How To Start an Online Clothing Store

The evolution of e-commerce has brought about better and increased opportunities in clothing online sales. With online clothing stores being a multi-billion-a-year industry, it’s one of the most popular e-commerce niches and this isn’t surprising. Many people are more comfortable and willing to buy things like garments, shoes, bags, eyewear, and a range of other fashion items online than they were ten years ago. This growth will continue to increase with the rapid development in technology and the best time to plunge in was ten years ago, the next best time is now!

Before you dabble into selling clothes online, however, you want to be sure you are adequately prepared and that you’re starting right for maximum success. In this article, I’ll list some basic fundamental steps you need to take as an online fashion business owner to ensure success and rapid growth.

Create a Niche

For starters, it is important that you create a niche. Niching helps you focus and categorize your target market so that you can then know how to seek them out or attract them to your brand. The reason why picking a niche is so important is it will help you position your store uniquely when you focus and plan your business model around the kind of shoppers you’re looking to get.

On the other hand, choosing a popular niche will not make it easier so you would have to be certain of the category you want to niche on. Choosing a popular niche means it’s already a famous section and you will have to differentiate your brand from the existing ones in order to be able to penetrate the market easier and better.

In drilling down your niche, you’re able to reduce your competition, appeal to a specific target market, and increase your potential for customer loyalty. There are quite a number of niches in fashion and some of the trending ones at this time are athleisure clothes i.e. casual clothing, vintage clothing stores, genderless fashion, sustainable fashion, and re-commerce fashion (second-hand clothing commonly known as thrift).

Additionally, when picking a niche, you should keep in mind four major factors which are: how unique your brand is to stand out, how passionate you are about this niche, how you can easily position yourself as an authority, and the earning potential of this fashion niche.

Choose a Product Line

It can be very tempting to want to sell just about any type of garment in your chosen niche but that is a grave mistake to make. Narrowing down even after identifying your niche area is equally important especially to establish your brand as an authority in this product line. For instance, do you want to sell shirts, dresses, work wears, etc? With infinite options available in the apparel market, there are countless opportunities to leverage within your niche. It’s a great way to start and steadily brand out to other lines as you grow. An example of this is Mrs. Bowtie who created one product..bowties, they have since added pocket squares, nighties, suspenders, and cufflinks just three years after launching selling out to over 300,000 customers.

I’ll give you three tips for picking a product line for your clothing business.

1. Start small. Just like the example given above, Mrs. Bowtie started by making only bowties for the first three years and they recorded exponential success. As a new store in a very competitive market, adding too many products will bring about complications you would rather not be dealing with, having the resources to deliver a great service experience has an indelible impact on your business as you start.

Think Ahead.

Fashion has always been fast and ever-changing, so it’s advisable to choose a stable product first that can easily change to changing styles and trends. Constant shifts are inevitable in the clothing game and your success will totally be dependent on your ability to adapt to these changes at different times.

Focus.

Be as specific and narrow as possible when starting out but an end-game plan. Picture where you see your online clothing store extending to in the future and make sure that you’re focusing on that end goal. This will ensure the seamlessly adding and implementation of new and trending products to your store and grow in your niche.

Your Online Clothing Store Business Model.

It’s time to choose a business model for your online clothing store. This is where you decide whether you’re using clothing manufacturing, going the white labeling route, or using dropshipping to build your business.

There are different types of business models in the fashion industry but I’ll be talking about four major ones that are most suited for the online clothing and apparel store. They are:

Print-on-demand
Custom cut and sew
White label
Dropshipping

Every one of these models has its pros and cons and your decision on which model to follow will be greatly influenced by your goal(s) as an online clothing store owner, your budget, your skills, and your capacity to hire a team. To help you understand better in order to make an informed choice, I’ll explain each of these models below.

Print-on-demand Business Model

This model is the easiest and cheapest of all the models particularly because of the high demand for it. It has been projected that the t-shirt printing business will hit a whopping $10 billion by 2025, that’s how lucrative this department is.

Custom Cut-and-Sew Clothing Business Model. This is for you if you are already or planning to be a fashion designer and dressmaker with the technical know-how of everything sewing. The model works by sorting everything pertaining to your garments making in-house, from start to finish. The best part of this model is that you are totally in charge of every process and can completely dictate how things go to the T. The downside, however, is that you are in charge of management and so you have to coordinate the patternmakers, source your fabrics, hire tailors to sew the cut fabrics, and oversee quality control, packaging, and delivery. It will require a lot of capital to start up and release your first-ever line.
Private Label Business Model. This is the middle point between print-on-demand and custom cut-and-sew, essentially producing your style designs for you under your own fashion brand. It requires less work in terms of production and affords you more time to work on the other important aspects of your fashion business like marketing and sales, fulfillment, and inventory. The best place to go for this service to experience global-level quality is Gazelle Garments Factory.
Dropshipping Business Model. In this fashion business model, you can sell clothing that will be fulfilled by the manufacturer or wholesaler. It is the least expensive as you don’t need to stock up on products, package, or ship said products; you just serve as the middleman. The downside to this model is that you may not have unique products and end up selling what everyone else is selling.

Outline Your Online Fashion Store Business Plan

Niche Check

Product Line Check

Business Model Check

Now, it’s time for your business plan/strategy, these include:

Your targeted market
Your unique products
Your biggest competitors
Your business model and strategy
Your brand identity

Pricing is an important part of building your business plan and strategy. You should consider every cost incurred in running your business including equipment, web hosting, and development, production costs per product, labor, logistics, materials, etc. It is important to ensure you’re privy to your competitors’ price range in order not to price your brand out of the market.

Setting up Your Online Clothing Store

And it gets exciting and more interesting from here on. You’ll need to buy a domain name for your brand if you plan to either hire a web designer or learn to use WordPress to build the site by yourself. If the revenue for hiring a web designer or the time to learn is too much luxury at the moment, using alternatives like Shopify, Wix, etc is another great option. Keep in mind regardless, that someone else could whip up your name any moment if you’re not proactive enough.

You want to ensure you upload quality and clear pictures of your products because they are the only ways your customers can see and verify what they’re buying before making payments, they’ll need to be certain of what they’re buying.

The Launch

You’re ready to launch when your products are sorted, the online business plan is in check, fulfillment is set and your site is done and ready. You’ll find these pointers useful in launching your online store.

Have a launch strategy. What is the strategy you would use to inform your potential customers that you’re now in business? Are you going for paid advertisements like Facebook, Instagram, or Google ads? Or you’re going live on Facebook to your waiting audience about your brand? Do you have a mailing list to push teaser mailers to? These are some of the ways to launch strategically.
Social Presence. Before you launch, ensure your social media accounts are up and running with sizeable content, it will make running your ads easier. Having a content marketing plan is likewise important here, this will encourage engagement and brand loyalty from your followers.
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing you can adopt. Planning and automating your email advertising for the first three months will immeasurably help the growth of your business.
Set up your Google Analytics and Google accounts. Be searchable and visible because visibility is king.

Your Clothing Store Marketing Strategy

Organize your content marketing which includes videos and posts, influencer marketing, and blog posts on your website. Marketing strategy for all social media platforms in paid advertisement to include TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Email marketing, SEO, etc.

The key to a successful e-commerce business is to be able to tap into buying intent. To penetrate a saturated niche or product line, will require you to have a brand identity that separates you distinctly from your competitors and follow up with great quality and good customer service.

Feel free to drop a comment or ask any questions you may have, I’ll surely answer them at the earliest possible. Now, go and kick some ass.