Thinking about starting up a Clothing company

[Bexhill]

I've always been into Business, and Fashion so I thought I would merge them both together.

My idea is a 'teenage-y? affordable' clothing company. I like the idea of Boohoo, or an online Primark but I don't want to copy that. I understand that there are a lot of businesses like this, and I will have to work at it to make it work.

I know how I will start to advertise it. I know what I want to do. I understand that I will most likely need to get a loan to start.

My questions:

Is there any cheap website hosting around?
How many products should I have to start off?
Do you think it's possible for this adventure to work?
What else am I missing?
What do I need to take into account?


Please ask me questions so I know what I need!

Thanks a bunch!

 

[Pareto Associates]

Hi,

Write a business plan and we can critique it. Other than you want to sell clothes to teenages, you haven't given us a lot to go on.

There are some pointers on the direct gov to get you started.
GOOGLE: direct gov business plan

Spend a good couple of weeks RESEARCHING the industry and writing the plan.

If you want to message me privately to take a look I am available for the next few weeks till I start a new job.

Good luck!

 

[DPearce]

Hi,

First of all you have some big competitors, as mentioned by you, Primark, Boohoo, I assume shops like Topman, Topshop, ASOS etc will also be competitors.
Build a nice looking site with good SEO for your keywords and slowly introduce more 'ranges' of clothing. Start off with maybe some designs of top/t-shirt of some sort in various colours, keep it simple to start.

May be a silly question but are you offering your own brand of clothing or selling brand names?

 

[TeeTick]

You should start small with a few samples per style to test the market before ordering in bulk. With a little bit of luck, a good sense of fashion, I believe your business will take off.

 

[KeithP]

Quite ironically, I was talking to one of the major UK fashion Wholesalers last week as they're looking to start selling directly to consumers online. The subject of BooHoo came up and just to put things into perspective, they apparently got started with an initial investment of £15 million.

Not wishing to pour cold water on your idea but having now had some insight into the mainstream fashion industry, it's incredibly cut-throat and work on tiny margins. There are just simply too many places where you can now buy decent, branded fashion at ridiculously low prices, both online and offline.

If you really want to enter the fashion market, you need to find a micro-niche and develop a brand from there.

 

[Pareto Associates]

Quite ironically, I was talking to one of the major UK fashion Wholesalers last week as they're looking to start selling directly to consumers online. The subject of BooHoo came up and just to put things into perspective, they apparently got started with an initial investment of £15 million.

Not wishing to pour cold water on your idea but having now had some insight into the mainstream fashion industry, it's incredibly cut-throat and work on tiny margins. There are just simply too many places where you can now buy decent, branded fashion at ridiculously low prices, both online and offline.

If you really want to enter the fashion market, you need to find a micro-niche and develop a brand from there.

Setting up a company selling clothes from a general wholesalers will possibly make you money, however, you will not make millions from it.

Your best best would be to invent or innovate your own product or range of products. I always use cases such as the cambridge satuel company for inspiration.

 

[MrsPWN]

This may sound daft but I have a friend with dwarfism, she is only about 44" tall and has a terrible problem buying clothes, she is 20 and just wants to be fashionable.

Would that be micro-niche enough??

 

[NextPoint]

The first you suggest is that you want a cheap website presence. I would say that if you don't have a lot of money to invest into a website, don't do it at all. Successful websites aren't cheap because you have to invest a lot into different elements/activities to make them a success. These are:

* Designing the website - not only do you need a design that looks appealing, but also a design that is designed to convert visitors to buyers. Not all designs that look pretty will convert visitors into buyers.

* Feature development - design is only part of what makes a website work. You need to have code that makes everything run properly. Hiring people to write code for you is expensive and can cost a lot of time depending on what you are asking for.

* Hosting and support - you need to have your website online, but also to have someone to make sure it keeps running if something goes wrong. If you have a very successful website and it stops working for some reason, you are losing sales for the duration that it isn't working.

* Content production - anything from product descriptions to photography. You need to sort all of this to a high quality on your own website.

* Marketing - however you decide to market your website, it will be costly - especially if you are operating in a competitive industry. If you don't market your website, you wont get any traffic. A website with no traffic will produce no sales, no matter how good the website is designed and developed.


Instead, I suggest starting with online markets like eBay and Amazon. The advantage with these is that you save on most of the above costs and can start generating sales straight away because these marketplaces already have an audience that are looking to buy what you sell. This means no upfront marketing costs other than a tiny product listing fee and you only pay commission to Amazon and eBay once you have made sales. Compare this to pay per click with Adwords where you have to pay for every click regardless of whether you generate a sale or not - you can see how you can potentially pay more for the Adwords advertising costs than the profit margin you make from your sale.

That's not to say you should never have a website, but not necessarily to start with because there are cheaper alternatives to start trading.

 

[businessfunding]

You need to find a niche (primark / Boohoo isn't a niche it is most of the market..)

Then you need to work out why/how people are going to come to you.

You can start to build a plan from those points.

 

[Pearce7141]

This may sound daft but I have a friend with dwarfism, she is only about 44" tall and has a terrible problem buying clothes, she is 20 and just wants to be fashionable.

Would that be micro-niche enough??

It is not just small people who are not catered for . It's a well known fact that the population of the western world is getting taller and wider ( even as teenagers) yet the big names still think a size 18 is enormous in female fashion . Evans and the like just do not cater for young fashions in a larger size . There is a market worth exploring .

 

[TODonnell]

Well, I'd go for high-quality, high-price, branded goods (to discourage copycats and to convey exclusivity). I'd guess there are 10 million people competing on price and speed of delivery. Make a few and sell them at a market or ebay. Learn and adapt. Just my 2P.

Let me inspire you:

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bEXHILL
Taste The Beauty

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[Root 66 Woodshop]

This may sound daft but I have a friend with dwarfism, she is only about 44" tall and has a terrible problem buying clothes, she is 20 and just wants to be fashionable.

Would that be micro-niche enough??

Personally, I think this would be a great idea to go at, I too have a friend who suffers from Dwarfism and he is always complaining about having to shop in the "kids" sections and having to adapt specific clothing to suit his body.

It is not just small people who are not catered for . It's a well known fact that the population of the western world is getting taller and wider ( even as teenagers) yet the big names still think a size 18 is enormous in female fashion . Evans and the like just do not cater for young fashions in a larger size . There is a market worth exploring .

No offence, but you've just described about half the population of the UK... These size 18 ladies or larger chaps can do something about their size, little people have no choice in the matter. There are shops already out there that cater for chunky, and not enough shops out there for ickle.

 

[Jonah E]

Hey,
first of Nice plan you have got in your mind- definitely starting a business online is way too difficult and also need some investemnt but there are some key points you should always ponder on. Built a perfect site online for grabbing the most eye balls, secondly- get the best SEO services for your online websites which will allow you to rank the number 1. Good luck