Start a Clothing Brand

If you have always had a knack for fashion and would like to start a clothing brand then this section will go over the steps it takes to find a quality supplier, create a point of sale for your products and market your products to your target customers.

The first step you want to take even before coming up with a name or a logo is to come up with what type of clothes you are going to focus on and what type of message your clothing is trying to send. You should be asking yourself from the start who your target customer is and what emotions will your brand evoke that will make someone go through the process of purchasing your brand. For example, you may want to create a streetwear brand that makes your target customer feel a sense of community and belonging for the differences they have from the rest of society. You might want to create a high fashion brand that makes your customers feel prestigious and proud for owning one of your articles of clothes. Whatever it is, make sure that you understand how you want your customers to feel when they stumble across an ad or video with your clothing and who that target customer is. Once you have figured this out you can begin to focus on finding where you can reach your target customers and how you can create a brand that will evoke the emotions you want to create buying impulse.

To find out where you will reach your target audience you must put yourself in the shoes of the people you are trying to reach. Maybe you are already one of your target customers and you know exactly where to find them in person and on the internet. If your target customers are skaters, then you can find them at the skate park or on social media pages that pertain to skateboarding. If your target audience is frat kids, then you can probably find them around college campuses and on social pages like barstool sports. Whatever your target customer is, spend a day thinking of as many places as possible that you can reach these people in person and online. Once you figure this out you will be in a great position to start marketing once you have created your brand and clothing.

Now that you know all about your target customers it is time to come up with that brand that will evoke emotion out of them and create a buying impulse. This part I will leave up to you to use your creativity to come up with a great name, style and logo for your brand. Really think about what type of clothing your customers will want and what message your brand is trying to send to them. If you are not great at designing graphics, you can go on Fiverr and pay someone to make a logo that you describe to them or use an ai software online like ChatGPT that can make a logo you describe in text.

After you have created your brand it is time to get a supplier for your clothing. There are two main ways that you can begin producing your clothes. The first way to do this is to order samples of blank clothing from suppliers that you can either heat press or sew your designs onto yourself or pay a screen printing business to do it for you. Some great sites for buying blanks are alphabroder.com, ssactivewear.com and sanmar.com, Alibaba and DH Gate. The other route you can go is to use a supplier that both supplies your clothing and prints your designs all in the same place. This will be a more expensive way of getting your clothing made but can certainly be worth it if you wish to focus more on the marketing side and not have to worry about ever even seeing your products after getting your samples. Some great sites to use if you wish to go this route are printful.com and printify.com. After you decide which way you want to produce your clothing, reach out to a few different companies’ phone numbers or emails and negotiate a better price than the website offers. You will probably only get about $0.20 off per article but this will certainly add up over time as you start to grow and they will definitely give you some kind of discount to earn your business. Once you have settled on a price and company you are happy with be sure to order a few samples before ordering in bulk to make sure you are happy with the products. After quality checking your articles of clothing you ordered you will be all set to start marketing your brand.

The next step to growing your brand is to create your website that will act as your point of sale for your products. You can use a website called Shopify to do this fairly easily and I recommend doing this to start out, but as you grow you can later create a site with WordPress or Wix.com in order to save a lot of money on monthly fees. It may take a bit longer to set up this way but being able to create your own site from scratch is a skill that you will be able to use with businesses you will start later on as well. I would suggest simply searching on YouTube, ”How to make a clothing shop with Wix”. You can follow one of the tutorials step by step and add your own color schemes and logos to your site.

Now that you have a brand, a target audience, a clothing supplier and a website to sell your clothing it is time to start getting your brand out there. The first step you should take when starting marketing for your brand is to create 2 Tik-Tok accounts, 2 Instagram accounts and a Facebook account. Once you have set up these accounts you should begin to make 3 videos everyday that show off the different styles your brand has to offer with either you talking about your brand and what it represents or some catchy music that will pertain to your target customer. After creating your videos each day you will post them to all your Tik-Tok accounts, your Instagram reels and posts, as well as your Facebook reels. If you do this every single day, you will be sure to get some traction but you have to make sure the starts of your videos catch the viewers attention right away. Try to get creative each day with the beginning of your videos and always think about a new way to go viral. You can also invest in some phones with service to make even more accounts with 2 TikToks, Instagrams and YouTubes per phone. Just make sure to leave your Wi-Fi always turned off so that you don’t get accounts restricted. If you don’t want to invest this money you can also have friends or family post your content on new accounts.

The next way you can gain traction for your clothing brand is to try and get an influencer or celebrity in your target audience to wear your brand and potentially promote it for you. This can certainly be a bit more difficult to do but you should start by coming up with a list of influential people that have a large influence on your target customers. If you are selling activewear you can create a list of athletes, their Instagram accounts, their po boxes, and a list of any places you would be able to meet them in person if possible. When you have created that list you can spend some time each week sending out personalized articles of clothing for these celebrities with a note that talks about how you are a huge fan and love their work and so you created this piece just for them and would love them to email or dm you a picture of them wearing it. If you find an influencer that is nice enough they may even end up posting a picture of them wearing it as fan appreciation. Even if they just send a picture of them wearing it, you can tell the story of how you did this on your Tik-Toks and other socials and flood the internet with the pictures. You can also reach out to them on Instagram about doing a paid ad with your clothing but just be ready to spend some pretty good money if it is a very influential person.

If you followed the steps we laid out in detail then you should already have a long list of places where you can find your target customers online or in person. The last form of marketing we will go over for your brand is to use this list to get in front of your customers in creative ways. For example, if your target customer plays basketball, you can try going to a court where good players go and you can sponsor the best players by giving them free shirts to wear. A lot of people take pride in being “sponsored” and so they will mention your brand to their friends and wear your clothes around giving you free advertisement. If your target customers like to socialize you can put together an event that you advertise every day all over your socials where you can have food, drinks and music and set up a stand in a high foot traffic area where you can sell your clothing. If you know your target customers may be in specific groups on Facebook or follow certain pages on Instagram you can start following those people with your brand profile to get seen. You can even dm people coupon codes for clothes on your site. However you get in front of your customers, be creative and make a schedule for yourself that keeps you busy repeating marketing tactics that prove to work well for you.

Always remember that creating a clothing brand takes time and you may also want to make adjustments to your designs based on the feedback you get. Be sure not to get hardheaded, and listen to your customers because they are the ones that you need to please. If you follow these steps persistently and continue to adapt and get in front of your target customers you will be amazed at how quickly you can make progress with your brand.