than any brand before. Poncho even developed their own proprietary fabric with one of the world’s great fabric mills. It’s as soft as cotton, but dries 10x faster. UPF 50 protection is inherent to the fabric so it won’t wash out like other shirts do, and their Bluesign Approved manufacturing process meets strict environmental standards. It’s a brand that outdoor enthusiasts can feel good about supporting.
Build an Unmistakable Brand Identity
In fashion, branding is not just about communicating value—it’s about creating value. The end product is not just the logos and packaging you make; the end product is what you make possible.
The best fashion branding does not describe an experience—it is an experience. It is an immersive story about the value and opportunity you provide to customers and community. Your visual and verbal identity should connect people to the core purpose of your brand, and authentically communicate with clarity, sincerity, and heart.
In building clothing brands, we create emotional connections by linking stories to experiences. Our designers weave the visual and verbal into immersive adventures that inform, entice, surprise, and delight. We use our expertise and insight to infuse these moments into brand name, messaging, identity design, packaging, product displays, digital branding, and more. With a memorable brand personality, we aim to make clothing brands impactful, commanding, curious, and memorable.
The strongest fashion brands have a visual identity and brand voice that spark brand awareness and clearly differentiate them in the marketplace. Those differentiators tie to the foundation of the business and the functional, emotional, and social value it delivers to consumers. That value is most potent when it is a result of an honest and unflinching display of authenticity.
Designing a clothing brand system is an opportunity to personify a brand’s essence, bring it to life, and establish genuine emotional connections with people. Brands with strong identities are confident—they know who they are and how to convey it to connect with their target audience. In short, a clearly defined brand gives companies an edge and an increased chance of near-term impact and long-term success.
Packaging & Unboxing Experience
Your clothing brand packaging is more than a container. It is one of the most intimate ways a person will experience your brand. They take it in with their eyes, hold it in their hands, and bring it into their home. Packaging represents more consumer daily impressions than any other communications medium.
Brand packaging represents a tremendous opportunity for a new clothing line. Of all the brand touchpoints experienced by consumers, none offer a more potent chance to connect emotionally with your audience. Understanding the psychology and emotional landscape of packaging is a game changer that can profoundly influence consumer perception and behavior. It can give your clothing company a strategic edge and an unfair advantage in a competitive marketplace.
Your clothing brand’s unboxing experience is a chance to share your brand story and take your customers on a journey that builds affinity and loyalty. The pacing of imagery, messaging, color, and pattern can create excitement and intrigue. Packaging structure and materiality also play a significant role in crafting the user experience.
When we partnered with Tecovas to refresh and revitalize their brand, the bootmaker had no unboxing experience to speak of. The boots’ craftsmanship and quality were fantastic, but shoppers opened a cardboard box to find them alone with just a warehouse packing slip. The brand was missing a huge opportunity to tell a story about the care and craft that went into every handmade piece, so that’s exactly what we did.
Working with Tecovas, our team optimized and evolved the brand into a tight, cohesive system that spoke a distinctive language and embodied a signature style. We crafted a packaging system focused on the idea of discovery in a buyer’s unboxing experience, pacing through moments of curiosity, information, and entertainment. The experience does more than just build anticipation; it connects with people emotionally and makes them feel pride and value in being a Tecovas customer.
Tapping into emotional cues like nostalgia, joy, or belonging can summon robust responses that drive future purchase decisions. Understanding your audience’s emotional mindset empowers packaging design that fosters authentic connection and cultivates brand loyalty.
The best packaging design creates an opportunity to entice your audience, pique curiosity, tell a story, inform, surprise, and delight. It is a powerful asset that fights for your brand in stores and online, seizing shoppers’ attention with shelf presence and scroll-stopping impact. Strong packaging creates brand recognition, customer loyalty, trust, and affinity.
Market Your New Clothing Business
Regardless of industry, marketing and driving sales are a constant challenge for brands. Successful fashion brands leverage large media budgets to keep their clothing items top of mind, but not all business models can support that expense. A strong, unique brand provides a strong foundation, and developing a marketing plan that builds on that foundation is key to growing a successful fashion brand.
You don’t necessarily have to match Hermès’ advertising spend to market your clothing brand—creativity, earned media, and organic reach all hold powerful potential to promote your brand. Here are just a few of the ways to showcase your clothing line that won’t break the bank.
Invest in content marketing. Today, content is king, and compelling video or keyword-targeted blog posts can drive traffic to your ecommerce platform or clothing store.
Cultivate an email list even before you have products to sell. Tease your upcoming clothing collection on social media and incentivize sign-ups with exclusive deals.
Find collaborations and partnerships. Collaborating with existing brands is a great way to introduce your brand to a bigger audience. Partnering with like-minded companies that appeal to your potential customers garners an implicit endorsement of your brand and associates your products with their values and quality. You can even gift your clothing to other fashionable brands for photo shoots to get shoutouts and exposure.
Try influencer marketing. You don’t have to snag a Kardashian to see results from influencer marketing. Find niche “micro-influencers” on social media—emerging Instagram or TikTok stars to hype your brand.
Build a loyalty program. Set up VIP or referral perks to engage your loyal customers in spreading the word.
Consider search engine optimization (SEO). Honing your SEO skills or hiring a consultant can help you drive traffic to your online clothing store through organic search results.
Try social media advertising. Experiment with a range of paid ads, promoted posts with creators, and other platforms and test the results. A/B testing lets you optimize the ways you tell your story and promote your clothing line online.
Make a splash at trade shows. Build an exciting trade show presence for your brand, and sell your products to buyers who purchase wholesale clothing for big retailers. Document your activity on social media and share insights you learn at trade shows like Outdoor Retailer.
Conclusion
Launching a clothing brand requires a mix of creativity, strategy, and resilience. By understanding your market, nailing your unique selling proposition, and building an unmistakable brand, you can set up your brand to carve out a niche in the competitive fashion business. Remember, brands like Nike and Supreme started small, but built empires through persistence and innovation.
