8 Problems You Might Face When Starting Your Own Fashion Label

Starting out with your own fashion label might come with some forms of difficulty. This article outlines some common problems startup fashion labels do experience and their possible solutions.

1. Business and Financial Management
As a young fashion designer, one thing you will certainly lack is business and Financial Management. You may be a great designer but may not know how to generate leads for sale. The fashion industry is so competitive nowadays, so it’s important you hire someone to do the business side of your fashion label for you. If you would like to do it yourself, industry experts suggest that you go and study fashion marketing or fashion business at the Bachelor or Master level, depending on your current education level.

2. Identifying your Target Market
Start your label once you get an actual idea of the market, demography and demand. As a designer you expect your customers to appreciate whatever you design but the fact is totally different. Once you start your own fashion label, you realize the people who can afford your wears are really not the ideal body shapes neither are they experimental. your idea or hypothesis of the general market goes for a toss when your customers are totally different from what you expect. So a proper research is a must be carried out to properly identify your target market.

3. Positioning
A Designer should focus more on unique positioning of His/her styles rather than an immediate sale and should emphasize more on returning customers and relationships because the fashion industry runs on that. There are so many designers out there doing same stuff and charging similar amount. It is advised that you have a distinct style. If not, then develop one before developing a brand.

4. Your Network
Networking is one of the most essential personal skills for business people, but it is extremely important for fashion designers. Communication and strong presence in the fashion ecosystem are productive approaches which will help you along your way to building strong relationships with other fashion designers from different age groups, nationality and fields of interest.

5. Not Enough Funds
Countless people with incredible ideas languish because they are not able to access the necessary funds to enter the marketplace. Fashion is a Business where you need money in every step. To make a quality design, to market it, promote it. And when we are talking about Marketing it’s a combination of (advertising, promotion, media etc). and do you know guys for a particular dress how much money a fashion designer spend is actually Much lesser than the Money He/She spend in Marketing. Because No Marketing No sell.

6. Distribution Challenges
Designing and producing your clothes is totally up to you but you cannot fully control the distribution of your clothes. Distribution is usually a challenge for Designers. You have to work hard to get your brands into clothing stores and that might cost you more than a little effort and time. When the goods don’t sell at retail, the designer is forced to take them back and turn around to sell them to a “discounter,” further extending the cycle of “more for less.” This obviously doesn’t work.

7. Less Connection With End-users
Before going to any seller the designers access the group to whom they actually target, but the fact is way different at selling points. Because for any product the end user is not the only decision maker who will buy and wear, in most of the cases the decision makers buy the garment or dress and the end user wears it. So this process is ridiculously complex and the designers need to understand whom to target and whom to not for every product or for every line of collections. In that way they can increase their connection with the end user which not only benefits them but also the retailers will get the benefit out of this process.

8. Getting Good Manufacturers
Getting good and reliable people to handle the production of your designs might also be a challenging experience. If you decide to handle the production yourself, that would actually mean a lot more capital because of the costs of equipment and if you decide to outsource to companies abroad where it is usually cheaper, you would have the problem of minimum order quantity because these companies usually have a minimum order that they can take which is sometimes in hundreds. How sure are you that you would be able to sell a hundred pieces of the same design easily? Again, you would need a lot more capital to do this.